Patrick Collison AMA on r/neoliberal
reddit.com
reddit.com
Defending credit card fees by criticizing net-neutrality. I guess at least he’s being interviewed in the right subreddit...
This is a bit disingenuous. He makes it sound like these fees are the primary income for card companies, but that's not the case. Interchange and merchant fees represent a minority of revenue for card companies[1] - about 26%. The bulk of actual revenue comes from cash advances, fees charged to the customer (both annual and penalty fees), interest on balances, and ancillary products like insurance.
Here's the rub: if the US regulated credit card fees like they do debit cards (via the Durbin amendment) Visa would still be profitable - they happily operate and makes money in countries where credit card fees are capped by law, like Australia. They wouldn't be as profitable, sure. Neither would Stripe.
[1]: https://www.fool.com/credit-cards/2017/04/13/this-is-how-cre...
It shouldn't even affect Stripe all that much. The CC fees are just a pass-through expense for them; their product is the infrastructure value-add, which AFAIK nobody is suggesting needs to be price-regulated.
One of the reasons the Federal Reserve was created was to eliminate rent-seeking by banks in check clearing. (The previous system was that banks would clear checks directly among each other, leading to abuses where banks would charge exorbitant fees to other banks.) I'd argue credit/debit cards are just as important today as checks were in 1913. A functioning economy requires a functioning payment system.
https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/friedman_images/Collection...
https://olivermhartwich.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/neoliber...
I guess with the aim of describing why they chose to use the word.
https://medium.com/@s8mb/im-a-neoliberal-maybe-you-are-too-b...
Basically used here to describe a politics which is fond of market-based policies but supportive of redistribution when it is necessary for positive outcomes.
I think that the existence of the AMA itself proves that at least in some circles you can.
This means that they must believe it has become defendable.
I was thinking of financial elites btw.
Take a look at this for example: https://twitter.com/r_neoliberal/status/974992740982370305?s...
Chief Neoliberal Shill is clearly a joke, but these people do believe in the positive consequences of what they're doing.
One interesting consequence of the Internet is that we're becoming very aware that for every label you could ascribe to yourself, there is some group out there who holds a deep, visceral hate for that label, so deep that they wish you would just cease to exist. I guess this was probably the case beforehand, but without instantaneous global communication, you generally weren't aware of the people who hated you. I remember that when I was growing up, terms like "American", "patriotic", "tolerant", and "generous" were unambiguously good, but now for each of those there is some group who considers them a dog-whistle for people they despise.
The term itself was hardly known/in use to the general public before the crash 2008 and occupy. Since then it was only known as basically a different word for greed.
As another commenter (who obviously decided to delete his comment) wrote here, I also doubt that a re-branding will ever be successful. It's not like coming up with a new term in economy is something hard to do.
Also, the term is still not known/in use to the general public. The set of people who are politically active via Occupy, Tea Party, Trumpism, #Indivisible, etc. is a small subset of all people, and relatively disjoint from the set of people with successful Internet-based businesses.
> They may not themselves want to adopt the label (particularly in front of their own customers, who bring their own baggage associated with it), but they'll be sympathetic to the ideas.
So you agree that there was no rehabilitation then?
I still don't understand why you wouldn't just come up with a new term. Is this bad marketing knowledge or intentional?
I don't think it's a thing in the US.
Good we have the Öffentlich Rechtlicher Rundfunk I guess ;)
It's a really common mistake to assume that the people you hang around with are representative of all people. The U.S. (let alone the world) is a really big place, and we don't all read the same media anymore.
However,
> They may not themselves want to adopt the label (particularly in front of their own customers, who bring their own baggage associated with it), but they'll be sympathetic to the ideas.
still stands here. Just from a quick lookup on wikipedia, you got to this statement. So if this is even obvious to you, we don't really have to talk about any kind of rehabilitation. The real issue would be some terribly bad informed people.
I'm reminded of something that I think I read here on Hacker News: if you want to see how you're being manipulated, read another country's newspapers. Not because they tell the truth, but because the propaganda in them is directed at the country's own inhabitants, and so it'll have no emotional importance for you. I look at the term "neoliberal" and view it neutrally, because the propaganda around it never really caught on in the U.S. out of certain very niche circles.
There are undoubtedly similar terms & issues in the U.S. where we get very much up in arms but an outsider would be "what's the big deal?" You could probably tell me what they are a lot better than I could (assuming you read U.S. news media), but I'd bet that things like "single payer", "gun control", and "social democracy" make the list, where half the U.S. population considers them a dirty word while most of the rest of the developed world is like "Duh, these are obviously good ideas. Why do you kill your own citizens?"
> things like "single payer", "gun control", and "social democracy"
You may be aware that many over here are interested in US politics and culture. It's a historical thing but it's also quite entertaining. I can say that I'm more interested and know more about what's going on in the US then in France or the Netherlands. At least most of the time. We are aware that those three things are being perceived differently by pretty much half of your population. This is nothing abstract here.
Clinton (Bill) was a Third Way neoliberal who basically believed what you and that blog post are saying. Clinton (Hillary) saw those policies defeated 2 years ago.
[S]omething different and distinct from liberal capitalism with its unswerving belief in the merits of the free market and democratic socialism with its demand management and obsession with the state. The Third Way is in favour of growth, entrepreneurship, enterprise and wealth creation but it is also in favour of greater social justice and it sees the state playing a major role in bringing this about. So in the words of... Anthony Giddens of the LSE the Third Way rejects top down socialism as it rejects traditional neo liberalism. — Report from the BBC, 1999,
It seems they are discovering a 30 year old term and blogging about it. What's been rehabilitated?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way
It's probably different in degrees, but let's be realistic, nothing has been rehabilitated nor is anything new being said.
Have you heard of the Adam Smith Institute?
It is a neoliberal think-tank and over the years many of its policies have been adopted by the UK.
That blog post was written by the executive director.
> The inability to come up with a new interesting term (or acknowledge the history behind the existing term) doesn't portend great things.
Quoting your previous deleted post here.
Are you aware that the meanings they're assigning to the term, are actually in line with what was meant when it was first used at the Walter Lippmann Colloquium in 1938?
You claimed that that blog post "rehabilitates" the term. I'm saying that the general beliefs that the author describes are well-trod ground within neoliberalism. He's describing himself as a third way neoliberal with slightly more libertarian tendencies.
Have you heard of the Adam Smith Institute?
It is a neoliberal think-tank and over the years many of its policies have been adopted by the UK.
That blog post was written by the executive director.
It'd be more impressive without the credentials because it reads like a random blogger.
Are you aware that the meanings they're assigning to the term, is actually in line with what was meant when it was first used at the Walter Lippmann Colloquium in 1938?
His blog post mentioned rejecting dogmatism. Calling back to 1938 as the "real definition" is very dogmatic. Since then the 1980s through 2016 have happened in the US, all associated with neoliberalism.
Just saying, like the other post, that a blog post and a Reddit post with 120 upvotes hardly change the general meaning of a term.
That post rehabilitated neoliberalism. There is now a community of people that use the term this way. Many have tens of thousands of followers on Twitter. Memes are created by its fans. CEOs of huge startups drop-in to do AMAs, etc.
To say that there has been no change in how the term is used or perceived over the last few years is utterly ridiculous.
In other words, an argument from authority.
To say that there has been no change in how the term is used or perceived over the last few year is utterly ridiculous.
You may be in an echo chamber because in politics and academics this rehabilitation is not known about.
Can't disagree with you that there may be a change in how it's been viewed, but to state that the "post rehabilitated neoliberalism" is equally if not more utterly ridiculous. Not to one up you, but please realize that. You're talking a Medium blog post vs how hundreds of millions of people view the term (whether they know what it is or not).
If you are powerful and interconnected with government then the way that you use political terms has a large impact on their meaning.
One of the most powerful think-tanks in the world uses the term this way. That has a real world impact.
Given this, your insistence that "in politics and academics this rehabilitation is not known about" is absurd.
You are right that millions of people probably have no idea or still have a negative opinion of globalisation, etc, however I do not think that this is mutually exclusive with it being rehabilitated in some circles and notably so.
Whether it is an attempt to "reclaim" the word or not, that subreddit's usage of "neoliberal" bears little relation it's usage as defined in books such as David Harvey's 'A Brief History of Neoliberalism', where it is most commonly associated with privatization, financialisation, tax cuts, the retrenchment of social welfare and rapid growth in inequality.
Critically, the neoliberal state is not 'smaller', it just prefers deficit spending to tax and prefers to funnel money to private enterprises and the military-industrial complex rather than spend it on it's citizens.
In contrast, /r/neoliberal seems to use the word to mean some sort of libertarianism-lite?
> privatization, financialisation, tax cuts, the retrenchment of social welfare
Also, neoliberalism is much more crafty with propaganda, by necessity. Neoliberals use advertising and public relations to mask their alleged conflicting agendas.
For example, Trump is a neoliberal in libertarian clothing, while Clinton is a neoliberal in democrat clothing. They are both neoliberals. If they weren't, they would lack the cooperation from private interests needed to run.
Libertarians lack cooperation from the private sector because their public image is not "supportive, caring",
Democrats lack cooperation from the private sector because their actual political interests (like defending the working class) are in conflict with it.
So, neoliberalism makes the choice easy by combining the best of both worlds: dystopic support for corporate takeover AND the public image of loving kindness.
Which is exactly true of libertarianism, which sees the only role of government as protecting it's model of property rights, which are precisely private interests.
> For example, Trump is a neoliberal in libertarian clothing,
Trump is neither a neoliberal norte does he dress in libertarian clothing. He's more a kleptocrat in authoritarian populist clothing, which is about as far from a neoliberal in libertarian clothing as you can get.
> while Clinton is a neoliberal in democrat clothing.
Neoliberalism is overtly the dominant ideology of the Democratic Party; Hillary Clinton is (and has for a long time been) a neoliberal in neoliberal clothing; though in the 2016 campaign she did try to preempt Sanders by adopting some progressive populist accessories.
Sanders ran as a populist/egalitarian candidate. I feel that neoliberalism will die, in fact the fact that Trump won, is the nail in the coffin, I lean towards Sanders philosophy more, personally, -- but with technological unemployment going to rise to more than 40% of existing jobs being gone by 2030, and income inequality only going to rise even more, there will eventually be a revolution of sorts.
If not a bloody one, then one of ideals, you can see it already in red states turning blue, or more people running for elections than normally would. In Utah for example more people are running as democrats than ever have before during an election cycle. Chances of winning are slim, for sure -- but more people are getting involved because they're starting to realize it's the only way to make a difference. Scientists are even jumping in, because for some reason the 'right' seems to hate science and education.
Perhaps self-identification is the next logical step for Democrats? Instead of rigging the primary against a likable progressive candidate like Bernie and causing internal backlash and resentment, maybe they can get Democrat voters to support and embrace a named neoliberal doctrine. Maybe they too can get people to passionately vote against their own self-interests just like the Republican voting base.
Decoding neoliberalism in the wild often requires a cultural critique because of the complacency associated. A politician might wager cultural symbolism to corral voters but have an entirely neoliberal agenda. Republicans have actually been keen on this longer than democrats but democrats have a higher ceiling because they are unbeholden to the limits of performing symbols of commitment to tradition now that their voter base thinks of itself as “progressive” which is an advertising notion, not an actual value. So neoliberalism values “progressivism” on the surface and self-interests below the surface.
Donald Trump is very much a neoliberal in the classic republican sense, but he realized the needle oF decadence has shifted away from tradition toward hedonism. Most of the tea party movement was led by neoliberals, too.
Contemporary libertarianism is literally hardcore neoliberalism, whereby the surface-level “progressivism” is peeled back, revealing ultimate individualism.
When we understand neoliberalism, we come to understand Trump and Clinton are mere equals on this spectrum.
Probably because you are too young to remember the “neoliberal consensus” before the hard-right turn of the Republican Party; it wasn't universally an insult then (though it was from the progressive left), and it was specifically bipartisan.
But, sure, now in the US it mostly refers to the center-right faction of the Democratic Party.
This doesn't fit neatly under any other label as far as I can tell, least of all "neoliberal." It's most closely aligned with centre-left policy, though from a very different value system (more utilitarian than about uniting the working class against their evil overlords).
This limited interventionism with a market core (both the general orientation and the specific degree of intervention preferred) is pretty much dead-on Clintonian Third Wayism, which is the most significant manifestation of the Democratic side of the late 20th Century “neoliberal consensus”, which in turn is essentially the defining instance of “neoliberalism” in its modern US political usage.
In modern US political usage (I'm not really concerned about Wikipedia) it refers to all of those (and not just those individual figures, but to large swathes of both major parties in the US, particularly in 1980s and 1990s—and similarly often both ruling and major opposition parties in much of the West); there is a reason that there was much talk of a neoliberal consensus in that time period, and to a lesser extent since.
(Providing the much needed context, "who is Patrick Collison?")