The belief that economic values are all that is real or important; human beings are motivated mainly by economic drives. Thornton (2007) Antipode 39, 5 thinks that American-style economism ‘poses a grave threat to the core values of Islam and the West alike’. ‘Economism is the claim that decision makers and theorists have overestimated the contribution that the economic realm can make to policy making’ (Wolff and Haubrich in M. Moran et al., eds 2006).