Anyone who makes it their business to keep up with academic economics cannot fail to notice that something strange has happened since World War II. While the exact contours of the altered ambiance are difficult to pin down, it might be characterized loosely as a certain ambivalence about the out-and-out truth (for lack of a more precise word) of the doctrines that comprise neoclassical economic theory. While recantations on the road to Damascus are still relatively rare, there does seem to be a surfeit of retreat to a vague paradigm of sophisticated general equilibrium models whenever a critic seems on the verge of scoring a point at neoclassical expense; or it may show up as a disparaging irony about the plausibility of the assumptions of the model (Klamer 1983). I have also encountered something like this phenomenon in reaction to the theses broached in the previous chapter.