> But economics and philosophy still expect their neophytes to read with care the scrolls of ancient dead white men as if their words had been written on clay t

> But economics and philosophy still expect their neophytes to read with care the scrolls of ancient dead white men as if their words had been written on clay tablets by the gods. My understanding is that economics programs rarely bother to require a student to dive much into history anymore. There's little time spent understanding the many schools, their development, what they get right/wrong, or how they continue to provide helpful models of understanding reality. Instead, they seek to present economics as a science with an obtainable universal theory/model of everything, free of subjective value judgments--but a half-decent study of the history of the development of political economy would, much to the chagrin of the neoclassicalists who changed the term to economics, would quickly disabuse the students of such a notion. As a former student who studied philosophy 20 years ago, there was zero suggestion that the dead white men's words were written on clay tablets by the gods. There was vociferous debate on those dead white men's words, none of which were divine, and then more debate when we found out what the next dead white man said to counter the first, and so on, until we started encountering notable dead (and sometimes not-dead!) white (and not-white!) men (and women!). Reading contemporary thinkers first would have been a rather frustrating and utterly counterproductive pedagogy because students wouldn't understand what newer thinkers were reacting and responding to if they didn't already understand what came before. I've never personally encountered a philosophy professor--or philosopher, for that matter--who even suggested anything in philosophy was written as if by the gods themselves (who very frequently are doubted to even exist, or don't figure prominently in notable works).