(1) First, not seeing the mortgage crisis coming for a regional economist, or a development economist, or an economic historian studying the fight between President Jackson and the Second Bank of the United States ... that's not a universal metric of whether they are wearing marginalist mainstream blinkers.

There are very few macroeconomists or financial economists remaining in the profession, having mostly been replaced by marginalist microeconomists pretending to do macroeconomics or financial economics ... and even an economist who is aware that the marginalist mainstream is radically incomplete would not have known the magnitude of the problem without the information.

I was online saying there was an unsustainable housing bubble in 2006, but I am a completely obscure regional development economist, and there's no reason that comments I make online would ever come to the attention of Jamie Galbraith. And I certainly did not expect the total meltdown, since I was not aware of how much financial fragility there was in the system. But if you had polled the individual subscribers to the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics and the Journal of Economic Issues, there would have been more than 10 or 12 who would have called a major financial system meltdown as a realistic possibility.

(2) At the 2006 ASSA meetings, there would have been more than 10 or 12 economists in the same room who would have argued that the housing bubble was unsustainable ... but it would have been the AFEE reception, and Jamie Galbraith would not have been there. Jamie Galbraith is a mainstream economist who understands some of the limitations of the approach, but that does not mean he is in close touch with large number of heterodox economists. And heterodox economists tend to be scattered across academe, in smaller institutions or lying low in state universities.

Indeed, the scattered nature of heterodox economics is on reason for the formation of ICAPE, the International Confederation of Associations for Pluralism in Economics, with 13 association members, and between 30 members between associations, institutes, journals and individual academic departments.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.