Behind the alarming financial headlines is a little-known story of bad ideas. For over fifty years, economists have been developing elegant theories of how markets work. What about when markets don't work? What about when they lead to stock-market bubbles, glaring inequality, polluted rivers, real-estate crashes, and credit crunches?

In How Markets Fail, Cassidy describes the influence "utopian economics" thinking that is blind to how real people act and that denies the ways an unregulated free market can produce disastrous unintended consequences. Oil-price spikes, CEO greed cycles, and boom-and-bust waves are the inevitable outcome of self-serving behavior in a modern market setting. Cassidy looks to the leading edge of economic theory, including behavioral economics, for a new, enlightening view of our volatile global economy.