JJ:  Of course, economics has “been captured by a small AND dangerous sect,” considering that money and how it works does not even come into play in orthodox economics. How the people have been hoodwinked by a few economists and the people will pay for it in the end.

Me:  Actually, the heterodox aren’t quite liberated yet either.

This is also why the heterodox must abandon the effort to convert orthodox academics, integrate with the new paradigm and take their message directly to the individual. Politics is simultaneously the strongest and weakest link in finance capitalism’s mental and structural armor, and directness of experience and systemic policy effect are aspects of the natural philosophical concept of grace.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

R. Buckminster Fuller

E:  I agree about the dangerous sect, but it is anything but small. In my view the orthodoxy is the emperor’s clothes. The dominant institution, now all but governing us, is the predatory (now more and more financialized and global) corporation. The orthodoxy deliberately and strategically ignores this institution and has done so for a century and a half. It provides a convenient theoretical cover for doing so.

These are two courses that directly threaten the orthodoxy and corporate rule: The History of Economic Thought (which might, heaven forbid, expose tender student minds to the penetrating thoughts of Karl Marx and Henry George and such radical ideas as jubilee and debt forgiveness) and Ecological Economics (which, among other things, presents the planet as other than an exploitable resource, and is truly pro-life). In my cursory review of the top economics departments in the USA (including the one in which I was trained, when “History” was required), none offered by name either course.

We need a plain-language heterodoxy that includes the History of Economic Thought, Ecological Economics, and People Economics and we need to offer it early, at 5th-grade Civics level, high school Social Studies, and Community College/Freshman levels to help change the thinking of the future. We need to do this urgently, as it takes time to penetrate.

Me:  Yes, in other words it is the entire web/pattern/paradigm that is the real problem. A new paradigm. like death, is “a thief in the night” for orthodoxies old and new.