What's puzzling is that morality so often comes thumping into it - when the subject has been taught for generations as if morality was someone else's job.
The economic historian Roger Backhouse says there was an historic split from "normative economics" - what we should do - to "positive economics" - the description of what we do in fact.
Some seem to blame this approach for the crash, implying that it somehow separated economic ideas from what people really are. Off goes the money into some virtual world that's nothing to do with me, back comes profit. So goes the parody.
An interesting question is whether this intellectual divorce might change in the light of the global economic mess of the last few years, in which much of the anger has been righteous. At least one leading economist, John Kay, thinks we should go back to talking about political economy, instead of economics, to show that moral values are still inescapably in there.
