ABSTRACT
The gradual adoption of a post-Keynesian perspective is likely to revitalize economics, offering a theoretical framework which is more open-ended and therefore more conducive to productive inquiry, but it is not likely to bring immediate results or pat answers. As the neoclassical orthodoxy gradually gives way to a post-Keynesian approach, the nature of economics as an intellectual discipline is likely to change in three important ways. At the most obvious—though not necessarily the most fundamental—level, the emphasis is likely to shift from the analysis of substitution effects to the analysis of income effects. Economics as a social science is largely the outgrowth of the eighteenth-century mechanistic view of the universe which Newton’s Principia inspired. It is based on the assumption that effects can be clearly distinguished from causes, and that the latter can explain the former.
