The crisis of vision in modern economic thought

by Robert L. Heilbroner

A deep and widespread crisis affects modern economic theory, a crisis that derives from the absence of a "vision" - a set of widely shared political and social preconceptions - on which all economics ultimately depends. This absence, in turn, reflects the collapse of the Keynesian view that provided such a foundation from 1940 through the early 1970s, comparable to earlier visions provided by Smith, Ricardo, Mill, and Marshall. The "unraveling" of Keynesianism has been followed by a division of discordant and ineffective camps whose common denominator seems to be their shared analytical...