Abstract

The present economic crisis seems to require a rethinking of both the system of market economy and the science of economics. There are two different views of how deep this rethinking should be. One can imagine and implement a stronger and better regulation of the financial system and some local adjustment of the prevailing paradigm of economic science, or one can deem it necessary to reexamine the modern system of market economy and to pay more attention to its consequences and to rebuild the science of economics from its roots. The paper argues in favour of this second hypothesis and proposes some ideas on how to implement it. Among these ideas there is the claim that today market economy has become a marketing economy, where marketing refers to all actions on the part of firms aimed at manipulating consumer's needs so that they will buy their goods rather than those of other firms and will buy more and more goods and always newly invented goods, and the claim that economics is a superficial science in that it separates the goods that are obtained in exchange of money from all other things which are goods for human beings and it has to make many false assumptions about human beings in order to be able to imitate physics.