Economists post-crisis turned methodological confusion into intra-school score-settling

Evidence

For the ragged remnants of economic methodologists, it was a sorry sight to watch a few older economists rummaging around in the vague recesses of memories of undergraduate courses criticizing Milton Friedman’s little 1953 benediction for believing whatever you pleased as long as it was neoclassical, and coming up with nothing better than badly garbled versions of Popper and Kuhn. Of course, quite a few had premonitions that something had gone very wrong, but the sad truth was that they were clueless when it came to analytical deployment of abstract philosophical argument in isolating just where the flaws in professional practice could be traced, and assessing the extent that they were susceptible to methodological remedies. Mired in banality, the best they could manage to prescribe was more of the same. No wonder almost every economist instead took their philosophical perplexity as an opportune occasion to settle internecine scores within the narrow confines of the orthodox neoclassical profession: MIT vs. Chicago, Walras vs. Marshall, mindless econometrics vs. mindless axiomatics, New Keynesians vs. New Classicals, Pareto sub-optima vs. rational bubbles, efficient markets vs. informationally challenged markets … In May 2010, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, still chief at that point of the IMF, insisted that “the crisis is an opportunity”; perhaps even he didn’t quite grasp back then that the main opportunity was for revenge (both personal and intellectual). — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 462

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the book’s core argument about the neoliberal ‘thought collective’ repairing itself; connects to Mirowski’s wider framing of neoclassical orthodoxy. — connects to: Macroeconomic modelers responded to 2008 by swapping textbooks rather than questioning the orthodoxy — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 779
• SEED: Angles on how disciplinary gatekeeping erodes methodological self-critique — the mechanics of why a crisis critique produces ‘more of the same.’
• CANDY: The Strauss-Kahn ‘crisis is an opportunity’ as revenge is a neat, darkly funny line to drop in conversation.