As I prepared a speech on the future of economists, I was very 
interested by the posting around the thread "Nber and HET". I guess that 
the content of economics during the  next decades is largely shaped by 
the topics, methodology, etc. included in the Phd of the newly recruited 
economists by the best universities.. I found very interesting the 
research done by Andrew J Oswald and Hilda Ralsmark "Some Evidence on 
the Future of Economics" No 841 WARWICK ECONOMIC RESEARCH PAPERS
DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS.

I can scrutinise such  process in my university where a department 
(Toulouse school of economics) competes and boasts to be among the bests 
but it is not so easy to discover trends or "lines of force" (I mean on 
the theoretical level). Clearly the department has been involved in the 
post general equilibrium epiphenomenon whereas it always despised 
macroeconomics (and history or applied (micro)economics as well ) but 
what are the contours of  the new paradigm (if any) now? It seems to me 
that the general equilibrium theory is still the canon but its light is 
rapidly fading as more and more of its features are removed.

Now just to come back to the way historians write history, let me 
mention that the seventh edition of Gide & Rist "A History of Economic 
Doctrines" included some developments on Keynes' General Theory. It was 
published in 1947 - Keynes was not at this time a "long-dead economist".
In a nutshell, during the last decades, HET has been put aside from 
mainstream curriculum, but conversely HET has hardly come to grips with 
the mainstream economics.

Alain Alcouffe