Because it seems so context-dependent. In our own time they literally just had a big conference with some of the heavy-hitters of Macro talking about post-crisis economics and what it should look like compared pre-crisis economics. 2008 hit us in the teeth right as we were in a period that economists were calling the “great moderation” and cockily claiming that the main macro problems of the business cycle were solved.
So maybe economics was working, but what changed was not the science itself but instead the economy in a qualitatively way that made the old science obsolete.
I think we see a bit of this in the move from Labor Theory of Value to the Marginalists – enough that we called it a revolution. What was different about the economy that Smith, and Malthus and Ricardo were studying than the one Jevons and Menger were looking at? It wasn’t static. One thing to look at would be the rise of the corporation and the diminishing in power of the landlord class. With the rise of the corporation we have the rise of a new class, the managerial class. This helped lead to the need for a new economics. Businesses were no longer the solitary price taker in the market place, but corporations which were islands of order in the chaos of the market. New economy, new economics.
What will our new economics look like?
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