Orthodox economics triumphed through prestige, austerity, and service to authority

Evidence

The completeness of the [orthodox] victory is something of a curiosity and a mystery. It must have been due to a complex of suitabilities in the doctrine to the environment into which it was projected. That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue. That it was adapted to carry a vast and consistent logical superstructure, gave it beauty. That it could explain much social injustice and apparent cruelty as an inevitable incident in the scheme of progress, [with] the attempt to change such things as likely on the whole to do more harm than good, commended it to authority. That it afforded a measure of justification to the free activities of the individual capitalist, attracted the support of the dominant social authority. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 485

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This attribution (Keynes quoting himself, likely) gives a five-part causal mechanism for why a doctrine with poor predictive record prevails — prestige from counterintuitiveness, virtue from austerity, beauty from logical consistency, legitimation of cruelty as progress, and service to capitalist authority. It’s a compact theory of ideological survival.
• XREF: Directly parallels the thought-collective survival mechanisms the reader is tracing — why orthodoxy persists despite predictive failure. Also evokes Mirowski’s broader argument about why neoliberalism survived 2008. — connects to: 1960s conservative economists cultivated an aura of impartial oracular authority. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 539; Austerity’s core principles predate the twentieth century by a century of classical economics — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 718; The economics prize displaced Europe’s indigenous economic schools with American orthodoxy — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 483 (+2 more)
• SHARE: Send to a friend who studies the sociology of economics or philosophy of social science — the five-part account of doctrinal survival.

Broader Connections

• Austerity’s core principles predate the twentieth century by a century of classical economics #expands (0.72) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 718
• The economics prize displaced Europe’s indigenous economic schools with American orthodoxy #expands (0.70) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 483