Neoliberalism

Occupy Wall Street Protesters in Zuccotti Park, NYC, November 15, 2011

It’s a no win scenario until basically elites figure out that at the end of the day, as I like to tell my American hedge fund friends, the Hamptons is not a defensible position. […] Eventually people will come for you.”

–Mark Blyth, Professor of International Political Economy, Brown University

The stagflation of the 1970s presented a major challenge to the Keynesian economic theory that predominated in industrialized Western nations from the New Deal through the prosperous post-World War II years. To address this challenge, governments began experimenting with two alternative schools of thought: the libertarian methodological individualism of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich August von Hayek, and members of The Austrian School, and the monetarist policies of The University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman.

These schools of thought form the foundation of neoliberal economic policy, which has grown to become the dominant economic world order today. It’s basic features include: privatization of the commons and public goods and services (transportation systems, public utilities, hospitals, schools, prisons, public lands, natural resources); austerity (cutting public spending on education, healthcare, pensions, public works, social welfare programs for the poor); deregulation (rolling back environmental regulation, labor laws, consumer protection legislation, etc.); and globalization (liberating private enterprise from any form of state control or intervention, regardless of how much social damage it might cause).

Decades of global neoliberal policy have been devastating for all but the tiniest minority of global elites. We’ve witnessed a massive redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle classes to the richest 1% of the population. Bubble-burst recessionary cycles have deprived millions of their homes and their jobs, leaving them deeply in debt. First World workers with First World expenses must compete with workers in emerging markets on wages. Poverty has increased dramatically. Unelected, unaccountable technocratic elites end-run democratic steering to transfer their casino capitalist investment losses onto the public books, while forcing governments to “tighten their belts” through growth and job-killing austerity. Deep austerity in Greece and other European nations threaten the very existence of the European Union.

In our essays addressing the subject of neoliberalism, we acknowledge and attempt to further articulate the central role that neoliberal capitalism has played (and continues to play) in creating the grim political, economic, and environmental predicaments we all face today. We also attempt to unpack and understand the ways in which unfolding events–from the Occupy Movement and the populist appeal of Bernie Sanders, to Brexit and the election of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency of the United States–are to varying degrees a reaction to the effects of neoliberal economic policy.