swtyndall.notwhatwethinkNeoLiberalism lives because too many people get their dysfunctional, psychological needs, like greed and power-hunger, satisfied by it. They care about that but not about the rest of us.
Why Neoliberalism Is Finally on the Way Out
An economist’s apology for his generation
https://newrepublic.com/article/168000/brad-delong-neoliberalism-finally-way-out
"Brad: There’s the inflation of the 1970s. There’s the productivity slowdown, that is that 3 percent per year wage growth above inflation no longer happens in America. There’s the upset caused by the oil shocks and gasoline lines, the resulting relative price shifts and exchange rate shifts that begin the process of hollowing out of Midwestern manufacturing and similar things. There is a genuine feeling that the world has been over bureaucratized. And there’s a general belief that, the system is too uptight and there needs to be more human freedom. So a coalition of left and right-wing viewpoints complaining that we could do significantly better and we should, the belief that we need to get rid of the New Deal order and replace it with something better, and then the fight over what will be better. Is it the left neoliberalism, which is try to use market means to social democratic ends in order to debureaucratize the system and to crowdsource things whenever possible? Or the right neoliberalism, in which we need not only to do that, but to make the poor poorer so they will work harder and the rich richer, so they will work harder? A greater degree of income inequality is in fact a feature, not a bug, because people deserve to have incomes depending on their worth, and your worth in the market is pretty much a sign of your moral worth.
Felicia: Which neoliberalism kind of won out, the right or the left?
Brad: ...but the policies wound up being right neoliberals because, say, whenever we left neoliberals did something like balance the budget and the interests of faster economic growth, the right takes power and promptly uses it to fund many more bigger tax cuts for the rich.
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Michael: I would add here a political point, which is that all this, all the points Brad just made, are very much what rich people wanted to hear in the 1970s and the 1980s.
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Michael: It fell very favorably on their ears. When you think back to the 1970s, early 1970s, 1971, the famous Powell memo, a memo written by Lewis Powell for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which went to him. This was before Richard Nixon put him on the Supreme Court, a few months before, and said, “We are losing our free market society. We are in danger of becoming a collectivist society. How can we stop this?” And so he wrote a memo that foretold and laid out the framework for much of what has become the right-wing infrastructure of think tanks and foundations and so on and so forth. There’s a big debate on the left about how much impact the Powell memo actually had. I’m just mentioning the fact of its existence by pointing out that rich people felt quite aggrieved by the New Deal order by the 1970s. So when Milton Friedman and others started saying this stuff, man, that’s what they wanted to hear and they put their money on that chip.
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Brad: I still cannot believe that the New Deal order collapsed as rapidly as it did in the 1970s. It was still delivering enormous productivity growth and real wage increases and the fact that it was undergoing this inflationary and even this productivity slowdown speed bump, that people were angry at bureaucracy, that people were angry at unions that they saw as having perhaps excessive oligopoly monopoly power on their own part in the sale of labor, that those shouldn’t have led to the immediate collapse within less than a decade of the most successful political economic system and order that the world had ever seen. It ought to have been more stable than that and also that I really cannot believe that the neoliberal order persisted as long as it did. That is, its three promises in 1979, 1980 were that it was going to restore productivity growth; that it was going to right the distribution of income by getting rid of various intermediary institutions that had market and regulatory power and were using it unfairly; and that it also was going to restore the moral center of life by making people realize that they could not rely on the government to always provide an after-the-fact safety net in case they didn’t make good decisions and didn’t worry about living their lives right. It did absolutely none of those things. All it did was greatly widen income and wealth inequality and even if you thought greater income and wealth inequality was a feature rather than a bug, it’s still only batting one of four. And yet, it went putt, putting along and survived not just the 1980s, but the 1990s, although we had hopes of breaking through in the Clinton administration then it comes roaring back in the 2000s..."
