... both very scientistic (scientific appearing, albeit not scientific in fact) with its heavily abused statistics and its arcane mathematical modeling, and very convenient to the status quo under normal conditions.

After all, under normal conditions, helping to understand the dramatic change coming and getting ready for it is not required of social theory ~ under normal conditions, it is far handier to have a strong bias for explaining why those with economic power should be allowed to do whatever they wish to do, by virtue of an economic theory which is blind to economic power.

And the supplanting of economic theory which arrived at inconvenient conclusions and replacing it with economic theory that arrived at more convenient conclusions started long, long before the Limits to Growth was every published, so explaining its continued progress from the 1970's through to today in terms of a reaction to the LTG is less persuasive than explaining it as a continuation of the strategies that accounted for its growing prominence through the 50's and 60's ~ tapping military and business sources of incomes to establish "economic analysis" units in PhD granting institutions which both funded the generation of the next generation of PhD's and also tilted the votes in academic departments in favor of the number crunchers.

A bias in your favor in both generation of new PhD's and hires of new PhD's means that over successive generations you shift the theoretical predisposition of young academics, who do the bulk of the work in peer review, and therefore tilt the degree of difficulty in getting different sorts of work published in the "top" journals.

Now, there was a very deliberate aspect to this, in that both military and business funding for this kind of economic research was a deliberate conservative strategy ~ but it was more a deliberate conservative strategy of the 1950's. By the time that the LTG was published, that channel of development was already entrenched as the status quo.

The fact that as a result economics has reached a cul-de-sac where it has blinded itself to almost all of the most important challenges facing economies in the real world is normal ~ there is no reason to expect development within an academic discipline to be dramatically different from development of "harder" technologies, and in harder technologies, development tends to follow established channels until the opportunities implicit in those channels runs out, and only then are the conditions ripe for more fundamental innovations to take hold and establish new channels with a wealth of unexplored new opportunities.

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