>There seems to be a consensus that the discipline of economics is rigid and
>averse to radical thought. I am not sure that is correct. It seems to me
>that the discipline is quite prone to radical lurches in one direction or
>another. The paradigm shift from Keynes to Friedman seems pretty radical
>and sudden to me. If universities were really so conservative, how do we
>explain this paradigm shift?
You're mixing meanings of the word conservative here. The Keynes->Friedman shift was dramatic, and in that sense not "conservative," but it reflected the rightward shift in ruling class opinion. To adopt the language of psychoanalysis, it was capital-syntonic.
Doug