Thanks for this perspective - it resonates with me, as someone re-entering economics after a career in the economic trenches (aka business). You validate my own discomfort with economic orthodoxy, and it's invigorating to hear about intellectual entrepreneurs forging new paths while remaining humble about what we don't yet understand.

I do agree that in recent decades, to a disturbing extent, a large majority of PhDs in economics have been awarded to philistines. In my experience, the typical economists under 50 scorns the liberal arts requirements typical of North American undergrad degrees, and has a naive scientistic admiration for science and math. They do know some math and statistics, but seldom know any science. Properly taught, science can be highly humanizing. A society run by the public policy prescription of the typical economist trained in the past 20-30 years is a society that would edge towards terminal conflict, self-destruction, and bureaucratic fascism. The views of academic economists about departmental and university politics are not a pretty sight. Economists believe that administrators should enjoy a maximum of discretion, forgetting that such discretion is likely to result in administrators' feathering their own nests and trampling on the rights of others. Keynes could write beautifully for the wider educated public, but he forgot that fact when he wrote the General Theory. At the same time, he also was fast forgetting technical economics. Hence the General Theory was badly written. It began to make sense with Hicks's IS-LM model. We did not really understand what Keynes was on about until Pigou and Modigliania worked out the full algebra and calculus details in 1943 and 44. Our ancestors eventually settled on Keynes having worked out the consequences of assuming certain "rigidities" in wage and price setting. When Keynes wrote, what came to be called classical or "market clearing" macroeconomics was poorly understood. It was Pigou and Modigliani who began to clarify the opposition between Keynes and the Classics. I should grant that rabid Keynesians often asserted that Keynes had said much more than this. I do not blame the current recession on decentralised market economies, or cowboy financial markets, or "capitalism." I blame it on the American bipartisan obsessive belief that dysfunctional people will clean up their acts if they become homeowners. Several million mortgages were granted to people who were very poor risks. When they were unable to meet their payments, house prices began to fall, which given the laxity of American creditor-borrower law, only made things much worse. Deep down, we do not know why the UK, Ireland, Canada, the USA, Australia, and New Zealand remain growing innovating societies under the rule of law and democratic due process. That many of the grand old men of neoliberal economics today were New Dealers and socialists when they were 20 is a telling indicator of the great ideological sea-change that has taken place over the past 70 years. We all believe in decentralised markets regulated by business law. Note the economic and political difficulties many post-Communist nations have had since 1990. I suspect that there are other unstated institutional assumptions underlying our political and economic order.

Lord Keynes was all of these capacities and more. His General Theory whilst not set in concrete overcame the Classical Economists dream time and proven the Chicago school of free marketeers as worse than dreamers, because their teachings led to plunder.

The institutional achievements of Western civilisation, such as individual liberty, the free market and the rule of law. It is probably the reigning assumption of the free market which is primarily at fault in the current crisis. Markets are rarely free, and to the degree that they are, instability is as common a result as equilibrium.