This purported "enrichment" of simpler concepts of rationality had even established a beachhead in the study of financial economics prior to the crisis; its most prominent advocate in the prelapsarian era was Lawrence Summers, which might begin to signal that its revolutionary potential may not have been all that transformative. Mostly, in finance it fostered models predicated upon the posited existence of a two-class world consisting of (a) stupid people, sometimes more charitably known as "noise traders," who performed certain functions in financial markets (liquidity, smoothing of reactions to shocks) so that the (b) neoclassically "rational" agents could more readily find the "true" or "fundamental" values dictated by the prior orthodox theory. Nothing here substantially impugned the basic orthodox model.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 728