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Paul Romer, who received the Prize in 2018, argued in 2016 that economics had such a ‘noncommittal relationship with the truth’ that it deserved the label of ‘post-real’ (Romer 2016, p. 5).
These criticisms of Neoclassical economics by prominent Neoclassical economists echo criticisms that economists from other schools of thought have been making for many decades. These rival approaches to economics are very different to the specializations that exist in sciences like physics. Some physicists specialize in General Relativity, others in Quantum Mechanics, Statistical Mechanics, Newtonian physics, and so on. Each of these approaches has different perspectives on how the Universe operates, but each works very well in its respective domain: General Relativity in the realm of the very large (the Universe), Quantum Mechanics in the realm of the very small (the atom), while Newton’s equations work very well in between, and so on.
But in economics, different schools of thought have visions of how the economy works that are fundamentally in conflict. There is no way to partition the economy into sections where Neoclassical economics applies and others where rival schools of thought like Post Keynesian, Austrian or Biophysical economics apply. On the same topic – say, for example, the role of private debt in causing financial crises – these schools of thought will often have answers that flatly contradict Neoclassical economics, and frequently also, each other. These non-mainstream schools of thought, which are collectively known as ‘heterodox’ economics, are followed by a significant minority of academic economists – as many as 10 per cent of the discipline, going on a campaign in France in 2015 to establish a separate classification there (Lavoie 2015b; Orléan 2015).2
The economists who did warn of the Global Financial Crisis came almost exclusively from these dissenting schools of thought.3 Though they differed from each other in significant ways, Bezemer noted that they shared ‘a concern with financial assets as distinct from real-sector assets, with the credit flows that finance both forms of wealth, with the debt growth accompanying growth in financial wealth, and with the accounting relation between the financial and real economy’ (Bezemer 2010, p. 678).