The crisis is overexplained in that there are so many possible suspects who can be rounded up and accused of being “the cause” that authors can construct convincing narratives featuring almost any culprit from Fannie and Freddie to leverage ratios to income inequality—even though the meltdown obviously was a deeply nonlinear and multicausal process. The crisis is overdetermined in that, being a nonlinear, multicausal process, many of these supposed causes could be ruled out and the crisis could still have occurred.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 74