The book attracted virulent criticism from many economists –as the variety of reviews on amazon.com shows

The book is an attack of a particular form of economics, which remains dominant in the teaching of the subject. The top economists in America have been moving away from this particular model for some years, but the rest of the profession is yet to catch up.

In 2001, I was invited by the journal World Economics to update my thoughts.

In 1998, I published Butterfly Economics in the UK. It came out in the US in 2000, and reached the overall top 10 on amazon.com

This, too, has been published around the world.

The first chapter is available here. I argue that the key weakness of standard economics is the assumption that the tastes and preferences of agents – people, firms – are fixed. Instead, agents adapt their tastes in the light of what other people do. This gives a more realistic and quite different picture of the world.

Why Most Things Fail is published by Faber and Faber in the UK April 2005, and will be published in America by Pantheon in 2006