Even in financial markets, the concept of market efficiency does not hold. - Paul Ormerod

In most Western economies, the general relationship is not in fact between the rate of inflation and the level of unemployment, but between the rate of change of inflation and the rate of change of unemployment.

We need to abandon the economist's notion of the economy as a machine, with its attendant concept of equilibrium. A more helpful way of thinking about the economy is to imagine it as a living organism.

But Adam Smith was a philosopher as well as well as an economist, famous in his time as much for his Theory of Moral Sentiments as for The Wealth of Nations. And as he understood so well, society is more than the sum of its individual parts.