ABSTRACT
Contemporary academic economics is not in a healthy state. Over many years now problems have regularly come to light which throw considerable doubt on the capacity of many of its strands to explain, or even always to address, real world events or to facilitate policy evaluation. Such problems especially beset the rather dominant 'mainstream' or 'orthodox' project, centring on econometrics and formalistic 'economic theory', which is my main concern here. This unhappy situation, moreover, appears to be increasingly recognised both inside and outside of the academy.
