Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions showed that sciences do not march onwards and upwards towards the light. Kuhn found that once a central paradigm is selected, there is no testing or sifting, and tests of basic assumptions only take place after accumulated failures and anomalies in the ruling paradigm plunge the science into a crisis.
Scientists do not give up the failing paradigm until a new paradigm arrives, which resolves the failures and anomalies that caused the crisis. It takes a theory to beat a theory.
Murray Rothbard, when discussing Kuhn, pointed to economics is an example of a science which moves in a zigzag fashion, with old fallacies sometimes elbowing aside earlier but sounder paradigms.
Thomas Humphrey wrote an excellent 250-year long literature surveys of both the rules versus discretion debate and the cost-push theories of inflation in the 1998 and 1999 Richmond Fed Quarterly.
Humphrey wrote the reviews…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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