The hypothesis I propose is to pursue a possibility raised in the previous chapter, that there have surfaced in the crisis some relatively systematic attempts to pump doubt and confusion into public discourse; in other words, some “explanations” of manifestations of the crisis and its aftermath have been launched as trial balloons not so much for purposes of further test and elaboration by sanctioned professional economists, but rather as calculated interventions in public discourse in order to buy time and frustrate any shared impressions of clearly delineated positions on a contentious issue. In other words, I am suggesting that the economics profession adopted a page from the neoliberal playbook, widely promoting the notion that intrepid economists were busy gestating all sorts of “new economic theory” to explain the crisis, when in fact they had mostly dug themselves into a defensive crouch where nothing about the orthodoxy was being sloughed off, and no errors would be freely conceded.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 665