Alongside politicians, bankers, and CEOs, few groups have received as much opprobrium for the 2008 financial crisis as economists." Economists are the forgotten guilty men" was the phrase employed in February 2009 by Anatole Kaletsky, editorat-large for the London Times, when explaining why" a bank with just $1 billion of capital [would] borrow an extra $99 billion and then buy $100 billion of speculative investments." 1 Selfindulgence and imprudence had a part, but so too, Kaletsky asserted, did those economists who insisted that their models" proved" that occurrences such as Long Term Capital Management's demise in 1998 or Lehman Brothers's collapse almost exactly ten years later were mathematically likely to happen only once every billion years. 2 Kaletsky's wider claim was that mainstream economics had been so discredited by the financial crisis that economics itself required an" intellectual revolution" or risked being reduced to a somewhat suspect sub-branch of mathematical modeling and statistical analysis. Kaletsky has not been alone in making such arguments. Economic historian Harold James made a similar point, albeit more temperately:[Aln overwhelming majority of modem economists were misled by treating short-term trends as if they were permanent phenomena that could be used to derive reliable behavioral correlations and extrapolations. There were some exceptions... but such analysts were dismissed as alarmist or