Who Runs the Economy? [electronic resource] : The Role of Power in Economics / edited by Robert Skidelsky, Nan Craig.

Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Session 1: Economics and Power: Basic Models of the Relationship -- Power and Economics -- Steven Lukes -- Jonathan Hearn -- Economics as Superstructure -- Norbert Haring -- Lucas Zeise -- Economics as Science -- Nancy Cartwright -- John Bryan Davis -- Session 2: Case Studies -- The Keynesian Revolution and the Theory of Countervailing Powers -- Robert Skidelsky -- Roger Backhouse -- Neoclassical Counter-revolution and the Ascendancy of Business 1970-1990 -- Daniel Stedman Jones -- Ben Jackson -- Session 3: Applications to the Present -- Economics and the Banks -- Adair Turner -- Thomas Palley -- Power and Inequality -- Jamie Galbraith -- Anthony Heath -- .

Since the financial crisis of 2008 and the following Great Recession, there has been surprisingly little change in the systems of ideas, institutions and policies which preceded the crash and helped bring it about. 'Mainstream' economics carries on much as it did before. Despite much discussion of what went wrong, very little has substantially changed. Perhaps the answer has something to do with power; a subject on which economics is unusually quiet. Whilst economics may be able to discuss bargaining power and market power, it fails to explore the reciprocal connections between economic ideas and politics: the political power of economic ideas on the one side, and the influence of power structures on economic thought on the other. This book explores how the supposedly neutral discipline of economics does not simply describe human behaviour, but in fact shapes it.