When I ask what the new methodologies are, people very rarely try to give concise explanations. Instead, they almost always directed to one of the following:
1. A book
2. A paywalled journal article
3. A video link
Books, of course, must be bought, so the book and gated article links are basically a request that I fork over cash before I even learn the very basics of what the new methodologies are. Video links, of course, are almost always useless.
On those rare occasions when a heterodox person does link me to a PDF purporting to explain the new methodologies, the content of the document is usually just more criticism of mainstream methodologies (see here, for example). Suppose I already believe that mainstream methodologies suck, and that something better is needed, and all I want now is to see people's ideas for that something? These documents will be mostly useless to me. Critiquing the old is not the same as inventing the new.
There's an even more fundamental problem here. If you're going to introduce a new methodology into a discipline, you really don't want to keep it behind a curtain of mystery. You do not want to force people to do massive amounts of work or pay money in order to grasp even the basics of the new methods. That kind of obscurantism -- forcing people to commit time, effort, and money before they can be enlightened with the True Way -- is the behavior of a cult, not of an academic school of thought.
If you really think you've got something new and better, you publicize the hell out of it. You make slides explaining the basics. You write working papers - free and ungated -- showing how the new thing works, and why it works. You give examples. You draw pictures. You teach. You educate. The burden of publicization and education is on you.
Mainstream econ does this like crazy. Want to know how the Solow Model works? Here are some slides! Want to know how the AD-AS model works? Here are some slides! If they're not good slides, find another set of slides - there are many. If slides aren't your thing, try some lecture notes, or a textbook chapter, or a paper! All of these exist in bountiful abundance, for a price of $0. Mainstream macroeconomics has many many problems, but it has done an admirable job of explaining its ideas publicly and clearly, for free, to anyone who wants to learn.
If you do not do this - if you instead choose to continually hold the details of your methodology just out of reach of the curious onlooker, if you taunt and insult people who become frustrated after repeatedly getting the runaround - then people will begin to suspect that you do not, in fact, have a new methodology. They will begin to suspect that you are instead running some kind of con.
So far, the main "heterodox" econ "schools" - Post-Keynesian, MMT, and Austrian - show every indication of having no new methodology whatsoever. Anyone who points this out will, of course, be greeted with a shower of insults from ardent followers of this "school". But when polite, patient requests for enlightenment and information have failed enough times, what else can we conclude?
from Noahpinion http://ift.tt/1TeBsRC