Heartfelt exhortations of “End This Depression Now!” have become sure signs of chicanery, the half-disguised theurgy of an often shadowy clique of economists. The neoliberals have triumphed in the face of this cacophony, at least in part, because their nominal opponents and their nostrums have proven so clueless. The resistance to the neoliberal tide has repeatedly looked to orthodox economics for succor, and it has betrayed them time and again. Beyond orthodoxy, even the intellectual case for a return to Keynes, or Marx, or Minsky as a panacea for the crisis has proven thin and insubstantial. Not only does the left lack a clear agenda for their own political objectives, but they have repeatedly mistaken or misunderstood the nature of the neoliberal political project, and consequently found themselves co-opted into it, or worse.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 901