ABSTRACT
Economics has come to focus on human behaviour as ‘a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses’. Microeconomics studies the behaviour of individuals and firms. The neoclassical approach to economics can be characterised by the drawing of logical inferences from assumptions, resulting in a resilient belief in the supremacy of markets. In opposition to the individualistic neoclassical perspective, feminist economics pays a lot more attention to social factors. In 2005, D. Colander asked students to react to the quote ‘Economics is the most scientific of the social sciences’. Since the crises that shook economies worldwide during the first decade of the twenty-first century, people from both inside and outside the discipline started to realise that economists had overlooked many relevant dimensions and had overestimated their own usefulness. Far into the nineteenth century, university professors in the United States offered students courses in political economy.
