Neoliberalism: A Quick Follow-up

The referee needs to stop the fight.

The problem for me is making the connections between Hayek, Friedman and Mont Pelerin on the one hand and eventually Clinton, Krugman, and Obama on the other hand while keeping neoliberalism as a specific historic political program with certain covert consequences (for instance hierarchical as you have discussed in some posts). Yes indeed, if you say Hayek = Obama same thing, you will get pushback from the centrists and moderates.

So I have to abstract from the history and programs and describe neoliberalism as something like “the ideology of the use of political power for individualistic purposes” thus including bank bailouts, title nine, the ACA. And of course looking globally at for example the nearly simultaneous repression of labour power on four continents I can only see neoliberalism as the emergent political economy of late capitalism.

” . . . that Founding Fathers fanboy who’ll periodically pop up in a discussion thread claiming that the United States is a republic, not a democracy.”

LMAO. Heard Chuck Todd on MSNBC the other day actually say something like: “I sometimes like to remind people [when they complain about the arbitrary absurdities of the U.S. electoral system] that the United States is a republic, not a democracy.”

So, not just Founding Fathers fanboys, but puffed-up, self-important political pundits as well.

Why do some, presumably intelligent (benefit of the doubt and all), people have so much trouble wrapping their heads around the concept of a “democratic* republic”?

*For a range of values of “democratic”, obviously.

Surely the fact that various political pundits and politicians and even (gasp!) economists used the same term as a way of saying “liberalism has gone astray” means that they all mean the same thing and propose the same program of reform is a rather bold leap. Even in academia, the same word can be construed to mean different things; in political discourse, not so much.

Hi Corey. Thanks for this, your follow-up is much appreciated and for me much sharper than the original, especially with your update.

You and others here err egregiously only in your assumptions that Chait and other champions of new liberalism give a shit about historical and intellectual accuracy. The entire “new liberal” edifice as it is structured both in the US and in other western democracies is nothing more than a rationale for grasping self-interest. It’s a two-fer for the upwardly mobile class exemplified by Elizabeth Warren, Bill, HRC, and the Obamas. Ivy League connections provide social cache (of a sort) and entry into the world of real money. Warren flipped houses for fun and profit during the great real estate scam we’re all paying for now, while building her cred as a native American legal eagle champion of the poor (true!). Why shouldn’t she get in on the fun? Michelle convinced Barry to cozy closer to Tony to get that amazing Hyde Park property while Tony’s tenants froze with no heat in Chicago.

“Nobody told me!” Is the constant mantra of the new liberal and the concerned conservative (essentially the same person), so the NYT can write op-eds about the
‘unseen poor’ well into the Obama years and Brooks can now discover that ‘hey’ life outside the semi-elite enclaves where six-figure earners gather to lament the rising costs of private schools and ‘good help’ isn’t really all that great after 8 years of new liberal rule.

New liberalism justifies class social climbing at the expense, primarily, of the richest who are expected to provide the cash to keep the lower orders content in public housing, etc, whilst new liberals race to distance themselves from the folks they profess to love, in order to become in every material sense as close to those they profess to hate.

In short, they suck.

The consequences of new liberal bullshit are manifesting themselves now even as Chait whines. http://www.salon.com/2016/04/29/a_liberal_case_for_donald_trump_the_lesser_of_two_evils_is_not_at_all_clear_in_2016/

The core assumption of modern New liberalism is that the greatly increasing number of people lower down on the food chain must learn to content themselves with less and less in a world where globalization and outsourcing are irreversible, and where their concerns and fears are increasingly viewed as meaningless and inconsequential.

For some reason, however, the poor are listening to David Brooks and Jon Chait. In fact, those in fly-over country are every bit as incensed at the hubris, frankly, of CT-type lefties, obscenely rich we know best GOP elites, and other sneerers, as Sander’s supporters. Because, I suspect, so many CT readers and commenters are far closer to Chait in their practices than they’d comfortably acknowledge (Bruce Wilder being a notable exception). Many of the geriatric self-satisfied here are blissfully unaware of just how bad things are for young people. The result is the Salon piece linked, and others, that question whether Trump may well be the better candidate.

This is Salon we’re talking about for fuck’s sake. Not the NRO. The NRO remains vehemently opposed to the Trump candidacy. Even as the tectonic plates shift (or appear to shift) people here are lost in discussions about definitions of neo-liberalism, and yet seemingly ignore how forcefully American voters are rejecting new liberal practices by Democrats many here profess to reject, but will support in the voting booth in November.

It’s a free country (at present). But if any think voters watching protesters force Trump to crawl under fences, smash police cars, and silence free speech on campus are winning over the majority of voters, many of whom have not had a pay raise in 18 years, I’d suggest that assumption needs a re-think. There is no room for nationalism and patriotism in the ethos and world-view of the moral minority. Both are anathemas to some.

That’s not the case, however, for people losing their jobs across America to outsourcing and legal immigrants entering America on visas allowing companies to profit while American workers suffer. The NYT, HRC, new liberals in general, and the GOP have demonstrated repeatedly they couldn’t give a rat’s ass how many Americans lose their jobs and guess what? Americans have finally noticed. Worse for you, is the fact that they now have a champion who has the resources, the rhetorical skills, and the will to set fire to the status quo.

Thousands gathered to protest the Trump rally in Orange County. Cue clapping. A car was flipped and a Trump supporter bloodied-up. Woo-woo. The 31,000 highly-motivated Trump supporters inside the arena noted every scream and epithet leveled at them.

Independent Americans, many of them tax-payers born in the US and naturalized citizens listened as they were abused as ‘racists, bigots, fascists’ etc for demanding strong borders and legal immigration. I’m sure each and every Trump supporter savored and drank the entire experience in. Millions more Trump supporters watched the news and will relive the experience either at Trump rallies across America, or in social media.

There’s a revolution taking place in America today – and it’s a rejection in many respects of many of the most closely held assumptions of new liberalism. Whether Trump can succeed in overturning the old order is a different question. But make no mistake, when magazines like Salon are raising the question of Trump’s appeal to Sanders’ voters at a time when 13 percent of these voters already regarding Trump favorably, new liberalism is under attack.

I like some of Chait’s work. I think he is somewhat more intelligent than, for example, Wolf Blitzer. (I recall Blitzer on Jeopardy.)

I’ve been rereading the Mirowski and Plehwe book myself. I like to note the existence of this reference:
Milton Friedman (1951). Neoliberalism and Its Prospects.
Friedman begins Capitalism and Freedom (1962) by whining about how the term “liberalism” does not mean anymore what it meant in Manchester in the 19th century. He does not begin Free to Choose (sic) that way.

And, I guess, we are now into discussing Friedman’s hero, Pinochet.

I think he is somewhat more intelligent than, for example, Wolf Blitzer.

Well, that’s a bit like saying, “They’re a better band than Happy Mondays,” no?

——

Re CR’s post: I thought the last post (the Jacobin one) was very helpful, but like several others on this thread, I’m a little confused by the Mont Perelin connection. Without getting into the weeds of the myriad possible meanings of “neoliberalism”, I do think it’s useful to distinguish between right-neoliberalism (which the rest of the world calls “neoliberalism”) and left-neoliberalism (which in the US gets called “neoliberalism”). Mont Perelin would I think fall into the first of these, Peters, Chait etc. into the second. And while there are undoubtedly ideological affinities, and both were perhaps shaped by similar social forces (or rather, one was a kind of reaction to the other—perhaps), I do think they are best considered as distinct phenomena. In other words, “neoliberalism = Mont Perelin and Charles Peters” seems like equivocation (or something close to it) to me.

@bob mcmanus

I can only see neoliberalism as the emergent political economy of late capitalism.

… and late Western hegemony.

@kidneystones

I like your term “new liberalism”. It is to neoliberalism as pounds are to kilos.

@Colin Danby

the term has multiple births, one connection is Latin American.

Of course. Debates that ignore this are as disconcerting to me as football games where the ball isn’t even round.

“@Colin Danby

the term has multiple births, one connection is Latin American.

Of course. Debates that ignore this are as disconcerting to me as football games where the ball isn’t even round.” –Lupita @17

Yeah, my initial (and painful) understanding of neoliberalism came from literature on Latin America. So maybe I’m biased, but it’s always seemed to me that if one really wants to understand neoliberalism as an interlocking, multi-scaled, programmatic political and economic phenomenon then one only need accost the first Latin American one sees on the street. They’ll fill you in.

It’s obvious Chait has no knowledge of the political and ideological history that informs the term. None. As someone said upthread, it’s just a bad word sanctimonious leftists spit at reasonable people–like shithead or something.

All right, it was a dumb joke. I could have said Creed or Pearl Jam or whatever, but in the moment, Happy Mondays seemed like a funnier choice. (Also, loads of UK critics think they’re “geniuses”? Seriously? That does not ring true to me, but I admit I could be wrong.)

Oh, it wasn’t really meant as a criticism, just honestly found it surprising. Never saw what the big deal with the Happy Mondays was, so interesting that someone thought they were unimpressive enough to stand in for “as bad at music as Blitzer is at smart.” Kind of refreshing, really. That in the day UK critics loved them was my impression, though I don’t know if their reputation has held up. (I do seem to remember that 24 Hour Party People was pretty hagiographic, but that’s getting pretty old now too)

In practical politics, ideas don’t usually become powerful until the powerful find them useful to adopt, or at least expound, and the powerful themselves generally don’t worry too much about ideological coherence anyway. Searching for the intellectual origins of neoliberalism is interesting academically, but doesn’t tell us why such policies were actually adopted at a certain point. The generation of politicians and bureaucrats in power since the end of the Cold War understands that simply saying “We will rob you” to the electorate might go down badly, but that on the other hand spending a tiny percentage of its wealth buying academics, journalists, commentators and politicians to pretend that stupid ideas are sensible ones can have a very high payoff. Sometimes politics is simpler than those who write about it professionally are prepared to accept.

There’s trolling, and then there’s comparing the Happy Monday to Creed. Wanna to take this outside?

(Fwiw I know for a fact HMs are still pretty popular outside of UK as I was living in a trendy non-Anglophone city a few years ago and hearing them everywhere..)

“The Liberal Party was named after a meeting called by Robert Menzies” , I meant to include that this meeting happened in 1944

Let us not forget that in the 80s and 90s, when these New Democrats were gaining control of the Democratic Party in the U.S., ‘liberal’ was a VERY dirty word. This is especially true for ‘third way’ types who wanted to convince those on their right flank that they weren’t like those dirty smelly hippies on the left.

OF COURSE it wasn’t a self-applied term: it went against their branding strategy.

The idea that descriptive labels applied by critics aren’t legitimate is another disingenuous complaint from people like Chait. He wants to reserve the right to come up with something that gives this ideology the intellectual credibility of liberalism without seeming stale, soft-headed, or weak. Having his cake and eating it too, in other words.

Chait remains an enthusiastic hippie-puncher, by the way. I suspect his animus is based on perpetual irritation that his critics on the left refuse to fall in line. The original tweet was just an exercise in trolling.

“Not having been in the US in this period, I was wondering, why did practical politicians, associated pundits and other activists trying to build a movement for the purposes of winning elections for the Democrats (or Labour for that matter) feel that it would be expedient to make like they accepted certain elements of the agenda, and the patterns of justification for this agenda, of the Republicans”

I think it was a direct response to the shift of working class whites from the Democratic to the Republican Party, which shift ultimately culminated in the Reagan revolution. The Republican conservative movement tailored their small government message to appeal to white who perceived that large government was being employed to advantage minorities at their expense. Taxes, social programs, redistribution, etc, all became bad large government liberalism, and the strategy was effective enough to bring an end to Democratic control of Congress and doom Democratic Presidential candidates who identified or were cast as ‘liberal”. The DLC and Clintonism – embrace the conservative message and some of their policies – was the response.

I think the 68/72 elections and the rise of Reagan acted as a one-two punch on liberal elites. The massive defeat of McGovern convinced them that grassroots movements within the party had to be squelched, and the loss of reliable working class voters, who became known as Reagan Democrats, led to the conclusion that the party’s platform had to mimic the Republican’s, in order to win back those voters.

This story does not take into account demographic changes, racial tensions, nativism, etc., but I think elite opinion was more concerned with hearing a tale that could convince them that strengthening their own control over their party was going to solve the problem of electoral defeat.

One further thought: I think that as the generation who lived through the Great Depression, and fought in WW2, aged out of the governing class, a lot of the liberal ethos was lost.

36: But that isn’t really what it is about.

What it is about showed up in a comment over at LGM, something like:

“My brother-in-law made $300,000 doing the SAP for the transfer of the Carrier air-conditioning jobs to Mexico.”

Every transfer of 10 $50k factory jobs overseas creates 2-5 $100k “creative class” jobs ( in services, finance, education, entertainment) back in the USA, and I add, probably 1-2 creative/managerial class jobs in the developing country, to identify under conditions of cultural imperialism with their peers in OECD countries.

This is the intersection of domestic neoliberalism with Lupita’s neo-imperialism

Bob @34,

Frank is frank about Democratic Party realities, and this doesn’t make him popular among “liberals,” who are really just compassionate conservatives these days.

There really isn’t that much difference between them (Dems and Republicans) on economic, war, empire, surveillance issues. Even taxes, which was once a sure-fire point of departure. And because it’s all relative now and PoMod, “liberals” can claim massive differences where they don’t exist, because the bar has been lowered so much. Like the paltry increase at the top from 35% to 39.6%, with even that weakened by making all Bush tax cuts permanent from dollar one to 400K. Weakened further by raising the top from 250K to 400K.

The ethos is basically the same, with different vehicles in place. For “liberal Dems,” it’s education. For Republicans, it’s business, “free enterprise,” etc. etc. That’s the pathway out of poverty or the middle class. Which results in, basically, the Dems catering to the richest 10%; the Republicans to the richest 1%. That still leaves the vast majority of Americans in the dirt, thrown under the bus, kicked to the curb, etc.

I wish America at least had the option of a coalition government that would include an alternative to this: The 100% alternative. No hierarchies to traverse. At least none so steep that they would take lifetimes or several generations. Instead of constantly struggling to move up the ladder, how about no ladder in the first place, and we’re already there, all of us, 100% of us, able to live and let live from Day One?

In short, all of this wasted time — decades, generations, centuries — struggling to find ways to move up the ladder of life. Our time would be far better spent trying to end class distinctions in the first place. End that endless journey up the pyramid. Flatten all of them instead.

“There really isn’t that much difference between them (Dems and Republicans) on economic, war, empire, surveillance issues. ”

Really, this is nonsense. Whatever you think of Obama, the notion that he’s no different a president on these issues than was Bush doesn’t stand up to even a moment’s scrutiny.

Layman @41,

There is a difference about difference here. I said “there really isn’t that much difference between” the Dems and Republicans on the listed issues. You then respond by saying it’s nonsense to claim — which I didn’t — that there is no difference between Obama and Bush on those issues. Now, in relative terms, this is a mild misreading for you. You usually get things more wildly wrong than this. But it’s still wrong.

That said, Obama did keep Bush’s defense secretary; rehired his Fed chairman; continued his Wall Street bailouts and prosecuted no one responsible for the crash; kept the war in Iraq going and escalated the one in Afghanistan; opened up several new fronts in the “GWOT”; radically expanded the use of drones; created a deficit commission in the middle of a recession and staffed it with neoliberals; surrounded himself with neoliberal economic advisers like Summers, and installed another, Geithner, at Treasury; offered Boehner the Grand Bargain which included slashing Medicare and Social Security; froze government hiring and pay in the middle of a recession — which even Republican presidents never do, etc. etc.

Throw in his smash-down of Occupy; his mass deportations of undocumented workers; his relentless pushing of TPP; his stimulus package with Republican tax breaks making up 33% of it; his silencing of Single Payer and even Public Option debate; his pushing of the Heritage Foundation’s health care plan, which resulted in the very conservative ACA . . . . and, yeah, there isn’t much difference between Obama and Bush on the issues I listed . . . other than tone, rhetorical style, etc.

Yikes, I most certainly do not think Happy Mondays are as bad as Creed! They’re miles—continents—apart, obviously. I actually sort of like a couple of HM songs (tho mostly I don’t think they’re very good, and their not-goodness is esp. brought into relief when you consider their Manchester musical peers). Also, it’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but as I remember it, 24 Hour Party People spent a lot of its second half gently poking fun at HM. But again possible I was misreading that.

Sorry this is very OT, but I needed to clear my name nym.

I have mostly seen the term Neoliberalism used by Europeans. In the US, it is nothing like Liberalism. It is like Libertarianism.

p.s. even after reading BW @44, I still don’t think there’s much similarity.

The following takes nothing away from your main points about the origins and development of neoliberalism, but may be of some interest.

The OED gives the following examples of the use of the term neoliberal:

1898   Econ. Jrnl. 8 494   “We must..bear in mind what is that hedonistic world, that realm of pure political economy, ever kept in view by the adepts of Neo-liberalism.
1924   H. E. Barnes Sociol. & Polit. Theory ix. ii. 161   He [sc. Leonard T. Hobhouse] represents the sociological expression of the Neo-Liberalism of England that has produced..more constructive social legislation than the combined product of earlier English governments.”

1938   Polit. Sci. Q. 53 133,  ” I deplore in an attempt to state a theory and formulate a practice of neo-liberalism, a trace of illiberalism and intolerence toward those who differ from the new credo.”

1978   Washington Post 10 Sept. c1/2   “Political necessities are headed … toward much more serious government intervention in the private economy. If you’re looking for a shorthand phrase, it might be more accurate to predict a period of ‘neo-liberalism’.”

1992   Globe & Mail (Toronto) 1 May d1/5   “These ideas include, beside free trade: privatization, deregulation, competitiveness, social-spending cutbacks and deficit reduction. The ensemble may be called neoconservatism, neoliberalism, the free market, [etc.].”

The first example an article by French economist and historian of economic thought Charles Gide in The Economic Journal (1898). The article deals with the idea and practice of co-operation. Gide begins the article by introducing a critique of co-operation made by the Italian economist Maffeo Pantaleoni.

According to Gide, Pantaleoni argues “that co-operation has not enriched economic science with any fresh principle whatever, and that, in practice, it can add nothing to what we get by way of natural result from the free play of competition” (Gide, 1898, p. 490). Gide refers to Pantaleoni as “one of the highest authorties” of “the Neo-liberal school” (492). Gide defends the idea and practice of co-operation, providing a rebuttal to Pantaleoni. In his rebuttal, Gide insists that “we must from the first bear in mind what is that hedonistic world, that realm of pure political economy, ever kept in view by the adepts of Neo-liberalism when they attack us and cry triumphantly, “You will never get further nor do better!” The answer, Gide argues, is that the “hedonistic world” of the Neo-liberals is:

“one in which free competition will reign absolutely; where all monopoly by right or of fact will be abolished; where every individual will be conversant with his true interests, and as well equipped as any one else to fight for them; where everything will be carried on by genuinely free contract, in which each contracting party will weigh in a subjective balance, infallibly exact, the final utility of the object to be disposed of and of the object to be acquired,-a bargaining where neither violence, nor fraud, nor lies, nor ignorance, nor dependence on others, nor any foreign disturbing element whatever—for instance the miserable preoccupation as to whether there’s anything for supper—will come in to upset so delicate an operation: a world where the law of supply and demand will bring about the maximum of utility for both individual and society, and will always send back the barometric needle, at once and without friction, to ‘set fair’—I mean to the fair price (494-5).”

Of course, Gide points out, this world does not exist; or rather, it exists “nowhere save in the inaccessible regions of abstract thought. It has no more relation to the society in which we actually live, than has the world of pure geometry with the configuration of the earth or the human form” (495). Furthermore, Gide argues, given that this imagined world of Neo-liberalism is a utopia, Neo-liberals such as Pantaleoni ought to consider the possibility that co-operation is instead the best way of producing “that which laisser faire and individualism never will,—a society governed by free competition and free contract” (495).

For Gide, the central problem that the new Liberals fail to account for is that the fin de siècle economy is characterized not by pure competition but by an “anti-social and demoralising competition…[a] struggle for existence in which the least scrupulous win and the most honest go to the wall” (496). Moreover, Gide argues, the purpose of the various “co-operative societies” is precisely to “abolish everything which tends to vitiate free consent between co-exchangers,” including: “adulteration of food, false weights, lying advertisements, tips to servants, usury, sale by credit which is but a form of usury, and, above all, the friction resulting from an excessive number of intermediaries and in fluctuations of price or an inert balance” (496).

In an interesting argumentative maneuver, Gide points out that under Liberal theorizations of perfect competition there is not profit, since “the value of things is always brought down to the level of the cost of production”—and this is precisely the goal of co-operative societies: “to abolish profit!” (498).

Lurking in the background, and at times even appearing in the foreground, of Gide’s discussion of cooperatives is “the Social Question.” This term, with its origins in 19th century Europe and North America, referred to the consequences of industrial capitalism—or, as Tony Judt put it: “How could the virtues of economic progress be secured in light of the political and moral threat posed by the condition of the working class? Or, more cynically, how was social upheaval to be headed off in a society wedded to the benefits that came from the profitable exploitation of a large class of low-paid and existentially discontented persons?”

@michael braverman

the term is nearly vacuous in current usage.

In case you haven’t noticed, commenters on this thread come from different countires and have different languages as their mother tongue. If we can talk about neoliberalism here and understand each other, that means that “neoliberalism” is precise enough to be understood across language groups and cultures and your assertion that it is a vacuous term is pretty much debunked.

I would respectfully urge you to burst out of your US-centric bubble and acknowledge the great work of economists from all over the world who have described and explained neoliberalism, of the political parties and heads of state who have stood up to its imposition, and of the courage and determination of popular movements such as the people of Cochabamba and the Zapatistas..

Jason Weidner @52
Interesting. I recall *many* years ago seeing a history of economic thought by Gide and Rist.

I think, however, that usage of a term as malleable as ‘neoliberalism’ has to be seen very much in the context of a particular time and place; thus, whether any kind of line can be convincingly drawn from Maffeo Pantaleoni to Charles Peters — or, as Corey would have it, from Mont Pelerin to C. Peters — must be, at a minimum, highly debatable. The line from Maffeo Pantaleoni to Thatcher and Reagan seems much more direct.

michael braverman @42
The state would have to be empowered to maintain market discipline—against the will and interests of its participants.

How? You leave off the comment just where it starts to get interesting.

Btw, your tone toward C. Robin is unnecessarily insulting. I certainly don’t always agree w him — I disagree with certain things in ‘The Reactionary Mind’ (I haven’t read his ‘Fear’ except for the excerpts he put up here some time ago). However, your “brash but intellectually hollow vituperations” goes overboard, imo.

Re @42: yes, the Braverman comment is dreadful, and its reading of Foucault eccentric too.

The place to start is Foucault’s 1979 biopolitics lectures, published in French in ’04 and English in ’08. An earlier version, with two of the lectures, emerged in 1991 in the Burchell/Gordon/Miller _Foucault Effect_ (Chicago).

And really (re@42), *everyone knows* the term has been overgeneralized. it is not a logical conclusion from that obvious fact that there is no such thing as neoliberalism.

59: It’s always been about disciplining everything else for the market.

The place to start is Foucault’s 1979 biopolitics lectures

Nah, it’s ok to start a few Foucault decades earlier, since, although he might have denied it, much of his work delineated the everyday mechanisms of Gramscian hegemony.

Plume @2:44 pm

There really isn’t that much difference between them (Dems and Republicans) on economic, war, empire, surveillance issues. Even taxes, which was once a sure-fire point of departure. And because it’s all relative now and PoMod, “liberals” can claim massive differences where they don’t exist, because the bar has been lowered so much. Like the paltry increase at the top from 35% to 39.6%, with even that weakened by making all Bush tax cuts permanent from dollar one to 400K. Weakened further by raising the top from 250K to 400K.

It should be noted that taxation of income from wealth went down, down to 15% under Bush-Cheney and is back up to 23.8% (in the limiting case) under Obama as a combo of increase on cap gains&dividends and the ObamaCare surtax (I leave out the fine print. . . )

still not really over

that is, unfortunately, true, in more than respect.

layman@41 perfect example der Narzissmus der klienen Differenzen. Lovely.

kidneystones @11

‘For some reason, however, the poor are listening to David Brooks and Jon Chait.’

I wouldn’t be prepared to guess who the poor are listening to. What’s your source of information on this point? And, if they are listening to David Brooks and Jon Chait, what are David Brooks and Jon Chait suggesting that they do? Are they suggesting that the poor should vote for Donald Trump?

‘Many of the geriatric self-satisfied here are blissfully unaware of just how bad things are for young people.’

So tell us, how bad are things for young people in the US? I’ve read about some of them being shot dead by the police — is that the sort of thing you had in mind?

‘The result is the Salon piece linked, and others, that question whether Trump may well be the better candidate.’

Does Salon speak for, or to, the poor? The linked piece doesn’t argue that Trump will be a better President for the poor in the sense of achieving more for the poor; one of the reasons given for thinking that Trump might be the better candidate is an expectation that he would achieve nothing as a President.

‘It’s a free country (at present). But if any think voters watching protesters force Trump to crawl under fences, smash police cars, and silence free speech on campus are winning over the majority of voters, many of whom have not had a pay raise in 18 years, I’d suggest that assumption needs a re-think.’

To me it seems unlikely in the extreme that people who have not had a pay raise in eighteen years are thinking to themselves ‘It’s because they’re silencing free speech on campuses, that’s why I haven’t had a pay raise’ or ‘It’s because people smash police cars, that’s why I haven’t had a pay raise’. You appear to be suggesting a connection between things which are not connected. (Also, I don’t know what makes you think it’s a free country.)

‘There’s a revolution taking place in America today – and it’s a rejection in many respects of many of the most closely held assumptions of new liberalism. Whether Trump can succeed in overturning the old order is a different question.’

To say that there is a revolution but then to suggest that it’s not certain the old order will be overturned does not make sense: if the old order is not overturned, then there’s no revolution.

bob mcmanus @34

‘And it really isn’t that Democratic Elites are cynically using Wall Street as a money spigot; the fact is that Wall Street is no longer your grandaddy’s Wall Street, much more socially liberal, and Democrats like the Clintons and Obamas genuinely prefer the company of the Bill Gates and Mark Cubans and Summers and don’t want to have anything to do with the working class or poor.’

What’s the contrast here? How much of the socialising of Democrats like Franklin Roosevelt, or Democrats like John Kennedy, was with the working class or the poor?

Since the earlier thread on this has been taken over by Brett, Brett and Plume, I’ll continue my historically-inspired musings here. I was thinking about the social bases of liberalism as contrasted with neo-liberalism. Liberalism found its original home in the British upper middle classes, a group concerned to preserve their access to the state, but fearful of the magnates who controlled the state after 1688. As the middle class broadened after 1850 or so, it expanded its political reach – although it was then pushing as much against the ‘socialist” working classes as the oligarchy. A comparison with the continent is instructive – the same classes there supported royal absolutism, since the middle classes were smaller and more dependent on the state, and the magnate threat larger and more direct (the magnates wanted to neuter the state, not control it).

Neo-liberalism has, as others have pointed out, not much a political base at all. It’s hostile to the security and settled relations that are the hallmarks of middle class life as much as it is to the communal solidarity of the working classes. It’s an ideology of administrators working with and for the new magnates – the global rich and their placemen. The careers of people like Blair, the Clintons, or their Australian counterparts illustrate this nicely.

The relationship to state power is also quite different. Former magnate groups – the Czartoryskis, Sapiehas, Radziwills and Eszterhazys who disabled the Polish and Hungarian states could rest confident that their private armies could keep the serfs in line, and the networks of commercial middlemen who translated their produce into urban palaces and Haydn symphonies would survive changes of regime (in this they were right – as a group most did fine up to the 1930s). British magnate power is more complex – they needed professional and political allies if they were to keep the French out and the Irish down and, in a strongly centralised state, they could not fall back on local power.

In the current case, the magnates need the state to collect their rents – from students, mortgagees, debtors abroad, IP rights everywhere. In Britain and Europe, local power is not an option. In the US, owning a local patch (Kansas, Wisconsin, North Carolina…) is still possible. And there’s an affinity between magnate power and the military/police which goes beyond economic interest which, in the US case, can be exercised locally as well as nationally.

The sum here is that, to understand neo-liberalism you have to look not at intellectual antecedents but at the rise of magnate power. Piketty, not Peters.

I just tried to post a comment disagreeing with Corey’s parenthetical remarks that the difference between the way Americans (USA) use the word ‘liberal’ and the way that others use it is not important to this discussion. Went into moderation possibly because the quoted bit was too long.

Anyway to make it brief, I am confused over what Americans mean by their use of the word “liberal” and I do think it’s worth further clarifying the differences between American usage and others. Anyone care to clarify?

@Val
I think CR’s parenthetical, though brief, is accurate. In contemporary European usage, the word ‘liberal’ tends to mean pro-‘market’, anti-state-intervention in the economy. In contemporary American usage, the word ‘liberal’ means someone a bit to the left of the nominal center in the US political spectrum, on both economic and social/cultural issues, unless it’s qualified as in “fiscal conservative, social liberal” (and those who describe themselves that way thus aren’t actually liberals all-round).

For aspects of the U.S. historical context w/r/t liberalism, I might suggest Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (1998), essays written roughly over the decade preceding its publication (n.b. I can’t claim to have done more than glance through it, but he is a widely read historian of the U.S. C20th). For one influential view of the longer perspective, cf. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (orig. pub. 1955).

Plume @73

You’re defending a statement something like this:
‘Modern Democrats like Obama and the Clintons differ from Democrats of an earlier age in the extent to which they’re committed to policies which genuinely benefit the working class and the poor.’

But the statement bob mcmanus made earlier, which I was responding to, was something more like this:
‘Modern Democrats like Obama and the Clintons differ from Democrats of an earlier age in their preferences relating to the company of the working class and the poor.’

Those two statements are not equivalent.

LFC I’m afraid that’s simply not correct, “liberal” is inherently ambiguous in the European context and economic liberalism is only one possible aspect.

Peter T: “Since the earlier thread on this has been taken over by Brett, Brett and Plume, I’ll continue my historically-inspired musings here. […] The sum here is that, to understand neo-liberalism you have to look not at intellectual antecedents but at the rise of magnate power. Piketty, not Peters.”

I’ll continue here too: I’m not sure that this is a “rise” of magnate power. There’s a familiar effect in studies of local elites in which they never decline, exactly, but at some point they are swamped by elites from further away as their local society becomes more connected to a larger one. It’s possible for the 1% to take more and more without the political power falling to the .0001%.

If administrators are working with and for the new magnates, well, the administrators are the ones being put into the positions of direct control. They can’t go against the direct, core interests of the magnates: I didn’t mean to imply that they could. But they have real power, and neoliberalism is in part the process of them thinking of each other as constituting a class. Part of that process is not-always-hidden scorn for the magnates who aren’t also administrators, concealed when the neoliberals are politicians who have to raise money directly, not so concealed in other cases.

I’m treating neoliberalism as different from right-wingerdom. It’s always possible for magnates to simply support the right, and the right has no difficulty in making a full-throated effort to support every magnate interest whether it’s financial like inheritance taxes or rhetorical like “job creators”. But the right is not how the world system comes together.

@novakant
LFC I’m afraid that’s simply not correct, “liberal” is inherently ambiguous in the European context and economic liberalism is only one possible aspect.

Ok. (I did use the phrase “tends to mean” in an effort not to be too certain-sounding).

Just to try to map the dispute here a little bit, one side sees the difference between right neoliberalism and centrist neoliberalism as a distinction without a difference. On this view (see 46 above) right and centrist neoliberalisms are playing bad-cop/good-cop in a nefarious common project to dissolve all alternative social structures in the acid of the market. On the other side we have the likes of Chait, who don’t see centrist neoliberalism as a participating in any such project but as responding in a commonsensical way to the recognition of supposed economic facts. It’s not entirely dissimilar to the question of whether welfare liberalism is or is not a camel’s nose for communism (at a high enough level of abstraction, i.e. leaving out the relative dumbness of the latter question). But a third possibility is that centrist neoliberalism may indeed suck, but not because it’s not importantly distinguishable from Friedmanite liberatarian conservatism. Put it this way, do we really want to say that Paul Krugman (whose roots lie in centrist neoliberalism) is in his essence just Tyler Cowen? Maybe not.

Sorry I am late to the party. At the risk of being that “fanboy” CR dislikes who points out that USA was founded as a republic, I insist that is important to note how neoliberalism is basically a rejection of the anti-authoritarian political economy which was launched by the formation of the American republic.

Liberalism was a revolt on behalf of a rising middle class against the power and privileges of European ruling oligarchs and monarchs, who used their connections and influence at royal courts to gain economic monopolies and other privileges. This is generally known as the system of mercantilism. The intent of classical liberalism was to limit and curb the power of these oligarchical and monarchical states, to make room for greater economic freedoms and property rights for the rising middle class.

The creation of the American republic, then, was a high point of liberalism. However, it is crucial to note that under the Constitution of the new American republic, economic freedoms and property rights were subject to the Constitutional mandate to promote the general welfare.

There are many who argue that the new American republic was merely a continuation of European mercantilism. This obscures the historical breakthrough represented by the creation of that republic, and its explicit Constitutional mandate to promote the General Welfare. Failing to see how this breakthrough represents a culminating triumph of the political and scientific Enlightenment over irrational and arbitrary power—ecclesiastical as well as oligarchical and monarchical—is a major reason the left today is so confused, disjointed, and ineffective.

The words “mercantilist” and “mercantilism” are generally used whenever government powers are used to promote a state’s economic powers. By specifying in the Constitution that government powers are to be used to promote a state’s economic powers in promotion of the general welfare, the American republic made a sharp break from European mercantilism, in which the welfare of a sole monarch or small group of oligarchs was often conflated with the general welfare of a state or nation.

In advanced industrial economies, the way a sovereign nation-state promotes and protects the general welfare is by imposing environmental, workplace, and consumer regulations on economic activity. There should also be strict limits on usury, speculation, and economic rent-seeking, which all drain financial capital away from the industrial economy and industrial enterprises.

Historically, then, where liberalism was a revolt against mercantilism–a mercantilism which channeled most of the wealth generated by economic activity to a small elite– neoliberalism is a revolt by a newly arisen class of corporatist oligarchs and plutocrats who are enraged that the promotion of the general welfare by modern sovereign nation-states involves laws and regulations which “stifle” their “business opportunities” and “economic creativity.” Not surprisingly then, we find, after nearly a half century of neoliberal reordering of the world’s economies, that just like mercantilism, neoliberalism channels most of the wealth generated by economic activity to a small elite.

Latin America was vulnerable to economic pressure due to not being able to borrow cheaply. This was due to the international financial markets lacking confidence in their ability to repay loans. The IMF would offer loans at below market rate but on condition that the borrower adopt policies that make re-payment more likely. The poor credit worthiness of Latin America was due to a long history of economic mismanagement and high inflation. They found themselves unable to lend in their own currency due to high inflation while borrowing in someone else’s currency can lead to solvency issues.

Joseph M. Schwartz[*] weighed in on Chait & liberalism & socialism at Jacobin on 4/28. I haven’t read his piece, but if you go there it shdn’t be hard to find.

(*Joe Schwartz to those acquainted w/ him.)

bruce wilder @96
100 times this.
They all have to keep up the charade that economics is not fundamentally political, that it is at root instead a technocratic enterprise about managing economic laws. Krugman is the high priest of the orthodoxy; read any of his posts on heterodox approaches to economics and this comes across clearly.

It is a shame, because there was a range of interesting work coming out of the 50’s and 60’s – think Kaldor, Robinson, Sraffa – that somehow never found its way into the mainstream. Even before that you have people like Gunnar Myrdal who in the abstract you might expect to have significant influence on the discipline, but don’t. Proponents of the neoclassical view didn’t triumph over these dissenters in an intellectual sense, but they were still widely successful in marginalizing these viewpoints.

I wonder at times if there is something distinctly American to this sort of narrowness.

Rich-
Certainly in the face of environmental apocalypse, all that looks trivial.
I guess what I mean is that if the discipline was unable to really engage with the ideas of someone marginally on the outside like Kaldor, there was no chance of them taking the ‘limits to growth’ thesis seriously. But I don’t think this intellectual closure is essential to the discipline – Galbraith not too long ago talked about affluence as replacing scarcity, for instance. Sometime after WWII it gets locked in; the narrowing of focus over the intervening decades is fairly remarkable.

I wonder how many people here have read ecofeminist critiques of mainstream economics? They show clearly that mainstream economics excludes subsistence work and unpaid caring/body work as well as environment/ecology, and the connections between them. I would strongly recommend Marilyn Waring if you haven’t already read her, especially her analysis of the United Nations System of National Accounts
Marilyn Waring ‘Policy and the measure of women: Revisiting UNSNA, ISEW, HDI and GPI’ pp 165-179 in Ariel Salleh (ed) Eco-sufficiency & global justice : women write political ecology.

I know I have mentioned Waring before but given that previous discussion of ecofeminist analysis got derailed by silly insults about “nutty” theory etc, it is certainly worth mentioning her again. I’m not sure that the environmental/ecological discussion comes out so clearly in that chapter, but there are numerous others in the book that make it very clear.

I have tried to engage John Quiggin in discussion of these issues but I don’t think he has yet engaged with the feminist critique of mainstream economics at a deep level (though he certainly does not dismiss it).

The idea of emission permits or pollution taxes have worked when actually implemented. The emission permits for SO2 worked at eliminating acid rain. The fact that the special interest lobby opposed to the pricing in of this externality has been strong enough to prevent implementation doesn’t make much difference to whether prciing in the externality would be an effective solution. Like with stimulus do you, as an economist, make a proposal that you think is what is best or do you moderate it based on what you believe to be politically achievable.

LFC @ 90

FDR sank his personal fortune into a polio rehabilitation hospital which was run essentially as a charity. He spent much of his free time there among his guests and that’s where he passed away in 1945. His wife, as a young woman, had worked in a settlement house and had a life long interest in helping the poor. I think at least three members of his cabinet had professional backgrounds in social work.

bruce wilder @107

Thanks for drawing my attention to that. I think it would be a good thing if there were more people in Cabinets (everywhere) with a background in social work. But that also reminds me that Barack Obama was a community organiser, and Wikipedia tells me that he spent three years in that job and helped set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants’ rights organisation. If that’s true, he probably spent a lot of time with poor and working-class people.

Peter T @ 75

Liberalism, broadly understood as an emerging ideology of secularism, meritocracy, constitutionalism, and rational and humanistic reform arises out of the 17th century experience with religious war, expanding literacy and the Scientific Revolution and the expanding commercial opportunities of a newly global world.

As an ideology liberalism is shaped historically as much by the need to garner and contain mass popular support as it is by needs and fears (and fears of) magnates. The Civil Wars of the mid-17th century in the British Isles have their Cavaliers, but also the New Model Army, which is the source of Leveler spirit in the good, old cause. The run-up to the Glorious Revolution of 1689 is marked by turning out popular demonstrations of support by Whigs and Tories.

The liberalism of France is more purely theoretical, the product of the reading clubs and the surplus of under-employed lawyers in an overly litigious society until hunger prompts the Paris mob to intervene and, of course, the emergence of the nation-in-arms at Valmy.

In both 17th century England and late 18th century France, the democratic spirit animates a republicanism which runs aground on the inability of assembled representatives to make sensible decisions. A dictatorship results. In France’s case, Napoleon proves the key factor enabling far-reaching institutional reforms, like the establishment of the Bank of France, the settlement with the Catholic Church and the landmark legal reforms embodied in the Code Napoleon. (And, yes improbably, Napoleon participated rather forcefully in the deliberations that moved forward his namesake law reform.)

Liberalism has an ambivalent relationship with the lower classes whose support is needed to obtain and exercise political power, but who want and need economic support in return, support liberals are reluctant to give.

Rick Puchalsky @110

I just read the Schmalensee and Stavins article, and I have no idea what you’re talking about. They conclude that the unrelated deregulation of rail lines might have accounted for one-third of the emissions reductions and cost savings from cap and trade, though some command-and-control alternatives, like mandating scrubbers, would have wiped out the possibility of those savings. How do you get from that to “minor effects”? By “regulatory effects” do you mean, um, deregulation? The program didn’t “collapse due to political opposition as soon as it would have been really needed.” It collapsed because a court struck it down. What might have been needed was a tightening of the standards, which the law didn’t allow. These people are neither dumb nor mindless ideologues, much as you may wish to think so.

Charles – classical liberalism was intensely anti-militaristic, not least because the Army was an instrument of royal power., and a potential source of tyranny. War was seen as a waste of time and money, and the military a profession dominated by aristocratic idiots. There were two interesting exceptions; One was the use of the military (and especially the Navy) to acquire and protect trade routes and keep the sea-lanes free, as I imagine the ghost of John Locke is now explaining to John Quiggin in a parallel thread. The other, never really separated from the first, was the spread of western liberal values, Christianity, and various normative ideas about government and society. The two were to some extent necessarily at cross-purposes with each other, but the rather awkward mix is visibly the origin of liberal militarism today, which on the one hand underwrites things like “free” trade and access to raw materials with force, and on the other hand believes that you can make the world a better place by killing all those who disagree with you; or as Tom Lehrer said in 1965 “I know there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!”. But liberal militarism is, and always has been, a different issue from traditional militarism, largely because liberals don’t know, and don’t want to learn, anything about the actual limitations of the use of force.

Howard Frant: “I just read the Schmalensee and Stavins article”

And I suspect that no amount of my explaining how it presents an incomplete picture will help, since you evidently aren’t reading the parts of it that make claims forthrightly as really making those claims forthrightly. But I’ll try a little bit:

HF: “They conclude that the unrelated deregulation of rail lines might have accounted for one-third of the emissions reductions […]”

So unrelated deregulation of rail counts as a success for the pollution trading program, because both programs are part of one big, nebulous thing called “deregulation”?

HF: “though some command-and-control alternatives, like mandating scrubbers, would have wiped out the possibility of those savings.”

There was effectively dual regulation of these emissions, something that you have to know the history involved to realize or read between the lines of the article a bit to see. You don’t have to read very far, though. Here’s a quote:

“It was widely recognized by the late 1990s that SO2 reductions in excess of those resulting from the trading program of Title IV would be required by other provisions in the Clean Air Act dealing with air quality standards because of the significant adverse health effects of ne particulates associated with SO2 emissions. ”

Those “other provisions in the Clean Air Act” always existed, and the cost of pollution permits was marginal because facilities had to install scrubbers or make fuel replacements anyways.

HF: “The program didn’t “collapse due to political opposition as soon as it would have been really needed.” It collapsed because a court struck it down. ”

Any long-lasting program periodically need to be adjusted by legislation. The court did not strike down any possibility of this kind of program. From the article: “the courts af rmed that EPA could not set up a new interstate trading system or modify the Title IV system in the absence of new legislation from Congress. ” When the program started to bite, it encountered predictable political opposition, and there was no constituency capable of pushing it legislatively against that opposition. Which is exactly what I wrote upthread.

Rich Puchalsky @117

I’ll try not to be as condescending as you.

1. “So unrelated deregulation of rail counts as a success for the pollution trading program, because both programs are part of one big, nebulous thing called “deregulation”?”

Who on earth said that? What I said, based on what S & S said, is that as much as a third of what’s attributed to emissions trading might actually be attributable to rail deregulation. That leaves two-thirds attributable to emissions trading. I repeat, how do you get from that to “minor effects”? They also say that if there had been a command-and-control program in effect mandating scrubbers for every smokestack, even the one-third savings wouldn’t have been realized.

Emissions trading is not, in my mind or anyone else’s, “part of some big nebulous thing called deregulation.” It’s part of a big nebulous thing called regulation. It’s just better regulation.

2. In the late ’90s it was realized that the big problem with these emissions was not so much acid rain as human health effects from particulates. That’s why they say, in a boldface section heading, that the Act did the right thing for the wrong reasons. So the limits needed to be tightened because of other provisions in the Clean Air Act dealing with human health. Yes, those provisions already existed; what didn’t exist until the late ’90s was the scientific understanding that made them applicable. There was never any contemplation of moving to command-and-control.

3. No, as I said, according to S&S what happened was a series of court decisions striking down interstate trading. This didn’t happen “when the program started to bite.” It was the result of court decisions.

Emissions trading worked. I’m not sure why you’re so eager to say that it didn’t, and that good old command-and-control is the way to go. Possibly in your mind it’s part of a big, nebulous thing called “neoliberalism.” For that see my comments at 106.

HF: “What I said, based on what S & S said, is that as much as a third of what’s attributed to emissions trading might actually be attributable to rail deregulation.”

The article twice qualifies this 1/3 with “in the early years of the program”, but let’s move on. More broadly it’s my contention that nearly all of the gains were attributable not to emissions trading, but to concurrent command-and-control regulation of the same sources.

HF: “No, as I said, according to S&S what happened was a series of court decisions striking down interstate trading. This didn’t happen “when the program started to bite.””

Oh yes it did. Look at the timeline in Figure 2 of that paper. In the late 90s, you get the realization that SO2 levels are going to have to be lowered a lot further. There’s no effect on allowance prices because no one sees this actually happening soon. Prices of allowances don’t start to zoom until it looks like something is actually going to be done via CAIR. But as prices go higher, EPA announces it will re-evaluate CAIR. Why did EPA make this announcement? Because of industry pressure, of course. Why was the agency sued over CAIR a year later? Because of the higher prices of allowances that a lower SO2 target would involve. The court decisions happened “when the program started to bite” because the court cases themselves were brought when the program started to bite.

HF: “Emissions trading worked. I’m not sure why you’re so eager to say that it didn’t […]”

Because I don’t think that it actually worked. Instead, I think that it failed just as other emissions trading schemes have failed or are going to fail. They share the common characteristic that as soon as the trading scheme becomes actually expensive for the regulated entities, the trading scheme effectively goes away.

RP @ 121: . . . as soon as the trading scheme becomes actually expensive for the regulated entities, the trading scheme effectively goes away.

I read the Schmalensee and Stavins article and it is hard for me to form a definite impression, beyond the sense that they don’t know what they are talking about.

If I were investigating, I would have been interested in the monitoring regime, its effectiveness and cost. How well were the EPA and the firms able to monitor and account for actual emissions? Was it a proxy measurement? How frequent? To what extent were things arranged to give the firms superior information?

Command-and-control does not go away. A market for permits introduces a possibly valuable decentralization, but the quality of command-and-control depends on the quality of the feedback and the freedom to act upon it. It doesn’t seem to me that our economists are curious enough about the right things.

I’ll just anticipate the next obvious what’s-the-difference question: “what’s the difference between a trading program and a command-and-control program if the regulated industry has the political power to get its way when it becomes expensive for them? Couldn’t they quash either one?”

There’s a big difference. Command-and-control says: you will not pollute more than a certain amount, because pollution is dangerous. This often uses the concept of best available technology, which means that within the bounds of reasonability cost isn’t really the deciding factor. If industry wants to pollute more, it has to say “Can we pollute more and kill more people? This is expensive!” That mobilizes a constituency that can effectively oppose the deregulation.

For a trading program, you’ve already said that money is the most important thing and that no one facility really has a limit on how much it can pollute. So they aren’t asking to break an individual limit. They’re basically saying “Do we have to buy these government issued pieces of paper? This is expensive!” And there’s no big constituency of angry economists waiting to rise up and defend their permit trading schemes.

Sorry, I already anticipated your question.

I’m surprised to see Paul Krugman, and especially Simon Wren-Lewis, described as neoliberals. Perhaps I’ve missed something, but they’re both anti-austerity, and as far as I know neither of them argues for implementing more neoliberal policies.

What Wren-Lewis is criticising under the rubric of “neoliberalism” is right neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism has been adopted and promoted by monied interests on the right, and that money often resulted from what we might call today crony capitalism.

Which he’s doing from more or less a left neoliberal perspective.
More generally, it is a huge error to think that because [right] neoliberalism invokes a highly selective and distorted view of basic economics, the left must therefore oppose mainstream economics.

awy: “when simply defining what specific policy or factual beliefs you wish to attack would be more efficient.

but there is no rhetorical or narrative points in that, is there.”

I guess that’s why I haven’t been writing about specific policy beliefs as illustrated by a specific policy example.

Bruce B., if one doesn’t go into detail, one gets back (paraphrased) “this is all vague and you’re blurring unlike things together”, if one does, one gets back (paraphrased) “I’m not that interested in this and why don’t you talk to the experts.”

There is no golden mean between the two, so it just becomes something that can’t be talked about in blog comments. Taking both parts of Dunning-Krueger into account, I’m not a top expert on this — I’m a data user rather than regulator, and although I worked in an area very close to this one for the last 25 years (i.e. through the entire history of the EPA acid rain trading program) it was an area close to this one, not exactly this one. So I know how much I don’t know about it. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that I do know a lot more about it than the other people here, some of whom seem pretty confident that they know how this program worked despite it not really being their area at all. I would guess that some people think that they know how this program worked because of theory. But that theory doesn’t work out in practice for reasons I’ve described above.

Oh, I’m not disagreeing. Particularly not with the experience of ending up condemned for too much or not enough with no allowance for anything in between.

awy @ 130, 137: defining what you mean by the label becomes pointless past a certain point, when simply defining what specific policy or factual beliefs you wish to attack would be more efficient

If you could pin those specific beliefs down, maybe it would, but these are moving targets in a fluid, only semi-transparent medium, as people circle in an endless cycle of explaining themselves, “yes, but . . . ” distinguishing themselves from others along several dimensions while also maintaining alliances and alignments. Persuasive rhetoric being what it is — manipulative, to speak plainly — those “yes, but” explanations offered in one particular context — even if strictly true and honest — can be deceptive or misleading regarding the overall program or constellation of ideas.

It is only over time, with recurrence of certain themes or stances, that one begins to pick up the pattern. The label is meant to draw attention to the fact that there is such a pattern by giving it a name. The pattern is more important, more telling than any particular proposition defended in the singular context of a place and moment in time.

It ought to be said that these patterns are, as Simon Wren-Lewis aptly observed in the phrase I quoted above, not necessarily in the nature of consistent and coherent beliefs. They may relate to theories, as various patterns, all labeled “neoliberalism”, relate to economic theories, but like any ideology what holds them together functionally is a foundation of partially unconscious shared social as well as idiosyncratic personal interests and preferences.

“Neoliberal” has been a label adopted by or applied to several different historic movements, each with a relation to theories and programs of political economy. The antecedent “liberal” has been a label both for the political seeking after the liberty of the market as an organizing principle of political economy and, in American politics, as a label for the politics of generosity in rejecting means-testing and discriminating the “deserving poor” in policy design.

Attaching “neo” to “liberal” is an obvious construction. Pedantry of the etymological variety seems sorely misplaced. Maybe, there would be some usefulness in pedantically exploring the psychology that drives people to use “neo” or “new” or “post” or “pre” or “ante” or “3rd” and so on, to demarcate the evolution of ideas with particular prefixes at particular times, and what it means when these labels are self-applied, and when they relate to retronyms. In American politics, “liberal” was adopted by FDR, using the semantic association with generous and universal as well as freedom (in the sense of freedom from fear, freedom from want) to distinguish New Deal reform movements from the earlier Progressive Movement, which was more deeply paternalistic and conservative. In continental European politics, “liberal” has antecedents in 18th century French laissez faire ideology as well as 17th century Whig philosophies. In Europe, the post-war ordoliberalism promoting a strong state and the EU introduced another strain, one that I think is probably often the primary if not exclusively the proper or intended antecedent to many applications of “neoliberal” as a label for recent developments in EU politics.

So yeah, even just acknowledging the diverse uses of “neoliberal” (and the diversity of antecedent uses of the label, “liberal”, that may be important to explaining why the label was constructed) throws up maybe too much information to process in a blog, let alone a twitter exchange.

Still, what Corey Robin pulled out of this dust cloud deserves attention. It is that there is a resonance or recurrence between the neoliberalism of Hayek and Mont Pelerin and the neoliberalism of Charles Peters. They do not descend from anything like the same or similar ideas of political economy. But, when countervailing power and institutionalized class conflict was amputated from New Deal liberalism to create the crippled third-way politics that Charles Peters labeled “neoliberal”, that remnant, allegedly centre-left “neoliberal” constellation began immediately to take on a symbiotic relationship with the Friedmanite conservative libertarian narrative, which was more properly heir to Mont Pelerin “neoliberalism”.

That affinity between these two “neoliberalism” with quite different pedigrees and ostensible theories originating in different periods, places and contexts — that’s the critically important takeaway insight.

That affinity is no small thing and no mere coincidence. It is at the core of American left neoliberalism, which you can see from the bit I quoted just above from self-described neoliberal Brad DeLong, where he’s nostalgic for Friedman and even Hayek. (He’s not saying he agrees with them; he’s saying he could productively argue with them. That’s why I keep using the term, dialectic, to describe this relationship.)

That this affinity becomes most salient when “Brad sees Red” and is motivated to attack more radical leftish advocacy than his own centrism, as stupid and/or unethical shows us important aspects of how this affinity between differing “neoliberalisms” affect our political dynamics. Brad is going to fight to remain the left pole of mainstream discourse; he’s not going to play nice and he’s not interested in a productive dialogue, doesn’t even see the possibility of a productive dialogue with critics to his own left, outside the axis he’s established in his own mind with Milton Friedman et alia. This reluctance among neoliberals to engage with those to their left contributes to the epistemic closure of “There is No Alternative”.

NG,One of Many,

This whole huge discussion about “left” and “right” neoliberalism is the result of an academic misunderstanding.

Charles Peters was trying to find a single word to describe what we might call the Washington Monthly approach to public policy. He coined the term “neoliberal” as a contrast to both traditional American liberalism and American neoconservatism. The basic idea was to achieve traditional American liberal goals with nontraditional, often market-oriented, means. The term was, I think, a new coinage. It never really caught on. I recall Nicholas Lemann, once at the Washington Monthly, saying later, “I never called myself anything but a liberal.” It would make life much simpler if we just called these people New Liberals.

At around the same time, we had the rise of Thatcher in Britain. People in Britain use the term “liberal” not as we in the US do, but to describe a strong belief in markets, associated with the right (but not traditional Tory right). For example, Hayek called himself a liberal. So people in Europe started referring to Thatcherism, in a derogatory way, as neoliberalism.

This pejorative term spread to the academic left in the US. Then some academic discovered the old Peters term, and assumed completely wrongly that there was some connection between the two terms. So we got such absurdities as people saying, “Hillary Clinton is neoliberal in that she’s for free trade, but she seems to lack these four other characteristics of neoliberalism,” and other people talking about it as a sinister ideology in America. No. Hillary Clinton is not a neoliberal. Bill Clinton was to some extent, and Hillary is to a lesser extent, a New Liberal, but neither is a Thatcherite. The confusion is, however, convenient for people who really, really dislike Hillary Clinton.

H. Frant:
This pejorative term spread to the academic left in the US. Then some academic discovered the old Peters term, and assumed completely wrongly that there was some connection between the two terms.

Some of us were alive and even adults (young or otherwise) in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Thatcher was elected in late ’79, and the Peters piece appeared in the early ’80s. It’s obvious that Peters was not a Thatcherite. But it’s still possible to argue, as Corey R. does in the OP, that there is *some* connection between the two. One can disagree w that argument (and I myself lean quite strongly in the direction of disagreement) without positing some mass amnesia such that everyone forgot about the Peters piece until some foolish academic stumbled onto it much later and “assumed” there was some connection betw the two terms or phenomena.

The Peters manifesto, and even more the Wash Monthly in general, made a bit of a splash among people who followed politics. I remember occasionally reading The Washington Monthly in those years. Peters hired a lot of young journalists many of whom went on to become well-known writers for glossier, more ‘mainstream’ publications. Those journalists (including the likes of James Fallows, Gregg Easterbrook, and Jonathan Alter, to name only three, of somewhat different ages) proceeded to take the Peters perspective or some variant thereof into the pages of Newsweek and The Atlantic. The idea that neoliberalism in the Peters sense went into some collective black hole of un-memory and was only much later discovered by an academic who misguidedly assumed that there was a connection betw. neoliberalism à la Peters and neoliberalism à la Thatcher is wrong. The degree to which there actually is any connection is (highly) debatable, but I object to the supposition that it’s all a complete misunderstanding, the result of some ignorant academic stumbling onto old copies of the Wash Monthly and leaping to the conclusion that the same word in two different contexts must mean the same thing. I don’t think that’s how it worked or that an academic who did even a minimal amt of research cd persist in an initial naive assumption. A decent historian wd be not be so gullible as to be misled by one word into being unable to draw any distinctions betw the ‘new liberalism’ of Bill Clinton and the ‘neoliberalism’ of Thatcher.

LFC,

I haven’t read all the thread but —

“Some of us were alive and even adults (young or otherwise) in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Thatcher was elected in late ’79, and the Peters piece appeared in the early ’80s. It’s obvious that Peters was not a Thatcherite. But it’s still possible to argue, as Corey R. does in the OP, that there is *some* connection between the two. One can disagree w that argument (and I myself lean quite strongly in the direction of disagreement) without positing some mass amnesia such that everyone forgot about the Peters piece until some foolish academic stumbled onto it much later and “assumed” there was some connection betw the two terms or phenomena.”

I think there is a connection, although I would say the two uses of neoliberalism are different but related.

I think at uni the readings are usually specific in terms of if they are discussing normative neoliberalism of which you could say Peters was a proponent of one variety, and descriptive neoliberalism which is more like saying the period 1970-2005 was a period of neoliberalism, or something like that.

I think it is a bit like post-modernist where you have people who were normative proponents of post-modernism, but also you have people like Harvey or Jameson who use the term postmodernism as a descriptive term to describe a period.

I think in the West neoliberalism and postmodernism overlap without being exactly the same. Lupita has brought out some differences between Western neoliberalism and neoliberalism in Latin America.

Where you might use neoliberalism to talk about governance and economics, you would use postmodernism to discuss arts and culture. You might call some art and culture neoliberal (?) but mostly no one would call governance and economics postmodern.

I think postmodernism was contested a lot more, and contested primarily from a conservative perspective, although also I think a working class perspective (hence Harvey and Jameson’s interest as Marxists of a fashion)

Neoliberal governance and politics on the other hand was embraced by conservatives as way of getting away from the control of big government I guess, but at least in Australia had working class critics using the name economic rationalism as a bit of an insult.

When you think about what the connection is between the two, I think it is that the event and aftermath of WW2 was profoundly destabilising, which paved the way for the 60s. And then some of the more radical parts of the 60s like the riots and perhaps just people’s fear of change sort of paved the way for neoliberalism in the normative sense by someone like Thatcher.

I moved to the country when I was one year old when my parents moved there as part of a bit of a migration of the counter culture to the country that happened in Australia in the 70s. There were quite a lot of people that moved to the area, but also a lot of families that had been here for generations. One man was talking about the hippies moving into the area in the 70s and 80s to the local paper a few months ago and said that towns welcomed them and even though it was a bit of a change they went along with their journey.

My area is a bit different because it is where people really mixed. I remember in high school we got called hippies quite a bit, but one guy in my class one time said we weren’t really hippies we were fake hippies. I just insulted him back as is my wont, and only many years later did I think he must have said it because he grew up in Nimbin before moving to this area, and that was a quite extreme counter culture town, compared to what happened here where the counter culture people mixed with the other residents mostly pretty well.

We didn’t really have a Thatcher in Australia, as I said above the neoliberal economic reforms here were mostly brought in by our Labor government in the 80s and early 90s.

So in Australia perhaps the Peters style of neoliberalism was more prevalent, but without the opposition to unions that Corey Robin says characterises Peters’ neoliberalism.

HF: “Stavins has been working in this field for 25 or 30 years. If you really think he’s wrong, please don’t waste your time talking about it on this blog.”

This blog is supposed to be a distraction from work, not more work. If I ever get this into defensible shape — which, as mentioned above, would involve a whole lot of detailed examination of what was happening year-by-year in terms of command-and-control CAA regulation vs Acid Rain trading program regulation — I’ll write it up. But that’s not actually my job and I’m sort of hoping that some economist gets to it before I do.

would you call it wilderspeak or brucespeak?

ZM @145
I’ve read your comment w interest. The hour is too late here for any substantive comment in reply, however.

I will only add that from a somewhat parochial U.S. standpoint, I think Peters’s role as mentor to and/or incubator of young journalists, quite a few of whom went on to v. successful careers (I mention three of them by name in the second graph of my comment @143) may be just as important as, if not more important than, his ‘manifesto’ and anything else he wrote. (Btw, I think he might have published a memoir; not looking it up.)

Lupita @152

But if I’m not sure which of those I am, how do I tell?

@Lupita

“If you are not a socialist, you are a neoliberal.”

What if I just want to belong to the People’s Front of Judea?

Bruce Wilder:

“No kidding. I never said they are the same thing.”

Fine. Then let’s retire the term “neoliberal” to describe the Clintons, and use some other term. I realize we can’t do it alone, but we can keep from adding to the confusion. Maybe at some point in the future people will have forgotten all about the European term.

> But if I’m not sure which of those I am, how do I tell?

You ask one of the guards, “if I asked the other guard, what would he say?”

Donald,

“I followed the Sanders Friedman Krugman Delong food fight– shameful is pretty much in the eye of the beholder. To my non- economist eye, it looked like a theological spat.”

Alas, just because something is over one’s head doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. This one involved the Sanders campaign claiming that its policies could, within ten years, raise the median income by fifty percent, reduce the poverty rate to three percent, etc., etc.

It didn’t take much expertise to see that the behavior of one side was shameful. In fact, it was pretty much an encapsulation of everything that repelled me about the Bernistas, and, eventually, their leader: the refusal to engage on policy, the strong and loud suggestion that anyone who disagreed with them was corrupt and a liar. (I’m omitting the details because I’m a slow typist.) They’re a blight on political discourse, and thus on democracy.

“Then let’s retire the term “neoliberal” to describe the Clintons, and use some other term”

DLC Democrat, centrist Democrat, something of that sort? In the 90’s the Clintons were known for being this new, improved Democrat (we could use that term too), Democrats who were pro-market, against big government, willing to use military force (failed in Rwanda, but never again), “reformed” welfare, deregulated Wall Street, got tough on crime, etc… And very pro “free trade” agreement.

In the US, I think this is what neoliberal has usually meant.

bruce wilder@ 139

the situation as i see it places the burden of explaining the term on the side that uses it to describe a lump made of people who wildly disagree with each other. the ‘neoliberal consensus’ defined by the …left people…(see, if i use a term here i would be at pains to define it again, let’s just use the extensional set of the term) as i see it is an acceptance of certain market economy principles , including belief in market led development, fundamental importance of economic growth, etc as well as a political worldview that is optimistic about the market led world order.

there are a lot of particular disagreements as the calendar turns but the fundamental perspective difference seems to be this. but as i originally claimed, if the discussion or disagreement is around who is right about the virtues or replaceability of market and market based institutions, strategies etc, then let’s discuss them in those terms. those who are described as neoliberal are mostly respectful of empirically grounded economics.

the CT type left is really important in fulfilling the role of critic and expanding the expectation/aspiration of politics, but doing so does not need to come at the cost of either respect for reality or level of discourse. i don’t see much value in hammering on the neoliberal label. it seems like a sort of moral or character flaw attack. maybe point at specific wrong beliefs etc.

“the situation as i see it places the burden of explaining the term on the side that uses it to describe a lump made of people who wildly disagree with each other. the ‘neoliberal consensus’ defined by the …left people…(see, if i use a term here i would be at pains to define it again, let’s just use the extensional set of the term)…” –awy @165

Not really. If you find the term so inchoate as to be incomprehensible you can read through this thread and many, many others on this blog or delve into literature across multiple disciplines to get a sense of how and why the neoliberal term is deployed in the way that it is. Anyway, it seems like you’ve got a decent start on grasping the import of it, but…

“i don’t see much value in hammering on the neoliberal label. it seems like a sort of moral or character flaw attack. maybe point at specific wrong beliefs etc.”

It’s not ad hominem . It’s a term of analysis. Perhaps if you start from this premise you’ll see differently.

“The good old days were not killed by the DLC; they were already dead.” –Howard Frant @166

Complete non-sequitur. Or is your point that everything about Bernie Sanders’ politics died a pathetic death in 1984? So, you know, wake up and smell reality, Bernistas.

By the way, what exactly are Bernistas anyway? Care to define that term? It sounds admirably objective.

I’d hypothesise that some of the hysteria about neoliberalism in US may be driven by nostalgia for a ‘purer’ capitalism of the past (and likewise the obsession with corporate capitalism and the division of management and ownership as the root of all ills). Also since criticising capitalism and advocating socialism is unsayable in many USian political circles, objections to capitalism may be vocalised as objection to ‘neoliberalism’. (Some of the criticisms about ‘neoliberalism’ on this thread are definitely just criticisms of capitalism.)

@167

how is it that you want people who wildly disagree with each other to characterize this rather hostile label that they are grouped under? that does not seem fair at all.

Brad DeLong routinely calls himself a neoliberal, so Howard Frant’s whole “I am not aware that DeLong ever identified himself as a neoliberal. I’m not sure he’d even know what you meant” is, well, kind of uninformed. But I’d given up by that point.

awy @ 165: [“neoliberalism”] is an acceptance of certain market economy principles , including belief in market led development, fundamental importance of economic growth, etc as well as a political worldview that is optimistic about the market led world order.

. . . if the discussion or disagreement is around who is right about the virtues or replaceability of market and market based institutions, strategies etc, then let’s discuss them in those terms. those who are described as neoliberal are mostly respectful of empirically grounded economics.

One reason “neoliberal” has become a bitter epithet in the mouths of its critics and detractors is that it has been revealed by political policy practice to be not much more than b.s., when it is not simply a pretext and apology for fraud and kleptocracy.

Neoclassical economics supplied a powerful rhetorical engine built around the idea of the self-regulating market and the Friedmanite conservative libertarians were ready to carry on an endless dialogue using that same rhetorical engine, creating the appearance of political deliberation and contention using a common language referring to consensus reality. But, the policy agenda was oriented to the opportunities for the elite — particularly RP’s managerial class perhaps — to profit from dismantling the institutions which had protected common and mass interests.

The deregulation of the financial sector that led to a global financial crisis, mass foreclosures, a prolonged period mass unemployment and stagnating wages ought to be a wakeup call on the functional nature of neoliberalism. Ditto the Euro crisis that has kept several European countries in economic misery.

Sure, you can accept the neoliberal pretension, accept their premises and self-regard . . . or you can keep your sanity and integrity.

Sure, Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman are going to say that they are guided by sound economic analysis and a careful consideration of empirics. What else are they going to say?

I don’t think an objective observer has much in the way of sufficient evidence to reject the hypothesis that neoliberalism is just an ideological fascade for elite rip-offs and incompetence (that facilitates rip-offs). What we know now ought to make us extremely skeptical of neoliberal claims and pretensions.

Not sure if that sheep herding quip is more insulting to me or to the people whom you think I am herding. Gratuitous at any rate.

We are talking about liberalism and then liberalization. We can move liberalize the movement in goods, the movement in money capital, we can ‘deliberalize” the flow of ideas and then call strong IPRs liberalism, we can liberalize the movement of people, we can liberalize the movement of productive capital (which seems to be in many ways what TPP is about at least according to a blog entry by mainstream economist Tim Taylor) or we can liberalize the workplace by making it more difficult to unionize.

It would help serious discussion, acceptable or not, to clarify what we are talking about here. We may want to oppose all these forms of liberalization or just some. It’s an open question.

Perhaps a quick note near the end of this thread about my own possibly minority position:

My interest in neoliberalism as a practice epithet mode of reproduction is what makes it sell. As someone attracted to autonomist theories of agency and complicity in the working class or supposedly oppressed groups I need to look at the aspects and mechanisms of an ideology that make it attractive to those that an outsider objective observer elitist or vanguardist might claim are its victims.

Because neoliberalism is not imposed by force or coercion anymore, it at a minimum tolerated by millions who are supposed to be victimized by it, as claimed by ideologues on all sides of the political spectrum. Who, as I have learned, will be most displeased by any attempt to connect gay or trans rights with the privatization of public utilities and outsourcing of the welfare state.

So for instance the connections between cliches like “free to be you and me” or “get the gov’t off our backs” or choice and diversity on the one hand and the claims of oppression by dominant social structures on the other hand and market liberalization on the gripping hand are areas of study.

In any case, neoliberalism is our current political economy, we are all neoliberals and there is no outside neoliberalism, and in point of fact, it appears we like neoliberalism quite a bit.

The important and interesting question for a communist or radical is not “who is the boss and how does she rule” but “why don’t we rise up”

The commitment to revolutionary possibility necessitates a recognition of complicity, not as guilt but as agency.

The successful operation of liberalism in nascent capitalism and neoliberalism in communicative capitalism requires the internalization of myths of individual freedom and social oppression as a process of atomization and de-collectivization.

And I am Spartacus. :)

bob mcm: “My interest in neoliberalism as a practice epithet mode of reproduction is what makes it sell.”

The non-ironic benefits of neoliberalism:

1. Better than the alternatives! If the alternatives are a right-wing authoritarian state, a somewhat less right-wing nationalist state, or a socialist state that has signally failed to protect its citizens and is effectively neoliberal anyways.

2. Neoliberalism is opposed to the raw deal you may have gotten by being born the wrong ethnicity, gender, or with the wrong sexual preference. That’s a huge deal for many people.

3. An operating world system. Once again, this is better than a *not* operating world system, most of the time. Under neoliberalism China, Europe, the U.S. etc. all work together and preserve stability.

4. A pathway for personal ambition, if you’re a technocratic type.

5. Preserves social hierarchies that people secretly like if they’re a step up from the bottom. Keeps down people who you don’t like.

6. GDP growth, very good for highly indebted countries.
7. Participation in the global system (as second class members for 3rd world countries, but still).
8. Modernity (do not underestimate the power of its allure in poor countries).

@LFC

Isn’t there a difference betw freedom for individuals (personal rights) and ‘freedom’ for business/capital (property rights)?

In Latin America, de-criminalization of abortion (under some circumstances) and equal marriage have been instituted by left-wing governments. Also, in practical terms, I see no difference between highly organized countries passing legislation tolerant of abortion and homosexuality and chaotic countries, such as Mexico, where the state does not have the organization to enforce anti-abortion and anti-gay practices anyway, so everybody ends up doing as s/he pleases. It feel just as free.

I know nothing about your fancy ‘personal rights’, but one thing I know for sure: in a free country one can take a sip of beer from a bottle. In public.

Or kiss the boy or girl of their choice.

Re: whether Lupita’s 7 is a subset of RP’s 3

I have vivid memories of talking with friends and acquaintances in Greece in roughly 2010 about the developing debt crisis. I had done back-of-the-envelope calculations and thought it obvious that “the only way out” would be some kind of exit from the Euro. But, that kind of reasoning had no purchase in Greece, especially with anyone who aspired to be middle-class or “European”. Greece’s own currency, even Greece’s sovereignty, were tainted by an experience of cronyism and other symptoms of political corruption. The Euro represented progress toward 1st world institutions.

Howard Frant @166

‘BTW, it strikes me that what everyone here knows but no one has mentioned is 1984 (the year, that is). 1. New Democrat vs. Old Democrat for nomination. 2. Old Democrat wins nomination. 3. Old Democrat is rejected by the electorate (oh, them) in second-biggest (?) electoral-vote landslide in history.’

No, not second, fifth.

I’m actually writing about neoliberalism now, and I’d like to put some of it here for the (no doubt) robust criticism of CT readers, but it seems a bit cheeky. Maybe just a short piece:

‘Much of the political analysis in [literature in my thesis topic area] is concerned with changes in the late twentieth century, particularly globalisation and neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has been described by David Harvey (Harvey 2007) as:

“a theory of political economic practices proposing that human well-being can best be advanced by the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterized by private property rights, individual liberty, unencumbered markets, and free trade” (Harvey 2007)

Neoliberalism has been characterised by governments restricting welfare benefits and introducing private sector [market?] principles to publicly funded and government provided services, for example through changing governance structures from direct government provision to government owned but arm’s-length corporations, funding non-government organisations to provide services, or selling them off to for-profit corporations (privatisation). This movement has also been described as “economic rationalism” in Australia, or “neo-classical economics” (Stretton 1999) , however I use the term ‘neoliberalism’ as a general term to describe a broad political position with advocates on both the left and the right. …

[My beef with this thread is that people seem to be using neoliberalism either as (a) a swear word (b) a synonym for ‘the universe’ [à la Cde Bob] (c) for what I would term ‘managerialism’ [or perhaps managerial capitalism, technocracy, Taylorism, etc] – and I don’t think I’ve ever come across this usage outside of the CT comments section (if anyone has references though I’d be delighted to peruse ’em…)]

Val,

As well as the fall of the USSR there was also the introduction of economic reforms into China with the Deng Xiaoping government, which are along neoliberal lines, apart from in a Chinese way.

Lupita says above one of the appealing things about neoliberalism was the allure of Modernity.

I think it is a bit more complicated than that, depending on how you are defining Modernity.

In China the neoliberal era coincided with the 5th Generation of film makers. Compared to the 2nd 3rd and 4th generation of film makers the 5th generation were less part of the state apparatus and engaged in what can be said to be critiques of the communist government, generally through films which were set in historical periods and explored tradition.

While Chinese films have moved on from era this now, I think this period really coincided ideas that modernism — in the Chinese context being communist modernism — had not fulfilled all its promises, and also that it could be seen as part of a continuity with historical Imperial China with similar problems emerging between individuals and the collective, and also with feelings that a lot of Chinese people didn’t want to discard all Chinese traditions in the name of modernism and communism, and also with ideas about gender in China where maybe women did not want to be the *same* as men which I think had been sort of the cultural revolution gender equity goal.

I think this ties into what in the West tends to be described pejoratively as “identity politics” here on CT…

I’m interested in how you see ‘Chinese neoliberalism’ ZM – I’m a bit ignorant about China, to my shame

In the area I’m looking at (debates in public health in the last 20 years) I got the impression that people were sometimes using ‘globalisation’ and ‘neoliberalism’ for a similar phenomenon – deregulation, privatisation etc. – but globalisation was a less politically charged term.

I think you could see globalisation as the vehicle for neoliberal capitalism – via those opportunities for cheaper, deregulated centres for manufacturing (and the creation of new markets). I use the term neoliberal capitalism because what happened in wealthy countries (at least the Anglosphere) is that capitalism got deregulated. However I suppose the threat of offshoring was also used to pressure governments to deregulate, so it’s a checked and egg question,

engels,

I think that it is not a great argument that it is bad that wages in advanced economy countries are staying the same or moving down and wages in poorer countries are moving up.

If you care about equity then you would have to support some sort of alignment with incomes in all countries, instead of a situation where people in advanced economy countries earn much more for the same work as people in less advanced economy countries.

Maintaining global inequality between countries is unfair socially, but also it will be disastrous for the environment if the only way which people from advanced economies accept as progressing towards global equity is rich countries incomes continuing to grow and poorer countries having to try to catch up.

Even Nestle had an internal report in 2009 (released on Wikileaks) acknowledging that it would destroy the environment if people all around the world adopted food consumption patterns the same Northern American ones —

“It is clear that current developed country meat-based diets and patterns of water usage do not provide a blueprint for the planet’s future. Based on present trends, Nestle believes that the world will face a cereals shortfall of as much as 30 percent by 2025. [Nestle] stated it will take a combination of strategies to avert a crisis.”

In Australia we didn’t have such a severe economic downturn with the GFC as the USA and UK so we have been quite lucky in that regard. But I think it is really inspiring a lot of what has been happening in places like Detroit as a response:

https://youtu.be/8uYgFRXz8bM

Donald

Possible, of course, that we just saw different stuff. But what I saw was that the Sanders campaign eagerly pushed the Friedman analysis to the media, and that after the numbers were criticized they didn’t say oops, never mind, but rather called the critics the Gang of Four and doubled down on the numbers. So it doesn’t look to me like the alleged Clinton people were just trying to pick a fight. Rather, the Sanders people responded by insulting and impugning the motives of the others. Then after they got one rather cursory and unconvincing letter from Galbraith, the response was, Well, this proves we were right! We demand that the Gang of Four plus one apologize! Yes, it was shameful. And then there was “Friedman? He has no connection with us!” And “Oh, he didn’t screw up! He’s just heterodox!” (After Galbraith had said the assumptions were completely standard.)

And this is typical of what I see on social media– an unwillingness to acknowledge the existence of differences of opinion that are honest. It’s always “He’s a Clinton shill” and “He wants a job with Clinton” and “That’s a totally Clinton newspaper.” I’ve never heard anyone called a Sanders shill. And, as Dukakis once said, a fish rots from the head down.

Yes, Romer was way low on predicting the effects of the recession, but that was a very early estimate, before all the numbers were in, which the Republicans promptly turned into a “promise” by Obama. Doing that stuff is hard. Was Friedman better in his predictions? Oh, he didn’t do any? Because that’s not, you know, his field (economic history of the labor movement)? Was Bernie saying the numbers were too low?

On health care, the criticism I recall from newly minted Clinton shill Ezra Klein, not to mention Clinton shill Paul Krugman, is that there wasn’t really much there. Bernie was promising people no copayments or deductibles, not mentioning that Medicare has them as well as a lot of European countries. Britain is much cheaper than us, why? Not just because they’re single-payer, but also because they pay doctors a lot less. Maybe that’s justified, but let’s have a little public discussion about it. People think they won’t have to deal with being turned down by the insurance company; no one tells them they’ll have to deal with being turned down by the government. And I distinctly recall Hillary using the word “relitigate” as what we shouldn’t be doing about health care. As for saying Paul Krugman supported it, I recall her saying that about her Wall Street plan, not health care. Little did she know that Bernistas were onto Krugman’s shilling.

@J-D, self-determination?

Layman @216

I’m afraid I would need to see that chain of reasoning spelled out at greater length before I could make sense of it.

Layman @219

If you could find an example of two countries which are unequal in economic terms because one has intentionally chosen a different lifestyle from the other for philosophical reasons, that analysis would apply. I don’t think you can.

@ J-D

First, I would not foreclose the idea that one factor driving varying levels of wealth among countries is self-determination. Second, if we should strive to make all countries equally wealthy (on a per capita basis), should we ignore their preferences in order to achieve that? Third, since it is unlikely that all countries can be as wealthy as the wealthiest countries today, because of ecological limits, does this mean we should strive to reduce wealth and standards of living in the wealthiest countries, against their collective will?

Layman @222

I wrote that I don’t think you can find an example of of two countries which are unequal in economic terms because one has intentionally chosen a different lifestyle from the other for philosophical reasons. I note that you haven’t even tried. I did not write ‘we should strive to make all countries equally wealthy’. I do think people’s preferences should be taken into account, but I can’t make sense of the idea of countries having preferences, and you haven’t given any evidence of the existence of the kind of preferences you refer to.

Ze K @224

The organisation of global society is a concern of all people in it.

Ronan(rf) @229

Policy choices made at elite level are choices made by some people for others.

Ze K @213

As long as we’re not meddling with other countries, global inequality between countries is not our concern.

Stated in this bald, unqualified form, this is an insane comment, like about two-thirds of what Ze K writes.

There are several reasons why “global inequality between countries” might be a concern. As an empirical matter, income and other economic-indicator gaps between countries have been narrowing in recent decades and income/wealth gaps within most countries have been growing. But it is nonetheless the case that a world in which a country with, say, five or six percent of the world’s pop. uses roughly 25 percent of the world’s energy resources (or other resources) might well reflect a skewed system that raises significant moral and political questions.

There is a substantial lit. on global distributive justice and related issues (as they relate to both inequality within and betw countries and absolute poverty) and for Ze K to toss the whole matter overboard in a single sentence is typical of his know-nothing approach to commenting. Ze K clearly knows a good deal about certain subjects, e.g. politics in Russia and the former Soviet bloc, but unfortunately his comments range much more widely than that, resulting in inanities of the sort just noted.

That’s why I repeated every time: ‘as long as we’re not meddling’, and ‘as long as we’re not robbing’.

I guess I didn’t take your intended implication from “robbing”. My view is that such inequalities do not *have* to be the result of theft or (in the classic Marxian sense) exploitation, though they certainly can be in some cases.

The “philosophy” wasn’t the only factor, but was part of it.

Yup, and also the case for Europe v US imo (crudely, US seems to prioritise consumption over leisure time, relative to Euro countries at a similar level if development)

‘as long as we’re not meddling’, and ‘as long as we’re not robbing’

… and helping and giving us foreign aid and charity, looking after our security, protecting us from communism, terrorism, drugs, sexism, racism, and oppression, or bringing civilization, truth, democracy, freedom, and modernity. Just leave us alone. Stop bombing us. Thank you.

Charming as ever, Corey.

You have totally missed the point of my comment. We were talking about neoliberalism. 99% of Sanders voters (or any voters) have never heard of neoliberalism. Only a few academics have.

Lemann notes that it was ironic that the very policies being advocated by upper-middle-class people like him, of sweeping away old corrupt structures to help people at the bottom, ended up creating space for the rich to get greater power. I noted that it was ironic that the (mostly upper-middle-class) critics of neoliberalism would probably, if successful, do the same thing. To spell it out, by sweeping away the corrupt old Democratic Party they would end up helping the Republicans and hurting the people at the bottom.

As for facts, they’re tricky to find sometimes. Bernie voters are more likely to be single. Is there something about being single that makes people want to vote for Bernie, or it is just that young people are more likely to be single? Similarly, young people have lower incomes than older people. I’d love to see the income figures controlling to age, but so far I haven’t. So– at a given age, are poor people more likely to vote for Bernie? Someone may know, but I don’t.

Really, Corey, this sort of slanging watch is the best you van do? My point was that there’s more to finding facts than listing a bunch of numbers you found somewhere. Sometime it takes effort, for example, to understand numbers.

The whole point of the above exchange was that (in my view) justifying low wages and high unemployment in your own society by ‘reducing global inequality’ is brazen bullshit

I’m not unsympathetic to that but if you think inequalities don’t matter unless they arise through exploitation than logically you appear to think inequalities between employed and unemployed workers in the same state don’t matter.

This was the video I was thinking of

This week, 175 Parties to the UNFCCC signed the historic Paris Climate Change Agreement – the largest ever number of countries to sign an international treaty in one go. Amid all the jubilation, there were stark warnings of the accelerating impacts of climate change and fact that the worst impacts can only be avoided by leaving the bulk of fossil fuels in the ground.
“Our young mothers are becoming climate refugees”, said Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, civil society representative from Chad, in a stirring speech.. Watch the full video.

https://youtu.be/n1b7ZskKukE

Lupita, you wrote something before about how work against climate change and anti-poverty had to go together, and how it was bourgeois to focus only on the first. But this is why I don’t agree. Working on climate change means primarily that wealthy countries have to change their own economies, because they are the main sources of GHGs. (I’m including China as a wealthy country for this purpose.) Working on poverty gives wealthy countries carte blanche to interfere in any way they like anywhere they like. Of course there are actual things that can be done against poverty, but not, I think, from that distance away.

Maybe 8-10 years ago. It was before intersectionalism and #solidarityisforwhitewomen, when it was still perfectly acceptable for 1st world feminists to be as patronizing and condescending towards 3rd world women as IMF neoliberals were towards Latin American socialists. Both manifestations of Western supremacy were the norm here at CT.

Very late in this thread, but this article by FDB mentions some of the points discussed — how Chinese commissars and the rest of the transnational class cooperate, how “income equality” across national borders is used as a tool to directly attack workers when it’s convenient to do so. The last time FDR was discussed here he was completely discredited because he’d written some sexist comments on a blog five years ago, but amazingly enough the man still has enough gall to keep writing.

No contradiction, but also no point of distinction at which to stop and rest, or take responsibility. For DeLong, that’s the excuse for another rendition of “There is no alternative” rather than an incisive analysis of what’s gone wrong that financial entrepreneurs can accumulate wealth while devastating the lives of millions to an extent scarcely equalled since Caesar pillaged Gaul to pay for an election campaign at Rome.