The crisis was contained to macroeconomics by orthodox economists’ own narrative

Evidence

Disturbing phenomena such as the low-grade fever of flash crashes in asset markets, which continues intermittently down to the present, should have been taken as a warning that the crisis was slowly undermining neoclassical microeconomics as well; and yet nothing of the sort has transpired. Instead, most economists kept pretending that, should any disconfirmatory experience of the crisis exist, it had remained localized somewhere in the neighborhood of “macroeconomics” alone. One of the strangest aspects of this crisis has been the utter failure of repeated attempts to insist that the orthodox economics profession in the face of crisis hews closely to a solid consensus, anchored to Walrasian general equilibrium theory, combined with the neurotic insistence that the damage has been contained to some relatively small subset of orthodox economic thought. It is astounding that neoclassical economists seem predisposed to accuse everyone other than themselves of something they called “irrationality” in the crisis, when a good working definition of irrational action is the repetition of the same old behaviors in hope of a different outcome. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 548

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the framing of the ‘thought collective’ — how a community’s self-narrative contains epistemic damage to a subfield, paralleling Mirowski’s earlier chapters on the Chicago School’s response to the crisis. — connects to: IMF’s chief economist declared macroeconomics healthy right as the crisis peaked — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 492; Macroeconomists mobilized after 2008 to obscure the crisis’s threat to neoclassical microeconomics — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 799