Why economics today is like British food in the 1980s

An amusing essay; an excerpt:

In 1986, I left my native South Korea and came to Britain to study economics as a graduate student at the University of Cambridge.

Things were difficult...[b]ut the most difficult thing was the food. Before coming to Britain, I had not realised how bad food can be. Meat was overcooked and under-seasoned. It was difficult to eat, unless accompanied by gravy, which could be very good but also very bad. English mustard, which I fell in love with, became a vital weapon in my struggle to eat dinners. Vegetables were boiled long beyond the point of death to become textureless, and there was only salt around to make them edible. Some British friends would argue valiantly that their food was under-seasoned (err… tasteless?) because the ingredients were so good that you oughtn’t ruin them with fussy things like sauces, which those devious French used because they needed to hide bad meat and old vegetables. Any shred of plausibility of that argument quickly vanished when I visited France at the end of my first year in Cambridge and first tasted real French food.

British food culture of the 1980s was – in a word – conservative; deeply so. The British ate nothing unfamiliar. Food considered foreign was viewed with near-religious scepticism and visceral aversion. Other than completely Anglicised – and generally dire-quality – Chinese, Indian and Italian, you could not get any other national cuisine, unless you travelled to Soho or another sophisticated district in London. British food conservatism was for me epitomised by the now defunct but then-rampant chain, Pizzaland. Realising that pizza could be traumatically ‘foreign’, the menu lured customers with an option to have their pizza served with a baked potato – the culinary equivalent of a security blanket for British people....

What a contrast to the British food scene of today – diverse, sophisticated and even experimental....

While my food universe was expanding at lightning speed, the other universe of mine – economics – was, sadly, being sucked into a black hole.

Up to the 1970s, economics was populated by a diverse range of ‘schools’ containing different visions and research methods – classical, Marxist, neoclassical, Keynesian, developmentalist, Austrian, Schumpeterian, institutionalist, and behaviouralist, to name only the most significant. These schools of economics – or different approaches to economics – had (and still have) distinct visions in the sense that they had conflicting moral values and political positions, while understanding the way the economy works in divergent ways....

Economics until the 1970s was, then, rather like the British food scene today: many different cuisines, each with different strengths and weaknesses, competing for attention; all of them proud of their traditions but obliged to learn from each other; with lots of deliberate and unintentional fusion happening....

Since the 1980s, however, economics has become the British food scene before the 1990s. One tradition – neoclassical economics – is the only item on the menu.