Beyond the Global Financial Crisis: Structural Continuities as Impediments to a Sustainable Recovery

Abstract

There has scarcely been a day in the last three years when we have not read depressing headlines in the newspapers about the global economic crisis. The current turmoil, which many experts concur in seeing as the worst jolt to the world economy since the Great Depression, is pushing the parameters of the established system to its limits. One could say that we see, in the short-term measures taken against the crisis at the time, an effective anti-crisis strategy. But ironically, the promptness with which these short-term measures were enacted prevented adequate questioning of the dominant paradigm which had caused the crisis. As a result, the structural problems leading to the crisis were not abated. Despite the occurrence of the deepest economic crisis to be experienced since the Great Depression, the present economic emergency did not shake the neoclassical economic paradigm as strongly as was needed. A puzzle that this study aims to solve arises here: Why and how has the conventional wisdom survived and reproduced its intellectual hegemony even after the “most devastating economic crisis” since the Great Depression?