It was precisely this sort of dogmatism that made neoliberalism itself so much more dangerous than the previous generation of ideas. Too many nations were to witness this at first hand in the 1980s. First via the rather callous settlement to the 1980s debt crisis that neoliberals called for (there could be no mitigating factors for third world debt, they claimed: even debt accrued illegitimately by former leaders for personal gain was to be paid back, plus the interest), then at the hands of the IMF's so-called structural adjustment policies (which frequently used poor countries' existing debt as a lever for drawing yet more market-friendly reforms out of them).