No matter how many times we tell these stories, folks outside of economics are simply incredulous. “You really mean those of you who are outside the mainstream don’t. . .” Get published in the mainstream journals? Right. Get hired in the departments of major colleges and universities? Right. Get grants from the National Science foundation? Right again.

The same is true of those who are mainstream economists. Everything looks rosy from where they sit. Normal science. Peer review. All reasonable arguments are accepted in the marketplace of ideas. Except they never read any heterodox economics, and have no idea how the hegemony of their favorite theory shuts out all other ideas. Those from Marx and Veblen and Sraffa and Robinson and so many others. They’re not taught and they’re not discussed. (They don’t even exist in the history of economic thought, since those courses are not even offered by most Ph.D. programs in economics anymore.)

Jamie Galbraith understands. Thomas Palley understands. So does Nathan Newman and many others who do economics but in departments and reseach centers other than the official departments of academic economics. And, of course, so do many economic activists—protesting the effects of globalization, racism, and inequality, and trying to devise alternatives, whom mainstream economists accuse of of holding unscientific, “ersatz” economic ideas.

That’s the situation that heterodox economists are trying to change. By using economic theories other than those of the mainstream (both neoclassical and Keynesian, along with their more contemporary descendants). By forming journals and associations apart from those of the mainstream (in which their ideas never get aired). And by challenging the mainstream conception of the discipline itself (including its notions of what science is, and what it means to “think like an economist”).

We do heterodox economics, or what some refer to as political economy—as against economics (which, as Chris correctly argues, has become identified with a tiny number of theoretical approaches). We write about rates of exploitation and the role of power in increasing inequality and the existence of patriarchy and structural racism. Not only do we want to argue that economic actors are sometimes irrational or guided by norms and values; some of us also want to analyze economic institutions and events without even starting from individual actors. Or efficiency. Or constrained optimization.

And that’s when things get ugly. When we disrupt the consensus. When we don’t obey the rules and when we suggest there are other ways of making sense of the world. The economy and the relationship between the economy and other aspects of the social world. That’s why some of the most interesting work these days is not being done by mainstream economists but by heterodox economists (Marxian, radical, feminist, postcolonial, institutionalist—the list goes on) and by noneconomists (Thomas Frank and Kevin Phillips come immediately to mind).

In all honesty, I mostly prefer not to read maintream economics these days. Either it says nothing of interest, or it gets me very angry. But I teach it, and I teach it in a way that is more rigorous than my mainstream colleagues. Because I teach its basic assumptions (and not as a kind of common sense) and because I present alternative views, heterodox economics. And then I read and do heterodox economics, independently of the mainstream. Because if we spend all our time worrying about mainstream economics, attempting to do mainstream economics (with a tweak here and a changed assumption there), we’ll never get around to developing alternatives.

That’s the real import of the story Chris tells in his article. The consensus is only apparent and there are lots of people—inside and outside the official discipline of economics—who are doing interesting and important work these days. And, given the forms of discipline and punishment meted out by capitalism these days, we certainly need those ideas.

P.S. Jamie, I checked with my anthropologist wife who argues that, while Amazon tribes were certainly more numerous, and probably even characterized by chiefdoms, before European colonization, they probably didn’t command anything like empires.

P.P.S. And one correction to Chris’s story about Notre Dame: it wasn’t the chair and president who engineered the split in the department but the chair, the dean, and the provost who together decided to marginalize the majority of members of the existing department and create a new department (Economics and Econometrics), which has all the new hires and the Ph.D. program.