Global crisis: a comprehensive interdisciplinary approach to paradigm change

The global crisis is threefold. First, it is a financial and economic crisis, inducing hugely negative effects on growth, distribution, and welfare. Second, it severely damaged the mainstream in economics, particularly the theory of efficient financial markets and the theory of self-regulating markets. Third, it caused an ongoing fragility of conventional public policies to address socioeconomic issues. The scale of the global crisis demands nothing less than paradigm change. This change requires adopting an interdisciplinary triangle, in which economics dialogues productively with political science and international relations. The goal is a more pluralist and interdisciplinary theory of economic policies. In that spirit, the paper provides a critical analysis of the dominant narrative on globalization, and outlines an alternative, one that could favor more democratic and progressive policies, at both the national and international level.