Among the most ambitious forms of economic experiment in recent decades have been the attempts in numerous countries to reformat the economy as a whole, in programs of neoliberal economic restructuring (see Fischer, Chapter 9 in this volume). The scale of these experiments offers unusual opportunities for putting economic arguments to the test. Such tests are interesting, not so much for the facts they confirm—the evidence never seems complete enough to establish conclusive arguments—as for what they tell us about how neoliberal facts about the economy are produced. They illuminate the relationship between neoliberal economics and the object it studies—including the role of think tanks and other intermediaries in this relationship.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1917