The letters of the University of Chicago economist Frank Knight are a testament to the depths to which laissezfaire had fallen. “We cannot go back to laissez faire in economics even in this country,” he wrote to a colleague in the summer of 1933. “Now it seems to me inevitable that we must go over to a controlled system,” he wrote later that year, adding that his only question was “whether any sort of liberty, especially freedom of consumption and intellectual freedom, can be maintained to a signifi - cant extent.” The 1930s were an era when even many of the economics profession’s most strident advocates of marketplace freedoms accepted that they would need to be curtailed to a substantial degree.

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 18