Contemporary orthodox economics lacks the consensus texts that define a stable discipline

Evidence

The unbearable lightness of the economy within neoclassicism is only the tip of the iceberg. Let us look more closely at the practical mechanics of orthodox contemporary “economics imperialism.” While gleefully encroaching upon the spheres of interest of other disciplines, orthodox economics has also freely appropriated formalisms and methods from those other disciplines: think of the advent of “experimental economics” or the embrace of magnetic resonance imaging, or attempts to absorb chaos theory or nonstandard analysis or Brownian motion through the Ito calculus. Indeed, if there has been any conceptual constant throughout the history of neoclassical theory since the 1870s, it has been slavish attempts to slake its physics envy through gorging on half-digested imitations of physical models. A social science so promiscuous in its avidity to mimic the tools and techniques of other disciplines has no principled discrimination about what constitutes just and proper argumentation within its own sphere; and this has only become aggravated in the decades since 1980. Economics, seemingly so powerful because so ubiquitous, parlously teeters on the edge of fragmenting into a pointless succession of whatever turns out to be fashionable in other scientific disciplines, which at least possess the virtue of having intellectual agendas that spawn novel practices and techniques. … Third, it would appear that the corporeal solidity of a live intellectual discipline would be indicated by consensus reference texts that help define what it means to be an advocate of that discipline. Here, I would insist that undergraduate textbooks should not count, since they merely project the etiolated public face of the discipline to the world. But if we look at contemporary orthodox economics, where is the John Stuart Mill, the Alfred Marshall, the Paul Samuelson, the Tjalling Koopmans, or the David Kreps of the early twenty-first century? The answer is that, in macroeconomics, there is none. And in microeconomics, the supposed gold standard is Andrew Mas-Collel, Michael Whinston, and Jerry Green (Microeconomic Theory), at its birth a baggy compendium lacking clear organizing principles, but now slipping out of date and growing a bit long in the tooth. Although often forced to take econometrics as part of the core, there is no longer any consensus that econometrics is situated at the heart of economic empiricism in the modern world. Beyond the graduate textbooks, the profession is held together by little more than a few journals that are designated indispensable by some rather circular bibliometric measures, and the dominance of a few highly ranked departments, rather than any clear intellectual standards. Indeed, graduates are socialized and indoctrinated by forcing them to read articles from those journals with a half-life of five years: and so the disciplinary center of gravity wanders aimlessly, without vision or intentionality. The orthodoxy, so violently quarantined and demarcated from outside pretenders, harbors a vacuum within its perimeter. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 68

Categorization

• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 68
• XREF: connects to: Economics profession generates strikingly few serious revisions to orthodoxy — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 663; Information-side patches to neoclassical economics remain epicycles never incorporated into the core model — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 1998; Economics as a discipline profited from manufactured doubt rather than suffering from it — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 633 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Economics profession generates strikingly few serious revisions to orthodoxy #corroborates (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 663
• Neoclassical economics as a whole is a zombie tradition resistant to refutation #corroborates (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 66
• Neoclassical economics treats its own past claims as disposable bygones #corroborates (0.80) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 453
• Information-side patches to neoclassical economics remain epicycles never incorporated into the core model #qualifies (0.75) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 1998
• Economics as a discipline profited from manufactured doubt rather than suffering from it #complicates (0.75) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 633
• Neoclassical economics’ canonical theorems undercut each other’s core claims. #corroborates (0.70) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 70