Seeing Like a Matt

The intellectual blind spots of anti-anti-neoliberalism

[Illustration from Vol.1, No.1 of Hugo Gernsback’s Technocracy Review, published February 1933]

A few days ago, Matt Yglesias put up a new post in his series on “Neoliberalism and Its Enemies.”* As someone who has been reading along, it’s a super-helpful post! I disagreed strongly with the first two posts in this series, but in multiple overlapping ways, making it harder for me to land on a single line of response. His most recent post pulls together some of the things that have only been semi explicit, making it accordingly easier to write a response that pulls my disagreements together.**

In brief (lots more below), Matt’s diagnosis of the state of affairs seems to me to be as follows. Once, and not so long ago, Democrats like Obama had a technocratic approach to policy which was dubbed neoliberalism by its enemies, but was actually pretty good! This approach involved letting markets do their thing so as to produce lots of delicious economic growth, and redistributing the proceeds to make people happy. Good policy making required careful thinking about the concrete costs and benefits of proposed measures - you calculated the tradeoffs and made the appropriate policy choices, ignoring the complaints of lefties. With notably rare exceptions, such as trade with China, this worked out pretty well. Sadly, in the last few years, many Democrats have fallen off the path of righteousness, seduced by the brazen idols of political economy. They have lost any understanding of tradeoffs, or of proper policy analysis, and are wandering the mazes of their own confused rhetoric in a condition of utter bewilderment. There is a cure. We Must All Return to the One True Path of Technocratic Neoliberalism, Though We Don’t Have To Call It That If It Makes You Feel Sad!

My own take (or, more precisely, my crude riff on other, more intelligent people’s ideas) is unsurprisingly very different. As I see it, there is no realistic prospect of going back to the technocratic shake-and-bake of letting markets rip and divvying up the benefits. It had its virtues, but we live in a different world, in part thanks to its equally substantial flaws. The problems that it has either ignored, exacerbated or actively generated - climate change, global security risks, bank crises, democratic failure for starters - are among the most urgent threats that we face. And they aren’t nearly as susceptible to the kinds of technocratic policy optimization that Matt likes as one might like. If the polycrisis could be solved through cost-benefit analysis, it wouldn’t be a polycrisis. Anti-neoliberals are at the very least aware of these difficulties, even if they aren’t notably good at handling them, but Matt’s preferred approach, in its standard configurations, is not. Returning to a mode of policy making that proceeds on the assumption that such difficulties don’t exist would be a very bad idea.

That’s the short version. The much longer one is below.

What is neoliberalism?

The big fight is over ‘neoliberalism,’ a catch-all term for the previous, more market friendly dispensation of policy making. Matt used to describe himself as a neoliberal on Facebook (perhaps he still does - I don’t use Facebook myself). Unsurprisingly, he is unhappy that some people detest a set of ideas to which he is still strongly attached. Hence, his displeasure with Hewlett’s program on Economy and Society,*** which explicitly looks to go beyond neoliberalism.

Matt’s first post in the series is an extended riff on a sentence that he grabs from the Hewlett program’s website, which describes neoliberalism as “the free-market, anti-government, growth-at-all-costs approach to economic and social policy” that “has dominated policy debates in the United States and much of the world for the last half century.” The main body of Matt’s post explains, at great length, and with lots of policy making history, why this is wrong. When people complained that Matt was attacking a “straw man” by obsessing on this sentence, he retorted that “this definition is the basis of a years-long, multi-million dollar grant campaign.”

Except that it isn’t! Instead, it’s part of a two paragraph website “overview” that is presumably intended to explain the overall program in simplified terms fit for the meanest understanding. The actual basis for Hewlett’s program - the memo to Hewlett’s board laying out the rationale for setting it up - is available online if you care to search for it. It presents a rather different understanding of neoliberalism.

The Hewlett memo describes neoliberalism as a philosophy, articulated succinctly by the late Milton Friedman, which understands the world as follows. First, human beings are rational utility maximizers, and normatively should be given freedom to compete freely. Second, the core measure of success for a society is wealth. Third, the proper role of government is to enable free markets to flourish. This, then, is the basis of a broad consensus in which “[l]iberals and conservatives have come to agree on the primacy of markets and the need to rely on them first whenever possible.” This philosophy has important, but somewhat indeterminate, consequences for actual policy outcomes.

intellectual paradigms … structure arguments and tilt the playing field for or against competing claims … Ideas play a critical role by putting a thumb on the scale in favor of some arguments and against others; they reshape the world, if not perfectly in their own image, then still in ways that are powerfully different from how the world would look without them

So Matt’s case against Hewlett (which is constructed pretty well entirely on discussion of the policy outcomes) is not really on target. Matt could very reasonably complain, if he wanted, that the website overview is overly handwavy and spicy, and does not reflect these underlying ideas as well as it ought. But again: that overview is not the basis for the program. It is a post-hoc blurb written about it. There is a difference.

It is notable that Hewlett’s actual understanding of neoliberalism seems a decent enough match to Matt’s own philosophy, in which economic growth and efficiency are indeed desiderata of the first importance.**** Although really, I think Matt’s flavor of neoliberalism is better captured by what Danielle Allen calls “fused welfarism” in her fantastic recent book, Justice By Means of Democracy. On her account, fused welfarism brings together aspects of utilitarianism (you want to grow overall wealth) with John Rawls’ critique of it (you want to distribute the goods according to some generalizable principle of justice). This all:

relies on cost-benefit analyses, linked to preferences typically cast in terms of material goods … abstracted away from the contextual, social, psychological, and cultural particularities of individual economic actors. … The pursuit of utilitarian welfare maximization has typically focused on maximizing aggregate growth—in terms of income and wealth—and on using redistributive policies to spread the benefit of that growth.

Cost-benefit analysis, maximizing growth and only then redistributing benefits - this seems to me to nicely summarize much of how Matt talks about the world. And it explains why he is unhappy with people who are opposed to it. Matt’s big claim is that “the backlash against neoliberalism has … mostly served in practice as a way to tell people that it’s okay to do sloppy economic analysis or say things that aren’t true.” You want good “policy analysis,” not “sloppy thinking and denying the existence of tradeoffs.” More rapid economic growth is how you “expand the safety net.” And, more generally, “people should recommit themselves … to the idea that taxes and the safety net are the primary means of addressing the distribution of income and that regulatory policy should be geared towards growth, rather than bank shot efforts at redistribution.”

I will expand later, but I do want make it absolutely clear this is not an inherently stupid way of thinking about politics. You certainly want to be as careful as you can about the costs and benefits of what you want to do, economic growth is a good thing, and people do, in fact, usually prefer more material things to less. There is a lot of value to Matt’s approach! But even if it is not stupid, it is very incomplete, and poorly suited to capturing many of the actual political problems that we face in the modern world.

The case against the case against neoliberalism

In his third post, Matt depicts anti-neoliberalism as Bizarro World neoliberalism. Anti-neoliberalism doesn’t care about trade-offs, is just fine leaving politically convenient inefficiencies to flourish, and prioritizes redistribution over growth.

there is significant principled disagreement … There’s a view that economic regulation should be made with an eye to the distributional consequences of each individual policy shift. So if an inefficient cab regulatory system helps bolster the bottom line of a mix of working class cabbies and affluent-but-hardly-billionaires dispatch companies owners, you ought to side with them against the interests of a gaggle of VCs and yuppie cab riders. … this is the crux of the argument over “neoliberalism” inside the Democratic Party. … the “neoliberals” think you should try to address individual issues on the merits and deal with distributional concerns separately through tax policy and the welfare state. … The anti-neoliberals think this is misguided, … the “address distributional concerns separately through tax policy and the welfare state” is impossible to execute on.

As far as I can see, Matt doesn’t actually link to, or directly quote, any “anti-neoliberals” to support his perspective. So I am not sure which people he is talking about or whether this claim is just based on generic vibes. But as someone who is at least adjacent to these discussions, I think his description of anti-neoliberal thought is quite wrong.

I’m not going to recapitulate the left neoliberalism wars of the early 2010s. But the left leaning people who push back against neoliberalism do not, in my experience, see political economy as about redistributing the material goodies produced by markets through policy micromanagement. Instead, they want to reconfigure both markets and government to better share political power and influence. Structures of power come before redistribution, and go beyond it. They inspire different questions. Do markets breed power asymmetries that reinforce themselves if not countered? What can government or other powers do to redress this? And so on.

That characterization may be unhelpfully abstract. So here’s an actual example of how critics of neo-liberalism talk to the major controversy that Matt uses as an example: how ought we think about Uber? Sabeel Rahman and Kathy Thelen published an article on Uber and platform power a few years back (it’s freely available here), which makes it as clear as clear can be, that the inequalities they are worried about cannot readily be reduced to redistribution via piecemeal policy shifts. Instead, they want to focus on deeper, underlying power relations within the economy. There’s lots in there: read it! But the below gives a flavor:

Once achieved, this “winner take all” market dominance offers many avenues for generating returns through rents while also multiplying the number of stakeholders whose dependence on the platform makes them potential allies in efforts to defend it against unwelcome regulation … platform firms enjoy a much more direct and unmediated link to their users, most of whom connect to these firms through devices they carry in their pockets every day. The most successful of such firms have proved to be extraordinarily adept in leveraging their loyal consumer base into an active public narrative and political advocacy strategy in order to secure legislative and legal support for the platform business model. … the platform firms—although often built through mergers and acquisitions as well—exercise market power by controlling other participants on either side of the platform. Thus, for example, Uber can dominate both drivers and riders and set the terms for both sets of users that make up the market. Similarly, Amazon’s retail platform structures and monetizes the interactions of vast numbers of consumers and sellers.

The article’s final sentences do not frame the major disagreement as one between those who want to redistribute via taxes and those who want to redistribute via microtailored policies. They frame it as a disagreement between those who think that taxes and such are enough, and those who think that such reforms simply can’t touch the deeper power dynamics.

This diagnosis of the nature and origins of the platform firm suggests that responding to twenty-first century inequality will require—beyond redistributive tax and wage policies—a change in political-economic dynamics that can address the concentrations of power and shifts of influence the platform firm represents.

Rahman and Thelen argue that these dynamics shape the perceived identities of citizens. That helps explain why Uber has been able to build political power in the U.S, in ways that it hasn’t been able to do in Denmark.

One could easily go further. Even as I write, there is a heated debate happening in the U.K. over what do about Twitter/X, which has been gleefully propagating racial hate and false rumors, with Elon Musk as conspiracy-theorist in chief. The loose consensus seems to be that there isn’t much that can be done by U.K politicians, because Musk is too powerful, and Twitter/X too central to how politicians and people communicate. Musk’s story is a story of the accumulation of market power, its use for political ends and the dilemmas of what do about it post-hoc.

The U.S. faces similar problems. Some months ago, there was a piece in the New Yorker explaining how the U.S. Department of Defense effectively had to beg Musk not to block the use of Starlink in the Ukraine/Russia war. What these examples suggest is that the power dynamics of the platform economy cannot - and should not - be reduced down to a fight over the redistribution of the benefits of market awesome. It is all about how the market should be organized in the first place.

All these complexities get filtered out of Matt’s view of the debate, so that he can’t explain accurately how the people on the other side of the dispute understand themselves, instead defining their beliefs as a sort of negative image of his own way of thinking about the world. I don’t for a moment believe that Matt is being deliberately dishonest in framing them so. Indeed, I would imagine that he believes he is being intellectually generous, when he acknowledges that there is a “principled disagreement” involved. But the actual beliefs of the actual other side simply do not compute within his low-dimensional mental model of debates between neoliberals and anti-neoliberals. You could reframe some of Matt’s ideas in a power based perspective, siding with citizens-as-consumers as opposed to citizens-as-workers, or arguing like J.K. Galbraith that big monopolies will lead to the creation of countervailing power as people mobilize against them. I leave the question of how much damage would be done to Matt’s perspective in this translation, as an exercise for others.

More broadly, as Dan Davies says in The Unaccountability Machine:

Adopting the economic mode of thinking reduces the cognitive demands placed on our ruling classes by telling them that there are lots of things they don’t have to bother thinking about. The adoption of economic growth and efficiency as a core philosophy and cost–benefit analysis as a method of governance means not only that thousands of possible policies can be rejected without serious consideration, but also that whole approaches to human life never need to be considered.

Just so.

Davies vs. Davos

These problems also compromise the second post of Matt’s series, where he writes about China and trade, asking why neoliberals didn’t see that more economic inter-reliance carried security risks along with it. As it happens, I have more than a casual interest in the broad topic of globalization, interdependence and national security. Abe Newman and I have been talking about this to the point where even I am am tired of it, but not so tired that I will pass up the opportunity to plug the book where Abe and I look to explain it all.

So, I have strong opinions on what went wrong, which are at least somewhat informed by reading the relevant debates in the 1990s and 2000s. I wouldn’t say that I’m a true expert on these debates - this was background research rather than building up the main line of argument. Still, I have read more outdated newspaper articles, policy briefs, trade association publications and wannabe business bestsellers about globalization than is good for anyone’s health.

Matt acknowledges in his post that anti-neoliberals were correct to identify the problems of the old consensus about trade and China, but says they haven’t come up with a good alternative. He provides a short account of the history of the debate over China, which gets (as best as I can see) most of the details right. But what seems to me wrong - or at least very seriously incomplete - is his lack of discussion of the connection between (a) the past consensus on trade and China, and (b) neoliberalism. Hence, the big story seems off target, even if the details are mostly fine.

Early on, Matt describes how the consensus about lowering trade barriers long pre-dated neo-liberalism. This is true - but it is equally true that neoliberal ideas went hand in hand with a fundamental transformation of global trade, financial flows, and all the rest. The world changed dramatically - and neoliberal ideas were a very important part of that story!

The core project was enabling global markets to flourish by removing inefficient hindrances and regulations. Maximizing wealth was a core goal, and markets and freedom were inextricably interlinked. The core precepts of neoliberalism were also the crucial elements of the organizing ideology of globalization. Practice differed from theory, and you could of course add more - Quinn Slobodian has a very good book arguing that Hayekian constitutionalism translated into ideas on binding international rules - but still, the main point stands.

None of this appears in Matt’s post. That is presumably in part because it focuses on the specific debates over China. But when Matt reaches for a wider explanation, he again seems to distance the core ideas of neoliberalism from the national security blunders of the late 1990s. Instead, Matt blames a “geopolitical revery” exemplified by Thomas Friedman columns and politicians’ speeches about culture, brand identity, and the ineluctable spread of liberal values of freedom. He suggests that this revery led to people thinking that it was a good idea to bring China into the global trading system, rather than just building up trade between allies. The implication seems to be that if it hadn’t been for all of that geopolitical confusion, neoliberalism would have never have been so foolish as to admit adversaries such as China into the global trade regime. Trade was doing perfectly nicely until it was corrupted by the loose ways of geopolitics, falling into dissipation and bad habits.

If you read the actual critics of neoliberalism, this really doesn’t add up. The geopolitics are coming from inside the house. The Actual Basis Document For Hewlett argues that the linkage between freedom and markets was a core part of neoliberalism from the beginning. The philosophy of neoliberalism did indeed put “a thumb on the scale in favor of some arguments and against others.” Plausibly, that’s a big part of the reason why Thomas Friedman’s arguments resonated so widely.

But I think that the Davies approach - thinking of neoliberalism as an “information-reducing filter” is more interesting and novel. From this perspective, the problem of the 1990s was the exact opposite of neoliberalism falling into a “geopolitical reverie.” Most of the time, neoliberals didn’t think about geopolitics at all. They didn’t feel that they had to. Their understanding of the global economy was almost entirely dominated by markets, trade and technology.

For sure, they saw political problems that stood in the way of globalization - bureaucratic rigidities, special interests who opposed increased market competition, greedy unions and politicians who needed to be better subjected to the austere rigors of market discipline. But all those could be understood easily within their paradigm - inefficiencies that needed to be ironed out through technocratic means where possible, and through the application of coercion where not . Problems that did not fit within this paradigm - such as the risk of geopolitical clashes - were either flattened so that they be squeezed in (without most of the accompanying information) or filtered out entirely.

In the age of high neoliberalism, discussions of the economic threat of China usually focused on whether it was becoming a dangerously strong market competitor, and perhaps cheating, through stealing ‘intellectual property’ and similar. Neoliberals didn’t typically ask whether global market development could cause national security problems. That didn’t really fit into their paradigm of how things worked.

No ideology is total, and every policy regime contains elements of its predecessors. There were some Cold War bureaucratic leftovers, such as the export controls regime, where people still thought about these topics and implemented technical restrictions, but they were specialized backwaters, only visible to technical specialists. Kevin Wolf, who ran the export controls system during the Obama Administration, used to joke that it was the perfect field for people who found tax law too exciting. When I interviewed John Bolton (a much more interesting and straightforward interviewee than I had anticipated), he told me that he hadn’t known about the Entity List (a key tool of export controls) before the Trump era confrontation with China started - but he was delighted to discover it then.

Also there are economic sanctions, which Matt mentions, but are their own separate and complicated topic. But such complications did not - as best as I can tell as an outsider - get real attention in the debates at grand global forums such as Davos, where political leaders and business leaders rubbed shoulders on a relatively equal footing. They did not fit into the boundaries of acceptable discussion over how the global political economy ought work.

Nor did geopolitics feature in actual business decisions. There is a great temptation (Abe and I talk briefly about this in the book) to overemphasize the importance of policy debates in spreading globalization, and to underemphasize the importance of business. But trade, investment and finance among firms are often where the real action happens. And most business leaders did not have any notion at all that geopolitics could be a problem.

We found lots and lots of examples of willed ignorance, while we were doing research for the book. My favorite example may be the Semiconductor Industry Association’s 2016 report, “Beyond Borders: The Global Semiconductor Value Chain,” which describes at enormous length how “[f]ew industries, if any, have a value chain and ecosystem so complex, geographically widespread, and intertwined.” In retrospect, this claim has some of the poignancy, if little of the romance, of a celebration of the diversity of Hapsburg Empire published circa 1912. You will have a hard time finding such celebrations today. As Morris Chang, the founder of TSMC, lamented in 2022, “those good days when we can serve everybody in the world, those good days are gone. I just hope that they don’t get any worse.”

None of this was visible to business leaders like Chang in 2016. The “good days” went hand-in-hand with a broader paradigm that seemed to provide an excellent explanation of the world and how it worked. The core ideas of neoliberalism were obviously simplifications, but they were powerful simplifications, apparently explaining a lot with a little. They told politicians and business leaders what they ought focus on, and what they could reasonably ignore.

It turned out that a lot of those things ought not to have been ignored! Neoliberalism’s ideological blinkers prevented elites from seeing was happening for a very long time, which is why they are hurrying to catch up now.

As Dan makes clear, ideologies are not just a way of organizing the world, but of attenuating its vast complexities, filtering out problems and questions that the paradigm is ill equipped to handle, so that no one pays attention to them and they don’t have to be dealt with. This explains, for example, why central banks didn’t spot the financial crisis in time:

The information was there, but it hadn’t been organised into the decision-making process and didn’t shape the view at the management or operational levels. It remained as mere ‘data’ or was attenuated away by simply ignoring it: the ‘information-processing system of last resort’.

Much the same could be said about the global elite’s cultivated ignorance of the relevance of geopolitics to such questions as ‘Is creating deep economic interdependence with China actually a good idea?’ Pointing this out - just a crucial little bit ahead of the bandwagon - has been very good indeed for my and Abe’s academic careers. But the decades of ignorance-as-information-processing-substitute have not been good at all for the global economy, for national security officials who suddenly find themselves having to reinvent government to deal with economic problems, for businesses that suddenly find themselves in a changed and frightening world, or for the ordinary people who are caught up in the cross fire. All of these groups might have benefited greatly from a more diverse intellectual ecology.

After neoliberalism

Taken together, the above explains why I think that Matt’s project is doomed. You can’t return to the apparent technocratic paradise of the Obama era and before, when the right people were in charge, and disagreement with neoliberalism was the brand of a fundamentally unserious person. An angel with a flaming sword stands sentry at that gate. She will let no-one pass.

The old technocratic consensus seemed idyllic to its practitioners but it also filtered out some enormously complex problems, so that they could be shrugged off or ignored. If an economic problem couldn’t be described and solved in terms of growth, increasing market efficiency, and a bit of redistribution on top, it was hard to get people to pay attention. So for the financial practices that spurred the financial crisis. So too for the geopolitics of markets, and for a variety of other problems.

In his first post, Matt said that “the backlash against neoliberalism … mostly served in practice as a way to tell people that it’s okay to do sloppy economic analysis or say things that aren’t true.” It would be churlish to retort that neoliberalism mostly served in practice as a way to tell policy elites that they could ignore big complex problems. More importantly, it would completely miss the ways in which neoliberalism can be useful.

Economic growth is something that you really do want to prioritize much of the time. Markets can provide more flexible solutions to problems that governments aren’t good at handling, and are often essential adjuncts to state policy (see Charles Lindblom’s great book, The Market System). And so on. But even if neoliberalism can plausibly provide part of the solution, it cannot be the master narrative. Its blind spots help explain why things have gotten so badly messed up in the first place.

Matt complains that post-neoliberals have not been good at thinking about tradeoffs. He’s largely right. Or at the least, I agree with him on this, and have often thought much the same thing myself. Much post neoliberal policy writing seems to suggest by omission, and occasionally by commission, that One Weird Trick policies can secure America against China, boost innovation, create well-paying jobs, save American democracy, and prevent climate change, all at the same time. It would be remarkable if there weren’t tradeoffs - and substantial ones too - between these varying goals. There is too much focus on political coalition building, and not nearly enough crabby commentary about the crudeness of the spot-welding that joins different elements of policy, and the ramshackle structures that they add up to.

But it is also, objectively much harder to think about tradeoffs when you are prepared to admit the complexity of the interlocking problems of the world, rather than waving them away as the past paradigm so often did. I’ll quote a Foreign Affairs piece that Abe Newman and myself wrote last year:

as the United States seeks to limit China’s ambitions, it has to take complex and uncertain technological risks. The United States has adopted a “small yard, high fence” approach to technology control, with strong measures taken to restrict a limited set of products and techniques. Doing that well, however, requires a degree of surgical precision that would be hard to achieve even with a detailed understanding of the global economy and the likely future paths of innovation. It requires a deep understanding of the sectors involved. … The United States might be tempted to steal a page from China’s playbook and encourage inward investment by Chinese battery technology companies, so that it can learn from and emulate its rival. But such a move might just create new vulnerabilities and dependencies.

Or a bit more broadly:

post-neo-liberalism is hard. Figuring out how to reconcile national security needs with economics is an inherently complex problem, and it mostly isn’t the kind of complexity that can be delegated to markets and forgotten. The decisions that have to be made are fundamentally political decisions, with complex and uncertain trade-offs. So how do we even begin to think about making them?

Hence, there are tradeoffs - but they are complex and uncertain. Neoliberalism’s usual tools for thinking about tradeoffs - cost-benefit analysis and such - are poorly suited to comprehend largely unpredictable future trajectories of technological development and largely unpredictable future security dynamics.

Personally, I am skeptical that we’re going to arrive at a post-neoliberal consensus anytime soon, and if we ever do, it will certainly have its own blind spots. But we have a lot of horribly complex, intersecting problems to resolve in the meantime, and will need to figure out how to apply a variety of approaches.

I’d very much like to see Matt as part of that effort, whether positively, through articulating his own position more clearly, or negatively, through sharp and well aimed criticisms. Nor does he necessarily have to be agreeable about it. Intelligent criticism is more precious than rubies, when you can get it at all. But I don’t think Matt is there yet, or near to being there, though he’s certainly capable of it, if he wants to be. Perhaps the subsequent posts will be better.

* Presumably a play on the title of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. Like its original, Matt’s series so far has been rather more specific about the enemies than the concept that he looks to defend against them. As a complete aside, I’ve always been fond of the crack, sometimes erroneously attributed to Ernest Gellner, that Popper’s book should have been titled The Open Society: By One Of Its Enemies. Popper was notoriously quarrelsome.

** NB that my post doesn’t even try to assess many of the particulars of Matt’s arguments. I’m more interested in trying to reconstruct why he so dislikes post-neoliberals, and what his own understanding of neoliberalism is (he isn’t as explicit as he might be).

*** I should note that I am a beneficiary of this program through the Center for Economy and Society at Johns Hopkins. I haven’t talked to anyone at this center, or at Hewlett, about this piece, which solely represents my personal opinions (I did briefly discuss my loose notions with a journalist, who contacted me unexpectedly to ask what I thought about Matt’s ideas, after I had already started writing it).

**** Matt is concerned that lefties deploy neoliberalism as a way of denying that there are any differences between people like himself and real rightwingers. For what it is worth, Elizabeth Popp Berman’s book on Thinking Like an Economist makes it clear that there was one important difference between the first wave of neoliberal reforms under Carter, and the Reagan revolution. The people inside the Carter administration took these ideas seriously, whereas the Reaganites very often seemed to view them as more or less convenient intellectual excuses for doing what they wanted to do anyway. Berman’s book is also good on one of the great benefits of neoliberalism, which is underrecognized by both advocates and critics - that it can turn irresolvable political disputes into somewhat more tractable technical disputes.