ABSTRACT
Economics is 'an inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations'. It is a social science. That is, economics attempts a scientific method to analyse the behaviour of society and to thus derive theories that may explain economic phenomena. There is an important difference, however, between employing a scientific methodology in studying economics to studying, say, physics – a natural science. In economics, the basic data people study include individual consumers, producers and governments. The behaviour of such social actors is sometimes surprising! In physics, from observing the behaviour of atoms all the way up to the movement of heavenly bodies, the data under review are far more predictable. Since the major financial crash of 2007/8 and the following Great Recession, there has been a major challenge to the dominant paradigm of economics and, as a result, there is an ongoing discussion regarding how this subject should be taught.
