To me, as an amateur in this debate, it seems that Adam Smith's warning that the drive of entrepreneurs is about *personal* advantage (profit), not *society's* advantage, remains valid.
It is not just about distributing that wealth, because what we want is more than just economic value.
In the end, the primacy of markets (entrepreneurs, the profit-drive) has taken over from the primacy of ethics thanks to an over-reliance on commercial markets to optimise results. It has become 'value' over 'values'. There is a fundamental problem with trying to get 'values' when a single 'value' has become the single most important one. And it is also not true that markets are always the most efficient (have a look at health care across the world and especially the US), the profits being siphoned off can make the overall result very inefficient from the perspective of society (not from the perspective of those siphoning off the profits, which brings us back to Uncle Adam).
I agree with you, but I'm not sure the American healthcare system is the best example. I believe Adam Smith would be just as pissed off by the monopolists and PBN's functioning as rentiers as you or I. It's like Cory Doctorow says, 'capitalists hate capitalism.'
I'm just an amateur as well, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but maybe a better example would be dealing with climate change? While markets on a macro level provide an organizational system for participants who each have different types and amounts of information due to how they respond to feedback, relying on that system to solve a problem, like neoliberals do with carbon credits, doesn't seem to actually make any progress towards its goal.
When you first study physics, you take the product of 3-dimensional Euclidean space and 1-dimensional Euclidean time to be the background for the universe and everything in it. Contra Aristotle, not only can vacuum exist, it is ontologically prior to everything else. When you move on to special relativity, you amend this geometry to 3+1 Minkowski space, but it remains the background taken as a given by quantum field theories (although we've changed our minds a bit about vacua.) But that is not how general relativity works; there space and time are dynamical relations between objects, each influencing the other according to Einstein's equation
By now you've probably sussed where I'm going with this. The relationship between wealth and power is of the second type. Wealth begets power and power begets wealth; therefore you cannot take either as a fixed background with which to analyse the other. That is a serious problem for a project which hopes to first optimize wealth and then redistribute it, because the redistribution step is inherently political and political relations are not a stable property of the system. In fact, with enough concentration of power, it becomes easier just to collect rents than to create wealth by innovating, and there are both theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that unconstrained wealth creation leads to unconstrained wealth concentration. Why should I take seriously someone whose main critique of his opponents is that they don't consider economic trade-offs if he is unwilling to contemplate political trade-offs?
Real GDP growth rates didnt rise under Neoliberalism, they declined, the declined under the Obama admin just as they had declined under the Bush admin, just as they been declining ever since the so called Neoliberal Era we’re in now was set up between the latter 1970s and mid 1980s, and as the new system became further entrenched over time, GDP growth rates continued to decline
Also, we haven’t had a “free market” since they transitioned the US economy from being a diffuse one that operated within a paradigm of competitive market structures into a concentrated one that operates within a paradigm of private sector central planning.
As a daily Yglesias reader who usually agrees with him, I found this essay valuable and insightful. Matt's taste for simplicity (as he explicitly acknowledged recently) is a somewhat pre-cognitive habit that leads him to willfully reduce problems to Econ 101 framing. As you note, his discussions of Uber and AirBnB are great examples.
That said, a couple points:
1. He's really good on the deep problems with having professional Progressives make major policy decisions: they are so Democratic that they become un-democratic. C.f. today's column "Bring back the revolving door!"
2. He learns. For example, he's done an incredible job on clean energy, to the extent that he has incorporated critiques from myself and others and even better, he has taught me, a clean energy professional, the errors of my David Roberts-esque thinking c. 2021. I still disagree with him on some sub-topics, but his contributions are fantastic in both directions—updating some of his priors and teaching the rest of us why we should update ours.
3. Broadly, he has taught me the cost of belonging to an intellectual tribe which defines itself against the mainstream. Figures such as David Roberts, Marcy Wheeler, and Jeet Heer, all of whom have done outstanding work, struggle to write a paragraph without implying that those outside their cohort are fools or knaves. Writers such as Dan Davies and Zachary Carter do much less personal identity advertisement, but when I closely read their wonderful books, I see signs that they will not follow their evidence and intellect past the bounds of an oppositional stance towards The Establishment.
Thanks so much for this piece. I think it moves the conversation forward. Off to read Kramer's essay ...
1) the main argument against the revolving door is that allowing public servants to get back into the industries for which they made policy *without* a lengthy waiting period (let's say 5-10 years) ramps up the risk of regulatory capture since those people can then be expected to make policy for which they will be handsomely rewarded once returning to the private sector. In Yglesia's pîece, he doesn't address this at all but instead constructs some strawmen to attack, which have little to do with the revolving door.
Also, attacking the very limited student loan forgiveness that the Biden administration enacted because it supposedly bails out universities (when the only reason that those loans can be forgiven in the first place is because the governments gave them) is dishonest.
And "Biden has been the strongest ally that labor union leaders have ever had" is an outright lie. I mean, Democrats themselves tried to sell him as a *second* FDR (not that he was that). And breaking the rail workers strike was a very strange way of showing one's allyship.
Finally, Stoller's not complaining that Harris "has some associates who have worked in the private sector" but pointing out that she has key advisors working for *Uber*, the arguably most predatory US company currently out there.
2) "Yglesia's has taught me the cost of belonging to an intellectual tribe which defines itself against the mainstream." Wait, what? Neoliberalism *was* the unquestioned mainstream until Trump and is still very powerful. Yglesia's has written from a position of strength all his pundit life, and typically (as in the revolving door piece) presents his political opponents as just not living in the real world, a.k.a. as "fools and knaves". I mean, in the piece he mentions, he explicitly says that the Revolving Door Project doesn't object to a public servants spouse because that spouse was a former Warren staffer.
Thanks for the reply. We have different perspectives. Briefly:
1. Of course there are costs to staffing business people to government. Yglesias' point is that there are significant direct benefits. I'd personally add that conflict of interest can manifest itself as harmful corruption or as productive coordination, but that's another argument.
2. "supposedly bails out ... is dishonest" is ad hominem. You think he's *incorrect*, which is fine.
3. Also ad hominem: "strongest ally ... ever" is obviously hyperbole, not a "lie". Biden is Labor's strongest ally in the White House since ... Johnson? Seems like a harmless overstatement in service of an important and accurate point. One counter-example does not disprove it.
4. Stoller: you are bypassing Yglesias' patient and thorough takedowns of Stoller, who deserves them.
5. "Wait, what?" I don't think you grasped my point. "Fools ad knaves": c.f. ad hominem above.
Re 1: you've misunderstood me. I don't have the slightest problem with staffing people from private business (who might have expertise that they couldn't have acquired otherwise) to government. I have an immense problem with allowing those people to then quickly return to the industries they shaped policy for. Yglesias doesn't address this issue, neither do you.
You're giving Yglesias a benefit of the doubt that I honestly don't think he deserves. The "strongest ally ever" thing is not formulated in such a way that it can be read as hyperbole (let along obvious one), and is a talking point that centrists and right-wingers use time and again to try and claim that leftists should support Biden. If you and I can see that Biden is not more pro-labor than Johnson and FDR then Yglesias can as well. And since his point would have lost nothing by making reference to a president who was in power before the Reagan rollback but he decided to not do it, Occam's razor says he lied.
Same for the supposed university bailout. Nothing in his writing is formulated to indicate that this is an interpretation that uses additional evidence to come to a different conclusion than the administrative setup. Someone who doesn't know the situation will believe Yglesias statement, which is marshalled against redistribution, and, again, Yglesias *has* to know what the actual situation is, even if he interprets it differently. Not admitting to reality is either bullshitting or lying and since he has a political point to make, it's unlikely that he's bullshitting.
>> 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.
I think this hits at the heart of the question which I would contend is, in very Dan Davies terms, that we've become too good at thinking about optimization when we need to get better at information processing. I hope that Matt engages in this discussion!
Thanks--this gets at my instant gut reactions too. First, that neoliberalism is emphatically NOT technocracy or technocrats (Nils Gilman's work, among many, demonstrates that technocracy is a much older issue--hell, government by experts was being actively debated between first-wave pragmatists and their critics before 1945. And that second, the historical failures of technocratic initiatives and thinking are so plentiful at this juncture that even a technocrat should judge that it's a bad basis for governance and policy-making. Neoliberalism has many separate problems, but it's a different conversation altogether except that neoliberalism sometimes bundles a kind of technocratic affect into its managerial presentation.
To your point about Uber - what if we upped the taxing and redistribution via enhancing transit in major cities to reduce Uber’s influence? Nobody really talks about Uber in Switzerland because everyone takes a bus that comes every 5 minutes.
1) I used to buy into the "neoliberalism is pro-market and anti-government" summary until I read more (including "The Political Theory of Neoliberalism") and understood just *how* much the neoliberal state intervenes time and again on the side of (big) business against everyone else. You hint at that with "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 in the rest of the text this is kinda hidden between "efficiencies" and "markets".
2) As others have pointed out in the comments, economic growth under neoliberal policies is consistently lower than under other regimes so it fails by its own official success metric. So I fail to see "the ways in which neoliberalism can be useful" (except as rhetorical cover for upwards wealth distribution).
3) Something that's struck me about neoliberalism's failure when it comes to US geopolitical aims is the current war in Ukraine. Not only the inability of the lean-production arms companies to produce enough shells etc. in time. But even more so the Ukrainian government's attempt to fight this as a neoliberal war: letting civilians pool funds to pay for weapon systems instead of buying them at bulk themselves, not financing drone improvements directly but buying from the "most efficient" contractor after the fact, ostensibly tendering defense structure construction (and then getting ripped off). They claim that this is a war for the survival of Ukraine but instead of putting the economy on a war footing, they do too little.
Which got me thinking that neoliberalism as practice could only come about in circumstances where economies look big and stable, and war is very unlikely. In the late seventies/early eighties, the risk of actual hot war with the USSR seemed remote (and even then arms production was kinda exempt until the USSR actually ceased to exist).
The idea is that steelmanning can often fail because your ideology keeps you from actually understanding the core background assumptions in others' arguments which is exactly what Matt is doing as you pointed out.
I tried to read Matt's fist post but I just can't handle the pervasive talking point that "nobody really knows what Neo-Liberalism means". Just from then on, the whole thing starts striking me as hopelessly intellectually dishonest. Did he ever stop to think that if some definitions of it seem contradictory to him, it may just mean he hasn't quite grasped the concept yet?
Yglesias is taking the easy pundit's way out of something like this: imply that a word is just one of those lefty-jargon things and you don't have to take any of the definitions seriously. By that standard, liberalism is also something whose meaning is wholly unknown; conservatism is wholly unknown; "progressives" are unknown; "the state" is unknown, etc. A surplus of definitional action around a term is not a green light to just say "oh fuck it, I don't have to talk about any of that stuff".
Whatever it was originally that's exactly what it became, a long time ago. Having gone to grad school in the 2010s, "neoliberalism" long ago became a generic term of abuse the way "woke" is now for the right. It is all the more irritating because 99% of the people who use it wouldn't know what a demand curve is if it bit them in the arse.
It's all about your frame of reference. You can always find a conversation where a meaningful or valuable term is being used loosely, abusively, valuelessly. I think it's a bad idea to begin a conversation that's meant to be serious by indexing yourself against the most evacuated, meaningless use of a particular concept or term. Or it's punditry/social media's usual quick road to vaguely elevating shitposting.
a) I don't think Matt didn't that and I think your framing of what he wrote is totally off base (compared, for instance to the article we are responding to b) I'm not "finding it", I've been subjected to it, for decades, both in academia and every day life
Straightforward question: why do you think anyone using the term neo-liberalism needs to have to have their use of it validated by understanding what a demand curve is? Please explain exactly why ignorance of that specific piece of economic lore somehow invalidates criticizing an ideology, because I think that besides the lazy both side-ism of comparing "neoliberal" to "woke" you're also engaging in a non-sequitur.
That's straightforward and actually related to the original article. Neo liberalism is criticised for the "worship of markets" and the related sin of excessive use of economic reasoning. How can you criticise something without understanding the most basic concepts of the thing you're criticising?
Oh, very simple: one can be completely illiterate about the tools used to determine market efficiency and still make an entirely cogent argument about why market efficiency should not be used to justify child labor, military coups or indentured servitude. Hope this clarifies.
I really enjoyed reading this—as someone with no econ/poli sci background (but a keen interest in understanding the world!), your explanation of neoliberalism and how it’s functioned in American politics to, as Davies argues, radically simplify complex geopolitical problems (“decades of ignorance-as-information-processing-substitute”) was so useful. Will try to find a copy of Davies’s The Unaccountability Machine now! Thank you for writing this.
To me, as an amateur in this debate, it seems that Adam Smith's warning that the drive of entrepreneurs is about *personal* advantage (profit), not *society's* advantage, remains valid.
It is not just about distributing that wealth, because what we want is more than just economic value.
In the end, the primacy of markets (entrepreneurs, the profit-drive) has taken over from the primacy of ethics thanks to an over-reliance on commercial markets to optimise results. It has become 'value' over 'values'. There is a fundamental problem with trying to get 'values' when a single 'value' has become the single most important one. And it is also not true that markets are always the most efficient (have a look at health care across the world and especially the US), the profits being siphoned off can make the overall result very inefficient from the perspective of society (not from the perspective of those siphoning off the profits, which brings us back to Uncle Adam).
I agree with you, but I'm not sure the American healthcare system is the best example. I believe Adam Smith would be just as pissed off by the monopolists and PBN's functioning as rentiers as you or I. It's like Cory Doctorow says, 'capitalists hate capitalism.'
I'm just an amateur as well, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but maybe a better example would be dealing with climate change? While markets on a macro level provide an organizational system for participants who each have different types and amounts of information due to how they respond to feedback, relying on that system to solve a problem, like neoliberals do with carbon credits, doesn't seem to actually make any progress towards its goal.
When you first study physics, you take the product of 3-dimensional Euclidean space and 1-dimensional Euclidean time to be the background for the universe and everything in it. Contra Aristotle, not only can vacuum exist, it is ontologically prior to everything else. When you move on to special relativity, you amend this geometry to 3+1 Minkowski space, but it remains the background taken as a given by quantum field theories (although we've changed our minds a bit about vacua.) But that is not how general relativity works; there space and time are dynamical relations between objects, each influencing the other according to Einstein's equation
By now you've probably sussed where I'm going with this. The relationship between wealth and power is of the second type. Wealth begets power and power begets wealth; therefore you cannot take either as a fixed background with which to analyse the other. That is a serious problem for a project which hopes to first optimize wealth and then redistribute it, because the redistribution step is inherently political and political relations are not a stable property of the system. In fact, with enough concentration of power, it becomes easier just to collect rents than to create wealth by innovating, and there are both theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that unconstrained wealth creation leads to unconstrained wealth concentration. Why should I take seriously someone whose main critique of his opponents is that they don't consider economic trade-offs if he is unwilling to contemplate political trade-offs?
Real GDP growth rates didnt rise under Neoliberalism, they declined, the declined under the Obama admin just as they had declined under the Bush admin, just as they been declining ever since the so called Neoliberal Era we’re in now was set up between the latter 1970s and mid 1980s, and as the new system became further entrenched over time, GDP growth rates continued to decline
Also, we haven’t had a “free market” since they transitioned the US economy from being a diffuse one that operated within a paradigm of competitive market structures into a concentrated one that operates within a paradigm of private sector central planning.
As a daily Yglesias reader who usually agrees with him, I found this essay valuable and insightful. Matt's taste for simplicity (as he explicitly acknowledged recently) is a somewhat pre-cognitive habit that leads him to willfully reduce problems to Econ 101 framing. As you note, his discussions of Uber and AirBnB are great examples.
That said, a couple points:
1. He's really good on the deep problems with having professional Progressives make major policy decisions: they are so Democratic that they become un-democratic. C.f. today's column "Bring back the revolving door!"
2. He learns. For example, he's done an incredible job on clean energy, to the extent that he has incorporated critiques from myself and others and even better, he has taught me, a clean energy professional, the errors of my David Roberts-esque thinking c. 2021. I still disagree with him on some sub-topics, but his contributions are fantastic in both directions—updating some of his priors and teaching the rest of us why we should update ours.
3. Broadly, he has taught me the cost of belonging to an intellectual tribe which defines itself against the mainstream. Figures such as David Roberts, Marcy Wheeler, and Jeet Heer, all of whom have done outstanding work, struggle to write a paragraph without implying that those outside their cohort are fools or knaves. Writers such as Dan Davies and Zachary Carter do much less personal identity advertisement, but when I closely read their wonderful books, I see signs that they will not follow their evidence and intellect past the bounds of an oppositional stance towards The Establishment.
Thanks so much for this piece. I think it moves the conversation forward. Off to read Kramer's essay ...
Two quick questions:
1) the main argument against the revolving door is that allowing public servants to get back into the industries for which they made policy *without* a lengthy waiting period (let's say 5-10 years) ramps up the risk of regulatory capture since those people can then be expected to make policy for which they will be handsomely rewarded once returning to the private sector. In Yglesia's pîece, he doesn't address this at all but instead constructs some strawmen to attack, which have little to do with the revolving door.
Also, attacking the very limited student loan forgiveness that the Biden administration enacted because it supposedly bails out universities (when the only reason that those loans can be forgiven in the first place is because the governments gave them) is dishonest.
And "Biden has been the strongest ally that labor union leaders have ever had" is an outright lie. I mean, Democrats themselves tried to sell him as a *second* FDR (not that he was that). And breaking the rail workers strike was a very strange way of showing one's allyship.
Finally, Stoller's not complaining that Harris "has some associates who have worked in the private sector" but pointing out that she has key advisors working for *Uber*, the arguably most predatory US company currently out there.
2) "Yglesia's has taught me the cost of belonging to an intellectual tribe which defines itself against the mainstream." Wait, what? Neoliberalism *was* the unquestioned mainstream until Trump and is still very powerful. Yglesia's has written from a position of strength all his pundit life, and typically (as in the revolving door piece) presents his political opponents as just not living in the real world, a.k.a. as "fools and knaves". I mean, in the piece he mentions, he explicitly says that the Revolving Door Project doesn't object to a public servants spouse because that spouse was a former Warren staffer.
Thanks for the reply. We have different perspectives. Briefly:
1. Of course there are costs to staffing business people to government. Yglesias' point is that there are significant direct benefits. I'd personally add that conflict of interest can manifest itself as harmful corruption or as productive coordination, but that's another argument.
2. "supposedly bails out ... is dishonest" is ad hominem. You think he's *incorrect*, which is fine.
3. Also ad hominem: "strongest ally ... ever" is obviously hyperbole, not a "lie". Biden is Labor's strongest ally in the White House since ... Johnson? Seems like a harmless overstatement in service of an important and accurate point. One counter-example does not disprove it.
4. Stoller: you are bypassing Yglesias' patient and thorough takedowns of Stoller, who deserves them.
5. "Wait, what?" I don't think you grasped my point. "Fools ad knaves": c.f. ad hominem above.
Re 1: you've misunderstood me. I don't have the slightest problem with staffing people from private business (who might have expertise that they couldn't have acquired otherwise) to government. I have an immense problem with allowing those people to then quickly return to the industries they shaped policy for. Yglesias doesn't address this issue, neither do you.
You're giving Yglesias a benefit of the doubt that I honestly don't think he deserves. The "strongest ally ever" thing is not formulated in such a way that it can be read as hyperbole (let along obvious one), and is a talking point that centrists and right-wingers use time and again to try and claim that leftists should support Biden. If you and I can see that Biden is not more pro-labor than Johnson and FDR then Yglesias can as well. And since his point would have lost nothing by making reference to a president who was in power before the Reagan rollback but he decided to not do it, Occam's razor says he lied.
Same for the supposed university bailout. Nothing in his writing is formulated to indicate that this is an interpretation that uses additional evidence to come to a different conclusion than the administrative setup. Someone who doesn't know the situation will believe Yglesias statement, which is marshalled against redistribution, and, again, Yglesias *has* to know what the actual situation is, even if he interprets it differently. Not admitting to reality is either bullshitting or lying and since he has a political point to make, it's unlikely that he's bullshitting.
A post riffing on a bad Matt Yglesias take took me right back to the early days of Crooked Timber!
>> 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.
I think this hits at the heart of the question which I would contend is, in very Dan Davies terms, that we've become too good at thinking about optimization when we need to get better at information processing. I hope that Matt engages in this discussion!
Thanks--this gets at my instant gut reactions too. First, that neoliberalism is emphatically NOT technocracy or technocrats (Nils Gilman's work, among many, demonstrates that technocracy is a much older issue--hell, government by experts was being actively debated between first-wave pragmatists and their critics before 1945. And that second, the historical failures of technocratic initiatives and thinking are so plentiful at this juncture that even a technocrat should judge that it's a bad basis for governance and policy-making. Neoliberalism has many separate problems, but it's a different conversation altogether except that neoliberalism sometimes bundles a kind of technocratic affect into its managerial presentation.
You’ve put more thought into Matt’s case for neoliberlism than Matt has.
To your point about Uber - what if we upped the taxing and redistribution via enhancing transit in major cities to reduce Uber’s influence? Nobody really talks about Uber in Switzerland because everyone takes a bus that comes every 5 minutes.
Great write-up as always. A few quick remarks:
1) I used to buy into the "neoliberalism is pro-market and anti-government" summary until I read more (including "The Political Theory of Neoliberalism") and understood just *how* much the neoliberal state intervenes time and again on the side of (big) business against everyone else. You hint at that with "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 in the rest of the text this is kinda hidden between "efficiencies" and "markets".
2) As others have pointed out in the comments, economic growth under neoliberal policies is consistently lower than under other regimes so it fails by its own official success metric. So I fail to see "the ways in which neoliberalism can be useful" (except as rhetorical cover for upwards wealth distribution).
3) Something that's struck me about neoliberalism's failure when it comes to US geopolitical aims is the current war in Ukraine. Not only the inability of the lean-production arms companies to produce enough shells etc. in time. But even more so the Ukrainian government's attempt to fight this as a neoliberal war: letting civilians pool funds to pay for weapon systems instead of buying them at bulk themselves, not financing drone improvements directly but buying from the "most efficient" contractor after the fact, ostensibly tendering defense structure construction (and then getting ripped off). They claim that this is a war for the survival of Ukraine but instead of putting the economy on a war footing, they do too little.
Which got me thinking that neoliberalism as practice could only come about in circumstances where economies look big and stable, and war is very unlikely. In the late seventies/early eighties, the risk of actual hot war with the USSR seemed remote (and even then arms production was kinda exempt until the USSR actually ceased to exist).
Just wanna say parts of this reminded me of this great essay I read 8 years ago: https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/08/09/against-steelmanning/
The idea is that steelmanning can often fail because your ideology keeps you from actually understanding the core background assumptions in others' arguments which is exactly what Matt is doing as you pointed out.
I tried to read Matt's fist post but I just can't handle the pervasive talking point that "nobody really knows what Neo-Liberalism means". Just from then on, the whole thing starts striking me as hopelessly intellectually dishonest. Did he ever stop to think that if some definitions of it seem contradictory to him, it may just mean he hasn't quite grasped the concept yet?
Yglesias is taking the easy pundit's way out of something like this: imply that a word is just one of those lefty-jargon things and you don't have to take any of the definitions seriously. By that standard, liberalism is also something whose meaning is wholly unknown; conservatism is wholly unknown; "progressives" are unknown; "the state" is unknown, etc. A surplus of definitional action around a term is not a green light to just say "oh fuck it, I don't have to talk about any of that stuff".
Whatever it was originally that's exactly what it became, a long time ago. Having gone to grad school in the 2010s, "neoliberalism" long ago became a generic term of abuse the way "woke" is now for the right. It is all the more irritating because 99% of the people who use it wouldn't know what a demand curve is if it bit them in the arse.
It's all about your frame of reference. You can always find a conversation where a meaningful or valuable term is being used loosely, abusively, valuelessly. I think it's a bad idea to begin a conversation that's meant to be serious by indexing yourself against the most evacuated, meaningless use of a particular concept or term. Or it's punditry/social media's usual quick road to vaguely elevating shitposting.
a) I don't think Matt didn't that and I think your framing of what he wrote is totally off base (compared, for instance to the article we are responding to b) I'm not "finding it", I've been subjected to it, for decades, both in academia and every day life
Straightforward question: why do you think anyone using the term neo-liberalism needs to have to have their use of it validated by understanding what a demand curve is? Please explain exactly why ignorance of that specific piece of economic lore somehow invalidates criticizing an ideology, because I think that besides the lazy both side-ism of comparing "neoliberal" to "woke" you're also engaging in a non-sequitur.
That's straightforward and actually related to the original article. Neo liberalism is criticised for the "worship of markets" and the related sin of excessive use of economic reasoning. How can you criticise something without understanding the most basic concepts of the thing you're criticising?
Oh, very simple: one can be completely illiterate about the tools used to determine market efficiency and still make an entirely cogent argument about why market efficiency should not be used to justify child labor, military coups or indentured servitude. Hope this clarifies.
Haven't the faintest idea what that as to do with what the OP is talking about. Anyway enjoy whatever that is.
Glad I found this, think the anti neolib debate is interesting but idk seems more like it will end up as a run at power bc ppl see weakness.
I really enjoyed reading this—as someone with no econ/poli sci background (but a keen interest in understanding the world!), your explanation of neoliberalism and how it’s functioned in American politics to, as Davies argues, radically simplify complex geopolitical problems (“decades of ignorance-as-information-processing-substitute”) was so useful. Will try to find a copy of Davies’s The Unaccountability Machine now! Thank you for writing this.