The best evidence that the accusations of failed prediction were so rebarbative that they provoked a triumph of indignation over complacency can be found in the wildly bipolar reactions of economists to the indictment: one coterie insisted that economists were vindicated by the successful predictions of the few and the canny; whereas another insisted instead that good economists never claimed to be able to predict the economy in the first place. Viewed as a totality, this exemplified a larger tendency for the profession as a whole to simultaneously assert A and not-A in response to calumny.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 697