I really appreciate Chris's well-written take on the modern economic profession. One thing worth highlighting is how heterodox analysis of the economy has fled into other disciplines outside Economics. My Ph.D. is in Sociology but I was very much identified with the Economic Sociology tradition based on a range of thinkers analyzing the social structures of how markets work-- and don't work. (My own research was on what it took to build the social structures that sustained the interlinked growth of the Internet and Silicon Valley).

Other "heterodox" analyses of the economy exist in scattered Geography departments, City and Regional Planning schools and a number of other disciplines where more empirically-minded and less equilibrium-obsessed schools of thought have bred.

What most of these other disciplines emphasize is that social structures proceed and are rarely generated spontaneously from market exchange. Where most economists only grudgingly grant the importance of legal structures to sustaining markets, other disciplines start from the questions of what is needed to generate the social and political structures needed to sustain market -- and alternatively, non-market forms of production.

The touchstone thinkers are people like Max Weber and Emile Durkheim and the social theory of Marx and later thinkers analyzing those economic structures. Even the most "radical" members of neoclassical economics today at best look at individuals' tendencies towards irrationalism and bargaining with little room for real analysis of larger social structures like states and group organizations.

The exception and an important one is some economic theory of why corporate firms exist at all, as opposed to having a mess of markets among individuals everywhere. But even there, most economists avoid much of the nitty-gritty of organizational structure, which is why you don't see many economists on the business best seller lists on how companies can improve their innovation and effectiveness.

In fact, one of the deans of business studies, Alfred Chandler, died this week and his training was notably not in economics but in History. Look around at other even mainstream business analysts and most of them have non-economics training, yet even most business leaders find their analysis of how the modern economic works more compelling than most neoclassical economics, which seems as fanciful to most business executives as it does to most leftist critics.

So while heterodoxy may barely scrape by within the economics profession itself, non-neoclassical views of the economy survive equite hardily in other disciplines.