Notes taken from Ha-Joon Chang's book " Economics: The User's Guide " Chapter 1 What is Economics · In the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, the majority of the economics profession was preaching to the world that markets are rarely wrong and that modern economics has found ways to iron out those few wrinkles that markets may have; Robert Lucas, the 1995 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics,* had declared in 2003 that the ‘problem of depression prevention has been solved’. 1 So most economists were caught completely by surprise by the 2008 global financial crisis.† Not only that, they have not been able to come up with decent solutions to the ongoing aftermaths of that crisis. · Physical money – be it a banknote, a gold coin or the huge, virtually immovable stones that were used as money in some Pacific islands – is only a symbol. Money is a symbol of what others in your society owe you, or your claim on particular amounts of the socie