The gambit to search for “successful predictors” among the economists seemed to have originated with journalists. Economists sat up and took more notice of the rebukes published in The Economist than the other news magazines, if only because those articles softened the condemnation with various potential excuses that the complaints found elsewhere had gone “too far,” and that the allegations only had partial validity. With regard to the accusation that “most economists failed to see the crisis coming,” The Economist averred that some had indeed issued warnings, and explicitly named Robert Shiller, Nouriel Roubini, and the “team at the Bank for International Settlements.” This set off the starting gun for a veritable silly season of all manner of economists being proposed as vindicated prophets and unappreciated soothsayers, as though the prescience of the few would redeem the dimwittedness of the many. This race to populate the Nostradamus Codex continued for more than a year, encompassing even an online ballot to vote for the best crisis prognosticator. A motley cavalcade of economists then jostled in an unseemly fashion to put themselves forward as having somehow anticipated the crisis, across not just from the orthodoxy, but spanning the political gamut from paleo-libertarians to left post-Keynesians. But worse, the scrum began to dissipate the definition of the moving object that stood as the appropriate target for prediction. In the rush to judgment, anyone who said or wrote anything about some kind of bubble or imbalance or financial instability sometime in the 2000s suddenly sought to be credited as rivaling the Oracle at Delphi, engaging in the most exquisite augury. Some Nobel winners in particular pushed this ploy well beyond the breaking point, eliding prediction proper, and instead suggesting that anyone who had ever produced a mathematical model mentioning bank runs or financial fraud or irrational expectations or debt deflation or (fill in the blank) was proof positive that the economics profession had not been caught unawares. It helped if the interlocutor stopped paying attention to what had been taught in the macroeconomics classes across the most highly ranked economics departments. It got so bad after a while that any mention of market failure or departure from equilibrium was supposed to function as a “get out of jail free” card in 2009.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 698