They are in thrall not to John Maynard Keynes, sage of the Depression, but to his Cambridge contemporary, Frank Ramsey, a precocious polymath who made his contributions in the prelapsarian 1920s.
Balls to the stars, and thralls to fortune's reign; Turn'd from themselves, infected with their cage, Where death is fear'd, and life is held with pain.
As the 1980s dawned, not just the general public but scientists too were in thrall to the then dominant idea in both cinema and literature that life abounded beyond our planet.
One recent paper suggests that, having previously been controlled in large part by the winds, the sea ice is now coming under the thrall of steadily warming waters below the surface.