A recent Evonomics article, Why You Should Blame The Economics Discipline For Today’s Problems by John T. Harvey, claims that at least in the USA economic politics is broken, because it’s based on the models of the economic orthodoxy of neoclassic macroeconomics, which is based on rather unrealistic assumptions. There are other models that seem to have much superior predictive capability. Some of those are also mentioned in the comments, so it’s worth reading those. The basic problem seems to be that the most prestigious academic journals only accept submissions that are in conformity with the academic orthodoxy. That’s bad because professors must publish in exactly those journals.
I wonder how much different the situation in Europe is. It is easier for alternative rigorous economic theories to be heard within academia and politics in Europe?
How could those alternative theories like “complexity economics” obtain more prominence?
And isn’t all of this a bit strange? If other models make better predictions, why don’t they rise to prominence must faster? Is this a kind of market failure in the market of economic theories within academia? Are the incentive systems so broken, that any such market would degenerate into the hegemony of a single theory, no matter how bad it was?