Economics's Runaway Standstill

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I have left the below comment here:

When I was studying economics at university, back in the early 14th century, I remember being bombarded by the same kind of complaints; everyone among the teachers felt they were a critical minority, fighting a lonely fight against the mainstream. Why have all these efforts at resistance and valiant pioneering never come to fruition, in the sense of giving rise to a new economic paradigm?

I suppose, complaining about the mainstream is good enough to stabilise the competing theological schools in economics. Viel Feind, viel Ehr', as the German saying goes: the more formidable my enemy, the grander my own cause.

Also, students of economics like to appear to one another and the rest of the world as being scientists, and among the paraphernalia of mainstream economics there is a lot of technical stuff that gives you a chance to maintain that appearance (econometrics etc.). This (really) pseudo-scientific ambition lends much stability to the subject.

Studying economics has a socialising and signalling function: it signals a competence for which people are prepared to pay a lot of money - you do not want to destroy that bonus by emphasising the theological and rather uncertain nature of economics. As far as socialising goes, irrespective of how close your particular affiliation/school/theological variant of economics may or may not be to the mainstream, most of us want to be taken seriously as economists after many years dedicated to the study of economics, even though the subject may not deserve to be taken quite that seriously.

This inherent conservatism of "economics" may give us a common language helping us express and expedite significant alterations and even revolutions every once in a while, as Keynes did, who left the neoclassical apparatus of economics largely intact, while attacking it in certain strategic places vehemently.

In a world that is free by historical standards, I suspect we will never arrive at a common corpus of economics that is beyond doubt and scorn. Economics is too much suffused with values (whose meaning and consequences we tend to interpret differently) to be able to ever attain the objectivity whose accomplishment is the claim of all the varieties in which it presents itself.