Pluralist Economics

Edward Fullbrook

Jul 2013 · Zed Books Ltd.

About this ebook

This book is an authoritative and accessible guide to the pluralist movement threatening to revolutionise mainstream economics. Leading figures in the field explain why pluralism is a required virtue in economics, how it came to be blocked and what it means for the way we think about, research and teach economics. The first part of the book looks at how neoclassical economics gained its stranglehold, particularly in the United States, and how the social and intellectual underpinnings of economics have enabled it to maintain this in the face of inconsistent evidence from the real world. This is then contrasted with different approaches to pluralism. Pluralist Economics then goes on to address the array of arguments for establishing pluralism, showing how economics came to function as a concealed ideology and not as a science, and how value-free economics is an illusion. Finally, it addresses the practical problems presented by this different way of doing economics.

About the author

Edward Fullbrook is the founder and editor of The Real World Economics Review (formerly the Post-Autistic Economics Review) and webmaster of www.paecon.net. He is a research fellow in the School of Economics at the University of the West of England. He is the author of Sex and Philosophy: Rethinking de Beauvoir and Sartre (2008).