No simple mechanical link can be drawn between the way economics as a whole was changing and the way financial markets were theorized. The unity of orthodox, neoclassical economics in the postwar United States is easy to overstate, as Mirowski and Hands (1998) have pointed out, and, as was noted above, even in the 1960s and the 1970s the financial markets did not seem to many economists to be a central topic for their discipline. The mainstream economists who did take finance seriously notably Franco Modigliani, Paul Samuelson, and James Tobin often had Keynesian sympathies, while Milton Friedman was among the economists who doubted that some of finance theory counted as proper economics (see chapter 2).

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, loc. 49