Economists lost control of crisis discourse to journalists—a sign of being caught unawares

Evidence

Exhibit #1 demonstrating that the economics profession was caught unawares by the meltdown in 2008 was the fact that it rapidly lost any control over how the crisis was discussed in public that year. From the failure of Bear Stearns forward, journalists scrambled to understand how it could be that problems in one sector would ramify and amplify into other sectors, such that the entire financial system seemed poised on the brink of utter failure. There had been bankruptcies and dodgy financial deals before: What was so different this time around? Reporters started out by interviewing the usual suspects (Alan Greenspan, and Ben Bernanke—himself prophet of the Great Moderation), and overwhelmingly, neoliberal economists from gold-plated schools (Martin Feldstein, Gregory Mankiw, Matthew Slaughter, Robert Barro, Glenn Hubbard, Larry Summers, Allan Meltzer, Ken Rogoff), but you could tell that all the tendering of lame reassurances was not holding up against the tsunami of bad news. Of course, the keening public just wanted simple answers and quick fixes, but the economists didn’t seem to provide any answers whatsoever. So the journalists, with a little help from the chattering classes, came up with the metaphors which ultimately rose to dominate initial discussions of the crisis in 2008–9. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 464

Categorization

• XREF: This loss-of-control-by-experts theme echoes Mirowski’s broader ‘thought collective’ framing and the earlier chapter on how orthodoxy lost its voice; also connects to Zamyatin’s We via the unstable-orthodoxy motif. — connects to: The crisis seemed confusing because elites deliberately obscured the truth — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 1769; Crisis metaphors dominating public discourse had no basis in economic theory — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 465; Mainstream business media turned openly hostile to economics after 2008 — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 444 (+4 more)
• SEED: Angles: the journalist-interviewer list as a map of the who-gets-quoted (‘gold-plated schools’) priors; how expertise is socially credentialed, not demonstrated.

Broader Connections

• Crisis metaphors dominating public discourse had no basis in economic theory #expands (0.72) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 465