The present economic crisis has been explained in many ways: a mortgage meltdown, a housing bubble burst, the collapse of fancy financial instruments. But all of these explanations point to a problem that plagues our economic system at its core: an economy floating free of firm connections with the real world. It’s an economy built on the abstractions of numbers on paper–“air money.” Air money is pouffy. It floats like a balloon out of reach of the ground. Read More…