Eonomists at big, powerful institutions generally think alike. From HM Treasury to the Bank of England, consensus views dominate. Whether it’s the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development or the International Monetary Fund, dismal scientists tend to converge towards a single “house view”.

This is hardly surprising. You don’t generally make your career within a large, hierarchical organisation if you like thinking “outside the box”. More fundamentally, these “top” institutions are essentially political and strategic in nature – with the strategy determined elsewhere. For all the scientific pretence, resident economists will overwhelmingly serve up what their political masters want to hear.

These realities explain why economics, or at least the “official” economics that dominate our newspapers and airwaves, is so often captured by “groupthink”. An example of groupthink from a few years ago was that the UK should join the single currency. Any economist who thought otherwise was treated like a pariah. A more recent illustration was that if the UK voted to leave the European Union, that would spark, in the Treasury’s words, “an immediate and profound economic shock”.

An ongoing example of groupthink, which holds right across the Western firmament of “leading” economists, is that quantitative easing is a good idea. Any economist who objects, or asks awkward questions about what happens when QE ends, is – once again – dismissed as unsophisticated or wilfully obtuse.

Groupthink indulges lazy, line-of-least-resistance analysis. Yet, the main economic research bodies across the Western world, taxpayer-funded and granted widespread respect, are drenched in it.

Last week saw a rare public defeat for Glencore’s Ivan Glasenberg, as his long pursuit of Rio Tinto’s Australian coal business ended in failure. Rio opted to sell Coal & Allied to China’s Yancoal for $2.7bn (£2.1bn) despite two bids from Glencore.