The profession of economics has a lot to answer for. Since the late 1970s, the ideas of influential economists have justified policies that have made the world more prone to economic crisis, remarkably less equal, more polluted, and less secure than it might be. How did ideas and policies that have proved to be such an abject failure come to dominate the economic landscape?
 
By critically examining the work of the most famous economists of the neoliberal period including Alan Greenspan, Milton Friedman, and Robert Lucas, Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson demonstrate that many of those who rose to prominence did so primarily because of their defense of, and contribution to, rising corporate profits, rather thantheir ability to predict or explain economic events.
 
An important and controversial book, The Profit Doctrine exposes the uses and abuses of mainstream economic canons, identifies those responsible, and reaffirms the primacy of political economy.
 

Robert Chernomas is professor of economics at the University of Manitoba and coauthor of Social Murder and Other Shortcomings of Conservative Economics, The Gatekeeper: Sixty Years of Economics according to the “New York Times”, and To Live and Die in America: Class, Power, Health, and Health Care. Ian Hudson is professor of economics at the University of Manitoba and coauthor of Economics in the Twenty-first Century: A Critical Perspective

— Steve Keen, author of Debunking Economics

— Gary Dymski, Leeds University Business School