Declaring the economy incomprehensible has immobilized the left’s response to the crisis.

Evidence

After the crisis, professional explainers from all over the map were throwing up their hands and pleading that the economy was just too complex to understand. Better to treat the Great Recession like an Act of God, and simply move on. This is a cultural debility that predated the crisis but has worked wonders in immobilizing responses to the debacle. As described in chapters 2 and 3, and anatomized in chapter 6, the neoliberals have developed a sophisticated position with regard to knowledge and ignorance; getting a grip on how they manage to deploy ignorance as a political tool will go some distance in dispelling the onus of having been transparently duped. It may also suggest that the time has come for the left to reinvent its own plausible sociology of knowledge. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 40

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the book’s core thesis that neoliberalism weaponizes ignorance — and to the reader’s broader thinking on the neoliberal ‘thought collective.’ — connects to: The 2008 crisis disoriented the left instead of vindicating its economic worldview — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 46; Leftist defeat became inevitable once capitalism’s inefficiency case was lost. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 107; Orthodox macroeconomics masked crisis buildup and blocked repairs afterward — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 662
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 40

Broader Connections

• The 2008 crisis disoriented the left instead of vindicating its economic worldview #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 46
• Leftist defeat became inevitable once capitalism’s inefficiency case was lost. #complicates (0.78) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 107
• Orthodox macroeconomics masked crisis buildup and blocked repairs afterward #expands (0.72) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 662