Do capitalists really want a recovery? Can they afford it? On the face of it, the question sounds silly: of course capitalists want a recovery; how else can they prosper? According to the textbooks, both mainstream and heterodox, capital accumulation and economic growth are two sides of the same...

Economic, financial and social commentators from all directions and of various persuasions are obsessed with the prospect of recovery. The world remains mired in a deep, prolonged crisis, and the key question seems to be how to get out of it. The purpose of our paper is to ask a very different...

The article tries to answer an old question of economic theory and institutional economics: How do trade unions fit into a market economy? Are they a constitutive element of the market order or: are they a source of irritation and disruption?

Ever since the beginnings of classical political economy in the early nineteenth century, economics has faced culturally based criticism from a long line of literary authors. This paper argues that the old literary criticisms are still relevant and can provide useful guidelines for economic...

Dualism - the division of an object of study into separate, paired elements - is widespread in economic and social theorising: key examples are the divisions between agency and structure, the individual and society, mind and body, values and facts, and knowledge and practice. In recent years,...

Population ageing is often thought to have adverse economic consequences, and economics therefore has a responsibility for contributing to an understanding of ageing. This paper discusses the treatment of population ageing in economic theory and argues that mainstream economics is too narrow and...

This paper aims to show that economic theory has become ‘desocialised’ and separated from social theory through the adoption of individualistic methods and neglect of social relations and structures. A historical overview traces how the social content of economic theory has diminished,...

In this manuscript we consider the conjugate notion focused from consumer theory as an interesting tool. According to us, conjugate notion remained undeveloped in economic theory because Fenchel's conjugate notion was introduced exclusively for proper convex lower semi continuous functions and...

This contribution focuses on a coherent new way of thinking about the macroeconomy in terms of both economic theory and economic policies. The central bank should focus on financial stability; for fiscal policy in the short term and in the long term to address demand issues is very important....

The aim of this paper is to analyze controversies of modern macroeconomic theories in the period of the global economic crisis. Ideas, disagreement and similarities between the most important theories in relation to state intervention and anti-crisis economic policy are presented. The topical...