It should now become apparent that the way in which these deep conceptual commitments get translated into public advocacy helps ward off brickbats hurled by those offended by the role of economists in the crisis. Economists, the prophets of incentives, quite logically respond to their own incentives to service their various constituencies, and as they never cease to insist, life is nothing but a sequence of trade-offs. Whenever they make reference to the "public good" or "general welfare" in the course of their endeavors, they frequently mean nothing more than the brute fact of caveat emptor. Thus, when some rude outsider—say, Charles Ferguson in Inside Job—gets all steamed up about "conflicts of interest" while uncovering their prognostications, they react in a way resembling the Harvard economist John Campbell in the film; insiders are nonplussed, really at a loss to see what all the fuss is about. (There is also the barely disguised sneer: stop your cheap rabble-rousing and riling up the groundlings. We are Harvard.) There will be no perfervid eleventh-hour conversions, no dark nights of repentance, no rending of garments and gnashing of teeth for the economics profession. And this, in turn, fortifies their inclinations to mount a united front to mollify the greater public already familiar with Freakonomic insouciance, no matter what their personal politics might be. There has materialized no better way to face up to the rebuke of the crash.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 608