http://delong.typepa...s-may-1-2014.html

Ex: (samples)

Paul Krugman: Paradigming Is Hard: "We have a body of economic theory built around the assumptions...

...of perfectly rational behavior and perfectly functioning markets. Any economist with a grain of sense--which is to say, maybe half the profession?--knows that this is very much an abstraction, to be modified whenever the evidence suggests that it’s going wrong. But nobody has come up with general rules for making such modifications.... READ MOAR

There are lots of ways to be slightly stupid.... It’s very hard to come up with a general theory about which of these ways they will choose in any given situation. Behavioral economics is a fine... collection of interesting and sometimes useful observations... [not] a general, well, paradigm.... Meanwhile, markets also fail... but while we know a fair bit... we don’t seem close to a general paradigm here either.

[B de Long]
But so far we have failed. I thought a generation ago that by now we would have a three-dimensional mapping among (a) plausible and common ways that individuals could be slightly stupid, (b) market structures and adjustment processes, and (c) emergent classes of macroeconomic outcomes. We don't.
.
.
But a general framework, a paradigm? No. Instead, we are still building each application by hand--as if we are each a member of a handicraft guild, Master Clockmakers rather than proprietors of are workers in a clock factory. And for Paul Krugman it is fine to be a master clockmaker. And for Paul Krugman it is a useful intellectual discipline for him that increases the quality of his work to force him to start from a well-functioning Arrow-Debreu setup in which the market economy maximizes social welfare, and explain why in this particular application the market-optimality theorem's assumptions are violated how.

But it is no way to run a railroad, or, rather, a clock factory to make a lot of reliable clocks...

And, of course, there is the disconnect between the good economics we do and political action to produce public policy, which Paul covers in his second contribution linked below:

Paul Krugman
Justin Fox
George Cooper
Paul Krugman II

So, there we [Don't] Have It: Milton's very-lost Paradigms Lost which--his having covered God, Satan and the usual suspects--Econ he could not, or at any rate did not explain to us.

Lots of clever, maybe even incisive analyses here, apparently agreeing that a/some New Paradigm is badly needed; this in the face of the inexplicability of a/any Present One (or n?)
I could not persist long enough to determine if the bifurcation, pseudo-science ever arose, but it seems that the roster of Brilliants here agree that (to use the Technical term) wishy-washy may characterize: the sum of 'our' Econ-body-of-Knowledge/2014.

I fear that, (the chances of replacing the Worldwide definitions of wealth--with one more appropriate to our dire predicament, (caused by excessive megawatt-hrs/person/year, thus far..) remain ... slim.
And absent that accomplishment: it may well be Robber Barons til the bitter End. Guaranteeing unimaginable levels of strife right up to the End-Week-end. YPB.
Hoist by Our Own gobbledygook, RR and the Cheney Shogunate. What an unflattering denouement.. for a species who made God in its own image. Eh?

Oh well. Easy come ... my faith remains in cats; they won't 'save us' but--once ascendant on the planet--they will not be inventing nuclear bombs (Disco or HoHos) Progress, at Last!