What is wrong with this opening paragraph to a post concerning a famous pathogen that kills potatoes?
The potato blight that caused the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s left families starving as their source of food was left rotting in their fields. Now, though, researchers have tracked the origin of this blight, and have found that the deadly plant disease actually first originated in an alpine valley in central Mexico.
The problem is this: The blight did not cause the famine that killed a million people in Ireland between 1845 and 1852. The cause of this catastrophe was not natural but cultural. In a kind of economic thinking that is still with us today, but took a bad hit in the stock market crash of 2008, an economic thinking that believes itself to be a science that deals with reality as it is, with a process that's completely independent of human culture and politics, an economic thinking that has faith in the powers of self-organization, the goodness of invisible hands, and sees the market as a kind of emergence whose workings are disrupted and even harmed by government intervention—in this, and this alone, we will see what was behind the famine that killed a million humans, and deracinated a million more.
To read a good account of how liberal economics lead to political policies that blocked any real action on this Irish disaster, read Felix Martin's Money: The Unauthorized Biography. It's all there. It's very depressing. Worst of all, we are ruled by an economic thinking that is related to, but much more potent than, the one that dominated much of the 19th century and only ended after the Second World War.