neoliberal agenda

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pages: 177 words: 50,167

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics by John B. Judis

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, mass immigration, means of production, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, Winter of Discontent

John Judis, whose track record is unrivaled, is the ideal author to tackle the subject, and he has done a superb job, placing contemporary trends, including the rise of Donald Trump, in historical perspective. Judis demonstrates the crucial role of the 2008 recession both here and in Europe in discrediting the neoliberal agenda. This is must reading.” —Thomas Edsall, New York Times columnist “The Populist Explosion blends groundbreaking reporting with insightful scholarship in the best guide yet to the most important political phenomenon of our time.” —Michael Lind, author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States “John Judis demonstrates again why he is one of America’s best political journalists.

The working and middle classes, with some justification, believed they would have to pay the bulk of the taxes to support programs that they believed would primarily benefit minorities and the poor and not themselves. This opposition to spending (and to any tax increases thought to support it) was capsulized in a general opposition to “Washington” and to “big government.” Many Democrats initially resisted the neoliberal agenda, but attempts in the first two years of the Carter administration to strengthen labor law, progressive tax reform, consumer regulation, and campaign finance reform were beaten back by Republicans and the business lobbies. In addition, Democratic policy makers found themselves hamstrung by the combination of growing unemployment and inflation—the result in the latter case of rising energy and food prices.

By the late 1970s, the Carter administration had acquiesced to supply-side business tax cuts and to a monetarist strategy of using high interest rates and rising unemployment to curb inflation. Over the next 12 years, Democrats, led by the “new Democrats,” would accept other key aspects of the neoliberal agenda, including trade pacts like NAFTA that eased foreign investment, deregulation of finance, and immigration measures to accommodate unskilled and later highly skilled guest workers. Democrats would continue to fight Republicans on some social spending measures and on income and inheritance tax changes, but once the Republicans won control of Congress in 1994, Democrats would be forced into uncomfortable compromises.


pages: 221 words: 46,396

The Left Case Against the EU by Costas Lapavitsas

anti-work, antiwork, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, capital controls, central bank independence, collective bargaining, declining real wages, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, hiring and firing, low interest rates, machine translation, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, post-work, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck

Contents Cover Copyright Acknowledgements 1 The European Union and the Left Fragmentation and retreat of democracy The challenge for the Left Notes 2 The Evolution of the EU: From Maastricht to Now Neoliberalism and hegemony in the EU – drawing on Hayek Neoliberalism and state monopoly over money Creating the euro: a lever of neoliberalism and conditional German hegemony The ‘architectural flaws’ of the euro The broader context of conditional German hegemony Notes 3 The Ascendancy of Germany and the Division of Europe A distinctive financialized economy The defeat of German labour in the 1990s The competitive advantage of Germany and the creation of the Southern periphery The unstable core of the EMU and the Central European periphery Notes 4 The Eurozone Crisis: Class Interests and Hegemonic Power The crisis erupts Imposing a neoliberal agenda An unstable and fraught equilibrium Notes 5 Greece in the Iron Trap of the Euro The proximate causes of the Greek crisis Long-term weaknesses of the Greek economy The lenders impose bail-outs and bring disaster Class and national interests in the Greek disaster The political débâcle of SYRIZA Notes 6 Seeking Democracy, Sovereignty, and Socialism Democracy and sovereignty in the EU, once again The impossibility of radical reform A class-based stance for the Left What is the Left to do?

Unfortunately for the countries of the Southern periphery their possession of a common currency, the euro, meant that there were no foreign exchange rates that could fall. The Eurozone ‘sudden stop’ crisis acquired a peculiar and sinister form, forcing the economies and societies of the Southern periphery to take the full impact of the shock. The implications proved dramatic for workers and the poor as well as for interstate relations. Imposing a neoliberal agenda The response of the EU to the shock of 2010 transformed a crisis of capital flows, international trade, and external debt into an economic and social disaster for the periphery, especially in Greece. It affirmed the hold of neoliberalism across the EMU while also revealing the sharp side of German hegemony.

The ESM is an unaccountable body, lacking entirely in democratic credentials, which commands substantial money funds, in the region of 500 billion euros, that are available for lending to countries in crisis. It has the power to impose severe ‘conditionality’ for the loans it makes, thus being able to impose a neoliberal agenda. By creating the ESM the EU could potentially develop its own IMF to act as the policing agent of neoliberal reform.11 Fourth, and crucially for growth and employment, debtor countries were obliged to achieve fiscal stability through the imposition of austerity, that is, by reducing public expenditure and raising taxes.


pages: 318 words: 85,824

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, debt deflation, declining real wages, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, labour market flexibility, land tenure, late capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Chicago School, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, union organizing, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Winter of Discontent

Faced with social movements that seek collective interventions, therefore, the neoliberal state is itself forced to intervene, sometimes repressively, thus denying the very freedoms it is supposed to uphold. In this situation, however, it can marshal one secret weapon: international competition and globalization can be used to discipline movements opposed to the neoliberal agenda within individual states. If that fails, then the state must resort to persuasion, propaganda or, when necessary, raw force and police power to suppress opposition to neoliberalism. This was precisely Polanyi’s fear: that the liberal (and by extension the neoliberal) utopian project could only ultimately be sustained by resort to authoritarianism.

On the one hand the neoliberal state is expected to take a back seat and simply set the stage for market functions, but on the other it is supposed to be activist in creating a good business climate and to behave as a competitive entity in global politics. In its latter role it has to work as a collective corporation, and this poses the problem of how to ensure citizen loyalty. Nationalism is an obvious answer, but this is profoundly antagonistic to the neoliberal agenda. This was Margaret Thatcher’s dilemma, for it was only through playing the nationalism card in the Falklands/Malvinas war and, even more significantly, in the campaign against economic integration with Europe, that she could win re-election and promote further neoliberal reforms internally. Again and again, be it within the European Union, in Mercosur (where Brazilian and Argentine nationalisms inhibit integration), in NAFTA, or in ASEAN, the nationalism required for the state to function effectively as a corporate and competitive entity in the world market gets in the way of market freedoms more generally. 2.

Like the neoliberals that preceded them, the ‘neocons’ had long been nurturing their particular views on the social order, in universities (Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago being particularly influential) and well-funded think-tanks, and through influential publications (such as Commentary).20 US neoconservatives favour corporate power, private enterprise, and the restoration of class power. Neoconservatism is therefore entirely consistent with the neoliberal agenda of elite governance, mistrust of democracy, and the maintenance of market freedoms. But it veers away from the principles of pure neoliberalism and has reshaped neoliberal practices in two fundamental respects: first, in its concern for order as an answer to the chaos of individual interests, and second, in its concern for an overweening morality as the necessary social glue to keep the body politic secure in the face of external and internal dangers.


pages: 277 words: 80,703

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle by Silvia Federici

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Community Supported Agriculture, declining real wages, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, financial independence, fixed income, gentrification, global village, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, labor-force participation, land tenure, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Occupy movement, planetary scale, Scramble for Africa, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, the market place, tontine, trade liberalization, UNCLOS, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

They also investigate the connection between warfare and the destruction of subsistence farming and, most importantly, the motivations behind the new global economy’s war against women. A running theme throughout the essays of Part Two is also the critique of the institutionalization of feminism and the reduction of feminist politics to instruments of the neoliberal agenda of the United Nations. For those of us who for years had stubbornly insisted on defining feminist autonomy as autonomy not just from men but from capital and the state, the gradual loss of initiative by the movement and its subsumption under the wings of the United Nations was a defeat, especially at a time when this institution was preparing to legitimize new wars by military and economic means.

These policies have so undermined the reproduction of the populations of the “Third World” that even the World Bank has had to concede to having made mistakes.18 They have led to a level of poverty unprecedented in the postcolonial period, and have erased the most important achievement of the anticolonial struggle: the commitment by the new independent nation states to invest in the reproduction of the national proletariat. Massive cuts in government spending for social services, repeated currency devaluations, wage freezes, these are the core of the “structural adjustment programs” and the neoliberal agenda. We must also mention the ongoing land expropriations that are being carried out for the sake of the commercialization of agriculture, and the institution of a state of constant warfare.19 Endless wars, massacres, entire populations in flight from their lands and turned into refugees, famines: these are not only the consequences of a dramatic impoverishment that intensifies ethnic, political, and religious conflicts, as the media want us to believe.

From this it follows that the economic and social condition of women cannot be improved without a struggle against capitalist globalization and the de-legitimization of the agencies and programs that sustain capital’s global expansion, starting with the IMF and the World Bank, and WTO. By contrast, any attempt to “empower” women by “gendering” these agencies is not only doomed to fail, but is bound to have a mystifying effect, allowing these agencies to co-opt the struggles that women are making against the neoliberal agenda and for the construction of a noncapitalist alternative.5 Globalization: An Attack on Reproduction To understand why globalization is a war against women we must read this process “politically,” as a strategy aiming to defeat workers’ “refusal of work” by means of the global expansion of the labor market.


pages: 182 words: 53,802

The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Banks by Ann Pettifor

Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clean water, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, Leo Hollis, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, The Chicago School, the market place, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail

The second is a smaller role for the state, achieved through privatization and limits on the ability of governments to run fiscal deficits and accumulate debt.13 The benefits in terms of increased growth seem fairly difficult to establish when looking at a broad group of countries, the paper argues: The costs in terms of increased inequality are prominent. Such costs epitomize the trade-off between the growth and equity effects of some aspects of the neoliberal agenda. Increased inequality in turn hurts the level and sustainability of growth. Even if growth is the sole or main purpose of the neoliberal agenda, advocates of that agenda still need to pay attention to the distributional effects. None of this is news to the victims of neoliberal economic policies in many poor, heavily indebted countries, but the IMF’s mea culpa rattled the cages of many a neoliberal academic and media institution.

By doing so, we, or they, were ‘bamboozled’ into allowing a small financial elite to create colossal quantities of private wealth while burdening the world with debt, volatility, crises and rising rates of inequality. Somewhat belatedly, the IMF in 2016 echoed the views of Professors Rey and Bhagwati outlined above, and issued a partial mea culpa in a paper titled ‘Neoliberalism: Oversold?’ In it, IMF staff argued that the neoliberal agenda – a label used more by critics than by the architects of the policies – rests on two main planks. The first is increased competition – achieved through deregulation and the opening up of domestic markets, including financial markets, to foreign competition. The second is a smaller role for the state, achieved through privatization and limits on the ability of governments to run fiscal deficits and accumulate debt.13 The benefits in terms of increased growth seem fairly difficult to establish when looking at a broad group of countries, the paper argues: The costs in terms of increased inequality are prominent.


pages: 320 words: 86,372

Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself by Peter Fleming

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, anti-work, antiwork, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon tax, clockwatching, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, David Graeber, death from overwork, Etonian, future of work, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, neoliberal agenda, Parkinson's law, post-industrial society, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Results Only Work Environment, scientific management, shareholder value, social intelligence, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, transaction costs, wealth creators, working poor

In the United Kingdom, following the rise of coercive-state, Thatcherism and the barbarism of subsequent neoliberal governmental reform programmes, we now see the true consequences of this desire to transform us all into little one-person corporations. In the wake of the 2008 crisis, the capitalist promotion of self-sufficiency and individual entrepreneurship no longer bothers to evoke the euphemisms of ‘creativity’, ‘innovation’ and ‘freedom’ that characterised 1990s neoliberal agenda. No, this is now about fear. You are on your own – but you still have to pay your taxes! Even Foucault fails – or perhaps refuses – to apprehend the grinding concrete reality that the birth of biopower actually implies. The real world behind the gloss of the ‘entrepreneur’ is actually sanctioned poverty, insecurity, precarity and an impossible life-structure designed to absorb the externalities of rich corporations and the neoliberal state.

Self-reliance is a basic requisite of neoliberal exploitation, since it is (a) the domain in which negative externalities are placed and (b) the ‘human resource’ that takes up the slack of an unworkable socio-economic paradigm. However, on the other hand, managers are constantly worried about this autonomy being directed towards non-exploitative ends, to the point where they are automatically hostile towards it. In the end, managerialism seeks to stamp out the very resource that it and the neoliberal agenda relies upon to get things done. There is a second reason why managerialism thrives on conflict. Most organizations do not really need the excessive and pointless amount of management activity that accumulates over time. Thus, managers constantly seek out ways to justify their own existence (e.g. by creating useless work for others) and engage in power-display rituals lest the owners of the means of production realize that much management is inherently needless and obstructive when applied to most jobs.

Many of the large-scale ‘business ethics’ programmes crafted by the neoliberal enterprise draw upon the idiom of work and employment as a key moment of justification. For example, when a large retailing business is forced to explain its irresponsible practices to governmental regulators, it also seeks to embolden the ideology of work at the heart of the neoliberal agenda. We are an ethical enterprise, so leave us unregulated and we will create jobs and invest in positive economic initiatives for the betterment of all. The ideology of work is buttressed by a broader complex that implicitly reflects the logic of production in a wide array of synaptic institutional relationships.


pages: 246 words: 76,561

Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture by Justin McGuirk

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, dark matter, Day of the Dead, digital divide, Donald Trump, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, facts on the ground, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, mass immigration, megaproject, microcredit, Milgram experiment, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, Silicon Valley, starchitect, technoutopianism, unorthodox policies, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, Washington Consensus

Instead of the market value of housing, Turner was asserting its ‘use value’. Most significantly of all, Turner took the view, long before it was fashionable, that the slums were sites of resourcefulness and creativity. As we shall see, this was a position that would later backfire when the World Bank used it to support a neoliberal agenda that effectively relieved governments of the duty to address the housing problem at all. However, before that turn of events, Lima’s barriadas still seemed full of promise. They became such a touchstone that the critic Charles Jencks included the barriadas on his map of twentieth-century architectural movements, next to Archigram and the Metabolists.

But just when policy-makers were throwing their hands up, they were offered a lifeline in the form of a new liberal economic ideology. From the late 1980s onwards, with the Washington Consensus spreading south through the arm-twisting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the neoliberal agenda took control. Government’s job was to cut spending, privatise, and let the housing market regulate itself. In effect, Turner’s argument for self-determination was turned on its head by politicians who, now relieved of housing obligations, no longer had to pick up the ruinous bill. And as the economy boomed, the effects were supposed to ‘trickle down’ to the poor.


pages: 357 words: 95,986

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

The means by which this was achieved were diverse, from physical confrontation and combat,44 to using legislation to undermine solidarity and industrial action, to embracing shifts in production and distribution that compromised union power (such as disaggregating supply chains), to re-engineering public opinion and consent around a broadly neoliberal agenda of individual freedom and ‘negative solidarity’. The latter denotes more than mere indifference to worker agitations – it is the fostering of an aggressively enraged sense of injustice, committed to the idea that, because I must endure increasingly austere working conditions (wage freezes, loss of benefits, a declining pension pot), then everyone else must as well.

Numerous members of what would become Thatcher’s administration passed through the IEA during the 1960s and 1970s.40 The outcome of the IEA’s efforts was not only to subtly transform the economic discourse in Britain, but also to naturalise two particular policies: the necessity of attacking trade union power, and the imperative of monetary stability. The former would purportedly let markets freely adapt to changing economic circumstances, while the latter would provide the basic price stability needed for a healthy capitalist economy. In the United States, too, think tanks and academic research groups were built to push for a broadly neoliberal agenda, the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institute being two of the most notable.41 The MIPR aimed to redefine political common sense by writing books on neoliberal economics that were intended for a popular audience, some of which eventually sold over 500,000 copies. Other books, such as Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, laid the foundations for the policy shift which today identifies welfare dependency rather than poverty itself as the central social problem.


pages: 325 words: 89,374

Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing by John Boughton

British Empire, deindustrialization, full employment, garden city movement, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Leo Hollis, manufacturing employment, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Russell Brand, starchitect, systems thinking, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, young professional

It kept large-scale capital expenditure off the books, replacing those bigger sums with far smaller annual payments, though the latter would in the end cost far more than any direct upfront payment. If there lay the financial logic of the scheme, such as it was, critics on the left also saw ‘a neoliberal agenda designed to open up the provision and management of public services to the private sector’.36 Broadwcilk, Pendleton Estate, Salford In 2008, 93 per cent of Pendleton’s housing stock was still council-owned. The ‘target position’ – outlined in the ‘Benefits Realisation Plan’ behind ‘Creating a New Pendleton’ one year later – was to fashion ‘a mixed tenure residential area’.

New completions plummeted and the £1.5 billion boost to housing investment announced that year was largely dedicated to the rescue of a private market in crisis. Readers should come to their own judgement about New Labour’s record in office but housing policy and achievement does offer an excellent yardstick. Even as it pursued its generally progressive social ends, New Labour undoubtedly pursued a broadly neoliberal agenda, one that gave economic primacy to the market and its disciplines, one which privileged private finance and the profit motive over public investment. Its social housing policies which rested in essence in a diffuse but pervasive belief in competitiveness – personal and institutional – afford one of the clearest illustrations of this overarching belief-system and, to many, will suggest its limitations.


pages: 91 words: 26,009

Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bretton Woods, corporate governance, feminist movement, Frank Gehry, ghettoisation, Howard Zinn, informal economy, land bank, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, RAND corporation, reserve currency, special economic zone, spectrum auction, stem cell, The Chicago School, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

Pablo Neruda, “Standard Oil Company,” in Canto General, trans. Jack Schmitt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 176. 35. For further analysis of the Gates Foundation’s involvement in privatizing education, coupled with drastic reductions in government spending, see Jeff Bale and Sara Knopp, “Obama’s Neoliberal Agenda for Public Education,” in Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012). 36. Joan Roelofs, “The Third Sector as a Protective Layer for Capitalism,” Monthly Review 47, no. 4 (September 1995): 16. 37. Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003). 38.


pages: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Even if substantial changes were on the table, they might be expected (given conventional understandings of Sixties sanctimony) to take the form of new commitments to the parts of the old program that worked well, like civil rights and environmental legislation, the reform of programs with mixed but generally positive results, like welfare, and renewed commitments to the fiscal restraint and investment priorities that had worked in the 1950s and 1960s but seemed in danger of lapsing. The seemingly least likely choice was what actually happened, a heterodox revolution that took the worst elements of older programs and combined them into a bizarre “neoliberal” agenda that featured an economy simultaneously laissez-faire and heavily dependent on state spending and occasional federal bailouts; a conservative government, yet one with radical ideals; a rhetoric of probity, but a policy of total fiscal and other indiscipline; Republicans overseeing government bloat while Democrats promoted free trade and the “end of welfare as we know it.”

More importantly, for decades, the economy grew and delivered mass prosperity despite (for the neoliberals) or because of (for everyone else) a government that operated a social safety net, invested heavily in physical and educational infrastructure, tolerated labor organizations, intervened in trade, stimulated the economy from time to time, and maintained reasonable budget discipline including through high taxes. For years, no influential politician embraced the full neoliberal agenda, nor did citizens demand such. Only in two areas, fiscal responsibility and a strong dollar, did conservative ideas retain any real sway, with generally good results. World War II made balanced budgets impossible, but the following twenty years saw a concerted attempt to reduce deficits and bring down debt.

So liberalism, neo-and otherwise, had to bide its time as a theory waiting for an audience. Before the 1970s, there was only one credible attempt to advance anything like liberalism, and then only in its Jurassic form. The failure of that campaign suggested the future compromises necessary to get the rest of the neoliberal agenda in place. The 1964 presidential race, between Johnson and Goldwater, provided the forum. In dramatic contrast to Johnson, Goldwater had no patience for any of the government programs or fiscal indiscipline that had despoiled the capitalist landscape. He said as much in his election-year book, The Conscience of a Conservative.


pages: 370 words: 102,823

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth by Michael Jacobs, Mariana Mazzucato

Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, collaborative economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Detroit bankruptcy, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, facts on the ground, fiat currency, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systems thinking, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, vertical integration, very high income

There is some ambiguity in neoliberal thinking over the role of other non-market institutions, such as family and community. For some, these provide a useful adjunct to markets; for others they are a source of inefficiency and would be better off for being incorporated within markets. The privatisation and outsourcing of industries and services owned by public authorities have been among the hallmarks of the neoliberal agenda. By privatisation one means the full transfer to private ownership of the activity in question. Under outsourcing the activity remains publicly owned, but its performance is contracted out to private profit-making firms or other non-state organisations, the public authority becoming the customer instead of the provider.

Hence in the UK one finds regulatory agencies covering most privatised industries, and certainly all utilities. Dominant firms have developed in the telecommunications, energy and water sectors partly because of the strong presence of network externalities, so competition remains oligopolistic. Although a call for deregulation is a fundamental part of the neoliberal agenda, in reality it produces a major increase in regulation, but with a changed purpose. In theory neoliberal regulation would only work out what a market would look like if there could be one, not introduce other policy goals. For example, neoliberal regulation of radio and television should be concerned solely with monitoring price behaviour, not with such issues as ensuring political balance or restricting pornographic or violent content.


pages: 464 words: 121,983

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe by Antony Loewenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, British Empire, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, do well by doing good, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, private military company, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, Scramble for Africa, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, the medium is the message, trade liberalization, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

“Forecasters significantly underestimated the increase in unemployment and the decline in domestic demand associated with fiscal consolidation,” it stated.44 Amazingly, Blanchard wrote that the IMF was largely blind to determining the role of their own economists when implementing its toxic medicine: “The short-term effects of fiscal policy on economic activity are only one of the many factors that need to be considered in determining the appropriate pace of fiscal consolidation for any single country.” In other words, there was a human cost to policies drafted in the halls of power. If history was any guide, it was hard to imagine the IMF departing from the neoliberal agenda embedded in its DNA. The message was clear, if backers of austerity cared to listen: impose brutal policies at your peril. The EU had never been less popular in Greece, or in many other nations across Europe, and the prospect of a united continent far into the future remained less than guaranteed (or even desirable): too many citizens suffered at the hands of Brussels bureaucrats.45 Dutch-American sociologist Saskia Sassen argued that Greece was undergoing “economic ethnic cleansing”—a tactic that allows the downtrodden to be ignored and shunned in the name of renewed growth.46 Opposition to an auction of national assets was strong.

He offered a story about former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide wanting capable Swiss instructors to train the Haitian police, but being told by the Americans that, because of some long-forgotten agreement dating from 1980, Washington had to be asked to approve such a plan. Needless to say, it was rejected. Chalmers placed Haiti’s dilemma in a global context. “We are unable to develop our own models of development and have to get international funding for the neoliberal agenda,” he told me. “It’s a way to show capitalism that we’re willing to work with you, but you’re actually destroying our own economy and agriculture.” Chalmers continued: “Haiti is one of the countries they call a ‘failed state.’ Since 1915, it’s been about how Haiti will please the United States, but there are alternatives to industrial parks.


pages: 482 words: 149,351

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

‘There are many tax abatements, and I have to fight for revenue to serve mentally ill people. This is not a sport.’ ‘Competitive’ tax-cutting has become like a mania. ‘There’s a circular discussion going on here. Cutting taxes is good. Why? Because it’s “competitive”. Why is “competitive” good? Because it means lower taxes!’ That plays into the neoliberal agenda that doesn’t like the common good. The notion of being a human that merits some reasonable standard has been totally dismantled. And it’s getting worse.’ This game is spreading across the United States. One of the bleakest recent stories concerns Amazon, which in 2017 announced plans to build a second headquarters and asked cities to submit bids with incentive packages.

In 2009, a month before his country assumed the rotating presidency of the European Union, Swedish prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt and his finance minister Anders Borg declared, ‘the Lisbon Agenda, with only a year remaining before it is to be evaluated, has been a failure’. See ‘Sweden admits Lisbon Agenda “failure”’, Euractiv.com, 3 June 2009. 32. The European Parliament, a bolshier but weaker European institution which often tries to push back against the Commission’s neoliberal agenda, declared in December 2015 that it ‘regrets that the Commission chose not to use the ordinary legislative procedure for the decisions regarding National Competitiveness Boards’. 33. Singapore enjoys a package that is as unrepeatable as Luxembourg’s. Its economic model is heavily statist, with 90 per cent of housing stock government-owned, rents tightly controlled and strong social democratic policies.


pages: 242 words: 67,233

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, British Empire, capitalist realism, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, impulse control, job satisfaction, liberation theology, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, placebo effect, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, source of truth, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, work culture

In Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion, Jeremy Carrette and Richard King argue that Asian wisdom traditions have been subject to colonization and commodification since the eighteenth century, producing a highly individualistic spirituality, perfectly accommodated to dominant cultural values and requiring no substantive change in lifestyle.18 Such an individualistic spirituality is clearly linked with the neoliberal agenda of privatization, especially when masked by the ambiguous language used in mindfulness. Market forces are already exploiting the momentum of the mindfulness movement, reorienting its goals to a highly circumscribed individual realm. Privatized mindfulness practice is easily coopted and confined to what Carrette and King describe as an “accommodationist” orientation that seeks to “pacify feelings of anxiety and disquiet at the individual level rather than seeking to challenge the social, political and economic inequalities that cause such distress.”19 However, a commitment to a privatized and psychologized mindfulness is political.


pages: 209 words: 80,086

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, David Ashton

active measures, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dutch auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market design, meritocracy, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, post-industrial society, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, working poor, zero-sum game

And Britain with its centuries old record of innovation, enterprise, and international reach, can be one of its greatest winners.”22 This enduring faith in the global knowledge-driven economy to create upward mobility for Western workers, reflected the extent to which governments bought into a neoliberal agenda. To question the theology of the free market or the idea that it could destroy the opportunity bargain was almost a heresy. It is therefore not surprising that faith in human capital to resolve economic and social problems retains a powerful hold on American public policy. As President Barack Obama reaffirmed, “In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity, it is a pre-requisite.”23 Naked Capitalism The promise of a hi-tech future of highly paid knowledge workers was pivotal to the creation of a neoliberal opportunity bargain, which left individuals responsible for their employability through educational achievement and commitment to career development.


pages: 263 words: 79,016

The Sport and Prey of Capitalists by Linda McQuaig

anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, diversification, Donald Trump, energy transition, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, green new deal, Kickstarter, low interest rates, megaproject, Menlo Park, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, payday loans, precautionary principle, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sidewalk Labs, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing

Company pensions, where they still exist, have increasingly been transformed from “defined benefit” to “defined contribution,” making them far less generous and reliable. The corporate world has also adopted a more hostile attitude toward unions, taking steps that have made it more difficult for workers to organize and to defend themselves. These substantial changes are part of what’s been dubbed “the neoliberal agenda” — a set of policies based on flimsy pseudo-theories that boil down to the simplistic notion that the private sector is inherently good and the public sector is inherently bad. The result has been a massive transfer of society’s resources from ordinary people to a small set of wealthy individuals and corporations.


pages: 261 words: 81,802

The Trouble With Billionaires by Linda McQuaig

"World Economic Forum" Davos, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, carried interest, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John Bogle, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, very high income, wealth creators, women in the workforce

The results are unmistakable: these policies have led to a massive shift in income and wealth from the bulk of society to the already-privileged few. Yet, strikingly, this dramatic rise in inequality – coming right after the most egalitarian era in modern Western history – has not led to an overthrow of the neoliberal agenda. There have been plenty of challenges to that agenda, plenty of brilliant critiques, but the agenda has not yet been rejected. The neoliberal economic orthodoxy of the last three decades continues to guide policy in the Anglo-American countries, perpetuating and aggravating levels of inequality that are already extreme by the standards of the developed world.


pages: 207 words: 86,639

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture by David Boyle, Andrew Simms

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Crossrail, delayed gratification, deskilling, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, financial deregulation, financial exclusion, financial innovation, full employment, garden city movement, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, light touch regulation, loss aversion, mega-rich, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working-age population

The new economics is certainly a reaction against the narrow form of globalization that has gripped the planet, a combination of global deregulation of capital, a moral vacuum at the heart of the economic system, and a process whereby the powers and resources of nation states are handed over to monopolistic global corporations. This has been described as the ‘neoliberal’ agenda, though there is nothing very new and certainly nothing liberal about it, and its failures are increasingly obvious. But it is not just a reaction against globalization. In practice, the ‘new economics’, which has been emerging over the past three decades, has been as much a reaction against the results of the previous consensus, which drew on aspects of Keynes – the inflation, centralization and narrow measurements of success – as it has been against modern corporate globalization.


pages: 261 words: 86,905

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means by John Lanchester

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, Basel III, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Swan, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, forward guidance, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, High speed trading, hindsight bias, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kodak vs Instagram, Kondratiev cycle, Large Hadron Collider, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, McJob, means of production, microcredit, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working poor, yield curve

Over this coming decade the distinction between winners and losers is going to be sharper than ever, and more visible than ever, and I say again that this will be a truly global theme—I don’t think there is a society anywhere in the world where this issue will not be acted out. The main economic model that has been used by international institutions over the last three decades is a set of policies that I’ve been calling neoliberalism. These policies have been effective at growing GDP, and equally or more effective at growing inequality. By now, the neoliberal agenda has taken us to a place where, for many people in the developed world, life offers the prospect of an interminable squeeze on prospects and living standards. The good years of open-ended, more or less frictionless growth that we in the developed world have all, broadly speaking, enjoyed since the end of the Second World War are over.


pages: 263 words: 80,594

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation by Grace Blakeley

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, decarbonisation, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job polarisation, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, pensions crisis, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-war consensus, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transfer pricing, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

It was a powerful message, and the polling shows that Thatcher’s victory came on the back of the switched allegiances of many low-income voters. This populist rhetoric was, of course, the thin end of the neoliberal wedge. Thatcher knew that there was little public support for the most important elements of the neoliberal agenda, so she hid her commitments to privatisation and deregulation in the small print. In fact, even those policies that Thatcher did advertise — from going to battle with the unions to reducing the size of the state — were no more popular amongst voters in 1979 than they had been in 1974.27 The lesson of Thatcher’s period in opposition is the importance of extended crises in eroding support for the status quo.


There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years by Mike Berners-Lee

air freight, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cloud computing, dematerialisation, disinformation, driverless car, Easter island, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, fake news, food miles, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jevons paradox, land reform, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, neoliberal agenda, off grid, performance metric, post-truth, profit motive, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, urban planning

That we find it difficult is evidence of the need for more practice. Greed A simple term for individualism. And one of the seven deadly sins. Along with hate and delusion, one of the three roots of 226 ALPHABETICAL QUICK TOUR suffering according to Buddhist philosophy. Greed is the motivation that drives the neoliberal agenda. The opposite of empathy. Would it be simplistic or concise to say that overcoming greed is the secret to wellbeing in the Anthropocene, and everything else in this book is just detail? Greenwash Prevalent, sometimes through wishful thinking, and sometimes deliberate. The easiest way for an environmental consultancy to make a living is to collude in this, and even if you don’t intend to, it is hard to know when you have been sucked in.


pages: 252 words: 13,581

Cape Town After Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City by Tony Roshan Samara

conceptual framework, deglobalization, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, illegal immigration, late capitalism, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, structural adjustment programs, unemployed young men, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, working poor

These are not the only recent conflicts that we can tie to underdevelopment—as evidenced by the spate of xenophobic violence that roiled the city in 2008 and the alleged link between local operatives allied with the African National Congress (ANC) and attacks on organized shack-dwellers from the Kennedy Road settlement in Durban the next year—but they are especially relevant here because they are between the formal governance structures responsible for urban renewal in their official capacity and township communities.1 Mirroring the response to remobilized communities across the nation, the local state has not only been quick to deploy security forces to confront protestors, but has also explicitly framed many of these actions and those who carry them out as criminal.2 In doing so, the state connects gangsters, other “real” criminals, and many community activists, perhaps the most visible township residents from the vantage point of the urban core, through a discourse of criminality, obscuring, or perhaps misrepresenting, the larger, more fundamental conflict between the city’s neoliberal agenda, security, and the demands of communities for socioeconomic development. Considered alongside the troubling rise in complaints by residents against police, the choice by state actors to respond to protests in this way suggests that securitization, itself embedded in neoliberal governance, has generated a form of punitive containment aimed at entire communities.3 The second important consequence of neoliberal governance for the state’s approach to the periphery is the absence of youth development.


pages: 341 words: 89,986

Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made by Tom Wilkinson

Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, double helix, experimental subject, false memory syndrome, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Google Glasses, housing crisis, Kitchen Debate, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, megacity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, nudge theory, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, starchitect, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration

This was apparent to many critics from the outset, but its consequences have now become obvious: the interest charged on the loans used to build new hospitals is so high that in order to make repayments other publicly owned facilities are being closed, including accident and emergency departments. If you were a cynic, you might ask if this was not part of the neoliberal agenda from the outset, a hollowing-out of the NHS to make the marketisation of healthcare palatable to the electorate. The dishonest obsession with cutting up-front costs, which has spread throughout British bureaucracy, has also had a devastating effect on the architectural profession. Good design is considered an unnecessary expense, so patrons opt instead for ‘design-build’ contracts, which cut out architects in favour of developers and their in-house design teams.


Data Action: Using Data for Public Good by Sarah Williams

affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, City Beautiful movement, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data philanthropy, data science, digital divide, digital twin, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, fake news, four colour theorem, global village, Google Earth, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, selection bias, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sidewalk Labs, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Steven Levy, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transatlantic slave trade, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration

I believe the scholars’ point is: because data and many of the insights it offers are gathered by private institutions, responsibilities once attributed to the state are now taken on by private agencies. And, for some governments, the shift of responsibility to private companies is exactly the point: it helps to promote their neoliberal agenda. One example often used as evidence of this phenomenon is the open data movement, which was promoted by governments to help spur private innovation for the development of services that governments would typically provide.11 These type of concerns about the shifting role of technology in society are not new.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

That drop in union participation coincided with a rise in economic inequality, and, as EPI argues, with a drop in training programs that keep workers skilled in this age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the US workforce productive and competitive.22 In the United States and the United Kingdom, two countries where workers have been hit hardest by the changes in the economic system, advocating for unions and education has become politically polarizing. In the 1980s, conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Republican President Ronald Reagan in the US embraced a neoliberal agenda that proved anathema to public investment in fields like education and the power of unions. Under this ideology, collective bargaining by unions was a barrier to establishing free markets, and the state with its taxes and services was a drag on high economic growth. In the US, President Reagan famously fired all air traffic controllers who participated in a union-organized strike, thereby breaking the back of unions in the US.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

That drop in union participation coincided with a rise in economic inequality, and, as EPI argues, with a drop in training programs that keep workers skilled in this age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the US workforce productive and competitive.22 In the United States and the United Kingdom, two countries where workers have been hit hardest by the changes in the economic system, advocating for unions and education has become politically polarizing. In the 1980s, conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Republican President Ronald Reagan in the US embraced a neoliberal agenda that proved anathema to public investment in fields like education and the power of unions. Under this ideology, collective bargaining by unions was a barrier to establishing free markets, and the state with its taxes and services was a drag on high economic growth. In the US, President Reagan famously fired all air traffic controllers who participated in a union-organized strike, thereby breaking the back of unions in the US.


pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

That the term has been thrown around with complete lack of nuance by many leftists is undoubtedly true, and hence why it immediately makes eyes roll whenever it is brought up in discussion and debate. But it is not just the left that has misused it. In a 2016 article reluctantly admitting that many of neoliberalism’s promises were “oversold”, the IMF defined it as: The neoliberal agenda — a label used more by critics than by the architects of the policies—rests on two main planks. The first is increased competition — achieved through deregulation and the opening up of domestic markets, including financial markets, to foreign competition. The second is a smaller role for the state, achieved through privatization and limits on the ability of governments to run fiscal deficits and accumulate debt.58 Unfortunately, this definition misses out what truly distinguishes neoliberalism from liberal capitalism and that which is yet another contradiction of our economic system: that while it seeks to erode the power of the state in domestic economic affairs, it actively enlists nation-states around the world to comply with this task.


pages: 403 words: 111,119

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

Scripting the play In 1947, the year before Samuelson published his iconic Circular Flow diagram, a small laissez-faire band of wannabe economic scriptwriters – including Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises and Frank Knight – gathered in the Swiss resort of Mont Pèlerin to start drafting what they hoped would one day become the dominant economic story. Inspired by the pro-market writings of classical liberals such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo they established what they called a ‘neoliberal’ agenda. Its aim, they said, was to push back hard against the threat of state totalitarianism, which was spreading fast thanks to the growing reach of the Soviet Union. But that aim gradually morphed into a hard push for market fundamentalism, and the meaning of ‘neoliberal’ morphed along with it.


Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

In 2009, while still in his pajamas, President José Manuel Zelaya in Honduras was ousted by a military coup led by a general trained at the US-based School of the Americas (SOA, now known as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), where sixty-four thousand Latin American military and elite counter-insurgency forces have trained. In Zelaya’s place, successive narco-governments favorable to a neoliberal agenda of special economic zones and corporate plunder have been installed. Present-day counterinsurgency operations are layered with the paramilitarized landscape of the war on drugs and the $1.2 billion Central American Regional Security Initiative.26 Dawn Paley asserts, “The war on drugs is a long-term fix to capitalism’s woes, combining terror with policy-making in a seasoned neoliberal mix, cracking open social worlds and territories once unavailable to globalized capitalism.”27 Today, all three countries have some of the world’s highest disappearance, homicide, and femicide rates.


pages: 515 words: 142,354

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Alex Hyde-White

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, pensions crisis, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, working-age population

There will never be unanimity, but when there are large disparities, it is inevitable that there will be considerable disgruntlement with whatever decision is taken. There are a myriad of detailed issues in which different conceptions of how the economy functions play out, not just the macroeconomic issues of austerity and inflation previously discussed. One aspect of the neoliberal agenda entails privatization. There are strong arguments that governments should focus their attention on those areas where they have a comparative advantage, leaving the private sector to run the rest. Though this principle makes theoretical sense, in practice determining where the government has a comparative advantage is difficult.


pages: 479 words: 140,421

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

activist lawyer, back-to-the-city movement, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Broken windows theory, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, food desert, gentrification, global pandemic, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, plutocrats, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Skype, starchitect, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, young professional

So what are we really talking about when we talk about gentrification in the twenty-first century? In many ways, the term itself is a diversion. It’s the bright green face of Oz that distracts from the man behind the curtain, the invisible hands pulling all the levers. Those hands belong to the globalized world order of the so-called free market, the neoliberal agenda launched in the late 1970s to destroy socioeconomic progressivism, the stuff that made New York so New York. In cities across America and the world, those hands pull the levers on hyper-gentrification. There is nothing natural about it. It is a man-made virus that grows rhizomatically, creeping into every crack and crevice of Manhattan, reaching ever deeper into the outer boroughs, pushing out whatever stands in its way.


The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community by David C. Korten

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, banks create money, big-box store, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, death of newspapers, declining real wages, different worldview, digital divide, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, peak oil, planetary scale, plutocrats, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, shared worldview, social intelligence, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, trade route, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, World Values Survey

In addition to the measures noted above, military expenditures were increased, and the abandonment of antitrust enforcement allowed for ever larger corporate mergers. Europe, Canada, and Japan were pressured to similarly “modernize” their economies. The third-world debt crisis of 1982 created the necessary pretext for the IMF and World Bank — operating under the direction of the U.S. Treasury Department — to impose the neoliberal agenda on indebted low-income countries. Through their structural-adjustment programs, the IMF and World Bank stripped governments, some democratically elected, of their ability to set and enforce social, environmental, and workplace standards or even to give preference to firms that hired locally or employed union workers.


pages: 504 words: 143,303

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

But, as the Guardian’s Aditya Chakrabortty points out, when it comes to policies, there’s a difference from Tory donors here: whereas the big funders of the Tory party expect and usually get favours, the 15 trade unions that provide Labour with much of its funds get neoliberal policies that reduce the power of working people and allow the rich to take more.17 Such is New Labour’s embrace of the neoliberal agenda. At the time of writing, the Labour leadership is proposing to switch to an opt-in system that would be likely to slash the amount it receives from unions, though it would improve the democratic credentials of the funding. In the US, things are bigger, of course – and worse, though at least they’re a bit more transparent.18 In the 2012 election each candidate spent more than $1 billion!


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Take away the regulatory power that the central state had amassed to itself during the over-reaching days of the New Deal and the Great Society, Reagan argued, and the social engineering initiatives of the federal government would simply collapse. The God-given liberties of Americans on matters of race, religion, and employment would then be quickly restored. Reagan, seemingly, had found a way to draw on conservative racial and religious fury to propel his anti-government, neoliberal agenda. That was quite a feat. He found a partner in Jerry Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority in 1979 to promote Christian values in American politics and to help propel Reagan into the White House. Falwell had long immersed himself in Milton Friedman’s writings; by 1980, he was willing to make the case that the Bible had instructed Christians to embrace free market capitalism.


EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book scanning, book value, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, global macro, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, pension reform, precautionary principle, premature optimization, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, working-age population, Yogi Berra

The combination fed anti-​government and anti-​European sentiment.129 Italian workers protested.130 Grillo linked his criticism of the Jobs Act with a renewed call to exit the eurozone.131 Thus, as the eurozone “elite” and Italian employers cheered, large segments of the Italian population positioned themselves on the other side of the political debate. To those who were economically vulnerable, the Jobs Act was more evidence that the European establishment was pursuing a “neoliberal” agenda that took away economic security but offered little hope in return. Renzi’s real task was harder: to give people greater opportunities to increase their skills, with which they would be more likely to get well-​paying jobs. European politicians speak often and glowingly of this alternative.