Michel Ghassibe, second year economist at Cambridge University and president of CSEP, explains how the different schools of Economics thought were alternatively in the spotlight throughout the 20th century. The integration of Economic pluralism in one's education is the best solution against these monopolistic shifts between different schools of thought. Many schools of thought have always competed for the dominant position in both the academia and the policy-making world. John Maynard Keynes’s School managed to establish an intellectual monopoly in the three decades following the end of World War II. It was centred on the notion that the economy is unstable because consumers and investors are driven by the spontaneous animal spirits. Its solution to these challenges, adopted by governments at the time, was to manage these fluctuations in demand through aggregate demand management by the state, nationalisation and fixed exchange rates to promote an export-led recovery.
The Vice President of the CSEP Marco Schneebalg stresses the importance and necessity of a new way for Economics teaching. The shape of the world economy has changed dramatically over the last twenty years, but the economic curriculum has not. Curriculum reform is necessary and long overdue to overhaul some of the outdated concepts that are still being taught. A re-introduction of the intellectual dynamism of pluralism would reinvigorate the discipline. The last twenty years have seen the dotcom bubble burst and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. It’s fair to say that economists failed to anticipate the coming of the crisis or its magnitude once it had arrived.
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