Why economics textbooks must, and how they can, be changed into a real-world and pluralist economics

We argue that economics must, and can, be taught in fundamentally different ways than the simplistic and ideology-laden “economics of x”. We illustrate this with a different new textbook, ‘Microeconomics of Complex Economies’ (2015). First, the mainstream’s inconsistency between some useful research and simplistic teaching in terms of “equilibrium” and “(perfect) market”, and the resulting dichotomic textbook structure, incoherent between (“perfect”) equilibrium and some recent real-world phenomena, is characterised. We then show how this can be changed, in terms of the new textbook’s structure and content, and by the process of publishing a “heterodox” complexity textbook with a leading publisher.