I thank Cornel Ban for his generous and thoughtful review of The Currency of Confidence. Time is the most valuable currency that scholars possess, and I am grateful for his willingness to spend some of his time on my book.

Both of the primary criticisms offered by Ban relate to the concept of “neoliberalism.” My conceptualization of “neoliberal” economic beliefs rests on four pillars, which, as he notes, should “sound familiar to every political economist schooled in the IPE canon.” But in Ban’s view, this conceptualization is problematic because it is at once too restrictive to be able to accommodate the offshoots that we might want to call “neoliberal” but which would dispute one or more of the elements in my conceptualization (e.g., economists from the Austrian school who disliked the formalization of orthodox economic theories)—and it is insufficiently restrictive to be able to exclude “neo-Keynesians” who are not neoliberals but might share an affinity with one or more of the pillars. The solution to these conceptual deficiencies is to take a deeper dive into the history of economic ideas.

Far be it for me to disagree with the notion that we would all benefit from reading in the history of economic thought! But we need to be very clear about the purposes that these efforts to further refine our conceptualization of neoliberal will serve. If the purpose is making an ever-more-refined taxonomy of the different branches growing out of the tree trunk of neoliberalism so that we can more accurately sort economic officials into different categories, then this is crucial. If, however, we have a different purpose in mind—for example, trying to develop a measure of ideational orientation for lots of policy teams in lots of countries over lots of years—then working to come up with the “right” definition of neoliberal might not be the best step.

With a concept like “neoliberal,” there is bound to be some fuzziness; as Nancy Cartwright and Rosa Runhardt (“Measurement,” in Nancy Cartwright and Eleanora Montuschi, eds., Philosophy of Social Science, 2014) point out, socially constructed concepts do not have definite boundaries. But if we are interested in measurement, we need procedures that can capture the “family resemblance” between the units we want to categorize for the purposes of testing an argument. I develop criteria and a procedure to assign policymakers to categories (neoliberal or not) so that I can explain variation in IMF program design and enforcement.

Ban praises the “very compelling” multimethod evidence in the book but then suggests that different procedures might have changed the results. (It is hard to tell whether he thinks these other criteria would sharpen the findings or overturn them.) Changing the criteria to restrict the boundaries around the neoliberal measurement creates more problems than it solves, though. Take the periodization issue. Ban suggests that it is only in the late-1970s that “neo-Keynesian” beliefs were pushed out of the “incubators” for neoliberal beliefs. But from the 1950s onward, the design of the Fund’s lending programs was based on the “financial programming” model, which was built on classical Humean—not Keynesian—foundations. (In fact, Robert Mundell took to calling it the “Hume-Polak” model after the IMF economist who originated the Fund’s monetary model.)

Likewise, Ban suggests that neo-Keynesian beliefs (the content of which is not defined in the review or in Ruling Ideas) dominated elite American economics departments “well into the late 1970s” (except, that is, for some departments like Chicago and Carnegie Mellon). These kinds of caveats make systematic measurement difficult. When can the neoliberal takeover of mainstream economics be identified? How can you account for the unevenness of the takeover? And why does Ban hone in on the neo-Keynesian consensus here but suggest in Ruling Ideas that the “neoclassical-Keynesian synthesis” was in fact the “dominant postwar school of thought in the Euro-Atlantic area,” and that this synthesis rested on “neoclassical bedrock” (p. 21)?

Ban ends his review on the question of progress, and I will end my reply on the same note. Is progress when we have reached complete agreement in answer to the question “Are policymakers X, Y, and Z neoliberals?” I doubt it. There is no transcendentally right or wrong characterization of a social construct like “neoliberal.” In the pragmatist vein, I think progress is likelier to be marked by the number of important research puzzles that we have come closer to solving using measures of the concept that are well suited for different purposes.