Some economists who had been strong advocates of behavioral approaches prior to the crash, such as Robert Shiller and Robert Frank, leaped in with op-eds essentially blaming the entire crisis on native cognitive weaknesses of market participants. This line became entrenched with the appearance of George Akerlof and Robert Shiller's Animal Spirits: displaying an utter contempt for the history of economic thought, they "reduced" the message of Keynes's General Theory to the proposition that people get a little irrational from time to time, and thus push the system away from full neoclassical general equilibrium.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 729