In the aftermath to the worst economic crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression, many people understandably have grown weary of accounts concerning recent forms of suffering visited upon various categories of the populace. Some disgruntlement can be attributed to the influence of the neoliberal theater of cruelty described in the last chapter, though one cannot altogether discount garden-variety disaster fatigue. More than four years out, what seems really to have captured the imagination of the general public are instead ripping sagas of those intrepid souls who managed to come through the crisis unscathed, impervious to the damage done all around them. One nice example is Michael Lewis's The Big Short, which Amazon at one time listed as one of the top best-selling books on the crisis: therein he relates the stories of a bunch of misfits and contrarians who managed to make substantial fortunes by betting against the securities derivatives that everyone else had found so seductive in the run-up to 2007. If Lewis's plucky Boys Behaving Badly could have bucked the headwinds so handily, then why not the rest of us?

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 437