I suspect the person you are replying to was not referring so much to academic economists as a whole (which would include Coase and Piketty and even probably Ma

I suspect the person you are replying to was not referring so much to academic economists as a whole (which would include Coase and Piketty and even probably Marx) but rather the mercenary subset of economists who get signal-boosted by powerful interests in order to promote the self-serving narrative of the day, and yeah, that subset of economists dodges subjects like inequality and externalities with more finesse and agility than Neo dodging bullets in the matrix.