It takes some thick skin not to cringe at the performance of four famous economists at the January 2010 meetings of the American Economics Association in Atlanta, in a session expressly titled, “How Should the Financial Crisis Change How We Teach Economics?” Three out of the four could not even be bothered to actually address the posited question, so concerned were they to foster the impression that they personally had not been caught with their pants down by the crisis. The fourth thought that simply augmenting his existing textbook with another chapter defining collateralized debt obligations and some simple orthodox finance theory would do the trick. Things got even worse in the subsequent year, with figures such as Alan Blinder and John B. Taylor touting new editions of their undergraduate macrotheory textbooks by reassuring instructors that the crisis did not require them to change anything they had been teaching for years.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 461