ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the malaise of modern economics is not primarily due to ideology at the level of substantive political economy. It offers that ideology is present in the economics academy nonetheless, albeit at the level of methodology. Economics is a discipline that is marked by significant explanatory failure stemming from wildly unrealistic formulations, and has been for many years now. Specifically, modern academic economics is dominated by a mainstream tradition whose defining characteristic is an insistence that various methods of mathematical modelling be more or less always employed in the analysis of economic phenomena. Many heterodox economists clearly demur, and most of these seemingly hold to the view that a superior explanation of the state of modern economics is provided by focusing on the prevalence of a form of political economic ideology. Bernard Guerrien considers Tony Lawson's main criticism of neoclassical economics: its lack of realism.
