In fact, only three tended to get puffed up into full-blown paladins of deliverance: naming them in decreasing order of ambition, they were (1) behavioral economics; (2) repudiation of the efficient-markets hypothesis; and (3) fixing the DSGE macro model. All three were extensively discussed in the blogosphere and in generalist books, newspapers, and magazines; yet incongruously, all three were hopelessly ineffectual when it came to understanding the crisis. It is their power to mesmerize combined with their impotence that warrants their discussion in this chapter. Returning once more to our insistence on the importance of agnotology, it takes some diligence and not a little digging to come to understand why the populace was being led up the garden path; those seeking enlightenment were lured to waste their time in dalliance with ideas that did little more than divert attention from the deeper structural causes of the crisis.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 725