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Christmas is dead ahead. Time to clean the desk and go searching for the eggnog recipe. Damn. Under here somewhere. What do we say about the year rapidly receding behind us? Chastening. Sobering. Deflating. Deflationary. Yecch. All these grand experiments, based on what now appear to be unsound footings, wrecked or at least severely damaged. Economies rise and fall, go boom and go bust -- and they've been doing this for a long time. In this Lucretian sense, there's nothing "wrong" with the economy or the world at large (indeed, as Steven Pinker argues, the world is getting less and less violent). Rather, what's gone wrong is our confidence in our own tools to understand, comprehend, predict and control economic growth and, ipso facto, political and social behavior. It's an intellectual failure. Obviously, intellectual confidence has been ebbing since 2008, whether it's in risk management and quantitative finance, or in economic projects of the last three decades built around notions of rational expectations, efficient markets or efforts to build dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. All of these involved marvelous feats of inventive math and modeling -- ambitious abstractions raised high into the air -- but built upon conceptions of human behavior that were at best rudimentary, at worst dangerously, even shoddily and amateurishly, simplistic. The ground gave way. 
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