"But perhaps the greatest rebuke of Piketty to be found among academic economics is not contained in any of these overt or veiled attacks on his scholarship and interpretation, but rather in the deafening silence that greets it, as well as inequality in general, in broad swathes of the field—even to this day. You can search through the websites of several leading economics departments or the official lists of working papers curated by federal agencies and not come across a single publication that has any obvious or even secondary bearing on the themes raised by Capital in the Twenty-First Century, even in order to oppose them. It is as though the central facts, controversies, and policy proposals that have consumed our public debate about the economy for three years are of little-to-no importance to the people who are paid and tenured to conduct a lifetime’s research into how the economy works."

This is still not evidence of conspiracy (but has the structure of classic conspiracy theories). It just means the mainstream looked at it and disagreed.

Nobody is owed attention from any discipline of study. Absence of attention is not conclusive evidence of anything.

Nobody is owed anything, but since publications are the currency of research and the measure by which academics are evaluated, publishing a critique of something as widely and publicly discussed as Piketty's books should be very tempting for academic economists (assuming that economics is a normal academic discipline).

So in front of that background, the silence is suspicious, and the most plausible explanation is that the majority of participants would like to disagree but find themselves unable to put forward such a critique.

>Disagreeing isn't ignoring. It isn't a conspiracy. It's just disagreement.

I've read a lot of those "disagreements". Most of them are thinly veil-led attacks and facile dismissals, the kind that pass for criticism in mass media today.

This is not a meaningful sample. The mass media is not "Economists", as an academic discipline.