In the last four decades, there have been only a handful of central bank and Treasury papers that I thought genuinely added to human knowledge. The economic-oriented departments within governments have in general been even more dominated by neoclassical orthodoxy than academic departments – and for good, bureaucratic reasons.
If, by some accident, a non-neoclassical economist gets tenure at a university, then generally speaking, the university is stuck with him or her. The only way to get rid of him is to either drub up a misconduct charge, or to shut the entire department down. So academic economics departments have a core of dissidents within them, and even at the most conservative of institutions – since every now and then a neoclassical economist will spontaneously transmute into a critic (as American economist and economist growth theorist Robert Solow has done since 2000 with his increasingly vehement attacks on DSGE modelling – see for instance his 2003 speech Dumb and Dumber in Macroeconomics).
