"The purpose of this book is to call for a wholesale rethinking of the way that markets treat both the labor and natural resources on which we all depend. It reveals how formal economic analysis justifies self-defeating policies that encourage wanton use of the environment and callous abuse of the least advantaged laborers. From Adam Smith to the present day, economic theory has shortchanged the workers most crucial to the functioning of human life and offered skewed views of scarcity and extraction.

Michael Perelman will show how this approach has produced a discipline in which its followers' models and representations of the world around them are so removed from reality that continuing to abide by them would jeopardize both human capacities and nature itself."--Jacket.