Markets were, as Friedrich Hayek put it with uncharacteristic exuberance, a ‘marvel’, co-ordinating economic decisions in ‘a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand’. They are, you might say, a device for pooling our ignorance. This way of looking at markets may not have been revolutionary, but it was genuinely illuminating, and Hayek would describe it as the only ‘discovery’ he had ever made, hoping it had finally disposed of that ‘skeleton in our cupboard’ – the fiction of ‘economic man’.