Solving Problems in the Real World

I owe my favorite local bookstore, the Harvard Bookstore, for making another day for me. Wandering the tall, packed shelves on a warm and breezy evening, I ran across Schaum’s Outline of Principles of Economics. One subtitle on the cover: “964 fully solved problems.” The problems include, for example (from page 50): “True of false: As used in economics, the word demand is synonymous with need,” or “True or false: A surplus exists when the market price is above the equilibrium price.”

I didn’t long much for either answer.

Instead, as the U.S. mortgage market has, as James Kunstler predicted on October 10, 2005, imploded “like a death star” and dragged “every tradable instrument known to man into the quantum vacuum of finance that it create[d],” as euros flee from Greece, and as bank loans dry up in Spain, I wished that the 964 fully solved problems included one or two of the real problems.