Karl Polanyi’s 1944 work, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, exposes the myths of laissez-faire, which remains widespread in the West and elsewhere. Looking at economic and other transformations during the Industrial Revolution and beyond, he showed that there is nothing inevitable and ‘natural’ about free markets, the ideological belief that they can solve most economic problems being utopian and dangerous. JM Keynes, an important economic thinker of the last century, saw those in authority as distilling thoughts “from some academic scribbler of a few ye…