It all started 75 million years ago when a huge shale deposit was laid down, under the sea, presumably, which is now the oil-rich Maracaibo Basin of northwestern Venezuela, site of several hundred menes , which are fossil-rich tar pits. There are other sites in the Americas, such as La Brea in Southern California which feature this phenomenon. See La Brea Del Sur: the fossil-rich tar pits of Venezuela may rival those of Southern California. Then the story continues in March 2013 when I was in Rurrenabaque, Bolivia, failing to get any help from my former colleagues at the University of Cambridge and, having sold everything I owned, facing a very uncertain future in the Bolivian Amazon. Realising my problem was economics and people's failure to understand what it is all about, I made what I thought might be my last attempt to explain Aristotle's economics to the general public. As I wrote, I listened to this on repeat. I think I must have heard it over a hundred times in three...