Methodological Conclusion

Abstract

Our critical study in this book has pointed out the limitations of economic theory in addressing great human problems. It then points to certain alternatives that lie beyond. We will discourse on what lies beyond traditional economic theory in the classical, neoclassical, Keynesian and monetarist doctrines that we have examined in this book. Many economic doctrines have come and gone leaving no permanence in our understanding of the underlying forces that shape the human world. Marxism as a branch of classical economic theory became marginalized with the fall of Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall and the rise of the capitalist order. The global capitalist order only a few years in its making has unleashed high uncertainty in a groping world. Faced with such uncertain interactions between purely economic forces and political interests, it has now become increasingly difficult to project any degree of efficacy in economic prediction and forecasting. The complexity of human issues with deep economic and political interests in them can never assume such a domain of interactions to be optimal in preferences and behaviour. Human beings and economic agents are therefore far from being rational agents as depicted in economic theory. The reason for such departure from prescriptive behaviour of purely economic agents due to politico-economic interactions that are now seen to take place between markets and institutions taken up in the widest sense.