John King has made challenging contributions to our thinking in many areas. This paper focuses on two of these: the case for pluralism and the case against requiring macroeconomic theory to be expressed in terms of its microfoundations. The purpose of this paper is to explore further the...

The economic crisis has exposed shortcomings in standard economic theory and provided an impetus for new economic thinking. But the theoretical debate in the wake of the crisis has been unduly constrained by the terms of the mainstream approach to economic theory. Like any approach, it is...

The way in which financial markets are framed depends on who is doing the framing, although there are reflexive interdependencies between these framings. Mainstream economics frames financial markets as archetypical competitive markets, focusing on prices as the key information on which to base...

The purpose of this paper is to argue that awareness of the epistemological issues arising from an open-system ontology is critical to understanding the crisis and the policy response, to challenging that understanding and to encouraging a radical policy shift. The argument is couched in terms...

It is the purpose of this paper to elaborate on the argument that formalism is non-neutral; analyses which today would be described as informal turn into something quite different when formalised. The reasons for non-neutrality refer to the choice of assumptions or axioms, the choice of method,...

The presence or absence of dualism can be crucial to the development of economic theory and our understanding of it. Dualism is inherent to the methodology of mainstream economics. But, while it is often assumed in the conventional terminology of economics, dualism is not a necessary...