This book is about the equilibria we are currently facing as a society. There are wildfires and floods, pandemics, wars, insurrection at the US Capitol, autocratic demagogues and fanatical religious leaders in countries throughout the world. It is not hyperbole, but reality, that humans on Earth are facing an existential crisis.

Economics is about the decisions and actions taken by individuals and the coordination of these actions into an equilibrium. This sometimes is mediated through a market, sometimes through government or international agencies, sometimes through units such as families and neighbourhoods, most often through a combination of all of the above in a ‘mixed economy’. This means that we cannot blame ‘shocks’ anytime something goes wrong. Since our building block is the individual, it also means that each of us bears a degree of personal responsibility.

For grown-ups and economists, it is not good enough to say that we are where we are due to shocks. It would be like a very bad insurance company that seeks to get out of every claim on the basis that the problem was ‘an act of God’, not an insured event. Instead, we need to figure out how we have collectively chosen to be where we are. Even if we had planned reasonably and did suffer from bad luck, we collectively have the choice to respond positively to the situation. We don't need to continue to have climate change, to have wars, to have poverty and poor education, and to have polluted rivers and skies. Either our individual decisions are poor, or the coordination mechanism is poor. Keynesian economics, for example, is about how individuals might in a recession not want to be laid off and how individuals might want to go out and buy the new washing machines that would keep the workers employed, but somehow the coordination mechanisms in the economy have failed to bring these demand and supply factors together.

Economics begins with individuals, their endowments and their preferences. This chapter is about how individuals, mediated through markets and organizations, can land themselves or their progeny in a bad situation.This can be through sins of commission – deliberately choosing the bad pathways – or omission – not summoning the will to change equilibrium.