Akerlof and Shiller’s animal spirits merely relabeled standard neoclassical utility tinkering

Evidence

Nevertheless, in the few instances when journalists actually read the book, the first thing they noticed is that it said very little that was substantive about the current crisis, for much of it had been written well before 2008. Brought up short, they began to doubt its pertinence. The second thing they noticed was it was full of overweening claims, but contained very little in the way of causal mechanisms. “Animal spirits” boiled down to such timeworn neoclassical expedients as changing the utility function over time and calling it “confidence” (while Chicago called it “time-varying rates of discount”), appealing to sticky wages and prices while attributing them to “money illusion” and concerns over fairness (which the neoliberals modeled as “envy”), and suggestions that corruption would grow over the course of a long expansion (the Chicago theorist Gary Becker theorized this as the “rational choice approach to crime”). Far from some brave venturesome foray into the unexplored thickets of real psychology by open-minded economists unencumbered by entrenched dogmas, this was just more of the same old trick of tinkering with the “normal” utility function to get out the results you had wanted beforehand—something falling well short of the trumpeted dramatic divergence from standard economic theory. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 731

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on how post-2008 ‘behavioral’ and ‘Keynesian’ interventions were absorbed back into neoclassical economics rather than challenging it — echoes themes in Callon’s performativity debates and the ‘economics imperialism’ literature. — connects to: Information-side patches to neoclassical economics remain epicycles never incorporated into the core model — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 1998; Economics profession generates strikingly few serious revisions to orthodoxy — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 663; Efficiency is treated as uncontestable truth rather than a contestable value — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 121

Broader Connections

• Information-side patches to neoclassical economics remain epicycles never incorporated into the core model #corroborates (0.78) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 1998
• Efficiency is treated as uncontestable truth rather than a contestable value #complicates (0.72) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 121
• Economics profession generates strikingly few serious revisions to orthodoxy #corroborates (0.70) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 663