"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.