Informed by critical realist ontology, this proposed book will throw light on the nature and causes of three different, but strongly interconnected crises currently ravaging contemporary societies worldwide: an economic crisis, an ecological crisis, and a normative (or moral and political) crisis of an unjust and profoundly inequitable distribution of wealth, resources and life-opportunities.
The global system of production and consumption is in profound crisis economically, ecologically as well as socially, morally and politically. Moreover it is on a highly unsustainable trajectory measured against all dimensions of sustainable development. The book will follow the roots of the different manifestations of the global crisis back to an inherent dynamics in the capitalist economic system itself as well as to its main discursive expression: neoclassical economics.
Being nearly immune to critical inputs from other disciplines, mainstream economic theory has been characterized as ‘autistic’ by some critics. With its unshakable faith in a set of axioms which can be shown to have been disproved by other sciences as well as by currently heterodox currents within it, the discipline of economics arguably belongs to the realm of myth and superstition rather than to a faculty of social science.