Many economists realise that -I was at a conference at LSE and asked a few questions to the speaker on this line, and the answer was that people in power will probably not change the way they view the world, but he was hoping that his work would have some influence over next generations of decision-makers.

Evidently the recent crisis and the inability to prevent the ongoing depression are the result of the absolute dominance of the neoliberal ideology and the absence of a credible alternative in the conventional wisdom which is all that can be expected of policymakers. Anyone formally trained (a one-semester course is sufficient, usually worse than a whole degree) in economics after ca. 1980 is suspect, unfortunately. So this speaker is right. The best that can be expected is that the next generation of political leaders entertains at least some doubts about the reigning economic paradigm, and that the next major crisis will find the collective consciousness equipped with analternative paradigm ready to take over when the dominant one is again shown to be inadequate.

Give it 30 years (*). 15 if we're lucky. Of 5 if there is another major crisis (though at the rate things are going a "major crisis" before 1920 might turn into a serious shooting war).

(*) We have had epochal crises after 1873, 1929, 1971, and 2007. Hence we may need to wait at least until the 2030s.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman