Roughly contemporaneously, Stigler complained: "social problems are the creation of the 'intellectual.' The intrinsic importance of a complaint against a social system, as judged by later opinion, has little to do with its effectiveness in shifting opinion. If enough able and determined men … denounce and denounce a deficiency, that deficiency becomes grave." Lurking was a question about what role, if any, economics could play in preventing or at least counteracting the intellectuals' monstrous creations.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 111