What does the economy look like?

"Markets do everything best – managing business and systemic risk, innovating, investing, organising executive reward – without the intervention of the supposed dead hand of the state and without any acknowledgement of wider social obligations." — A quote from The Guardian as part of an article that answers the second question.

Two questions:

1) If it works, what is it supposed to look like? How does the economy look and function?
2) Does that in any way match what the economy looks like right now?

WTF? Workers = Consumers?

Pundits have an incredible ability to segment information, separating out bits of data into separate categories. They see people or events as discreet bits of information, to be categorized and sorted. This is useful for many things. Scholarly analysis is one of them.

However, not for a lot of real life analysis. For example:

It was with much astonishment on my part to watch a selection of economic pundits discuss their personal confusion over the fact that consumer confidence was down. Those pundits were completely and totally flabbergasted, their eyes wide or eyebrows up with astonishment, their words spoken in tones of shock and disbelief. What piece of information caused this mental shakeup?

The statement that workers and consumers were one and the same, and the loss of jobs meant the loss of ability to consume.