The most salient reason neoclassical economics became dominant in policy circles is that it was allied with a general revanchist business interest squeezed by late-60s/early 70s crisis. But we should not forget that it also presented the policymakers dealing that crisis something that more heterodox approaches did not: parsimony.

neo-liberalism succeeded not, or at least not simply, because of Milton Friedman, the Mont Pelerin Society and the rest of it. It came to dominate because it was the only plausible language that people could minimally agree on, at a moment when enormously consequential new policies needed to be enacted.