That is a catch 22: they must believe that HET leads to pubs in top 
journals, but top journals will not bother with HET unless most 
economists see it as important. Of course, HOPE and JHET are good 
hits for any economist, so long as they have hits in mainstream 
journals, but HET is at best optional for most economists. Another 
avenue is teaching, its pretty common for mainstream economists to 
babble about how Arrow and Debreu formalized Smith's conjecture or 
how Keynes converted everyone in the universe to his view in less 
that ten minutes, and they look foolish to anyone who knows HET. 
Trouble is that they mostly preach this nonsense to those who know no 
better, so there is no embarrassment factor. How then can the 
foolishness of knowing virtually nothing about the history of ones 
own alleged area of expertise be made apparent? How can we make the 
feel as foolish as they are?

Doug Mackenzie