Whatever Has Happened to Political Economy?

The deep recession, which followed the 2007-2008 financial crash, has contributed to rekindling the debate on the adequacy of the commonly adopted economic theories and models to explain slow growth, involuntary unemployment, and rising inequality. Now, even some great economists, Nobel prize winners, maintain the idea that dominant economic theories are not a suitable basis for economic policies able to deal with the current social and political problems. Indeed, a paradigm based on the principle of selfregulating markets appears unfit to understand a situation of massive unemployment, or under-employment, an increasing number of working poor, and idle productive capacity in most of the advanced countries.