At the meetings in Boston of the American Economic Association, protesters have gotten quite a bit of attention for demanding that the economics profession stop embracing “neoclassical” thinking and get with it. That means letting in various “voices” that all have statist agendas. At PowerLine, Steven Hayward has a great post about this.
The protesters proclaim “BEFORE ECONOMICS CAN PROGRESS, IT MUST ABANDON ITS SUICIDAL FORMALISM” to which Hayward replies, “Translation: you must abandon the rigor and conventions that stand in the way of our political agenda.”
This is nothing new, by the way. Soros and his acolytes have been pushing the idea that economics should forget about that old fuddy-duddy stuff about supply and demand, the results of interfering with the price system, and so on, in favor of mindless enthusiasm for gooey ideas like “living wage” laws.
Economics pays plenty of attention to all those ideas, but then many economists have the bad manners to point out that they have serious adverse effects.