The new instruction sheet, which came to be known as “neoclassical,” or more popularly, “neoliberal” economics, was quite technical, but basically it started from the premise that individuals were not the shortsighted, animal-sprit, driven businessmen lampooned by Keynes, but were instead supersmart processors of information. The new approach distrusted anything bigger than the individual, insisting that accounts of the behavior of aggregates such as “financial markets” had to be based in prior accounts of the behavior of the individuals (investors, firms, funds) that made them up, and that any theory of the behavior of aggregates must be generated from the two main assumptions of this new neoclassical economics, that individuals are self-interested agents who maximize the pursuit of those interests, and that markets clear.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 125