Essentially, the indictment by Inside Job and many commentators was that the crisis had revealed that the economics profession was rife with intense conflicts of interest, and this, in turn, had so corrupted the actual orthodox doctrines of the profession that its analyses of the crisis had become untrustworthy. What was missing from these screeds was an appreciation for a major escape hatch: that immersion in neoclassical training produced adherents who lived by the motto that the very notion of conflict of interest was unprepossessing, and that corruption of market-based research was essentially impossible. Rephrasing the insight, economists were fortified to dodge the bullet because they denied the bullet had ever taken flight.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 591