Samuelson drew up the twentieth-century cast list. But it was his neoliberal rivals Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman who – just like Shakespeare’s editors – imbued each part with such telltale traits that the rest of the script almost wrote itself. In their resulting laissez-faire story of who the economy’s actors are and how best to let them work, the plot was loaded from the very start. We are all well versed in its line-up of characters, having been told that the market is efficient, that trade is win–win, and that the commons are a tragedy. Given such a cast, the triumph of the market
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