Let us wake up to beauty

The present article has three purposes. The first is to describe what was, at the time, a highly promising research program known as Disequilibrium Macroeconomics, the difficulties of developing it and the importance of its insights for understanding the nature of the Great Recession and of the possible ways out of it. Hence the interest in waking up this sleeping beauty. The second purpose is to discuss two topics that were probably at the center of the lack of success of this approach: Effective demand Failures and the Neoclassical Corridor. The deeper examination of these two ideas and the clarification of the debates around them constitute the third purpose of the article. And finally some ideas are presented in favor of using a complex systems approach to understand both the development of ideas and the nature of the economic system.