Neoliberals weaponize performative ignorance to paralyze post-crisis response

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. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 40

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: the ‘complexity excuse’ as a neoliberal political strategy — how shared professions of ignorance became a coordinated immobilizing device across elite institutions.
• DEEPTHINKING: The idea that a sophisticated epistemology of ignorance is deployed as a political tool — not just opposed to knowledge but weaponizing not-knowing — is a genuinely paradigm-level claim about how the thought collective works.
• XREF: connects to: Feigned ignorance of outcomes is structurally required for neoliberal order — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 276; Cognitive dissonance drives economists and neoliberals to treat crisis as reinforcing their beliefs; Manufactured ignorance buys time for neoliberals to stymie post-crash reform. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 942 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Manufactured ignorance buys time for neoliberals to stymie post-crash reform. #corroborates (0.95) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 942
• Feigned ignorance of outcomes is structurally required for neoliberal order #corroborates (0.92) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 276
• The Great Recession triggered a redoubling of deliberate ignorance production in economics #corroborates (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 629
• Neoliberalism reframed politics as an epistemological question of what can be known #exemplifies (0.82) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 54
• Strategic ignorance can be a ground-up equitable political strategy #qualifies (0.80) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 327
• Cognitive dissonance drives economists and neoliberals to treat crisis as reinforcing their beliefs #expands (0.78)