[notahacker]

If your marginal utility function is driven by money and career progression rather than a desire to write papers about your particular hobby horses, you don't become an academic economist, period.

If your particularly hobby horse is writing papers about economic elites ruining the world and mainstream economics being wrong then ample funding opportunities are available even from members of the economic elite, and your book will probably sell more copies too. And you probably don't prize the opportunity for tenure at Chicago that highly unless you actually admire the school's economists anyway.

When the most influential economists of all time are Marx and Keynes, and Stiglitz, Piketty and Krugman get more public attention than most of the rest of the profession put together, it's more than a little difficult to argue that academic economic discourse is highly constrained by the class interests of billionaire rentiers.