Mainstream-post-crisis economic controversies absorbed public attention while serving the Thought Collective’s aims

Evidence

I have just frog-marched the reader through some turgid conceptual critique of the last few years of orthodox neoclassical models of the crisis. It has not been pretty. Perhaps you have come to suspect that much of the sound and fury over the intellectual response of the economics profession to the crisis has been bootless and counterproductive. Even if you think that the history of economic thought should pertain to an assessment of the crisis, you might be inclined to wonder: Why bother with this mainstream stuff ? Possibly you recognize that I have consciously chosen as candidates for consideration those vanguard deviations among the orthodox that have been most widely taken up by journalists and the blogosphere in the aftermath of the crisis; these, therefore, are the Potemkin controversies that have sucked up most of the intellectual oxygen in the public agora. However, what may have been felt missing from this tale of woe is evidence of the causal story proffered at the beginning of the chapter, namely, that the ensuing confusion serves the purposes of the Neoliberal Thought Collective in fostering doubt and confusion in pursuit of its political objectives. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 825

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘agnotology’ and frames the Neoliberal Thought Collective’s purpose as fostering doubt and confusion.
• XREF: connects to: Post-crisis public imagination fixated on survivors who profited, not victims — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 437; Economists’ ineffectual model disputes distract the public from threatening crisis explanations — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 840; Three splashy economics revisions diverted attention from structural crisis causes — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 725 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Three splashy economics revisions diverted attention from structural crisis causes #expands (0.95) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 725
• Economists’ ineffectual model disputes distract the public from threatening crisis explanations #expands (0.92) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 840
• Late-capitalist crises are displaced from economy onto culture as legitimation gaps #expands (0.75) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 403
• Attention activism began as an organized collective response to a perceived crisis. #expands (0.72)