Yet the strangest thing of all about this fracas was that much of it was forgotten almost as soon as the pixels faded. It was as if economists and their critics were no different from the protagonist of the Christopher Nolan film Memento: beset with massive memory loss, they forgot what they had just inscribed on their skin last week or last month, condemned to surprise themselves over and over. The contempt of neoclassical economists for the history of economic thought was notorious; but here it was, deployed in real time. One of the ten commandments of neoclassical theory is that bygones are bygones; neoclassical economists trusted that the attention spans of their patrons were so short and flighty that this principle would extend to anything they might have said about the crisis, and one another. And with hindsight, who's to say they were wrong?

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 453