For a generation, the United States, along with most of the West, was in the thrall of an ideology that asserted that the magic of market competition held the solution to every problem. But even the father of modern economics, Adam Smith, knew that this ideology is false-a lesson we are learning anew in the current financial crisis.

Dorwin P. Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action Barry Schwartz argues two things. First, markets have their place, but that place isn't every place. And second, even in their place, to work properly, markets depend on nonmarket values that market competition actively corrodes.

Reverend Thomas Bayes’ view that belief is a basis of probability has led to the development of methods for repeatedly rubbing conditional probability distributions together in such a way so that they give birth to information drawn from a corresponding joint probability distribution. This information can interact with our beliefs to form a comprehensive inference about parameters that shape our world. Professor of Economics Philip Jefferson uses these methods to examine the relationship between consumption and income as embodied in a famous hypothesis by Professor Milton Friedman.

Professor of Economics John Caskey provides a non-technical overview of the cause of the current financial crisis, emphasizing how a decline in housing prices can lead to a system-wide freeze in the availability of credit and a potential recession. He also discusses what the government has done to try to unfreeze credit markets (as of Oct. 10, 2008) and speculates on what the government might try to do in the future.