The paper deals with the evolution of economic method during the last centuries. The author argues that the Marginalist Revolution in the end of the XIX century created radically new vision of the subject-matter and method of economic theory. As a result, contemporary mainstream economics is now based on the assumptions of methodological individualism, optimization and absence of genuine uncertainty. These processes have strongly diminished the potential of economics. As a response various heterodox conceptions have emerged emphasizing different kinds of non-optimizing and/or group behavior and also stressing the importance of complexity, volatility and genuine uncertainty of economic environment. In this respect, in particular, the paper shows that J. M. Keynes' theory is beyond contemporary mainstream economics.

The article justifies the definition of economic ontology (ontology of economics) as a study of the most general features, categories and structure which belong to reality described in economic models. The author distinguishes ontology of science from ontology of economic life (the latter often functions as a substitute for science) and points out that ontology plays a significant role in resolving theoretical debates and in making clear philosophical presuppositions of economic theory. In the case of orthodox theory mathematics and mathematical structures are suggested as formal ontology.

The article considers influence of entrepreneurial experience on the wageemployment wages. Empirical analysis is based on the RLMS-HSE panel data, 2000—2013, with using fixed effects models on the overall sample, five-year- and flexible window. Results show that transition from entrepreneurship to wageemployment leads to penalty of wages. Wage growth rate of former entrepreneurs’ lag behind the wage growth rate of workers without entrepreneurial experience. The size of wage-penalty decreases if the profession remains the same in transition from entrepreneurship to wage-employment.

The paper analyses recent sociological and epistemological trends in the evolution of economics as a scientific enterprise and as a social institution and tries to evaluate its current state and further perspectives. It concludes that now there is neither triumph nor crisis in modern economic science. Rather, economics is in an ordinary working state though not very promising since the period of big theoretical ideas seems to be over for it, since new atheoretical tendency in it is becoming stronger, and since it would become more and more interventionistic in the nearest future.