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The development of the Post Keynesian school of thought after the Great Depression is also crucial. There were strident critics of the Neoclassical mainstream before the Great Depression, such as Joseph Schumpeter and Thorstein Veblen (Schumpeter 1928; Veblen 1898, 1908, 1909), but there was no truly revolutionary school of economic thought.10 The development of this heterodox school over the eight decades between the Great Depression and the GFC meant that, when that crisis struck, there were coherent explanations of it – indeed, prescient warnings of it (Godley 2001; Godley and Izurieta 2002; Godley and Wray 2000; Keen 1995, 2006, 2007) – that did not exist when Keynes attempted his revolution.
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which arose out of interactions between the entrepreneur Warren Mosler (Mosler 1998, 2010) and a group of Post Keynesian economists – primarily Randy Wray (Wray 1994, 1997, 1998), Stephanie Kelton (Bell 2000, 2001), Scott Fullwiler (Fullwiler 2003, 2005) and Bill Mitchell (Mitchell 1987, 1994; Mitchell and Mosler 2002; Mitchell and Watts 2002) – has also done something that has not been achieved since Keynes: it has made the public at large aware of a distinctly non-Neoclassical approach to economics. A non-Neoclassical economics book, Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth (Kelton 2020), has become a best-seller, ranking in the top 300 on Amazon on its debut. MMT is challenging the stranglehold that the Neoclassical school has on public opinion, and their myriad protestations about MMT are a sign that they are, for once, worried about losing their dominance.
Similarly, non-Neoclassical scholars like Mariana Mazzucato (Mazzucato 2015, 2019), Bill Janeway (Janeway 2012) and Kate Raworth (Raworth 2017) have, if not broken the hold that the Neoclassical meme of ‘supply and demand’ has on how the public thinks about economics, at least shaken it by showing that there are alternative, and empirically grounded, ways to thinking about the public and private sector’s roles in innovation, and the dependence of the economy on the environment. Statistically-oriented researchers like Schularick, Jordà, Taylor and Bezemer are analysing issues, such as the role of credit in macroeconomics, which are ignored by Neoclassical econometricians (Bezemer and Grydaki 2014; Jordà et al. 2011, 2019; Schularick and Taylor 2012; Zhang and Bezemer 2014). Some mathematicians have become aware of fundamental fallacies in economics, such as the timeless, ‘ergodic’ foundations of Neoclassical finance theory (Peters 2019; Peters and Gell-Mann 2016) and are actively working on alternative approaches (Costa Lima et al. 2014; Grasselli and Costa Lima 2012; Grasselli and Nguyen-Huu 2018).