Thank you, Peter Boettke, for your statement of optimism about the  
future of HET! I see the field flourishing in exactly the spots you  
identify: in interdisciplinary, policy-related work. Of course that  
doesn't mean everyone needs to do that kind of work. (and of course  
"flourishing" is a relative term.)

I find it astonishing that we, as an intellectual society, can be  
driven to such soul-searching by a bureaucratic exercise conducted by  
a statistical agency. Yes, we needed to respond to them, but we don't  
need to be quite so desperate to "fix" one another.

If heterodoxy is responsible for our current status, as Roy  
(unconvincingly....) argues, then so be it. Heterodoxy is an  
undeniable part of who we are as a field. let's see where it takes us  
as a field. If Eric believes the implications of such an argument  
"unfitting of a serious intellectual enterprise", good for him.  
(Although even he ought to see the humour in making such a statement  
as part of a plea for tolerance)

But please someone tell me: when was this golden era when HET was at  
its apogee? Did subfields in economics really exist before the 1950s  
and 1960s? And haven't we always been a rather small collection of  
voices in the wilderness? Isn't that precisely what attracted most of  
us to the field in the first place? Don't we relish our eccentricity?

Evelyn L. Forget