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If you haven’t yet studied economics, or you’re in your early days of doing so at school or university, I hope this gives you pause: shouldn’t mainstream economics also concern itself with finance and debt? Surely they are essential features of the economy? Au contraire, the mainstream long ago convinced itself that even money doesn’t really affect the economy, and hence monetary phenomena – including money, banks and private debt – are omitted from Neoclassical models. One Neoclassical economist put it this way on Twitter:

Most people who teach macro do it by leading people through simple models without money, so they understand exchange and production and trade, international and inter-temporal. You can even do banks without money [yes!]. And it’s better to start there. Then later, study money as it superimposes itself and complicates things, giving rise to inflation, exchange rates, business cycles.

This statement was made in late 2020 – a dozen years after the failure of Neoclassical models to anticipate the crisis.

Why didn’t mainstream economists change their beliefs about the significance of money in economics after their failure in 2007? Here, paradoxically, economics is little different to physics, in that significant change in physics does not, in general, occur because adherents of an old way of thinking are convinced to abandon it by an experiment whose results contradict their theory. Instead, these adherents continue to cling to their theory, despite the experimental evidence it has failed. Humans, it appears, are more wedded to their beliefs about reality – their ‘paradigms’, to use Thomas Kuhn’s famous phrase (Kuhn 1970) – than reality itself. Science changed, not because these scientists changed their minds, but because they were replaced by new scientists who accepted the new way of thinking. As Max Planck put it:

a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. (Planck 1949, pp. 33–4)