Jean-Luc Gaffard is professor at the Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis and at the SKEMA Business School. He is an honorary member of the Institut Universitaire de France, a member of the GREDEG laboratory at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and scientific advisor at the Observatoire Français des Conjonctures Economiques (OFCE).
Mario Amendola is professor at the University of Rome La Sapienza.
Francesco Saraceno is Deputy Department Director at OFCE-Sciences Po.

Economists don’t think about time.
This gap in their theories has made them incapable of anticipating events that didn’t belong in their realm, whether it was the Great Depression of the 1930s, high inflation of the 1970s, or the Great Recession of 2008.

The goal of this book is to reintegrate time and its profound dynamics of change into economic theory. It shows the necessity of taking into account the reality of industrial market economies as they developed from the middle of the Eighteenth Century in Europe and the United States. Denouncing the myth of a stable equilibrium to which either the market (neo-classical theory) or the government (Keynesian theory) would always enable a return, it analyzes the role of entrepreneurs and their decisions to invest, and that of currency and credit, as decisive elements in the linking of the short and the long term. It is then up to governments to help the various actors master the clocks…