Who Runs the Economy?: The Role of Power in Economics

Since the financial crisis of 2008 and the following Great Recession, there has been surprisingly little change in the systems of ideas, institutions and policies which preceded the crash and helped bring it about. 'Mainstream' economics carries on much as it did before. Despite much discussion of what went wrong, very little has substantially changed. Perhaps the answer has something to do with power; a subject on which economics is unusually quiet. Whilst economics may be able to discuss bargaining power and market power, it fails to explore the reciprocal connections between economic ideas and politics: the political power of economic ideas on the one side, and the influence of power structures on economic thought on the other. This book explores how the supposedly neutral discipline of economics does not simply describe human behaviour, but in fact shapes it.

Robert Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at Warwick University, UK. His three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes won five prizes and his book on the financial crisis, Keynes: The Return of the Master, was published in September 2010. He was made a member of the House of Lords in 1991, where he sits on the cross-benches, and was elected as a fellow of the British Academy in 1994. How Much is Enough? The Love of Money and the Case for the Good Life, co-written with his son Edward, was published in July 2012. His most recent publications were as author of Britain Since 1900: A Success Story? (2014) and as editor of The Essential Keynes (2015).