The appeals to nature are rather unself-conscious and aboveboard in the writings of the contemporary proponents of financial engineering, such as Robert Litan, Barry Eichengreen, and Robert Shiller. Because Shiller had become anointed by the media as the exemplar of an economist who had presciently warned of the housing bubble before it burst, the public has imbibed a seriously mistaken impression of him as some sort of economic maverick of the left. While he diffidently renounces the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, in all other matters Shiller is about as orthodox an economist as one can find nowadays. Shiller has been insisting upon the literal interpretation of finance as a technology for some time now; and given the opportunity, he reaches for the physical equivalent in order to render his utopian vision more tangible.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 959