Economists of Other Denominations

 

This is not to say that there are not other approaches. It is to say that the level of dominance of neoclassical economics is along the lines of Alabama scheduling SUU for an early season football game. 

These alternatives go by a number of different names: Marxist, radical, heterodox, post-Keynesian ... and lately progressive.

There are departments that specialize in this, and individual professors, but they are scattered: the University of Utah, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (the main campus), UC-Berkeley, UC-Riverside, the University of Michigan, the University of Tennessee, the New School for Social Research, my alma mater the University at Buffalo-SUNY, Notre Dame University, CUNY, New Mexico State, to name several. Some on that list may be out of date; it's not like I keep up on this stuff.

Importantly, this strain is often also found in schools of public policy. That sounds like something no one could be opposed to: who could be against programs where they teach you about how government works. Unfortunately, they now mostly teach only how a progressive government might work. Some of these programs even require zero economics for an education about what government can and should do. My impression is that this shift started with the Humphrey School at the University of Minnesota about 40 years ago, but I could be wrong.

One of the things I notice about economists in this group is that they publish in a smaller set of journals that often doesn't intersect much with the ones neo-classical economists use. They have fewer journals to publish in, fewer peers to review their stuff, and fewer opportunities for co-authoring. 

(I am reminded of a one-liner from a movie about 20-somethings back in the 90s ... Reality Bites maybe. One friend tries to convince another that he's a loser and needs to give up on his band. He replies "But, we're really big in Belgium").

Personal Opinion: I worked at the U back in the 90's. I liked the Marxist/radical/heterodox/post-Keynesian people I worked with, and a normal fraction of them were "really smart". But my impression was that in an academic sense they "didn't get out much", and seemed unaware of much of what was going on in neoclassical economics. My takeaway was that maybe schools that want them should have 2 departments: one for "economics" and one for "radical economics". Notre Dame actually had an arrangement like this at the time.