For anyone with a little soft spot for economics arguments, whether of the strictly WSJ type or the bearded (post-)Marxist variety, the discussion going on here is worth reading.

Long story short: Nation writer Chris Hayes published an article a week or so ago (also worth reading, here) arguing that the current orthodox trend in mainstream economics, that of neo-classical, market-is-God thinking, is essentially or explicitly a mafia that shuts out dissenting thought from journals, marginalizing even the most brilliant thinkers who simply are drawing from a different toolset.

However, even Hayes noted that many of the most promising “heterodox” insights and techniques — people making irrational decisions, transactions taking place with imbalanced information, empirical psychological studies showing up in behavioral economics — are now finding their way into mainstream analyses.

Fast forward a bit to this TPMCafe discussion, where a gang of top economics professors are debating whether or not this exclusion is actually happening, with fascinating forays into what’s acceptable and why in today’s economics.