The excuse tendered to repress this demand was that the students needed still more mathematics preparation, more statistics, and more tutelage in “theory,” which meant in practice a boot camp regimen consisting of endless working of problem sets, problem sets, and more problem sets, until the poor tyros were so dizzy they didn’t have the spunk left to interrogate the masses of journal articles they had struggled to absorb. How this encouraged students to become acquainted with the economy was a bit of a mystery—or maybe it telegraphed the neoclassical lesson that you didn’t need to attend to the specifics of actual existing economies. It was brainwashing, pure and simple, carried out under the banner of rigor.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 460