Duncan Foley participated in a 2003 conference comparing and contrasting general equilibrium theory with long period models developed by advocates of the Cambridge capital critique. This is from the wrap-up discussion on the last day.
"I am in a somewhat peculiar position because due to certain idiosyncrasies of my education I never learned 'neoclassical economics'. The economic theory that I learned wasfrom Herbert Scarf and it was couched entirely in terms of the abstract general equilibrium model with n commodities, abstract production sets, and so forth. Someone has defined economic intuition as what you learn in your first course in economics, and since I did not learn the same things as many other people, my intuition is not the same. My economic intuition was always that there were no theorems of the following kind: suppose you increase the supply of labour, as a result the equilibrium real wage will fall. I knew there were no such theorems available in general equilibrium theory. I also knew, and maybe this became clearer because of Scarf's mathematical point of view, that once you took the step to a simultaneous general equilibrium vision, you had to give up hope of sustaining some traditional ideas. For one thing, you lost any sense of causality. In a general equilibrium model there is no real sense in which one factor causes another: everything is determined simultaneously by the whole collection of relationships... And I never thought there was any hope of proving general stability theorems, because Herbert Scarf had showed that you could not prove stability, at least tatonnement stability, without unacceptably strong hypotheses on aggregate demand functions. So these things are not counterintuitive to me, these are just facts of the matter. I see them as inherent defects of the general equilibrium point of view. I tend to read this as a case where neoclassical economics, in an attempt to purify itself logically, leached out all of the substance, the concrete substance and content, of what it had to say about the world. And it raises the question in my mind whether it is really fair to talk about general equilibrium theory as if it were neoclassical economics, precisely because it does not have that content of substitutability, well-behaved stability properties and well-behaved comparative statics properties. In fact, when I was at MIT it became apparent to me that for, say, Solow and Samuelson, who are perhaps closest to being true believers in the old neoclassical rules, general equilibrium theory was just as much a threat as the Cambridge controversy to their point of view." -- Duncan Foley (2003) final discussion, in: General Equilibirum: Problems and Propsoects (ed. by Fabio Petro and Frank Hahn), London: Routledge.
I have not looked at the American Economic Review, for example, in quite some time. But I have long lost an ability to make sense of mainstream economics. Doubtless, market power of employers, search costs for employees in finding new jobs, montoring costs and principal agent problems for employers, and the suggestion that an employee is a 'lemon' if they offer to work for a lower wage than many are all of empirical importance. But why must they be invoked to explain persistent unemployment or the failure of a rise in the minimum wage to create disemployment? The rigorous theory, in both the comparison of intertemporal general equilibrium paths and in comparisons of long period positions does not yield downward-sloping demand functions for labor. Likewise, rigorous theory does not yield regular supply and demand relations for other markets either.
Do mainstream economists even have an articulated, overall vision for microeconomics? Neither general equilibrium theory or game theory seem to provide one. Is it sufficient to just have lots of little models? This seems to be the position of mainstream economics for decades.