ABSTRACT
Now that the twentieth century has drawn to a close, what have we learned about how to manage our economic affairs? This chapter reviews our most recent failures to design a desirable economic system hoping to avoid repeating history as farce. First I summarize what is wrong with laissez-faire capitalism, the economic system that stands triumphant at the beginning of the new millennium poised to sentence billions to abject poverty and destroy the biosphere if unchecked over the century to come. Then I examine what was wrong with communism and command planning, the first misguided attempt to transcend the economics of competition and greed, which is now in the dustbin of history itself.
