Philip Mirowski — Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste

641 published claims from this book.

• 1960s psychedelic drug culture prefigured the neoliberal plastic self
• A burst of bad news rarely brings an established dogma crashing down.
• A leading bailout critic admitted economists tailors advice to what audiences want.
• A leading economist declared the pre-crisis consensus vindicated and its future bright.
• A model imposed from above proved unprepared for the crisis
• A Mont Pèlerin insider openly denied believing in democracy as majority rule
• A non-Chicago, Ayn Rand acolyte rose to head the Federal Reserve
• A single financier can dominate economics via interlocked corporate boards and faculty placement.
• A single foundation seeded a third of all market-oriented think tanks
• Academic economists lent public trust to the TARP that Wall Street economists could not
• Academic economists’ private financial ties predict weaker calls for regulation
• Academics who shaped the crisis conceal their consulting ties while playing impartial arbiters
• After 2008 the neoliberal thought collective intensified capture of economics
• Agnotology studies manufactured ignorance, distinct from necessarily unknowable things.
• Akerlof and Shiller’s animal spirits merely relabeled standard neoclassical utility tinkering
• An academic economist supplied the models that sank AIG with credit default swaps.
• An unranked program testified before Congress as often as Harvard did.
• Andrew Lo denies the crisis implicated efficient markets, Wall Street pay, or bank leverage
• Anonymous heterodox blogs outpaced named economists in post-crisis insight
• Auctions advocates shifted their crisis claims after the fact to fit their designs.
• Bad news alone cannot bring an entrenched dogma crashing down
• Bailing out finance was the single most important event protecting orthodox economics
• Bank nationalization was treated as off-limits even amid collapse proceedings
• Bank profits shifted from loan interest toward securities-packaging fees before the crisis
• Banks with Fed directorships were more likely to receive TARP funds
• Behavioral economics explicitly denies being a paradigm shift in economics
• Behavioral economics gets coopted to excuse rather than reform orthodox theory
• Behavioral economics has produced no empirical or theoretical payoff for macroeconomics
• Behavioral economics offers the sensation of reform without reform
• Behavioral economics produced no crisis warnings because its practitioners avoided macroeconomics
• Behavioral economists never intended to displace mainstream neoclassical orthodoxy
• Behavioral finance’s noise-trader models left the neoclassical framework untouched.
• Belief in bodily self-ownership props up neoclassical economics but is itself a myth
• Belief in fossil-fuel-driven climate change fell sharply in the US between 2007 and 2011
• Belief in the Great Moderation blinded the Fed to signs of crisis
• Bernanke attributed the Great Moderation primarily to improved monetary policy
• Bernanke’s Fed doctrine is the Friedmanite branch of neoliberal monetary catechism.
• Bernanke’s Fed escaped any consequences for its failed crisis forecasting and bailouts
• Bernanke’s Fed leadership continued Greenspan’s market-discipline orthodoxy rather than repudiating it
• Best-selling crisis books offer the least information about the crisis
• Blaming personal profligacy for the crisis presumes understanding individuals were denied
• Bloggers lampooned DSGE by turning its own rational-expectations logic against it
• Body-commodification freedom is recent and serves market demands, not tradition
• Borrowing scientific methods has never made economics genuinely scientific
• Both neoclassical and Marxian economics have proven poor antidotes to the free-market muddle
• Both the Mont Pèlerin Society and its leftist critics obscured what neoliberalism is
• Buying academic influence predates the modern Koch era.
• Calling neoliberalism ‘market fundamentalism’ obscures its actual content
• Calling post-1980 policy shifts ‘deregulation’ misdescribes what happened.
• Carbon permit markets divert emissions curbs into market-making technicalities
• Career incentives lock economists into intellectually indefensible models they know are wrong
• Cash-voting via buycotting can mobilize consumers where the state fails.
• Casinos normalize risk so market failure loses its political charge
• Central bank funding blurs whose interests academic economists serve
• Central bank lender-of-last-resort functions were redesigned as part of the neoliberal project.
• Chicago economics directly inspired the financial derivatives and deregulation behind the crisis
• Chicago economists denied ideological uniformity even while conceding nothing post-crisis
• Chicago economists deny the crisis falsified their core theories
• Climate and health experts also hide financial ties, making capture profession-wide
• Climate denial trades on manufactured doubt, not persuasion of scientists
• Clock auctions reduce common-value uncertainty and beat sealed-bid formats on efficiency.
• Cognitive capture by a bankster-regulator complex explains economics’ crisis denial
• Cognitive dissonance drives economists and neoliberals to treat crisis as reinforcing their beliefs
• Cognitive-enhancing drugs are already widely used off-label for performance
• Cold War physics contraction pushed scientists into banks as quants, fueling the crisis
• Commercialized genetics ultimately aims at self-directed DNA upgrading, not designer children
• Commodification critiques became productive once reframed as questions of personhood
• Competing schools within the MPS hold irreconcilable definitions of the market
• Conditions driving empire and neoliberal failure remain, producing a ‘second Arab spring’
• Conflicting defenses of economic orthodoxy after 2008 cannot all be true.
• Confrontation with contrary evidence can intensify rather than weaken firm belief.
• Congress held its first-ever hearings on a pure economic theory model in 2010
• Congress itself helped cement the DSGE’s intellectual monopoly.
• Congressional skeptics turned to outside economists but found no ready alternative plan
• Consumer credit judgement shifted from personal relationships to automated for-profit scoring
• Consumer protection agencies that mimic bank analytics legitimize a model-driven financial order
• Consumer rebellion staged as shopping defuses actual political mobilization
• Consumer-protection transparency rules fail because banks manipulate the very form of simplicity
• Contemporary economics resists admitting the human tendency to rationalize.
• Contemporary orthodox economics lacks the consensus texts that define a stable discipline
• Corporate outsourcing and CEO pay inflation stem from neoliberal theory, not efficiency
• Credit-score surveillance shifted all rectification costs onto individuals, not firms.
• Criminal law targets the poor while tort law disciplines the wealthy
• Crises recurring across eras implies neoliberalism may not cause them
• Crisis commentary from 2008-10 shared one syllogism, that failure proves neoliberalism dying
• Crisis lets neoliberal officials arrogate sovereign power to define emergencies
• Crisis metaphors dominating public discourse had no basis in economic theory
• Crisis readers tuned out by 2012 due to information fatigue
• Crisis rescue shifted private sector insolvency onto sovereign state accounts
• Crisis-fixing economists stood to profit directly from adopting their recommended policy tools.
• Crisis-ridden eurozone governments appointed unelected economist technocrats to lead
• Debt securitization served as inadequate compensation for welfare-state dismantling
• Debtor prisons have been revived through debt-collection lawsuit traps
• Declaring the economy incomprehensible has immobilized the left’s response to the crisis.
• Democracy and liberalism can be decoupled and even opposed
• Digital protest platforms covertly harvest signatories’ data for commercial profit
• Disconfirming evidence can strengthen rather than weaken committed beliefs.
• Disconfirming evidence rarely topples deeply held doctrines and worldviews.
• DSGE and efficient markets theory both ignored all evidence and criticism that challenged them
• DSGE models are defended because abandoning them threatens the entire economics orthodoxy
• DSGE models rule out genuine uncertainty by requiring insurable probabilities for all events
• Early crisis discourse conflated domination with Gramscian hegemony
• Early neoliberalism distinguished itself from laissez-faire by championing competition.
• Early neoliberals explicitly distanced themselves from classical laissez-faire doctrine
• Economic crises are also conceptual and intellectual catastrophes
• Economic heterodoxy declined because graduate training filtered out non-economists
• Economic orthodoxy has grown more neoliberal and more conservative over time.
• Economic orthodoxy’s stagnation hurt the left’s credibility more than the right’s
• Economics as a discipline profited from manufactured doubt rather than suffering from it
• Economics departments eliminated methodology courses by training out all qualified instructors
• Economics enforced doctrinal conformity hardest after the Cold War ended
• Economics escaped crisis blame because the banking sector it protected escaped unscathed
• Economics expelled rational-expectations dissenters unlike physics, which tolerates internal inconsistency
• Economics has been flooded with physics-derived saviors, not starved of science
• Economics has displaced clergy as society’s untouchable oracles despite crisis failure
• Economics is held together by circular journal rankings and prestige, not intellectual standards
• Economics lacked any professional code of ethics or enforcement body
• Economics profession generates strikingly few serious revisions to orthodoxy
• Economics professors refused to discuss the 2008 crisis in class
• Economics survived the 2008 crisis intellectually unscathed, unlike other disciplines under attack
• Economists actively denied the crisis, not merely failed to predict it.
• Economists advising on financial reform mostly hid private industry affiliations
• Economists and think-tank neoliberals respond to disconfirming evidence differently
• Economists defended failed prediction by asserting contradictory claims at once
• Economists drove and profited from the commercialization of universities
• Economists embedded their university vision in administrative structures that outlive them.
• Economists grew from roughly one to four percent of university faculty over a century.
• Economists had no consensus explanation for the 2008 financial crisis
• Economists involved in financial innovation disappear their own roles when narrating crises
• Economists lost control of crisis discourse to journalists—a sign of being caught unawares
• Economists manufacture simplified crisis narratives blaming government to preserve public trust
• Economists obscuring knowledge during crisis stems from contradicting logics of expertise and market faith
• Economists opposing the bailout publicly hid their Cato Institute affiliations.
• Economists post-crisis turned methodological confusion into intra-school score-settling
• Economists publicly deny the industry ties that structure their profession.
• Economists ran crisis institutions, not just theorized about them
• Economists responded to the 2008 crisis by manufacturing doubt and delay rather than clarity.
• Economists responded to the Queen’s question with denial of institutional failure.
• Economists responsible for the AIG collapse faced no reputational consequences and gained advisory power
• Economists serve the financial sector by muddying public debate to block political action.
• Economists still cannot explain the causes of flash crashes
• Economists who enabled the 2008 crisis emerged without any institutional consequences
• Economists who warned of a housing bubble were purged from Fed advisory positions
• Economists, not politicians, are the ambient zombies in crisis culture
• Economists’ appeals to science deflected attention from their own failure
• Economists’ conflicted interests drive their advocacy of carbon markets
• Economists’ deepest ethical controversy was advising dictatorships, not crisis conflicts of interest.
• Economists’ ineffectual model disputes distract the public from threatening crisis explanations
• Economists’ persistence in error needs institutional explanation, not just psychology
• Economists’ talk of public good actually means protection of their own professional interests.
• Effective opposition requires first understanding the adversary’s actual project
• Efficient-markets theorists treated the 2008 crash as confirming their doctrine
• Elite reform conferences excluded genuine heterodox economic schools
• Empirical failure does not dislodge orthodox economists from their theory
• Empirical tests only hardened both sides of the EMH debate
• Establishment economists defended Greenspan despite the 2008 crisis
• Ethical consumerism replaced political boycott with paid market-based moral gestures
• Europe’s carbon trading spent $287 billion with almost zero emissions reduction.
• Even anti-neoliberal orthodox economists now operate inside the profession’s neoliberal frame
• Even prominent crisis commentators had undisclosed financial conflicts of interest
• Even sharp critics of DSGE refuse to reject its general equilibrium foundations
• Expert consensus reports codify what banks can get away with rather than genuine reform
• Failed prediction exposed latent flaws in the rational economic agent concept
• Failed prophecies boost proselytizing among those with fellow believers.
• Fair trade certification has little real impact on ground-level poverty.
• Fair trade functions as consumer self-expression rather than supply-chain change.
• Fama claimed the efficient-markets hypothesis was confirmed by the 2008 crash.
• Fama denied the existence of bubbles by dismissing the term as meaningless.
• Fama dismissed absolute-price inefficiency by arguing knowledge of it would make one rich.
• Famous economists responded to 2008 by defending their unchanged textbooks
• Fannie and Freddie did not cause the subprime lending explosion
• Fannie Mae commissioned economists across the political spectrum as lobbying ammunition
• FCIC insiders leaked confidential data and prepped bank witnesses
• Fed jobs serve as career consolation prizes that build an interlocking orthodoxy
• Federal crisis bailouts enacted Milton Friedman’s Depression remedy of shielding the wealthy
• Federal Reserve crisis lending quietly enlarged the biggest banks at taxpayer expense
• Federal Reserve exculpatory logic transformed herding and iron-hand discipline into rational consensus
• Federal Reserve meetings before the crisis were marked by frequent laughter
• Feigned ignorance of outcomes is structurally required for neoliberal order
• Finance escaping crisis consequences legitimated the economics profession dodging blame
• Finance produced 41 percent of U.S. corporate profits in 2007
• Financial conflict-of-interest definitions assume contested goals for research enterprises
• Financial engineering is promoted as outsourcing social problems to entrepreneurs
• Financial engineering naturalizes crisis to justify yet more markets
• Financial innovation rhetoric frames new financial instruments as technological progress to legitimize deregulation
• Financial regulation was outsourced to quasi-private bodies like rating agencies
• Financial self-help rhetoric collapses into absurdity when applied to student debt
• Financial system complexity now exceeds human cognitive and regulatory capacity
• Flash crash prices so unreliable that 27 percent of trades required cancellation
• Fogged public discourse enabled discredited economists to be rehabilitated after the crash.
• FOMC transcripts show abundant laughter during the 2001-2006 bubble years
• Formal neoclassical theorems undermine the very principles the theory claims to establish
• Formalizing irrationality inside a utility function collapses it back into rationality
• Foucauldian critique offers no alternatives, potentially serving an ideological function
• Foucault pioneered the critique of human capital theory as self-disintegration
• Foucault saw economics as a discipline that forbids any sovereign viewpoint
• Foucault treated the market as an unexamined oracle, no differently than Hayek did
• Foucault’s biopolitics resembles but misleads analysis of everyday neoliberalism
• Foucault’s governmentality concept may itself be a cog in the neoliberal regime of truth
• Foucault’s market lectures echoed Mont Pelerin’s exoteric public face
• Foucault’s prescience about everyday neoliberalism came from adopting neoliberal doctrine
• Friedman claimed no government redistribution program succeeds in its stated aim.
• Friedman publicly backed Greenspan despite doctrinal rivalries with Randian libertarians.
• General equilibrium frameworks can only explain change through outside intervention, not internal dynamics
• Geoengineering is the logical extension of neoliberal market-fix doctrine
• Harvard economist Miron deflected crisis causation toward timeless historical repetition
• Hayek considered genuine independent thought a minority capacity in any society
• Hayek designed the Mont Pèlerin Society as a closed ideological academy
• Hayek dropped anti-engineer rhetoric for political expediency, not principle
• Hayek faulted 19th-century liberals for overconfidence in what public communication could achieve.
• Hayek framed individual rational self-direction as dangerous civilizational hubris
• Hayek grounded freedom in the inevitability of ignorance
• Hayek held that dispersed market knowledge trumps even the wisest individual’s knowledge
• Hayek held that mixing spontaneous order with organization is never rational
• Hayek located rationality in impersonal market processes, not individuals
• Hayek rejected all Third Way positions, setting him apart from Keynes and Stiglitz
• Hayek rejected utility maximization in favor of knowledge dispersion as the market’s justification
• Hayek saw American egalitarian democracy as more hostile to elites than capitalism
• Hayek treated belief in market superiority as an article of faith, not rational demonstration.
• Hayek’s epistemology denied others the holism his own vision required
• Hayek’s theory of knowledge cannot be traced directly to Hume
• Higher capital requirements bind nothing when capital quality is unregulated
• Historical icons of neoliberal selfhood are largely manufactured retrofits
• Human capital theory logically extends to genetic self-investment
• Ideas, not vested interests, ultimately shape political possibility.
• IMF’s chief economist declared macroeconomics healthy right as the crisis peaked
• Individual geoengineering project failures still serve the broader neoliberal project.
• Industry groups rent university prestige to launder paid advocacy as academic scholarship
• Information-side patches to neoclassical economics remain epicycles never incorporated into the core model
• Informed trading undermines the existence of competitive equilibrium
• Insider critics accused mainstream macro of being self-referential and disconnected from economic reality
• Insulated theory communities respond to crisis by claiming vindication.
• Intellectual orthodoxies require active institutional support to survive crises, not inertia
• Italian Fascists privatized on a large scale before neoliberalism existed
• J-1 cultural exchange visas supplied indentured student labor to major US logistics firms
• James Buchanan thought the public needed tutoring to accept the neoliberal position.
• Journalistic both-sides coverage can be weaponized to manufacture public ignorance
• Key crisis actors were rewarded with prestigious positions rather than sanctioned
• Keynes wrote the General Theory to save capitalism from fascism and socialism
• Keynes’s famous account of how economic ideas reach politics is badly flawed.
• Krugman blamed economists’ crisis blindness on aesthetic attachment to math
• Krugman engaged heterodox economics only tactically, as opposition to a common foe
• Krugman predicted behavioral finance would move from periphery to center of economics.
• Krugman rejected Minsky’s insight because Minsky abandoned neoclassical micro theory
• Leading economists frame post-crisis failures as pedagogical noise rather than systemic defects
• Leading neoliberals blamed regulation and inaction rather than their own policy failures
• Leading orthodox economists could not agree on the crisis’s actual causes
• Left academics wrongly assumed the 2008 crash would doom neoliberalism
• Left climate advocacy can be co-opted into serving the market agenda it opposes.
• Left economists’ voluntary adherence to orthodoxy explains the left’s failure post-2008.
• Left parties struggled to comprehend the swift neoliberal resurgence after 2008
• Left responses to crisis fail because they seek restoration instead of reconstruction
• Leftist pragmatic compromise is structurally outmatched by coordinated neoliberal strategy.
• Life insurance gained legitimacy by framing itself as family care rather than death gambling
• Macroeconomic modelers responded to 2008 by swapping textbooks rather than questioning the orthodoxy
• Macroeconomists mobilized after 2008 to obscure the crisis’s threat to neoclassical microeconomics
• Macroeconomists offered almost no public defenses of DSGE after the 2008 crisis.
• Mainstream business media turned openly hostile to economics after 2008
• Mainstream economic models cannot explain when bubbles start or stop
• Mainstream economics gives patrons the knowledge they pay for rather than objective truth.
• Mainstream economics maintains hegemony because it offers tools and language no alternative matches.
• Mainstream economists admit failure to predict the crisis but resist overhauling the discipline
• Mainstream economists defended their failure by calling crises tautologically unpredictable.
• Mainstream economists defended theory by scapegoating Greenspan-style market fundamentalism
• Mainstream economists exonerated Bernanke while scapegoating Greenspan for the crisis
• Mainstream elite economists from top universities mobilized as a hard-right bloc in 2011
• Mainstream journalists now openly suspect economic crisis analysis was deliberately manipulated
• Mainstream-post-crisis economic controversies absorbed public attention while serving the Thought Collective’s aims
• Manufactured doubt deployed by agnotologists also operates inside economics
• Manufactured doubt need not be consciously willed to paralyze economic reform
• Manufactured ignorance buys time for neoliberals to stymie post-crash reform.
• Market designers and anti-TARP critics converged on shared anti-government assumptions.
• Market designers claimed better auctions alone could have prevented the 2008 crisis
• Market designers could not agree how auction rule changes affect performance
• Market designers deliberately conflate actual markets with the abstract market
• Market designers flipped their public stance on TARP once they lost auction contracts.
• Market designers framed the 2008 crisis as a liquidity problem, not an insolvency one.
• Market designers leveraged lab experiments to posture as impartial science against Treasury politics.
• Market designers misrepresented the crisis to serve their own profit, worsening public confusion.
• Market designers pitched crisis auctions partly to win lucrative government contracts
• Market designers positioned themselves as correcting markets’ information-aggregation flaws for common-value assets.
• Market designers redefined competitive prices to justify politically managed bailouts
• Market designers’ clock-auction efficiency claims were internally incoherent.
• Market success is self-justifying for neoliberals, like natural selection.
• Marketing works by making consumers feel immune to it while they buy in
• Markets are products of truth struggles, not validators of truth
• Markets conceal their own mechanisms of visibility and knowledge production.
• Markets primarily fabricate felt needs rather than conveying goods to those in need
• Mathematics boot camps functioned to suppress questioning of economic orthodoxy
• Mechanism design theory gave no guidance on basic auction design choices
• Mechanism designers had done no prior work on fixing a collapsing economy
• Membership in the Mont Pelerin Society defines who qualifies as a neoliberal.
• Methodological self-scrutiny had been banished, leaving economists unsophisticated at crisis defense.
• Mont Pèlerin Society economists drove academic changes, contrary to conventional wisdom.
• Mont Pelerin Society members accepted that humans must remain slaves to the state
• Mont Pelerin Society members deny the salience of class in modern economies
• Moral framing of recessions as punishment blocks public acceptance of stimulus
• Most consumer goods satisfy psychological cravings rather than felt deprivations
• MPS members preferred stricter ideological policing over Popper’s open debate
• Narrow economics training makes practitioners mistake ignorance for intellectual freedom
• Nationalization was inverted to socialize losses while privatizing remaining gains
• Nearly all orthodox American macroeconomists receive central bank funding
• Neoclassical agent theory collapsed when selves became infinitely plastic.
• Neoclassical economics and the Neoliberal Thought Collective are distinct movements
• Neoclassical economics as a whole is a zombie tradition resistant to refutation
• Neoclassical economics treats its own past claims as disposable bygones
• Neoclassical economics’ canonical theorems undercut each other’s core claims.
• Neoclassical economists are the zombies, not the neoliberals themselves
• Neoclassical models cannot diagnose man-made crises, only exogenous shocks.
• Neoclassical training immunized economists against even recognizing financial conflicts of interest
• Neoliberal ‘freedom’ is internally redefined to mean market autonomy, not political liberty
• Neoliberal anti-intellectualism dates back to Hayek’s 1949 attack on intellectuals
• Neoliberal authors produce obfuscating scholarship that disguises the movement’s own practices
• Neoliberal climate strategy treats ineffective measures as a feature, not a bug.
• Neoliberal corporate theory was deployed to defend Too Big to Bail banks
• Neoliberal crisis narratives redirect blame from structures onto individual psychology
• Neoliberal crisis response expanded rather than shrank state power
• Neoliberal crisis responses deliberately undermine state fiscal authority
• Neoliberal culture recasts welfare-state dependence as a moral failure to embrace risk
• Neoliberal denial of class categories paralyzed Obama-era tax policy debates
• Neoliberal discourse inverted liberalism’s visionary rhetoric into accommodation to the status quo
• Neoliberal doctrine holds every problem, even market-caused ones, has a market solution
• Neoliberal doctrine must be distinguished from failures in its state implementation
• Neoliberal doctrine pairs contradictory claims about markets guaranteeing democracy and freedom
• Neoliberal erasure of class discourse captures struggles for bourgeois liberalism
• Neoliberal figures deliberately blurred their boundaries with rival right-wing factions
• Neoliberal freedom culminates in radical solipsism that denies the economy’s existence
• Neoliberal funders treated policy influence as a vertically integrated production pipeline
• Neoliberal intellectuals deliberately blurred distinctions between their doctrine and classical liberalism
• Neoliberal intellectuals exploit economists’ ignorance to justify abandoning regulation while exempting themselves
• Neoliberal logic treats even selling one’s own organs as protected self-determination
• Neoliberal markets and selves co-evolve through mutual trial-and-error adjustment
• Neoliberal markets pre-optimize and monetize protest identities for profit
• Neoliberal orthodoxy defines corruption as existing only in the public sector
• Neoliberal persuasion works by convincing people they cannot be manipulated
• Neoliberal prescriptions need not work to be promoted, only to advance the project
• Neoliberal risk thinking undermines the actuarial categories classical insurance requires
• Neoliberal schools offer divergent fictions of law’s neutrality to mask its politicized character.
• Neoliberal science-policy think tanks adopt anodyne names that conceal their political orientation
• Neoliberal self-entrepreneurship destabilizes the fixed boundaries of personhood
• Neoliberal selfhood reframes reward and punishment as risk outcomes, not justice
• Neoliberal theorists openly argued liberty must be limited to be possessed
• Neoliberal thought control is organized as nested institutions
• Neoliberal trade doctrine plus corporate reengineering drove offshore capital flight
• Neoliberalism abolishes classes, the individual, and Lockean property in one move
• Neoliberalism absorbed countercultural self-fashioning into self-optimization via the neurochemical self
• Neoliberalism absorbed natural-science metaphors to become a comprehensive worldview beyond economics
• Neoliberalism can be studied despite mutating by tracking its institutions, members, and texts
• Neoliberalism claimed openness to all viewpoints while privately enforcing ideological conformity
• Neoliberalism defines interest so as to render false consciousness unintelligible
• Neoliberalism deliberately pairs moderate and hard-right positions to dominate debate
• Neoliberalism denies any harmable self, dissolving all positive freedom
• Neoliberalism differs from laissez-faire by making competition its core principle
• Neoliberalism differs from traditional conservatism in ways that shield it from accountability
• Neoliberalism differs fundamentally from the Cold War era economy
• Neoliberalism evolved by sloughing off earlier liberal doctrines without acknowledging reversals
• Neoliberalism expands state penal power while professing to shrink government
• Neoliberalism forms one distinct faction within a fractious New Right coalition.
• Neoliberalism has a coherent crisis logic despite lacking fixed doctrine
• Neoliberalism has no answer for subjects who use liberty against it
• Neoliberalism has pursued ongoing intellectual accommodation with religious conservatives despite deep contradictions.
• Neoliberalism induces risk-bearing then blames the victims when risk fails
• Neoliberalism inverted classical liberalism by defending monopoly and corporate power
• Neoliberalism inverted the moral status of gambling from vice to virtue
• Neoliberalism is a mutable thought collective, not a fixed market-fundamentalist creed
• Neoliberalism is a self-consciously evolving thought collective, not a fixed catechism
• Neoliberalism is fundamentally an epistemological project, not merely a political or economic one
• Neoliberalism is transmitted through everyday consumer encounters, not texts
• Neoliberalism makes the market, not experts, the arbiter of truth
• Neoliberalism may not cohere as a unified doctrine in actual practice.
• Neoliberalism operates from a unified playbook despite surface variation
• Neoliberalism persists through pervasive cultural imagery, not popular political theory
• Neoliberalism redefines citizenship as mere customerhood to justify consolidating power within the state.
• Neoliberalism redefines coercion so that no market exchange can ever count as coercive
• Neoliberalism rejects laissez-faire in favor of perpetual constructionist state intervention
• Neoliberalism replaces class analysis with a cynical catechism of limitless self-transformation
• Neoliberalism replaces labor with human capital and dissolves the stable self
• Neoliberalism seeks a strong state that thwarts democracy, not a weak one
• Neoliberalism seeks to capture and reconstruct the strong state, not shrink it
• Neoliberalism seeks to transform and take over the state, not shrink it
• Neoliberalism served interests, never grounded in economic theory
• Neoliberalism survived 2008 by becoming an unrecognized everyday worldview
• Neoliberalism survived 2008 through deliberate strategy, not default
• Neoliberalism survived the 2008 crisis intact, contrary to premature obituaries
• Neoliberalism survived the 2008 crisis relatively unscathed.
• Neoliberalism sustains itself through double-truth pretenses of spontaneous revolt masking top-down organization
• Neoliberalism targets elite opinion through knowledge redefinition, not direct corporate service.
• Neoliberalism transforms the self so that crises stop being read as system failures
• Neoliberalism treats freedom as an absolute moral principle divorced from religion
• Neoliberalism wants science dissolved into market activity
• Neoliberalism was always a political doctrine ungrounded in economic theory.
• Neoliberalism was never a unified doctrine but three cross-fertilizing sects
• Neoliberalism was never a unified doctrine but three distinct sects from its founding.
• Neoliberalism weaponizes its own rebellious aesthetic to absorb anti-system dissent.
• Neoliberalism’s 1980s breakthrough rested on decades of prior institutional groundwork
• Neoliberalism’s activist stance contradicts its own claim that markets naturally triumph
• Neoliberalism’s cohesion comes from thought-collective structure, not explicit doctrine
• Neoliberalism’s crisis strategy redirected blame from banks onto state debt
• Neoliberalism’s double-truth doctrine originated in Hayek’s covert borrowing from Schmitt
• Neoliberalism’s durability rests on fusing the economic with the cultural
• Neoliberalism’s freedom ideology borrowed from fascist critics of liberalism
• Neoliberalism’s internal contradictions are displaced onto cultural theaters of cruelty
• Neoliberalism’s invisibility was manufactured by both its architects and its critics
• Neoliberalism’s opponents, not its own theory, collapsed after the crisis
• Neoliberalism’s public rhetoric of open liberalism contradicted its actual closed, hierarchical organization
• Neoliberalism’s purported state-skepticism actually mandates a strong state
• Neoliberalism’s self-cultivation culture has a dark twin in public spectacles of humiliation
• Neoliberalism’s survival after 2008 meant losing its unchallenged narrative, not its policy program.
• Neoliberalism’s ultimate ideal self is the autonomous self-made individual
• Neoliberals actively engineered their post-crisis survival rather than winning by default
• Neoliberals co-opt left critiques to discredit even market-based ethical consumption.
• Neoliberals co-opt protest through takeover plus commercialized recruitment.
• Neoliberals deliberately bypassed universities in favor of a closed, hand-picked elite society.
• Neoliberals deploy identical denialist response templates to crises and climate change.
• Neoliberals disagree sharply among themselves about what a market is
• Neoliberals do not practice the laissez-faire they preach to the public.
• Neoliberals exploit emergency exceptions to bypass democratic accountability.
• Neoliberals have repeatedly appropriated left-wing ideas and twisted them to their own purposes.
• Neoliberals historically co-opted leftist ideas but offered no new thinking in 2009
• Neoliberals once named themselves openly and then abandoned the label
• Neoliberals out-thought the left on how knowledge is organized politically.
• Neoliberals preach market supremacy while exempting themselves from its rule
• Neoliberals redefine freedom as something to be limited and detached from democracy
• Neoliberals reject market-failure theory, so they cannot see crisis as market glitch
• Neoliberals reject naive laissez-faire in their internal thinking while professing it publicly
• Neoliberals repurposed international institutions to lock in prior policy wins
• Neoliberals restrict freedom to negative freedom to shield market epistemology from scrutiny
• Neoliberals themselves deny their doctrine ever existed while others prematurely proclaimed its death
• Neoliberals treat inequality as a necessary motor of progress, not a flaw
• Neoliberals weaponize performative ignorance to paralyze post-crisis response
• Newspaper critics of the crisis are themselves cogs in the neoliberal discourse machine
• Nobel economics prizes after 2008 openly celebrated the very orthodoxy that failed
• Non-philosophy disciplines have best grasped everyday neoliberal consciousness
• NSF-funded research helped originate the conservative economic ideas now used to justify cutting NSF.
• Obama’s SEC pick signaled early reluctance to reform finance
• Observers widely expected the 2008 crash to refute neoliberal doctrine
• Occupy collapsed because it rejected theory and organization while ignoring its own neoliberal backers
• Occupy failed because it lacked a coherent counter-repertoire to embedded neoliberalism
• Occupy mirrored the Tea Party’s anti-government populism while ignoring its commercialization of protest
• Occupy’s slogans and reforms recycled 1980s-era proposals rather than novel ideas
• Official crisis reports posited contradictory causes rather than settled explanations
• One organization founded a third of the world’s market-oriented think tanks since 1981
• Opaque subprime mortgages spread because banks had to match fly-by-night lenders to survive
• Open-source labor mirrors paid guerrilla marketing in converting faux rebellion into market value
• Opponents of neoliberalism could not locate the intellectual roots of the 2008 crisis
• Ordinary citizens are deliberately kept ignorant of the esoteric neoliberal playbook
• Orthodox crisis models still measure fluctuations against rational-expectations equilibrium.
• Orthodox economics grew more intolerant the more it proclaimed its own openness
• Orthodox economics models structurally excluded the possibility of major crises
• Orthodox economics triumphed through prestige, austerity, and service to authority
• Orthodox economics’ internal disputes serve as deliberate diversions protecting the neoliberal project
• Orthodox economists retaliate against critics while never being held accountable themselves
• Orthodox economists’ model-legitimacy criterion is political, not epistemic.
• Orthodox finance theory denies that inherently toxic assets can exist at all
• Orthodox macroeconomics masked crisis buildup and blocked repairs afterward
• Orthodox-leaning insiders expect any neoclassical revival to come from lower-ranked younger economists.
• Patenting financial algorithms made finance seem scientifically grounded
• Patronage, not analysis, explains academic economists’ crisis positions.
• Paul Krugman publicly conceded he was never an evolutionary economist
• Payday lenders deliberately target minority communities for store locations
• Payday lending went from outlawed to celebrated since the 1980s
• People accept cruelty to the poor but recoil at commodifying their own bodies
• People resist the view that the economy manipulates their beliefs and actions
• Personal property is constitutive of the self, so alienating it harms the person
• Popper acknowledged tolerance’s paradoxes but never solved them, unlike Hayek
• Popper’s open-society ideal directly contradicted the MPS’s closed founding design
• Post-1980 economists selectively adopt psychological doctrines that reinforce neoclassical orthodoxy.
• Post-2008 financial reforms left the system’s core infrastructure unchanged
• Post-crisis attempts to make DSGE models realistic are self-contradictory
• Post-crisis behavioral economics reduced Keynes to irrationality that disrupts general equilibrium.
• Post-crisis commentary failures stem from refusing to admit the ideology itself failed
• Post-crisis economic consensus lists were dominated by orthodox defenders
• Post-crisis economists reacted in one of three distinct ideological postures
• Post-crisis market policies exist to thwart writedowns and state intervention, not to enable them.
• Post-crisis orthodoxy rebounded as the left lacked a diagnosis
• Post-crisis public imagination fixated on survivors who profited, not victims
• Post-crisis reforms to neoclassical economics were theatrical failures that still served a distraction function.
• Postneoliberalism means delegitimized market narrative, not abandoned policy
• Prior everyday neoliberal culture buffered the crisis until the collective mobilized.
• Private asset managers designed and ran government bailout programs
• Professional exclusion of heterodox economists makes neoclassical orthodoxy self-reinforcing
• Public legitimacy of economics rests on its predictive and prescriptive authority
• Public-choice logic applied to economists themselves reveals built-in incentives toward rent-seeking theories.
• Rajan’s deregulatory academic positions predated and contradicted his public crisis warnings
• Ratings agencies’ internal culture shifts, not technical error, enabled crisis mispricing
• Reagan-era appointments turned the Fed into a channel for neoliberalizing economics
• Reality TV and gaming shifted from rewarding contestants to humiliating losers
• Rebellious voices matter historically even when they fail to achieve their goals
• Refuting laissez-faire alone does not justify alternative policy
• Reregulation is a rhetorical trap that the left should abandon
• Rescue merely shifted crisis risk onto government balance sheets
• Rescued financial firms prospered and bankrolled the right-wing resurgence
• Risk discourse retroactively moralizes outcomes whose causality it denies beforehand
• Risk-category classification replaced individual screening as credit control logic
• Rogoff’s ‘all crises are alike’ discourse shifted blame from private sector to sovereign debt
• Romer blamed financial crisis on government regulation, not private corruption
• Samuelsonian synthesis depends on strategic micro-macro inconsistency
• Satire can reveal everyday neoliberalism by exaggerating life-organizing trends
• Scholars dispute whether ideas or class interest explain neoliberalism’s internal cohesion
• Science denialism, carbon trading, and geoengineering together form a coordinated neoliberal climate strategy.
• Self-described new economic thinking at INET recycled old nostalgic tropes
• Self-help ideology has become the spontaneous ideology of the neoliberal era
• Selling citizenship rights follows logically from core neoliberal premises yet was mostly rejected
• Shadow banking drove the crisis as much as mortgage defaults did
• Shadow banking is framed by its apologists as natural banking evolution
• Shiller’s public reputation as a leftist maverick is misplaced
• Signatories of the 2010 pro-austerity letter refused to admit error after Britain’s contraction
• Social disciplines alone deny contested concepts existed even while declaring them dead
• Social studies of finance recapitulated orthodox economics and obscured the crisis’s political economy
• Social-choice theory is nearly as neoliberal as public-choice theory
• Socialist parties themselves introduced key neoliberal reforms in several countries.
• Some policy debates feature one side uninterested in truth where scholarship is propaganda
• Soros’s INET inherited the Popper-Hayek divide over science and open society.
• Sowing deliberate public confusion is the core aim of economic denialism
• State-promoted gambling both raises revenue and distracts the precarious workforce
• Stigler argued the public rationally under-informs itself about policies with diffuse costs
• Stiglitz declared Washington Consensus dead and US model discredited
• Stiglitz’s information models cannot explain 2008 because the information itself was deliberately corrupted.
• Stiglitz’s internal critique left neoclassical economics essentially unchanged
• Student loan debts survive bankruptcy and trigger wage garnishment and license revocation
• Student loan discharge requires proving ‘certainty of hopelessness’ in repeated court appearances
• Subcontracting chains let firms deny responsibility for exploitative labor practices
• Summers avoided substantive accountability for his role in the crisis
• Summers blamed graduate training standards for economics’ predictive failure
• Summers denied his financial-sector payments conditioned crisis policy.
• Summers evaded serious banking reform questions by invoking socialism
• Summers openly declared that all honest Democrats are now Friedmanites.
• TARP was drafted hastily and pushed through by threatening total collapse
• TARP was framed as market construction, mirroring emissions-trading as a neoliberal instrument.
• Thaler held the no-free-lunch component of the EMH survived the crisis untouched.
• The 2008 crisis briefly turned mainstream economics criticism into a mass public phenomenon
• The 2008 crisis debate collapsed to first-year textbook economics.
• The 2008 crisis disoriented the left instead of vindicating its economic worldview
• The 2008 crisis killed none of the dominant economic doctrines.
• The 2008 crisis killed none of the economic ideas that caused it
• The 2008 crisis paradoxically strengthened right-wing and austerity politics worldwide
• The 2008 crisis produced no genuine reform and empowered the political right
• The 2008 crisis reinforced rather than refuted neoliberal and orthodox economic doctrine
• The 2008 crisis strengthened rather than weakened the political right
• The 2008 crisis was expected to falsify neoliberal doctrine but did not
• The 2009 US cap-and-trade bill lavished its biggest subsidies on the worst polluters.
• The American Economic Association defaulted on its own ethics and data-disclosure pledges
• The anti-bailout petition retroactively legitimized the vilification of TARP after Republican losses.
• The behavioral-economics-revolution narrative was manufactured by journalists and political appointees
• The Boston Fed exonerated economists by calling bubble warnings minority views with poor data
• The category of middle class functions as a denial of all other class identities
• The Community Reinvestment Act did not cause the US housing bubble
• The crisis bailout’s chief decision-maker was personally enriched by the rescued banks.
• The crisis destroyed confidence that anyone can understand the economic system.
• The crisis exposed an epistemological contradiction festering inside orthodox economics
• The crisis narrative blaming government interference absorbed leftwing grievances to defend market orthodoxy
• The crisis seemed confusing because elites deliberately obscured the truth
• The crisis was contained to macroeconomics by orthodox economists’ own narrative
• The crisis-as-government-fault narrative was engineered to justify austerity
• The crisis’s demand for speed let well-funded networks capture its interpretation.
• The Day of Reckoning narrative collapsed when bankers were bailed out and prospered
• The discourse of risk retroactively legitimizes any market outcome.
• The DSGE consensus model was a top-down compromise, not an organic agreement
• The early neoliberal network deliberately concealed its political-bias intentions from the public
• The economics profession and the Neoliberal Thought Collective symbiotically keep the financial system unaltered
• The economics profession is actively erasing the memory of its own crisis failures.
• The economics profession reverted to its prior doctrines after the crisis
• The economics profession used crisis theory as calculated doubt-pumping to defend orthodoxy
• The economics profession’s failed self-reform serves the neoliberal project by generating noise
• The economist career conveyor belt into finance undermined the pretense of independent expertise
• The efficient market hypothesis and bubbles are logically compatible.
• The Efficient Market Hypothesis resists empirical falsification through the protective shield of auxiliary hypotheses
• The efficient market hypothesis survived every empirical refutation and became finance orthodoxy
• The efficient-market hypothesis has survived thousands of studies without consensus
• The efficient-markets hypothesis erased discussion of bubbles and speculation
• The efficient-markets hypothesis simultaneously justifies state failure and enabled the financial crisis
• The failed-bank bailout preserved economists’ political standing and career trajectories
• The FASB changed mark-to-market rules under political pressure, letting banks inflate asset values.
• The FCIC’s competing crisis narratives both shielded Wall Street from blame
• The Fed employs 43 percent of US monetary economics specialists
• The Fed issued conflict-of-interest waivers and no-bid contracts to favored banks during the crisis.
• The Fed’s amnesty extended to shielding economic theory itself from blame
• The Federal Reserve acted subservient to banks while posing as a regulator
• The Federal Reserve dominates economics as a funder and employer
• The Federal Reserve is structurally owned and controlled by private member banks
• The financial system was deliberately built to confuse its own architects.
• The Fisher-Minsky-Koo model repackaged debt-deleveraging crisis into New Keynesian orthodoxy
• The forecast scandal was a systemic orientation bias, not mere incompetence
• The Great Recession triggered a redoubling of deliberate ignorance production in economics
• The greed-versus-regulation framing itself is a false dichotomy
• The GSE meme succeeded because it offered a simple crisis story
• The housing bubble traces to private securitization, not government GSE lending
• The human-capital concept entails that education is a consumer good, not transformative experience
• The ideal entrepreneurial-agent construct erases the very concept of predatory lending
• The Koch network built the Mercatus Center into a leading neoliberal policy think tank.
• The left’s reliance on orthodox economics enabled its co-optation by neoliberalism
• The mainstream adopts every good idea, making schools of thought pointless
• The market must be actively constituted by political intervention, not discovered
• The Mont Pelerin Society deliberately bypassed academia for closed debate
• The Mont Pèlerin Society pioneered a nested structure integrating theory and action
• The Mont Pèlerin Society pioneered a novel hierarchy for incubating political theory and action.
• The Mont Pèlerin Society provides a stable reference for identifying neoliberalism
• The MPS deliberately capped membership at five hundred to build exclusivity and global reach.
• The neoliberal thought collective crafted the government-caused-crisis narrative as the dominant right-wing explanation.
• The neoliberal thought collective may deliberately split its doctrine into exoteric and esoteric versions
• The neoliberal thought collective was founded to redeem itself from Depression-era defeat by Keynesians
• The neoliberal thought collective was itself a designed order, not a spontaneous one
• The New York Fed suppresses dissenting expert views through intellectual inbreeding and vertical hiring.
• The orthodox crisis narrative by 2010 blamed government policy for the crash.
• The orthodox model’s ban on disagreement suppressed heterodoxy and worsened later conflict.
• The political fight hinges on what humans can know that markets cannot
• The post-crisis INET conferences drifted toward orthodox star power rather than new economic thinking
• The post-crisis search for prophetic economists diluted prediction into vague prior warnings
• The purported postcrisis consensus was ideologically incoherent and self-contradictory
• The Russian doll structure amplifies individual neoliberal voices across distinct organizations and personas
• The same rhetorical repetition fortified the right while further delegitimating the left
• The Samuelsonian synthesis is intellectually unstable because micro and macro rest on inconsistent assumptions
• The Samuelsonian synthesis subordinates free markets to prior government full-employment policy
• The self-become-brand commodifies even the most intimate bodily details
• The SPICE geoengineering test collapsed over an intellectual-property dispute, not scientific opposition.
• The Squam Lake group’s funding source was never publicly disclosed.
• The state provided a price floor for all damaged financial assets
• The Tea Party fused astroturfing with grassroots entrepreneurship into a self-propagating franchise
• The Tea Party was a product of engineered state-legitimacy crisis, not grassroots spontaneity
• The Tea Party’s apparent spontaneity was manufactured by networked astroturf organizations
• The working poor became the only growth customer segment after incomes hollowed out
• Theorists explain neoliberalism’s cohesion through class interest, phases, or rhetoric.
• There were over 23,000 heterogeneous securities with no reliable price information
• Think tanks attached economists’ names to position papers they did not endorse
• Think tanks deliberately manufacture public doubt about settled science to shape policy
• Three splashy economics revisions diverted attention from structural crisis causes
• Tobacco firms funded quality research to distract from smoking’s causal role
• Top economics journals banned history and philosophy of economics entirely
• Trade agreements now serve as legal shields against domestic financial regulation
• Treasury abandoned market-designed asset auctions for direct capital injections
• Treasury officials engineered auction outcomes to avoid exposing banks as insolvent
• Treasury prioritized political efficacy over economic efficiency in TARP design.
• Treating culture and economics as separate spheres misreads how neoliberalism operates
• Twenty-five mortgage firms controlled 90 percent of the market by 2007
• Two AEI scholars fabricated the claim that GSEs caused the crisis
• Under a dozen prominent economists predicted the 2008 crisis and were ignored
• Universities manage research conflicts as risk exposure, like banks do
• Universities protect academic economists’ ethical autonomy more than they police it
• University commercialization since the 1980s entrenched economics by placing economists atop major universities.
• University restructuring locked in economists’ institutional shelter from accountability
• Within neoliberalism, one’s theory of markets determines one’s definition of freedom