Economics in the Century Ahead

Abstract

This paper deals with the implications for economics of changing social, political and institutional attitudes and structures proceeding from the hypothesis that economics cannot be a static discipline, that so to regard it is an assurance of scholarly obsolescence. The corporation and the increasingly evident pursuit of personal power within the corporate structure, other bureaucratic patterns of behavior so evident in the firm, the changing political context of economics, the policy errors from the ever more damaging distinction between microeconomics and macroeconomics and the extraordinary problems associated with the movement from comprehensive socialism to welfare-moderated capitalism are cited as examples of the accommodation that economics must make in the years ahead and, to repeat, of the irrelevance that awaits failure so to acommodate. Copyright 1991 by Royal Economic Society.