Abstract
What I am going to talk about follows on directly from what we have just discussed, the power of shaping beliefs and preferences, and the role of economics in that exercise. To pay tribute to the Marxist title that Robert has suggested for my talk ‘Economics as Superstructure’, I would like to start with a (slightly abbreviated) quote from Karl Marx: ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships; the relationships that make the one class the ruling one; therefore the ideas of its dominance.’
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Clark, J. B. (1899). The distribution of wealth: A theory of wages, interest and profits (p. 4). New York: Macmillan.
Häring, N. (2012). Economists and the powerful. London: Anthem Press.
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Häring, N., Zeise, L. (2016). Economics as Superstructure. In: Skidelsky, R., Craig, N. (eds) Who Runs the Economy?. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58017-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58017-7_3
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