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An economic crisis, when it strikes, does disturb the mainstream. Their textbook advice – if the crisis is empirical rather than theoretical – is thrown out of the window by policymakers while the crisis lasts. Mainstream economists react defensively – which is not significantly different from what happens in a science. They can justify the extraordinary policy measures undertaken by the unexpected nature of the crisis, but then treat the contradiction the crisis poses for their theory as an aberration, which can be handled by admitting some modifications to peripheral aspects of the core theory. One example is the concept of ‘bounded rationality’ promoted by Joe Stiglitz (Stiglitz 2011, 2018). This can be invoked to say that, if everyone were strictly rational, then the problem would not have arisen, but because of ‘bounded rationality’, the general principle didn’t apply and, in this instance, a deviation from policies recommended by the pure theoretical canon is warranted.

Minor modifications are made to the Neoclassical paradigm, but fundamental aspects of it remain sacrosanct. Again, this is comparable to the reactions to an anomaly by adherents to an existing paradigm in a science.

Over time, the crisis passes – whether that passing was aided or hindered by the advice of economists. A handful of economists break with the majority because of the anomaly, which is how heterodox economists are born. But the majority of students become as entranced as their teachers were by the fundamentally utopian Neoclassical vision of capitalism as a system without power, in which everyone receives their just rewards, and in which regulation and punishment are unnecessary, because The Market does it all. These new students replace their masters, and they continue to propagate the Neoclassical paradigm.

This is the first hurdle at which economics fails to be a science. The process Planck describes, of the death of adherents of the old (Neoclassical) paradigm resulting in them being replaced by a ‘new generation’ that is familiar with the ‘new scientific truth’, does not occur in economics.