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More than a decade after the global financial crisis there are a number of heterodox textbooks on the market. For example, the CORE project offers an online as well as a print version of its textbook developed over recent years by a group of economists, including Wendy Carlin and Sam Bowles (The CORE Team 2017, https://www.core-econ.org/; cf. Stirati 2018 in this journal). The influential modern monetary theory economists have published a textbook too (Mitchell et al. 2019; cf. Michell 2019). Another now well-established series of textbooks was written and maintained by economists of the Economics in Context Initiative (ECI) (Goodwin et al. 2019; 2020a; 2020b; cf. Lavoie 2009; 2015). Sebastian Dullien has adapted the macroeconomic textbook to the European situation (Dullien et al. 2018; cf. Lavoie 2018). Those textbooks address the introductory level and try to integrate standard economics content through the lens of (and in contrast to) heterodox theories.
This review showcases further contributions to the growing corpus of heterodox textbooks, and it contrasts two quite different approaches. Anti-Blanchard Macroeconomics by Brancaccio and Califano is now, after three Italian editions, available in an extended English version. Komlos's Foundations of Real-World Economics has been updated and revised recently and is now available in its second edition. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that both books have established themselves on the market and that there is an ongoing interest in them.
Concepts and potential audiences of the books differ enormously. Anti-Blanchard Macroeconomics is a critical appraisal of the famous textbook by Blanchard (2017, and previous editions) and at the same time an alternative to it. To be precise, the book offers in a condensed form a reformulation of the models of Blanchard's older versions of his macroeconomic textbook and of the latest edition, revised in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and inspired by his work for the International Monetary Fund. The presentation by Brancaccio and Califano does not resemble the typical style of recent textbooks. No examples, illustrative case studies, trenchant cartoons or exemplifying boxes are to be found in the main text. On the contrary, the book uses a very lean approach to provide a lucid development of the causal structure of both Blanchard's AS–AD model, used in the first...