Look through the past 20 years of research in a wide range of areas of economics, as I did recently, and you'll find that the 'laissez faire neoclassical orthodoxy' has evaporated. This is not just because of the high-profile rise of behavioral and experimental economics, nor even the prevalence of Freakonomics-style neat ideas in practical social science, but because of the adoption of less restrictive assumptions, new modelling techniques and a more applied approach across the board - in growth theory, international trade, competition and regulatory economics, labor economics, and so on. What professional economists do - in the wider world of consultancy and policy as well as the academic world - has changed dramatically in the past generation.

If you test actually existing economics against the complaints made by many who regard themselves as heterodox, you will often find that the complaint has lost its footing. Mainstream economists often do what heterdox economists say they ought to be doing. Loss aversion? Imperfect information? Social norms? Absnce of perfect competion? Increasing returns? You bet. We mainstreamers offer all of that as standard now.

So what's left of the complaints? Simply that the mainstream is the mainstream. It's hardly a scandal, still less a surprise, that economics has its own sociology of status hierarchies and peer group reinforcement. So does every academic subject. These change slowly, as insiders defend their status. One of the defense mechanisms is the absorption of good ideas from outsiders.

This is not to say that there's nothing to be criticised in the world of academic economics. I'd pick out two serious flaws. One is the unacceptable lag between what economists do and what they teach. Those professors who're doing interesting and, yes, heterodox work themselves are still teaching essentially the same flawed neoclassical model they no longer use. A second is a different aspect of the sociology of economics: its practitioners are much, much less likely than those in other fields to be female or non-white. The lack of diversity of ideas within the mainstream, the main charge made by heterdox economists, is much less pronounced than it used to be. I think the lack of diversity in these identity terms is more pronounced than ever.