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These factors interact to make economics extremely resistant to fundamental change. In physics, anomalies like the clash between the results of the Michelson–Morley experiment and the predictions of pre-Relativity physics persist until the theory changes, because the experimental result is eternal. The anomaly doesn’t go away, but the theory that it contradicted dies with the pre-anomaly scientists. Try as they might, they can’t recruit adherents to the old theory amongst new students, because the students are aware of the anomaly, and won’t accept any theory that doesn’t resolve it.

In economics, anomalies are gradually forgotten, and new students can be recruited to preserve and extend the old beliefs, and to paper over anomalous phenomena. School and university economics courses become ways of reinforcing the Neoclassical paradigm, rather than fonts from which new theories spring in response to failures of the dominant paradigm.

In physics, intellectual crises are intense but, relatively speaking, short-lived. The crisis persists until a new theoretical breakthrough resolves it – regardless of whether that breakthrough persuades existing physicists (which as a rule, it doesn’t). The ‘anomaly’, the empirical fact that fundamentally contradicts the existing paradigm, is like the grain of sand in an oyster that ultimately gives birth to a pearl: the irritation cannot be avoided, so it must be dealt with (Woit 2006).⁵ It is the issue that believers in the existing paradigm know they cannot resolve – though it may take time for that realization to sink in, as various extensions of the existing paradigm are developed, each of which proves to be partially effective but inherently flawed. It is the thing young scientists are most aware of, the issue they want to be the one to resolve. As their lecturers who stick to the old paradigm age, the students take in the old ideas, but they are actively looking for where they are wrong, and how these contradictions might be resolved.