Getting beyond neo-institutionalism: Virgil Storr's culture of markets

Storr is a free trader in ideas, bringing back into economics meaning, long banished by behaviorist dogma. His elegant little book, though, is too kind to neo-institutionalists. The followers of Douglass North, repeating without much thought over and over, "Institutions matter," mean to say that "Institutions are constraints like budget lines. They are not human conversations." Since the conversational character of markets is Storr's main point, he would do better to make common cause with "humanomics," that is, an economics keeping its mathematics and statistics but entering, too, the human conversation since the Epic of Gilgamesh.