I side with Steve Keen’s Debunking Economics on this. It’s interesting that, in effect, he agrees with you that later economists refuted the earlier models, but he hardly infers that economics should be let off the hook on that account. On the contrary, he points out that mainstream and leading economists, and what’s taught to undergraduates and to business majors ignore those later findings, thus indoctrinating these students with a phony neoliberal sense of reality.

That, then, is the justification for delving into the earlier models, because mainstream economics in the US ignores the later findings too. For instance, the fact that crazy assumptions are needed to sustain the early models should count as a reductio ad absurdum. But the mainstream economist’s justification of laissez-faire capitalism just goes on and on as if economists themselves hadn’t refuted it.

The question of the nature of contemporary economics is an empirical one. I’m certainly no expert on it, but I suspect most of those practitioners are more doctrinaire than you suggest. And I’m not talking about economists here or there, but about the institutions, the leaders of the field, and the bulk of what’s taught to economics and business majors. You say it’s one way, Keen says it’s another. You both likely have axes to grind here, as do I. How would you suggest we gauge what the answer is to this empirical question about the status of contemporary economics?