"For critics of
mainstream economics, the 2008 financial crisis represents the final nail in
the coffin for a paradigm that should have died decades ago. Not only did
economists fail to see it coming, they can’t agree on how to get past it and
they have yet to produce a model that can understand it fully. A number of books critical of economics have
been written or re-written with the crisis in mind; articles by journalists and critical economists are
keen to use the crisis as evidence of the fields failings; and that
student-led anti-economics initiatives call themselves things like
the 'Post-Crash Economics Society' speaks
for itself.
However, economists
tend to see things differently – in my experience, your average economist
will concede that although the crisis is a challenge, it’s a challenge that has
limited implications for the field as a whole. Some go even further and argue
that it is all but irrelevant, whether due to progress being made in the field
or because the crisis represents a fundamentally unforeseeable event in a
complex world. Below I have
compiled the 7 most common arguments used to defend economic
theory after the crisis, and will consider each of them in turn, with the
quality of the arguments increasing as we go further down the list."
