However, Stigler had already argued that one should not trust the academy to regulate itself. Absent some jolt from the outside, a faculty would become “mediocre and complacent.” But this raised a perplexing question. If the organizing principles of intellectual life and markets really were the same, then how could one reasonably hold—as Stigler did—that there was something persistently wrong with the kind of knowledge it produced? Stigler’s answer is worthy of close scrutiny. Markets did give people what they wanted. But this was nothing to celebrate, because most people are instinctively predisposed to hold the wrong views about them. Markets produced the wrong kind of knowledge because they gave people what they wanted.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 120