What is New Economic Thinking?

In the UK, the government is grappling with an unprecedented budget deficit and unemployment is over 1 million higher than it was before the recession. This is a crisis for the real economy and for economic policymakers, but it should also be seen as a crisis for the economics profession and for economic theory. Not only did mainstream neoclassical economics – which has been the overwhelmingly dominant strand in economic thinking for over a century – fail to predict the collapse and recession, its models do not even concede that such events could happen. In the future, there is bound to be more interest in economic theories that offer a better explanation of recent events; and this is where heterodox economics comes in.