Economic Crisis And Economic Thought

The ongoing economic crisis has revealed fundamental problems both in our economic system and the discipline which analyses it. This book presents a series of contrasting but complementary approaches in economic theory in order to offer a critical toolkit for examining the modern capitalist economy. The global economic crisis may have changed the world in which we live, but not the fundamental tenets of the discipline. This book is a critical assessment of the relation between economic theory and economic crises: how intellectual thinking impacts on real economic events and vice versa. It aims at challenging the conventional way in which economics is taught in universities and later adopted by public officials in the policymaking process. The contributions, all written by distinguished academics and researchers, offer a heterodox perspective on economic thinking and analysis. Each chapter is inspired by alternative theoretical approaches which have been mostly side-lined from current academic teaching programmes. A major suggestion of the book is that the recent economic crisis can be better understood by recovering such theoretical analyses and turning them into a useful framework for economic policymaking. Economic Crisis and Economic Thought is intended as a companion to economics students at the Master’s and PhD level, in order for them to confront issues related to the labour market, the financial sector, macroeconomics, industrial economics, etc. with an alternative and complementary perspective. It challenges the way in which economic theory is currently taught and offered via alternatives for the future.

A deep and widespread crisis affects modern economic theory, a crisis that derives from the absence of a "vision"--a set of widely shared political and social preconceptions--on which all economics ultimately depends. This absence, in turn, reflects the collapse of the Keynesian view that provided such a foundation from 1940 through the early 1970s, comparable to earlier visions provided by Smith, Ricardo, Mill, and Marshall. The "unraveling" of Keynesianism has been followed by a division into discordant and ineffective camps whose common denominator seems to be their shared analytical refinement and lack of practical applicability. This provocative analysis attempts both to describe this state of affairs, and to suggest the direction in which economic thinking must move if it is to regain the relevance and remedial power it now pointedly lacks.

Why did the economists of the so-called "mainstream" seem to fail to foresee the global economic crisis that exploded in 2008? And why do they appear to have difficulty in putting forward an interpretation of it that is consistent with the theoretical foundations of their models? These two questions have echoed insistently since the outbreak of the crisis, not only in academic circles but also in the mass media, and appear to reflect increasingly widespread dissatisfaction with the dominant paradigm of economic theory. Many believe that the global recession now underway may constitute an historic watershed for the evolution of economics and therefore that an authentic change of paradigm is called for, rather than only minor adjustments to the dominant approach. Since the start of the crisis, there has indeed been a profusion of contributions from alternative areas of economic study, and in particular from those adopting a critical stance with respect to mainstream economic theory. This collection puts forward promising reinterpretations of the primary schools of heterodox political economy, stringent critiques of the conventional readings of the recession, new schemes of theoretical and empirical analysis of the crisis, and proposals for economic policies alternative to those hitherto adopted. This book contains a selection of some of the most recent contributions to the critique of mainstream economic theory and policy, and discusses the origins and possible evolutions of the current economic crisis. The collection should be of interest to students and researchers focussing on macroeconomics, monetary economics, political economy and financial economics.

The Economic Crisis and the State of Economics brings together leading economists from a diverse set of backgrounds and presents their take on how economics can explain the current crisis but also how the crisis will affect economic thought.

Economic Thought and History looks at the relationship between facts and thought in historical economic research, viewing it in the context of periods of economic crisis and providing detailed analyses of methods used in determining the bond between economic history and economic theory. This interdisciplinary collection brings together international researchers in the history of economic thought and economic history in order to confront varying approaches to the study of economic facts and ideas, rethinking boundaries, methodologies and the object of their disciplines. The chapters explore the relationship between economic thought and economic theory from a variety of perspectives, exploring the relationship between history and economics, and the boundaries defining the history of economic thought, in terms of both single authors and schools of thought. The book offers particular insights on the Italian tradition of thought. The uniquely interdisciplinary and analytical approach presented here bridges the methodological gap between these disciplines, unearthing a fertile common ground of research. This book is intended for Postgraduate students conducting further research into the field, or for professors and academics of economic history and history of economic thought.

The democratic industrial societies face a deeply-rooted institutional crisis. The accepted ways and means of living lead to frustration and anxiety rather than creativity and joy. The roots of this crisis are political and economic. These societies contain economies that pervert and obstruct the human life process and polities that are subordinate to economic vested interests. Karl Polanyi was a Hungarian emigrho witnessed first hand the cataclysms to which this political economic crisis can lead. He created a powerful social economic theory to analyze this institutional impasse and lay the foundation for social reconstruction. This book reviews Polanyi's life and work, his contributions to the methodology of economics, his concepts of social integration, his theory of market capitalism, and his view of freedom in complex industrial societies.

This book aims at investigating from the perspective of the major economic dictionaries the notions of economic crisis and cycle. The project consists in giving an extensive summary of a number of significant entries on this subject, with an introductory essay to each entry placing them (and the dictionary to which they belong) in their context, giving some details on the author of the dictionary entry, and assessing the entry’s (and its author’s) contribution. The broad picture (including the history of these encyclopedic tools) will be examined in the introductory essays.

Economists have rightly been criticized for not having foreseen the crisis that exploded in 2007–2008. As Giancarlo Bertocco eloquently argues, responsibility does indeed rest heavily on their shoulders. By developing a theory which excluded the possibility that a catastrophic crisis could ever happen, the economics profession has justified decisions and behaviours that caused the Great Recession. This book presents an alternative theoretical approach built on the lessons of Marx, Keynes, Schumpeter, Kalecki, Kaldor and Minsky, which highlights the structural instability of a capitalist economy and the endogenous nature of the current crisis.