There were two interesting articles I read (among others) in recent days that attack mainstream economic analysis in different ways. The first, published August 18, 2013 – Removing deadweight loss from economic discourse on income taxation and public spending – is by Northwestern Economics Professor Charles F. Manski. He wants our profession to dump all its negative welfare analysis about the impacts of taxation (as “deadweight losses”) and, instead, focus on the benefits that come from government spending, in particular, highly productive infrastructure provision. So, an attack from the inside! The second article was a Bloomberg Op Ed (August 21, 2013) – Economists Need to Admit When They’re Wrong – by the theoretical physicist, Mark Buchanan, who has taken a set against my profession in recent years. Not without justification and with some panache, one should add. They both add up to the same conclusion – mainstream economics is defunct and we should decommission teaching programs throughout the world and introduce new progressive approaches to the discipline that will produce a new bread of useful Phd graduates, rather than the moribund graduate classes that get rubber-stamped out of our higher education institutions, ad nauseum, at present.