This may seem strange, since CAPM and the broader work it inspired were based on the assumption that investors make mathematically optimal investment decisions with the information at their disposal. As a result, Eugene Fama, of Chicago’s business school, wrote, “actual market prices are, on the basis of all available information, best estimates of intrinsic values.” Fama called a market with this virtue an “efficient market” — and argued that the data showed that real-world financial markets are, in fact, efficient, or very nearly so. But if the markets are already getting it right, who needs finance professors?

In fact, however, Wall Street was eager to hire “rocket scientists,” especially after Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, working at M.I.T.’s Sloan School, came up with a formula that seemingly solved the puzzle of how to value options — contracts that give investors the right to buy or sell assets at predetermined prices. The quintessential collaboration between big money and academic superstars was the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, whose partners included Scholes and Robert Merton, with whom Scholes shared another finance Nobel. L.T.C.M. eventually imploded, nearly taking the world economy down with it. But efficient-markets theory retained its hold on financial thought.

All along, there were critical voices. Robert Shiller, who has become famous for predicting both the Internet crash and the housing bust, first made his mark by casting statistical doubt on the evidence for efficient markets. Lawrence Summers, now a senior official in the Obama administration, began a paper on financial markets thus: “THERE ARE IDIOTS. Look around.” And a whole counter­culture emerged in the form of “behavioral finance,” which argued that investors are irrational in predictable ways. But the sheer scope and sweep of the efficient markets hypothesis — not to mention the fact that so many people devoted their careers to it — allowed it to brush off most of these challenges.

Of course, there have always been men of affairs wise enough to see past the current dogma. In “The Sages,” Charles R. Morris profiles three of them: George Soros, Warren Buffett and Paul Volcker.

Morris, the author of “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown,” doesn’t have much patience with economic theory, and it shows; I almost gave up on the book after Morris managed, in the space of just a few pages, to thoroughly misrepresent the ideas of both John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman. But the book comes to life with its personal profiles, especially the surprisingly endearing portrait of Warren Buffett as a young man.

Do the lives of the sages carry useful lessons for the rest of us? Soros doesn’t really seem to have a method, except that of being smarter than anyone else. Buffett does have a method — figure out what a company is really worth, and buy it if you can get it cheap — but it’s not a method that would work for anyone without his gifts. And Volcker’s main asset is his implacable integrity, which most mortals would find hard to match.

Indeed, I came away from reading these books wondering if their shared under­lying premise — that the current crisis will put an end to Panglossian views of financial markets — is right. Fox points out that academic belief in the perfection of financial markets survived the 1987 stock market crash and the bursting of the Internet bubble. Why should the reaction to the latest catastrophe be any different? In fact, what I hear from my finance professor friends is that there’s a lot less soul-searching under way than you might expect. And Wall Street’s appetite for complex strategies that sound clever — and can be sold to credulous investors — survived L.T.C.M.’s debacle; why can’t it survive this crisis, too?

My guess is that the myth of the rational market — a myth that is beautiful, comforting and, above all, lucrative — isn’t going away anytime soon.