The Neoliberal Transition in Intellectual and Economic History
muse.jhu.edu
muse.jhu.edu
One of my favorite quotes in that regard is from Lee Kuan Yew, a controversial figure who is credited with transforming Singapore into one of the world's most advanced economies in one generation: "We are pragmatists. We don't stick to any ideology. Does it work? Let's try it, and if it does work, fine, let's continue it. If it doesn't work, toss it out, try another one. We are not enamored with any ideology."[a]
[a] Source: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/187723.Lee_Kuan_Yew
In practice even deeply ideological people end up being pragmatic changing course in the face of evidence of things not working or having the intended effects.
I'm not sure how I would approach issues like, "should we have slavery or indentured servitude," "should women be considered full persons legally or considered extensions of their husband," "should we have state sponsored religion or let people worship as they please" in a way that's pragmatic and doesn't ultimately rely on ideology or appeal to god/natural order.
A long list of people, many of whom are way smarter than me, have written about this issue extensively over the centuries. As a starting point from which to branch off, I'd recommend the book "Enlightenment Now" by Steven Pinker.
[a] https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/187723.Lee_Kuan_Yew
> “It was not you who ate the idea, but the idea that ate you
(Dostoyevsky, Pevear and Volokhonsky, 1995)
Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects
https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/internal/media/dispatcher/...
The thing that bothers me most about neoliberalism is that being pervasive means that the whole idea of tuning economic systems for general benefit is largely gone. In that place is a common belief in Late Stage Capitalism as the inevitable death of the larger whole as it is sucked dry by elites. This complicates even the most basic discussion of economic systems and their potential tuning and regulation.
The exact opposite is the case. From the mid 1980s to the recession of 2008 or so (which, much like the 1930s depression, was due to mismanagement by central banks in the U.S. and Europe), the macroeconomy was successfully "tuned" to an impressive degree in many developed and middle-income countries. That was a direct outcome of the "neo-liberal revolution".
"Everyone is equal in the eyes of the law" is an incredibly good and fair default to have, and the societies which throw it out often wind up paying a horrible price for it.
"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"? Absolute banger.
American Liberalism (big L) is a political identity (as opposed to American Conservatism, which is also a political identity) and many policy positions are about signaling membership of an in-group to demonstrate moral puritanism (same goes for Conservatism). It is not governed by an overarching ideology
It’s truly a mystery, I guess we’ll never know.
Nothing more _liberal_ than a decade of military junta, book burning, widespread torture and assassinations by death squads, heh?
"General Joaquin Lagos [es] explained why he didn't return the bodies of the 14 executed prisoners of Antofagasta to their families:
I was ashamed to see them. They were torn into pieces. So I wanted to put them together, at least leave them in a human form. Yes, their eyes were gouged out with knives, their jaws broken, their legs broken ... At the end they gave them the coup de grace. They were merciless. "[...] "The prisoners were killed so that they would die slowly. In other words, sometimes they [...] shot them [in] parts: first, the legs, then the sexual organs, then the heart. In that order the machine guns were fired"
"many of the victims had voluntarily turned themselves in to the military authorities, were all in secured military custody and posed no immediate threat because they had no history of violence, nor were threatening to commit any such violence."
love when people act like the Soviets weren't financing and supporting South American leaders in the exact same way as the US. They were as "popularly elected" as Kim Jong Un and Putin. It was a proxy war in the same way the Middle East is/was, global powers each picking a side to achieve their goals.
the only logical thing is to feel bad for the citizens who get caught in the crossfire
You don't get to cry "fraud" just because you don't like the result. And while the Soviet Union liked Allende, realistically their reach was much weaker than the US'. South America is/was "the backyard" of the US, and their reach here has always been the strongest.
Allende won the elections fair and square. We now know, due to declassified documents, how hard the US illegally meddled with its government, and how it helped a bloodthirsty military coup against it. A blot in the history of the US, one that shows how false it is to claim the country is a beacon of light, freedom and democracy.
And the US did not overthrow Allende. To allege so is to deprive Chileans of any kind of political agency
If the choice were between pinochet and a liberal democratic government, then the liberal democratic government is the obvious choice. But the choice was between a military Junta and Communism; you've got two bad choices, but one of them has a free market and economic stability. The utilitarian decision is to pick pinochet.
If you have to choose between Naziism and Communism, you've got two equally bad, genocidal choices. In such a case, you shouldn't side with either group as it makes no difference which one you pick.
Democracy is a useful tool for building consensus, it is not the end goal of politics. Marxism is a catastrophic political cult which has never resulted in anything other than the deaths of millions, either through deliberate genocide or incompetent adherence to its pseudoscientific economic divinations. It should be removed from government through any means necessary. If a Nazi was elected president and vowed to use his political authority to achieve his goals, the military would be justified in overthrowing him and violently suppressing his supporters
Consensus can be achieved through other means. All forms of government rule by a monopoly on the use of violence, including democratic ones.
Your whole analogy is moot: if a Nazi achieves power via democratic means, and stays there via democratic means, he wouldn't be a Nazi: Nazism is the rule of antidemocratic Might Makes Right; he wouldn't remain democratic if things didn't go his way. Which paradoxically, is precisely what you seem to be advocating: that it's ok to abandon democracy when it doesn't go your way.
I appreciate your honesty and candor: you dislike democracy, and your worldview is despicable and vile. Still, your honesty is something!
The same is true of communism, which advocates for the violent murder of land and property owners and the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat. I have little faith there would have been another election after Allende; Marxism is an inherently violent political cult which sees its enemies as subhuman. Sound familiar?
> you dislike democracy, and your worldview is despicable and vile. Still, your honesty is something!
Try to attack ideas instead of people. The way you argue is unconstructive. I like democracy, but it's imperfect.
> your worldview is despicable and vile
You defend the presidency of a Marxist; I can say the exact same thing about you. Would you likewise defend a Fascist who was elected and vowed to abolish democracy?
I think the disconnect between you and me is that I see no substantive difference between Communism and Naziism, while you seem to think that Communism is capable of a soft side, which it objectively is not
You are arguing in favor of the overthrow of democracy because you don't like the party in power. What's worse, in your attack of Communism you decided to defend a bloodthirsty, murderous dictatorship that tortured thousands of people (some were mutilated so horribly, even the military that captured them are on record as horrified. Read the accounts).
So I thought long and hard about how to reply to you, and my argument boils down to this:
Fuck you.
I want nothing more to do with you. Don't bother replying, I think you're vile.
If you had to power to prevent a man who espouses a genocidal political ideology from seizing absolute power, would you not do so?
Of course we now know Hitler ended up with a dictatorship, but at the time he was playing by the rules. If you are going to argue scifi time-travel scenarios, I'm not interested and you can shove them up your ass where they belong.
This is getting really silly. Either you respect democracy or you don't.
You don't, period. Your worldview is vile and I want nothing to do with you.
Indeed, he got into power by democratic vote. After that he bullied his way in dictatorship. But the first step was getting elected into the Bundestag.
>> Really, this is getting silly: it's ok to overthrow dictatorships, it's not ok to overthrow democracies you don't like as long as they remain democratic. You have to wait your turn.
If somebody promises to overturn a democracy the moment he is elected. We should wait for him to do this and only then start with the resistance?
Stick a Christmas tree up your ass.
I looked at your post history and saw your discussions with other people, and it seems this is your modus operandi: spout bullshit and then dodge direct questions. You did this here: you basically avoided all direct statements and instead went on fantasy tangents.
Fuck off.
And even if it wasn't, it's still on the level of "at least the fascists got the trains running on time".
Since, like the trains cliche, it's not even true, it's just cheerleading for pointless death and torture.
No. Pinochet "fixed" nothing, his government was one of cronyism and his "miracle" deepened injustice and inequality in Chile.
> And the US did not overthrow Allende. To allege so is to deprive Chileans of any kind of political agency
The US absolutely abetted and prepared the coup, as part of Cold War thinking. This has been declassified and is well known.
I guess you want to live in a post-truth world. It's unfortunate that reality doesn't agree with what your spouting.
We know it as a fact because the whole CIA archives have been declassified.
You are a revisionist on the same scale as holocaust deniers.
Nixon's presidency pre-dates neoliberalism. As does American animosity to Marxism.
Arguably, Nixon was the final New Deal president, bringing us the Clean Air Act and attempting to give all Americans socialized medicine. His rise to power was really through his involvement with HUAC (the House Unamerican Activities Committee, seeking to rid the US of communists) as a Congressman.
> The term "neoliberalism" has been understood in a variety of ways: as a package of policy prescriptions; a design philosophy for state-market relations; the spirit of leading institutions of global economic governance; a form of politics focused on private property ownership and consumption as civic participation; a form [End Page 559] of political and social subjectivity; and a distinct epoch in the history of modern capitalism beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
But it also talks about how we are in “a world dominated by neoliberalism”.
Talking about omnipresent and powerful, yet nebulous and vague forces… to me it sounds more theological than economic
The Price of Peace by Zachary D. Carter is a recent biography on John Maynard Keynes that is also a fascinating look at the history and transformations of economic thought after Keynes. I highly recommend it.
Luckily we have HN crypto-bros telling those academics they did't get their terminology right.
It's a mess, and always has been. I'm having a hard time taking any of this seriously anymore for a while now.
Edit/p.s.
I suppose we can conclude that what defines "neoliberalism" is that it is not well liked by those who like to use the term, everything else about it seems to be in perpetual flux.
it's not some meme term invented last year on tiktok that we're fine to be ignorant about.
The situation might be better if the socialist propagandists had been as keen on explaining the concept as they have clearly been on maligning the term. Which is kind of informative in itself, as it was meant to be a compromise solution between laissez faire and socialism, which led to some more principled classical liberals to distance themselves from the idea.
It's also kinda ironic to call out references to terminology while using "crypto-bro" in such a meaningless way.
On a macro-economic level liberalism is flawed in so many aspects, it is astonishing that shit hasn't hit the fan way earlier in countries like Germany (where I live)
You need some other entity which can operate at a loss (by design) to provide these services. And that means taxes are needed.
A private for profit organizatin would traditionally try to keep costs down, operate services only on attractive routes (population center to population center) and try to turn a profit by charging for the tickets and potentially some travel amenities. Every overall benefit the rail company creates, whether that be employment, reduced car travel, increases in property prices in well-connected areas, don't benefit the company.
The government on the other hand can consider profit differently. The governments goals may be increasing increasing employment, reducing safety risks, and developing a given structurally weak region. Since the "profit" the operating government expects differs from that one of a private entity, the rail lines a government can operate while still "profiting" (in terms of developing towards their goals) are vastly different. But it doesn't have to be a loss strictly speaking
I firmly believe that a well ran and reasonably strong government, government market participation (i.e. in terms of providing infrastructure) and market intervention (i.e. antitrust legislation and intervention) leads to a net benefit for the vast majority of people in a given economy.
Also, especially in terms of something as fundamental fiscal & monetary policy many neoliberal discussions, for example those focussing around government debt, are demonstrably false.
For economies that enjoy a large degree of autonomy, schools of thought like the modern monetary theory serve as much better frameworks to explain macroeconomics and are substantially more suitable to build a progressive economy.
Nobody, including MMT, claims you shouldn't keep the national debt levels under control. But the reasons why you do it, to which extent you do it, and by which means you achieve that are vastly different.
Take taxation as an example. Simplified, Neoliberal = taxes bad. MMT considers taxation to be an instrument to control demand and inflation (by proxy).
Not so: the two points of view boil down to the exact same thing logically, even though MMT proponents sometimes fail to highlight this. Again, see FTPL which precisely explains the logical consequences of what you referenced above ("taxation [as] an instrument to control demand and inflation") without abandoning the neo-liberal framework.
Simplified, the fiscal stance (taxation + government spending) is indeed one factor in demand and inflation but the central bank "moves last" in that game, so we are free to let other considerations determine the best mix of taxation and spending. It's only when monetary intervention is ineffective that less conventional policies may be needed, for some reason or other. (Deep deflation, or hyperinflation would be examples of this.)
I mean oversimplifying is something we can do confidently after a set of ideas has lived up to the standards we expect from a macroeconomic framework.
One big problem with MMT is that it’s been basically whatever Stephanie Kelton et al. says it is each time they hop on a podcast and argue for some policy positions.
For a while it was hey spending more won’t cause inflation.
It sounds like you’re saying now it’s hey taxation is how we control inflation?
So with MMT it’s historically been difficult to make definite statements about anything and seems more a tool to argue for policy.
Among other things. A (if not the) fundamental idea of MMT is that for a government that issues its own currency, money is *not* a limited resource. The wealth the private sector accumulates is what the government (or rather, its central bank) issued in the first place. Taxes are not there to finance the government and its spending, they're there to establish the government issued currency as a valid form of payment.
This is a stark contrast to today, where "the taxpayer pays for the government".
Pretty much everything else builds upon this fundamental idea.
> For a while it was hey spending more won’t cause inflation.
This isn't universally true or false, it's also very much compatible with the idea of MMT.
Fundamentally, as introduced, money is considered to not be a limited resource. The restrictions placed on how much debt a government can take on etc. are arbitrary and of political nature.
There are, however, very real restrictions that aren't artificial in nature. Human labor as well as the availability of natural resources are the two example that would effectively constrain everything.
Regardless of how much money you throw at a given industry, when they cannot fulfil the demand because they don't have the human labor to produce the stuff in demand, prices will go up (=inflation). The same principle applies for natural resources, but in two ways. For one, if your production capacity has reached its natural limited (i.e. there is no more stuff), prices would go up if you continue throwing money at the problem. You're also constrained if you'd have to import resources. The Eurozone can create euros, but if you have to pay for Oil in USD they won't matter much.
That is also where the restrictions for MMT in terms of applicability come from. The state needs a large degree of monetary autonomy and the currency is not bound to a physical object (gold standard, etc). Also, as already implied, if you'd have to take on debt in a currency that you do not issue yourself, MMT won't really be applicable either.
"Neoliberalism" embodies an academic mindset, where a group of academics imagines an opposing group of academics, which has opposing views but is otherwise structured the same, around ideas, books, conferences and so forth, but ignores the ordinary voter as an explanation for "neoliberal" policies.
You do know that FDR's preferred economic system was overtly inspired by European fascism, right? You're literally saying that a fascist, authoritarian state and a wartime economy are the best we could possibly do. Excuse me but I'm a bit skeptical.