THE PROBLEM OF DISSENT IN ECONOMICS

Even in the natural sciences, there are dissenters who reject what are generally considered well-established principles. Believers in extrasensory perception reject the laws of physics; those creationists who believe that all species were created simultaneously reject the theory of evolution; and believers in a lost civilization of Atlantis confront sceptical archaeologists and geologists. But, although scientists may feel frustrated by the publicity such views receive, the supporters of such views generally do not pose a significant problem for scientists: they can be dismissed as cranks and not taken seriously. Biologists may disagree over how evolution works, but they are in complete agreement on the principle. Archaeologists are equally unanimous that the evidence for the existence of Atlantis (at least as the city is portrayed in popular writing) is non-existent. Unorthodox ideas sometimes become respectable, but this is rare. Science is organized so as to exclude cranks. The strength of established theories is based, to a great extent, on well-established procedures and rules of evidence that rule out flawed ones. Results must be replicated in other laboratories, and they must not violate firmly established physical laws (for example, biological theories must obey the laws of chemistry). Such accepted wisdom may be closer to social conventions than objective rules than scientists would like to believe, but it has evolved because the implicit rules, however imprecise, appear to have worked over long periods of time.