Is dissent alive and well in economics? Chris Hayes’ affirmative finding has stood up pretty well in our discussion, I think. Stars, at least, make a go of it. In "The Methodology or the People?" Paul Krugman makes a useful distinction between our interest in Topic A, the analyses that economic dissenters bring to bear (or fail to bring to bear) on the intellectual/political problems in the world; and Topic B, the sociology of the economics profession. The two are related, naturally. But they sometimes get mixed up.

Those we call heterodox economists are often better understood as critics of mainstream dogma. There must be several hundred of them around the world who can be considered relatively prominent in one community or another (including several participants in this group), and they play valuable roles, prodding and provoking those inside the profession to rethink their premises, by contributing new tools and/or instructing outsiders in their alternative views.

Conspicuous examples of the work-within-the-system type include Thomas Schelling, Douglass North, Ronald Coase, Oliver Williamson and Amartya Sen. Those who took their heterodox views directly to the public in an earlier age -- Jane Jacobs, John Kenneth Galbraith, Rachel Carson and Peter Drucker come to mind – have been replaced by the likes of Michael Porter, Joseph Stiglitz, Bill McKibben, Thomas Friedman and Krugman. And these are just the celebrities. For every one of them, another dozen sturdy dissenters work away just out of the limelight. And that’s just the major leagues of Heterodoxy.

In either case, competition for mindshare is conducted best by bringing analysis to bear on important problems. A particularly interesting instance is indeed the one that Krugman mentions, in which he was deeply involved, discovering how energy companies took advantage of California’s botched deregulation of power markets to game the system.

But there is no shortage of other good examples: Dani Rodrik on the ill-effects of globalization; Louis Uchitelle on the impact of corporate lay-offs; Lucien Bebchuk and Jesse Fried on managerial pay; the recent exchange among Nicholas Stern, William Nordhaus and Martin Weitzman on the economics of responding to global climate change; the prescient work by Nordhaus and Stiglitz on the cost of the war in Iraq.

All these are testimony of the capacity of outsiders to change the consensus view. And as is demonstrated by the recent oral dissents by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in two cases before the Supreme Court involving the rights of women, you don’t have to be an economist to deliver a forceful opinion.