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"When discussing what to eat and how much, people often come to the conclusion "Everything in moderation." This is too vague for me. What exactly is "everything"? Every kind of Drake's Cake and candy bar? There's a lot I could justify with this "directive." Twinkies in moderation? Pop-Tarts in moderation? Ice cream in moderation? I could make an entire "everything in moderation" diet in which I eat nothing but crap.\n\nOf course, this is not what "everything in moderation" means. It means lumping these foods into one category (junk food, or refined carbohydrates, or sugar, or desserts, or processed foods) and taking the whole category in moderation. But what exactly is "moderation"? What, pray tell, would a "moderate" amount of chocolate be? An ounce a day, a week, or only on special occasions? And what would a moderate amount of trans fat be? Aren't some things better avoided altogether, or is this what people mean when they say, "Everything in moderation. Even moderation"?\n\nAnd where did this "Everything in moderation" come from? "

"I. MISTAKING BEAUTY FOR TRUTH It's hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were congratulating themselves over the success of their field. Those successes - or so they believed - were both theoretical and practical, leading to a golden era for the profession. On the theoretical side, they thought that they had resolved their internal disputes. Thus, in a 2008 paper titled "The State of Macro" (that is, macroeconomics, the study of big-picture issues like recessions), Olivier Blanchard of M.I.T., now the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, declared that "the state of macro is good." The battles of yesteryear, he said, were over, and there had been a "broad convergence of vision." And in the real world, economists believed they had things under control: the "central problem of depression-prevention has been solved," declared Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago in his 2003 presidential address to the American Economic Association. In 2004, Ben Bernanke, a former Princeton professor who is now the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, celebrated the Great Moderation in economic performance over the previous two decades, which he attributed in part to improved economic policy making. Last year, everything came apart. Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field's problems. More important was the profession's blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy. During the golden years, financial economists came to believe that markets were inherently stable - indeed, that stocks and other assets were always priced just right. There was nothing in the prevailing models suggesting the possibility of the kind of collapse that happened last year. Meanwhile, macroeconomists were divided in their views. But the main division was between those who insisted that free-market economies never go astray and those who believed that economie