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Once a solution is found, the protestations of the necessarily older, ageing, sometimes retired and often deceased champions of the previous paradigm mean nothing. Ultimately, all the significant positions in a university department are filled by scientists who are committed to the new paradigm. Then, as the new paradigm develops, it first undergoes a period of rapid extension, but ultimately confronts its own critical anomaly, and the science falls into crisis once more, as philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (Kuhn 1970) explains.⁶

This is a punctuated path of development. It starts with the development of an initial paradigm by a great thinker, around whom a community of followers coalesces. They extend the core insights and thus form a new paradigm in that science. Initially, they enjoy a glorious period of the dance between observation and theory, where observations confirm and extend the paradigm. But finally, some prediction the theory makes is contradicted by observation. After a period of denial and dismay, the science settles into an unhappy peace: the paradigm is taught, but with less enthusiasm, the anomaly is noted, and the various within-paradigm attempts to resolve it are discussed. Then, out of somewhere, whether from a Professor (Planck) or a patents clerk (Einstein), a resolution comes. Rinse and repeat.

Those punctuations never occur in economics, and because the punctuations don’t occur, neither does the kind of revolutionary change in the discipline that Kuhn vividly describes for physics and astronomy. Economics is, therefore, not a science. As Kuhn explains brilliantly, a real science goes through a process of paradigm change via a shift from what he calls ‘normal science’, to a scientific revolution triggered by a fundamental anomaly and resolved by a new paradigm, after which normal science resumes once more with the new paradigm. Economics has experienced many theoretical and empirical crises since the Neoclassical school became dominant in the 1870s, but none have resulted in a revolution to a new paradigm akin to the shift from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy.