In late 2008 the celebrated economist Professor Paul Samuelson, MIT (Nobel, 1970), referred to

'fiendish frankenstein monsters of financial engineering'

as a main cause of the financial crisis; adding ominously that some of the financial instruments concerned were designed by people like him.

This approving, even gleeful, commentary on a significant technical cause of the Great Recession actually underlined two of the individually-fatal defects in the discipline that had been his life’s work.

One defect emanates from economics, the other from management science. Both were discussed in the section ‘Failure of macroeconomics: the Great Debate, decade from the mid-1960s’.

• Economics. Absence, in macroeconomics, of a detailed, designed interface between policy and the actual behaviour and outcomes that determine its success or failure. This interface cannot exist in macroeconomics.

• Management science. Inability of both econometrics and macroeconomics to handle the high levels of disaggregated and dynamic complexity that must be effectively and efficiently addressed, if successful policy is to be delivered.