ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter gives an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is designed to give anyone interested in economics a first step into the world of pluralism described above. It is written by academics and experts in various fields of economics, and compiled and edited by a small team of students and recent graduates from Rethinking Economics. For those born into an era that promised 'an end to boom and bust' and that 'the central problem of depression prevention had been solved', the economic events of 2008 and 2009 came as quite a shock. Economics is a hugely varied field, with an amazingly colourful array of different paradigms, methods and focuses, and pluralist economics is an education that includes all of these. Marxists have tools to analyse power relations and large historical trends and Post-Keynesians to deal with uncertainty, stagnation and crisis.
