Economists' responsibility for economic crises - scope and impact

The aim of the article is to answer the question posed in the title: are representatives of the economics profession responsible for causing and course of economic crises? The authors made a critical review of the literature on the subject, both world and Polish. The conducted considerations allowed for the conclusion that the difficulties of economists in the struggle with understanding and explaining economic crises result from two main groups of causes: endogenous and endogenous in relation to economic sciences. The article consists of three parts. The first deals with the issue of the ability to explain crises by modern economic sciences in the context of their essence, functions and peculiarities. The subject of considerations in the second part is the impact of economists on the real economy, in particular the channels of economic knowledge transmission and the related issue of responsibility for economic crises. In the next part, the field of considerations has been further expanded, and attention has been focused on deciding whether in the practice of the functioning of the modern market economy we are dealing rather with repetitive but transient crises of capitalism, or we are experiencing a crisis of capitalism as a socio-economic order.