Economic Sciences in Need of Reform

"This time is different" is the title of a contentious book by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff (2011). For fully seven years, an accumulation of adverse effects has been grounding international businesses, countries and their politics, mostly in Europe. Some of the disastrous developments and their causes are better understood today than before the crisis broke, but some interactions are still disputed and will take considerable time to be finally clarified. The complex coalescence of problems is not restricted to the purely economic level. As a result, attempts to illuminate their backgrounds through the use of traditional economic approaches which are, moreover, typically contradictory, will have little success. Fundamental changes in fields whose causes are at most indirectly related to the economy constitute complications for the dismal science that are difficult to analyse for its practitioners.