Last August, Graeme Maxton published a book arguing that “modern economics has failed us,” and this April, the New York Times hosted a roundtable “about how the teaching of economics should change in light of the financial crisis.”

This soul-searching has led to the establishment of organizations such as the Institute for New Economic Thinking and invigorated discussions about alternative metrics for gauging countries’ welfare…

To get the pulse of a field in flux, I asked eight of the world’s top young economists to identify the biggest unanswered questions in economics and predict what breakthroughs will define it a decade or two hence.

A collection of interesting viewpoints…  increased emphasis on gathering and processing empirical data, research into intergenerational mobility and behavioural economics (e.g. reassessing the assumption of rationality), better understanding of the global economy, and incorporation of recent financial crises into models.