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Comment by tormeh | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the parent said it was. This is clearly closer to mercantilism, given the degree of government involvement.

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They've claimed this is the result of or at the behest of 'ultra capitalism'. I don't even mind hyperbole--call it fascism if you want--but at least use the dimensionally-correct terms. This is like when people call everything 'neoliberal'.

Isn't neoliberal just Friedman and the Chicago boyz' liberalism? So policies enacted by Reagan, Pinochet and Thatchers?

Sort of and to varying degrees. Neoliberal is a funny one because it's used as a thoughtless pejorative by both the left and right.

I've heard people say housing policy has failed because it's too neoliberal meaning too free market, and then other people say it's failed because it's too neoliberal i.e. too much government intervention.

Neoliberalism is basically just markets-by-default and evidence-based alternatives when they fail.

> Neoliberalism is basically just markets-by-default and evidence-based alternatives when they fail.

That's not though. I think the name is from the 'New classical school', oppose Keynesian economics. I think the meaning drifted to mean supply-side economics (direct inheritor from the Chicago school and the new classical school).

Neoliberalism can't be 'evidence-based' when it rejects basic observation (like those from MMT. You can reject MMT 'solutions', that's fine, I do too. Don't reject evidence though).

Let's be honest, even being an MM theorist is a form of self selection that enables another kind of discussion. Neoliberal disagreement with MMT is categorically different from e.g. its disagreements with neocons or socdems in general. The latter are often just moral beliefs or running with first principles in a way that niche economic frameworks are not.

I think your criticism of it as not being 'evidence based' because it 'rejects basic observation' is emotive but fundamentally it's still a technical criticism, not a moral one. Neocon criticisms of neoliberalism (even if they misidentify what that means) revolve around the decay of traditional values, for example. Socdems around inequality (which to them is ipso facto bad).

I think i disagree? Socdems are mostly weird keynesians, and think of the economy from the demand side. For them, inequality is fundamentally bad because it reduce aggregate demand. You know the legend about Ford paying its employee more so they could afford cars (it was not, competent auto/metallurgy workers were rare and took time to train, he paid them more because he had to to keep them working for him)? That's basically a socdem wet dream (that's why some socdems accepted trickle-down economics like neolibs (i.e without any shred of evidence), because it conform with the theory).

But that's true that a lot of socdems don't really understand economic theory and so some criticism seems empty, because they repeat a criticism they did not understood. And that's ok, because macroeconomics is the less scientific of all social science field (for good reason), and who would want to bother with it (unless you're an idiot who took that in college because it seemed to pair well with math :/)

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