From Prof Robert Hunter Wade.

Sir, Several of your correspondents on Philip Ball's column on economics, "Baroque fantasies of a peculiar science" (October 30), are outraged at his caricature. Go to the journals, they say, and you find a world of great variety and innovation, where some of the best work is done on issues of market failure, a long way from the fundamentalism pictured by Dr Ball. And they are right as far as they go. But one should also sample economics as it is applied by people such as World Bank country economists when they advise the government of country X, and as it is hard-wired into World Bank formulas for evaluating countries' policies and institutions.