Thanks for the great reply Jeff.
One of the articles I linked to was John Rapley’s piece in the Guardian. John was arguing that economists have more in common with priests than scientists. I wasn’t completely convinced, but part of his argument was about the social processes that operate within the discipline. These are pretty much the same as in any science: some people come up with ideas that seem the best for the time; those people get important jobs — professors, government advisers — and write the textbooks used to teach the new generation. This makes it difficult to move on to new ideas when the weaknesses in the old ideas start to show. The problem for economics may be harder because (a) it’s hard to do proper experiments in economics (particularly macro), so much of the evidence is observational; and (b) it’s not just academics whose reputations get stuck to prevailing ideas, but also politicians, business leaders and so on.
I think economics (and science generally) would do well to think about how to sustain diverse thinking, both in the production of ideas, and their implementation. This might help to encourage a bit more caution in pursuing radical policies based mostly on economic theory. As you say, this starts in school and university. It was heartening when economics students at Manchester protested the way that their course only taught a conventional neoliberal version of economics. It might be interesting to think about how this problem arises. Ironically, it looks like a kind of market failure (asymmetry of information between students and teachers). How you fix this is beyond me, but I imagine it needs both action from inside the profession as well as informed engagement from outside.
