Steve Kates wrote:
You do not become
a better physicist by reading Newton, Rutherford and Einstein, but you
do become a better economist by reading Adam Smith, Marx and Hayek.


This seems to be the issue.  Who in fact is making the "better" 
determination? All Kates et al. seem to be saying is that "better" is 
defined by "having read canonical author X, where X is my boy Smith 
or Ricardo or Mill or Marx or George or Keynes or Hayek or ..."  If 
you are really an economist, I would have thought that you would have 
agreed that "better than" is a partial ordering relationship on the 
set of economists. And certainly that ordering is individualistic. 
Put another way, for those who have read Robbins but not Koopmans, 
interpersonal comparisons of utility are a big "no-no". So all I take 
from Kates and Gunning et al. is that most contemporary economists 
have different preferences from those that Kates et al. seem to 
share. This is no essentialist matter, to be decided by one true 
revelation of that which is, but rather it is a pragmatic matter of 
what works for a particular community as it pursues its own local and 
contingent objectives. And an overwhelming majority of modern 
economists find HET of no use whatsoever in their own projects. 
Attempting to valorize that belief, that choice, is simply a waste of 
time. It is akin to trying to convince Netanyahu that Palestinians 
have a right-of-return, or to convince the Indian Prime Minister that 
Kashmir is part of Pakistan.  Good luck.

E. Roy Weintraub