| Abstract: | The objective of this paper is to explore the correlation between the recent economic crisis and economic science and demystify the dogmatic conflict surrounding them. The paper starts by summarising the various arguments against economic science and economists, considered by many to be responsible for the crisis. Following that, an attempt is made, subject to space constraints, to objectively evaluate the individual arguments. Particular reference is made to the role of both policy and the markets in the crisis and the prospects for replacing the neoclassicist school, dominant until now, with the Keynesian. The analysis concludes that economic science did not cause the crisis; however, many of its theories did offer an intellectual background or some sort of academic legitimacy to both policy and the markets, and, in the case of the recent crisis, there was not only a failure of the dominant form of economic thought but, above all, of those two. The analysis shows that there is a problem of selective use of economic theories when it comes to practical economics and that, in order to be useful, economics ought to utilise knowledge from other disciplines and take more account of interdependencies between political and social phenomena. |
