Andrew Gelman gives a wishy-washy answer.
Steven Levitt’s an outsider in academic economics because, before he blazed the Freakonomics trail, it was generally considered second-rate for economists to work on fun little problems instead of the big questions. I often feel like an outsider myself because I do applied statistics and it sometimes seems that theoretical work gets more respect within the statistics profession. I know this feeling is ridiculous—I’m as much of an insider in statistics as Levitt is in economics or Cuomo was in politics—but it’s hard sometimes to avoid having that outsider feeling.
I go back to David Halberstam’s description of Robert Lovett as the ultimate insider. If you wanted to get ahead in the foreign policy world circa 1960, Lovett’s approval was a big factor. Similarly, if you wanted to get ahead in macroeconomics circa 1980, Stan Fischer’s approval was a big factor. In my macro memoir, I contrast Fischer with Robert Shiller. Shiller won a Nobel Prize, and I think everyone would agree that his research had greater impact (setting aside my own mixed feelings about Shiller’s work). But Shiller did not have the same weight within the profession. I think it’s because there is another game going on, aside from the game of doing important research. Call the other game academic politics, if you will. It means pleasing those above you on the totem pole and joining in when someone below you is mocked and scorned. Think of how a member of a teenage gang behaves in order to achieve higher status within the gang. Fischer mastered that game, and Shiller never really bothered to.
Academia when you really don’t want to leave middle school politics behind.
This can also change over time. Steve Levitt was definitely an insider early on — Harvard junior fellow, John Bates Clark medal, all the top publications. But now, yeah, he’s an outsider.
Fischer Black was an outsider for a while, but in the last few years he was an insider. You might say he shifted the mass of the finance profession so that what was once ”outside” become ”inside”.
John List and Richard Thaler also examples of outsiders-who-become-insiders.
I recently read that Norm McDonald was an insider in comedy, and other comics loved his comedy. By Malcolm Gladwell, who doesn’t much like comedy nor think Norm was very funny.
There’s a huge amount of desire to be a higher-status “insider” among the group you hang out with, who are all insiders for the group. Outsider “goths”, or skateboarders, form groups who then become an insider group.
Austrian/ Libertarian economists are almost a separate group, certainly are outsiders to most college econ departments. But there seems some insider groupism, or there was.