"What Hath Neoliberalism Wrought?"

"The endlessly iterated message of this lobbying, Oreskes and Conway say, is that economic and political freedoms are indivisible. Any restriction on the first is a threat to the second. This is the 'big myth' of their title, and they show us, in somewhat fire-hose detail, how a lot of people spent a lot of time and money putting that idea into the mind of the American public. The book is an immense scholarly feat, but the authors insist that it is not just an 'academic intervention.' They have a political purpose. They think that one role of government has been to correct for market failures, and, if government is discredited, how is it going to correct for what may be the biggest market failure of all: climate change?"

At The New Yorker, Louis Menand reviews Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway's The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.

"A Deeper, More Fundamental Point"

"A public health crisis that demands a coordinated, powerful public response, leveraging all the power and reach of the federal government, meets an ideology that cannot accept a robust role for the public sector and believes the free market will solve all. An incredibly unequal economic crisis driven by a collapse in customers, in which the wealthy are mostly doing fine while everyday people teeter on the brink of generational ruin, meets an ideology that cares only for the prospects of those at the top and sees tax cuts as the only useful economic answer. A fast moving, novel virus meets an ideology that disdains scientific expertise and treats empirical research as a threat to business interests. A disaster that exploits existing racial disparities meets an ideology that refuses to accept the reality of structural inequity." 

At Politico, Michael Linden and Sammi Aibinder write that "COVID was the test that conservatism was built to fail."

"It's Long Past Time to Chart a Different Path"

"Without the assumption that shareholders care only for profits, the entirety of Friedman's argument collapses. According to his own logic, if shareholder concerns are dominant and shareholders care about something other than profits, then profits cannot be the sole corporate mission. Friedman appears to recognize this weakness: He nods to the possibility of forming corporations as hospitals, schools, or for other charitable purposes. He also allows that sole proprietors, and presumably partnerships, may manage their businesses however they please, though he passes over them as largely irrelevant. For Friedman, the big prize is driving the activity of large corporations exclusively towards profit seeking, and he leaves no room for the possibility that such enterprises could pursue both profit and public benefit." 

At Democracy, Jonathan Soros criticizes the Friedman Doctrine fifty years later.

"Capitalism's Useful Idiots"

"Although very few people I knew voted for Reagan, affluent college-educated people, liberals and otherwise, tended not to disagree ferociously about politics in the 1980s and '90s, and certainly not about economics. In retrospect, the rough consensus about economics looks like the beginning of an unspoken decades-long class solidarity among the bourgeoisie. Affluent college-educated people, Democrats as well as Republicans, began using the phrase socially liberal but fiscally conservative to describe their politics, which meant low taxes for higher-net-worth individuals (another new term) in return for tolerance of . . . whatever, as long as it didn't involve big new social programs that affluent people would have to pay for. It was a libertarianism lite that kept everything nice and clubbable and it did at least have the virtue of ideological consistency."

The Atlantic runs an excerpt of Kurt Andersen's Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History.

As does The New York Times.

Anti-Intellectualism on the American Right

"The conservative portrait of higher education, if true, is devastating. However, it has a number of serious flaws. The first is that it is empirically inaccurate. America’s universities are not monolithically left-wing. Rather, a battery of recent evidence on higher education show that although the professoriate tends to lean left, conservative students and faculty continue to flourish in significant numbers. Moreover, as the philosopher Charles Taylor argued at length in his 1992 book The Ethics of Authenticity, 'nihilism' has never been an accurate or fair account of the American counterculture. Rather, Bloom mistook a disagreement over morals as a rejection of them."

Jason Blakely at The Atlantic discusses "the rise in sharply hostile ways of talking about the universities among conservatives in the last fifty years."

"Any Business Deal Appears Like a Small Battle in a Never-Ending War for Financial Supremacy"

"His rejection of Friedman's vision of trade is clearly not a considered view but a gut reaction. The story he tells himself about capitalism is one that involves a high-stakes game of winners and losers—those who beat, and those who get beaten. As such, it seems axiomatic to him: In any deal, whether it involves individuals or independent nations, only one side can win. As a matter of economic science, Donald Trump may be wrong, but with respect to the sensibility that guides his approach to business and colors his understanding of capitalism, it may be the case that the GOP nominee is simply a man of his time—and ours."

John Paul Rollert at The Atlantic describes Donald Trump as an avatar of "Sociopathic Capitalism."

"Looking at Historical Experience, There Is No Obvious Relationship between the Minimum Wage and Unemployment"

"This conviction that the minimum wage hurts the poor is an example of economism in action. Economists have many different opinions on the subject, based on different theories and research studies, but when it comes to public debate, one particular result of one particular model is presented as an unassailable economic theorem. (Politicians advocating for a higher minimum wage, by contrast, tend to avoid economic models altogether, instead arguing in terms of fairness or helping the poor.) This happens partly because the competitive market model taught in introductory economics classes is simple, clear, and memorable. But it also happens because there is a large interest group that wants to keep the minimum wage low: businesses that rely heavily on cheap labor."

James Kwak at The Atlantic argues that "introductory economics can be more misleading than it is helpful."

"The Dead-Serious Ideas Undergirding Their Behavior"

"To liberals, it may sound baffling and incomprehensible that ordinary political arguments about taxes and regulation could outweigh his authoritarianism. Liberals generally see economic policy as a normal disagreement, apart from and subordinate to larger questions about democracy and structure of government.

"Most conservatives, however, do not see these issues this way. The conservative movement treats small government as a first-order question of liberty, alongside or even above political liberty. Liberals treat economic policy on pragmatic grounds—the point of Medicaid is to help poor people get health care, and the point of the Clean Air Act is to create more breathable air. Expanding government is the means toward those discrete ends. Conservatives have discrete goals, like economic growth, but also larger ideological ones. As Milton Friedman once put it, '"freedom" in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so "economic freedom" is an end in itself to a believer in freedom.' While it may seem strange to liberals, for economic conservatives, the fight to slash down the size of government is itself tantamount to a fight against authoritarianism."

 

Jonathan Chait at New York explains why most conservatives have reconciled themselves to Donald Trump.

"Is the Nobel Prize in Economics More Similar to the One for Physics or the One for Literature?"

"While nearly all of the Nobel Prize categories were established in the will of the Swedish scientist Alfred Nobel, the award for economics, which this year will be announced on Monday, October 10, was not created until decades after his death. In the late 1960s, Sweden's central bank was actively pushing for the country to pursue a more market-friendly approach, and the prize, which was established in 1968 to commemorate the bank’s 300th anniversary, became a tool with which to support this campaign."

Jeremy Venook at The Atlantic talks with Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg about Offer and Gabriel Söderberg's new book, The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn.

TINA Has Turned

"What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it's not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed. For Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to develop an economic Apollo programme, a conscious attempt to design a new system, tailored to the demands of the 21st century."

George Monbiot in The Guardian previews his new book, How Did We Get Into This Mess?

"Antipathy to Expanded Government Is Based Ultimately on Philosophical Opposition"

"The events leading up to and including Paris are completely consistent with the optimistic hypothesis, and deeply inconsistent with the negative one. The major emitters have implemented dramatic policy changes—a sweeping array of greenhouse-gas regulations in the United States, massive green-energy support in China and India. China appears to have already reached peak coal, and its energy intensity has fallen, allowing it to provide more energy to its people without polluting more. There is no plausible explanation for all of these policies and results except that these countries actually want to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions and are at least willing to try concerted international action to accomplish that.
It is also certainly possible that global willpower to reduce emissions will weaken, or collapse entirely. Future events cannot be proven. Only rigid dogma like American conservatism (or, for that matter, Marxism) gives its adherents a mortal certainty about the fate of government policy that a liberal cannot match, and should not want to."

Jonathan Chait in New York describes why conservatives can't combat climate change.

Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen heute "Conservative Economics Tradition"?

"Elsewhere in the world, conservatives are perfectly willing to regulate or sometimes socialize industries or rig markets in the pursuit of social objectives.  Conservative social objectives, however, are different from those of the center-left.  What distinguishes most conservative parties and movements in the advanced capitalist world is their greater degree of nationalism and familism, compared to center-left supra-nationalism and individualism.  Nationalism has often led conservatives in Britain, France and Germany to support protectionism or the nationalization of strategic industries.  And conservative familism leads, in countries like Germany, to a preference for stay-at-home mothers, as opposed to the working mothers in Sweden and France whose careers are enabled by state-provided day-care.
"Thus the puzzle:"


Michael Lind in Salon asks the question.

"The Turn Toward Capitalism"

"Today, confronting the twin pressures of mounting income inequality and escalating concerns about climate change, partisans of economic growth face stronger opposition than at any time in decades. Even if continued growth were desirable, an increasing number of economists are convinced that a decrease from the last century’s norm will be unavoidable in the century ahead. It is a strange tableau: while economists speculate on growth's decline, a swath of the historical profession, eager to challenge the tyranny of economists, has attempted to make modernity into the story of economic growth—a story that the economists of a prior generation did more than any other group to canonize. Understanding how we arrived at this intellectual crossroads requires a history of its own."


Timothy Shenk in The Nation looks at the rise of "capitalism studies."

"Rooted in Decades of Intellectual Malfeasance"

"Now, it's true that the relative handful of economists claiming that stimulus can't possibly work, or that slashing government spending is actually expansionary, have a much higher profile than their numbers or their influence within the profession warrants. Why? Partly, the answer is that the news media—especially but not only partisan media like The Wall Street Journal's editorial page — have promoted the views of economists they like for political reasons. Partly, also, it's because politicians listen to economists who tell them what they want to hear. I'm not saying that mainstream economists bear none of the blame; the decades-long retreat from Keynes has undoubtedly allowed old fallacies to make a comeback. But austerity mania has to a large extent spread despite mainstream economics, not because of it."


In The New York Times, Paul Krugman reviews Jeff Madrick's Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World.

"Those with More Education than Money Against Those with More Money than Education"

"Too often, conservatives dupe themselves. They wrap themselves in closed information systems based upon pretend information. In this closed information system, banks can collapse without injuring the rest of the economy, tax cuts always pay for themselves and Congressional earmarks cause the federal budget deficit. Even the market collapse has not shaken some conservatives out of their closed information system. It enfolded them more closely within it. This is how to understand the Glenn Beck phenomenon. Every day, Beck offers alternative knowledge—an alternative history of the United States and the world, an alternative system of economics, an alternative reality. As corporate profits soar, the closed information system insists that the free-enterprise system is under assault. As prices slump, we are warned of imminent hyperinflation. As black Americans are crushed under Depression-level unemployment, the administration’s policies are condemned by some conservatives as an outburst of Kenyan racial revenge against the white overlord."

David Frum in The New York Times offers lessons from the last two years.

Galbraith versus Friedman: or, Fact versus Faith, part two?

Writing in The Boston Globe, Harvard fellow Richard Parker contrasts two icons of twentieth-century economics.