Whatever place the ‘credit crunch’ eventually finds in economic history, one certain victim of the crisis has been free market economics. It is impossible any more to hold that economies will prosper only if markets are freed from political bondage. Attacks on the economists by politicians and journalists have become commonplace. Even the Queen of England asked publicly why none of them saw it all coming. The ideological hegemony of mainstream economics, especially since the 1980s, has been holed below the water. This is not to say that the free marketers have been silenced, but public acceptance of the notion that the economy is social, institutional and in need of political guidance is now commonplace. And Karl Marx, after being sidelined for decades, is once again a best-seller in Germany. All of this suggests to me that the crash has opened up a new terrain for thinking about anthropology, economics and history.
Professor Keith Hart, in Angry Bear: Cross-post: A human economy for the twenty-first century (via quotingthecrisis)
