You’re backpeddling and quibbling. The issue isn’t whether you have any reason to read something you don’t like. Obviously, we might want to read what we know we’re going to disagree with, to challenge or to amuse ourselves or to learn about our enemies. That’s not my point. My point is that orthodox economics is insulated from criticism because these economists condescend to everyone who hasn’t mastered the math. The insularity is based on scientism and physics envy. So the question isn’t whether you’re inclined to read amateur criticisms of your field; rather, it’s whether orthodox economists dismiss such criticisms because of a misplaced, condescending, scientistic bias, the latter being a charge of the criticisms in question.

I’m not saying you personally have been condescending in your criticisms of my articles. If anything, you’ve given the game away in the opposite direction, as it were, betraying your concerns about economics by being too emotional and obsessive rather than aloof. However, my interest isn’t in your personal motives (about which I know next to nothing), but in what your arguments may reveal about orthodox economics.

Obviously, you don’t formally represent the whole field. But I think it’s reasonable to assume that when you say, “Most of what is offered to the lay public by non-economists is trash,” you’re implying that non-economists generally aren’t qualified to criticize economics, so their criticisms can be dismissed. Yet the reason for that attitude is, in effect, that those lay criticisms are on to something: these economists are too scientistic, too insular, and even cultish in their physics envy and in their condescension towards sociology, politics, and history (in favour of GIGO math). So there's a performative self-contradiction here.

I know this has changed in recent decades, as heterodox economists have forged bridges with those other fields. But the revolution hasn’t happened yet, so the orthodox bias is still worth hammering, and that’s what I’m doing with this series of articles.