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These same factors isolate those economists who refuse to ignore the empirical and theoretical failings of Neoclassical economics, and who form rival paradigms like Post Keynesian, Marxian, Austrian and Biophysical Economics. These academics survive as marginalized iconoclasts within the economics departments of leading universities (like Ha Joon Chang and Tony Lawson at Cambridge University), as leading academics in Departments of Business or Management rather than Economics (like Mariana Mazzucato at UCL’s Faculty of the Built Environment), or as lecturers in Economics in low-ranked universities that prominent Neoclassicals don’t want to work in (such as the University of Western Sydney in Australia, and Kingston University in the UK, where I was respectively a Professor and Head of School).

Given this dominance of the Neoclassical paradigm despite numerous crises, both empirical and logical (Keen 2011), and the co-existence of incompatible rival paradigms, the discipline sits in a state of perpetual, understated and unresolved crisis. Neoclassical economics evolves over time, in ways that its adherents believe are scientific revolutions, but it is never replaced in the way that obsolete paradigms are replaced in science. Rival paradigms develop as well, but never lead to the discredited Neoclassical paradigm being displaced.

Perhaps you’re thinking ‘But what about the Keynesian Revolution?’. Keynes certainly saw his work as constituting a clear break with the Neoclassical orthodoxy – which he described as ‘classical economics’:

I accuse the classical economic theory of being itself one of these pretty, polite techniques which tries to deal with the present by abstracting from the fact that we know very little about the future. (Keynes 1937, p. 215)

However, Keynes’s revolutionary ideas were snuffed out by John Hicks, in a paper that purported to reach a reconciliation between ‘Mr Keynes and the Classics’ (Hicks 1937) by developing what became known as the IS-LM model.⁷ Hicks interpreted Keynes as not revolutionary at all, but merely adding ‘the Economics of Depression’ to the existing Neoclassical toolkit: