Posts Tagged ‘neoliberalism’
“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhuman”*…
Why are health care costs so high in the U.S.? Harvard public health scholar John McDonough chalks it up to a “wrong turn” in 1980, and the consequences that have ensued…
“What happened in 1980?” John McDonough wondered every time he looked at the numbers.
After 1980, U.S. healthcare became far more expensive than care in peer nations such as France and Germany. In 1980, the U.S. was at the top of a tight pack of industrialized democracies. After that, the cost of American healthcare soared. By 2024, U.S. spending as a percentage of GDP was about 50 percent higher than that of peer nations.
“In the early 1980s, we can see a significant upsurge,” McDonough, professor of the practice of public health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in an interview. “All of a sudden, we jumped from the rest of the crowd and were now in a category by ourselves. Over the following 40, 45 years, the distance kept growing.”
McDonough knew what he could rule out: Any suggestion that Americans get more for their money. On the contrary, millions of U.S. citizens are uninsured; out-of-pocket costs and medical debt are high; and even people with insurance have trouble getting appointments. Meanwhile, physician satisfaction is low, leading to early retirements and migration to nontraditional models like concierge care.
When the pandemic hit, McDonough had time for a deep dive into the issue. This month, after a five-year “labor of love,” he’s presenting his answer in a new book, America’s Wrong Turn: US Health Care in the Neoliberal Era [here]. In it, McDonough links increases in healthcare costs to a new political and economic era dominated by a belief in an unfettered free market, tax cuts, deregulation, privatization, smaller government, increased immigration, and free trade.
This trend in U.S. policy — “Reaganomics” before it became “neoliberalism” — included tax, spending, and regulatory overhauls instituted during President Ronald Reagan’s eight years in the White House. But McDonough, a Democrat who served 13 years in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, isn’t just interested in Reagan. Over the next 40 years, some presidents adhered to neoliberalism’s tenets but even those who didn’t were influenced by its deep penetration into the nation’s political and economic ecosystem, he says.
McDonough found a guide in the writings of Yale University political scientist Stephen Skowronek, who suggests that presidents should be measured by the durability and influence of their ideas and values well beyond their terms in office. Skowronek identified only five singular and decades-long eras in U.S. history, those of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan.
While Reagan was the first president to espouse neoliberal political and economic philosophy, the core ideas date back decades, fostered by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, who became a key economic adviser to Reagan.
“There was a New Deal-FDR era between 1933 and 1980,” McDonough said. “The neoliberal era that Reagan kicked off saw itself as the corrective to the pro-government prior era. Important dynamic consistencies persisted among Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and even Barack Obama. There were sets of beliefs with a Republican conservative flavor and with a Democratic flavor that were surprisingly consistent.”
When describing the U.S. healthcare system under neoliberalism, McDonough, who worked with U.S. senators on the Affordable Care Act, cites several major effects, chief among them a permissiveness toward corporate mergers and consolidations that reduces competition, and an unleashing of private equity.
Since the 1980s, U.S. healthcare has become increasingly consolidated, dominated by fewer and larger organizations. The two largest dialysis centers have 92 percent of the U.S. market, for example, while the two largest providers of intravenous solutions control 75 percent of the market. The two largest syringe manufacturers have a 69 percent market share.
Consolidation extends to physician and hospital markets, with 90 percent of hospital markets, 65 percent of physician specialist markets, and 74 percent of health insurance markets considered highly concentrated, McDonough writes.
One argument for larger organizations is the potential for cost saving through both efficiencies and a greater ability to negotiate savings, but the cost-saving record of larger organizations in healthcare is poor, McDonough says. He cites a 2022 RAND study that indicates that price increases of between 3 percent and 65 percent accompany hospital mergers.
Private equity’s focus on generating profits to maximize shareholder value conflicts with improving patient care, McDonough argues. When private equity firms target businesses, enhance their operations, and quickly resell them at a profit, critics say the value extraction from the deals creates harmful operating cuts and dismantling rather than business improvement.
McDonough reviews other key forces in the evolution of U.S. healthcare in recent decades, including fragmentation leading to high administrative costs, low spending on public health and preventive care, unequal access and uneven quality of care, and cost shifts onto consumers via copays, coinsurance and other cost-sharing mechanisms, which result in high levels of medical debt.
McDonough offers prescriptions, but recognizes that change will require political buy-in for things such as strengthened antitrust action to break up megacompanies and stronger regulation of prescription drug pricing, both difficult in an era of sharply divided politics. Government, along with industry, needs to reaffirm a commitment to patient care as the center of its efforts, he says, while also foregrounding equity, access, affordability, and population health.
“The damage to U.S. health and medical care from the 40-year neoliberal era has left considerable harm for patients and consumers, for medical workers at all levels, and for public/population health,” McDonough said. “It will take radical action to reinvigorate the values and principles of our health system that have been lost and eroded. An essential way to do this is to understand how we got to this position in the first place.”…
How we got here and how to respond: “How to fix U.S. healthcare? ‘Radical action’,” from @harvardmagazine.bsky.social.
For a case in point, see David Oks‘ “Why American ambulance rides are so expensive” (source of the image at the top).
And for a more straightforward, but somewhat more “radical” prescription than McDonough’s, see: “Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1 Trillion and 114,000 Lives Every Year, Yale Study Projects,” from the Yale School of Public Health: “A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace…”
Finally: this is the third (R)D in a row that focuses on (some of) the consequences of the unholy infection of government by business, largely in the U.S. (though, of course, we can see the phenomenon all over the world). The focus shifts with tomorrow’s post. But before we go, Dylan Riley‘s pithy diagnosis of “the chaotic obscenity of our current moment”: “The Thesis of Political Capitalism.”
* Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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As we actually make America healthy again, we might recall that it was on this date in 1793 that prominent Philadelphia physician (and Declaration of Independence signatory) Benjamin Rush alerted the city’s mayor that an epidemic of mosquito-borne yellow fever was fast emerging.
In the summer of that year, refugees from a yellow fever epidemic in the Caribbean fled to Philadelphia. Within weeks, people throughout the city were experiencing symptoms. By the middle of October, around 100 people were dying from the virus daily. Caring for the victims so strained public services that the local city government collapsed. Philadelphia was also the seat of the United States government at the time, but federal authorities simply evacuated the city in the face of the raging epidemic. Eventually, a cold front eliminated Philadelphia’s mosquito population, and the death toll fell to 20 per day by late October. By the time the epidemic ended, roughly 5,000 people had died.
Today, a vaccine prevents yellow fever in much of the world, though thousands of unvaccinated people still die every year from the disease.
“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable”*…
Progressives have been fighting on the neoliberals’ terms. Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker propose a flip, an approach that is more humane– and that promises a far more prosperous country…
In 1962, the historian of science Thomas Kuhn published a short book that changed how educated people think about intellectual progress. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that knowledge does not advance through the steady accumulation of better facts. It advances through ruptures—moments when a prevailing framework, or paradigm, collapses under the weight of anomalies it cannot explain, and a new one takes its place. The Ptolemaic model of the solar system gave way to the Copernican. Newtonian mechanics gave way to relativity. The shift is rarely smooth or purely rational. People resist. Institutions resist. The old framework doesn’t simply yield to better evidence; it has to be displaced by an alternative that can explain not just the anomalies but everything the old model explained, plus more.
We are living through one of those moments now. The prevailing economic paradigm—the neoliberal consensus that dominated policymaking across the Western world from roughly the mid-1970 to 2020—has collapsed. It has not collapsed quietly, in the pages of academic journals, where it was already in serious disrepute. It has collapsed loudly, publicly, and catastrophically, in the lived experience of hundreds of millions of people who were told the model would deliver prosperity. Instead, they watched it deliver stagnation and insecurity and drew the obvious conclusion: The people running the system either do not know what they’re doing or do not care about them, or both. The democratic consequences of that conclusion are now visible everywhere.
This essay argues three points. First, that the democratic emergency we face—the rise of authoritarian populism across the developed world—is not primarily a political failure but an economic one. It is the result of a failed set of economic ideas: When the neoliberal paradigm lost its intellectual and popular support after the 2008 crisis, there was no credible alternative, and the resulting vacuum was filled by populism. Second, progressive responses—while valuable—have not filled the paradigm vacuum because they have operated largely within the neoliberal frame rather than replacing it. Third, that an emerging modern economic consensus we call Market Humanism has the potential to replace neoliberalism—not by proposing a new set of policies, but by constructing a new paradigm grounded in twenty-first-century science. This new paradigm can not only to help us create an economy that is fair, prosperous, and sustainable, but also repair our broken democracy…
[The authors explain how neoliberalism broke the social contract (and democracy) and why the progressive response has failed. They explain the “scientific revolutions” that set the stage for Market Humanism: “From Selfish Homo Economicus to Cooperative Homo Sapiens,” “From Markets as Efficient Allocators to Markets as Evolutionary Innovators,” “From Value Is Market Price to Value Is Solutions to Human Problems,” and “From Inequality Is Meritocratic to Inequality Is Created by Structure and Power.” They then outline the steps necessary– the four imperatives of Market Humanism: “Grow the economy by making it fairer,” “Grow the economy by supporting the middle class,” “Measure what matters—human flourishing,” and “Make the state a partner in prosperity.” And they explain how Market Humanism can help democracy succeed. They conclude…}
… It is useful to recall what happened during a previous time a major paradigm changed. For most of recorded history—thousands of generations—people looked up at the sky and saw what seemed obvious: the sun moved, the earth stood still. Entire systems of knowledge, theology, and political authority were built on that foundation. Then, in the early seventeenth century, Galileo Galilei perfected the telescope and turned it on the heavens. What he saw—moons rotating around Jupiter and the phases of Venus—was inconsistent with a universe organized around a stationary earth at the center of the universe. Galileo’s theory actually had evidence you could see with your own eyes.
He brought that evidence to the most powerful institution of his day. He showed the Church’s leaders what the telescope revealed. They looked. They understood what they were seeing. And then they told Galileo to shove his telescope where the sun did not shine. He was tried by the Inquisition and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
Why? Not because they couldn’t see the evidence. But because if the earth was diminished, so were they. The geocentric paradigm was not just a theory of astronomy. It was a foundation of institutional authority, and the people whose power rested on that foundation were not interested in whether it was true. They were interested in whether it was useful—to them.
This is the situation we are in now. The evidence against the neoliberal paradigm is not ambiguous—we can see it right in front of our eyes. But the paradigm has made a small number of people very wealthy, and they have spent decades building the infrastructure that keeps it alive in policy long after it died in the academy. They will not abandon it. They will call the alternative radical, un-American, dangerous. The rich and powerful will circle the wagons and spend whatever it takes.
They will still lose. Not because they suddenly see the light. Because a paradigm that is empirically wrong cannot indefinitely outrun one that is empirically right—not when ordinary people are the ones living the difference and noticing it. The defenders of the old paradigm will lose because stagnant wages, predatory healthcare, and hollowed-out communities are not abstract to the Americans paying their costs. They will lose because ordinary people pick up the telescope, look through it, and refuse to look away.
That is what Market Humanism is. It is not the property of the academics who built it or the policymakers who will implement it. It belongs to the people whose lives it describes—workers, small business owners, teachers, nurses, scientists, young people told their whole lives that the rules of the neoliberal economy are incontestable facts of nature, and who now are beginning to suspect, rightly, that they were scammed.
This paradigm does not need permission from the people in power to take hold. It needs only to be claimed by the people who have been waiting for it. That is how every paradigm that ever displaced a wrong one has won—not because the powerful changed their minds, but because enough ordinary people stopped accepting a story that no longer matched the world they lived in.
That is what is being asked of us now. The telescope is pointing at the sky. The evidence is clear. The alternative is built. What remains is the work of ordinary people, in extraordinary numbers, refusing to live inside a story that no longer explains the world. The people told for 50 years there is no alternative are about to discover that there is—and that it has been theirs all along.
Fascinating, provocative, and eminently worth reading in full: “Market Humanism: A New Paradigm for a New Era,” from @nickhanauer.bsky.social and @ericbeinhocker.bsky.social.
* Adam Smith, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776
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As we cultivate change, we might recall that it was on this date in 1991 that Nickelodeon premiered its first three original animated series– “Nicktoons“– Doug, Rugrats, and Ren & Stimpy. One of these was not like the other two.
Ren & Stimpy follows the misadventures of Ren Höek, an emotionally unstable (indeed, psychotic) chihuahua; and Stimpy, a good-natured and dimwitted Manx cat. But while Doug and Rugrats were clearly family fare, Ren & Stimpy featured a surreal blend of dark humor, sexual innuendo, violence, and shock. It’s producers had trouble with Standards and Practices; it’s creator was fired after the first year… but kids loved it. It ran for five seasons and 52 episodes (93 segments).
“Neoliberalism: An ideology to absolve banks, landlords and monopolists from accusations of predatory behavior”*…
Neoliberalism has undoubtably contributed to remarkable economic growth, but it has also fostered inequality and “enshittification.” In any case, neoliberalism is, to put it politiely, showing strains. What’s next for the structure of the economy in the U.S. and the world? The estimable Branko Milanović…
Why did neoliberalism, in its domestic and international components, fail? I ask this question, in much more detail than I can do it in a short essay here, in my forthcoming The Great Global Transformation: National Market Liberalism in a Multipolar World. I am asking it for personal reasons too: some of my best friends are neoliberal. It was a generational project of Western baby-boomers which later got adopted by others, from Eastern Europe like myself, and Latin American and African elites. When nowadays I meet my aging baby-boomer friends, still displaying an almost undiminished zeal for neoliberalism, they seem like the ideological escapees from a world that has disappeared long time ago. They are not from Venus or Mars; they are from the Titanic.
When I say that neoliberalism was defeated I do not mean than it was intellectually defeated in the sense than there is an alternative ready-made project waiting in the wings to replace it. No: like communism, neoliberalism was defeated by reality. Real world simply refused to behave the way that liberals thought it should.
We need first to acknowledge that the project had many attractive sides. It was ideologically and generationally linked to the rebellious generation of the 1960s, so its pedigree was non-conformist. It promoted racial, gender and sexual equality. By its emphasis on globalization, it has to be credited by helping along the greatest reduction in global poverty ever and for helping many countries find the path to prosperity. Even its much-reviled Washington consensus—while some of its commandments were taken to an extreme length and other ignored—is fundamentally sound and has much to recommend itself. Not least that it provides an easily understandable shortcut to economic policy. It does not require more than an hour to explain it to the most economically ignorant person.
So, to go back to the original question, why did neoliberalism not remain the dominant ideology? I think there are three reasons: its universalism, hubris of its adherents (which always comes with universalism), and mendacity of its governments.
That neoliberalism is universal or cosmopolitan requires, I believe, little convincing. Liberal ideology treats, in principle, every individual and every nation the same. This is an asset: liberalism and neoliberalism can, again in principle, appeal to the most diverse groups, regardless of history, language or religion. But universalism is also its Achilles’ heel. The pretense that it applies to everybody soon comes into conflict with the realization that local conditions are often different. Trying to bend them to correspond to the tenets of neoliberalism fails. Local conditions (and especially so in social matters which are products of history and religion) are refractory to the beliefs founded under very different geographical and historical conditions. So in its encounter with the real world, neoliberalism retreats. The real world takes over.
But all universalists (communists among them too) refuse to accept that defeat. As they must because every defeat is a sign of non-universalism. That’s where the intellectual hubris kicks in. The defeat is seen as due to moral flaws among those who failed to adopt neoliberal values. To its votaries nothing short of its full acceptance qualifies one as a sane and morally righteous person. Whatever new social contract its votaries have determined is valid, were it only a week ago, must unconditionally be applied henceforth. The morality play combined with economic success that many proponents of neoliberalism enjoyed due to their age, geographical location, and education, gave it Victorian or even Calvinist undertones: becoming rich was seen not only as a sign of worldly success but as an indication of moral superiority. As Deng Xiaoping said, “getting rich is glorious”. This moral element implied lack of empathy with those who failed to find their right place within the new order. If one failed, it was because he deserved to fail. Faithful to its universalism, Western upper middle-class neoliberals did not treat co-citizens any differently from foreigners. Local failure was no less merited than the failure in a faraway place. This contributed more than anything else to the neoliberals’ political defeat: they simply ignored the fact that most politics is domestic.
The hubris which comes from success (and which got elevated to unheard-of heights after the defeat of communism) was reinforced by universalism—a feature shared by all ideologies and religions that by their very construct refuse to accept that local conditions and practices matter. Syncretism was not in the neoliberals’ playbook.
Finally, mendacity. The failure to observe, especially in international relations, even the self-defined and self-acclaimed “rules-based global order”, and the tendency to use these rules selectively—that is, to follow the old-fashioned policies of national interest without acknowledging it, created among many the perception of double standards. Western neoliberal governments refused to own to it and kept on repeating their mantras even when such statements were in glaring contradiction with what they were actually doing. In the international arena, they ended in a cul-de-sac, manipulating words, reinventing concepts, fabricating realities, all in the attempt to mask the truth. A part of that mendacity was present domestically too when people were told to shut up and not complain because the statistical data were not giving them reason and thus their subjective views were wrong and had to be ignored.
What next? I discuss that in The Great Global Transformation. I think there is one thing on which most people would agree: that the past fifty years have seen the debacles of two universalist ideologies: communism and neoliberalism. Both were defeated by the real world. The new ideologies will not be universal: they would not claim to apply to the entire world. They will be particularist, limited in scope, both geographically and politically and geared toward the maintenance of hegemony wherever they rule; not fashioning it into universal principles. This is why the talk about global ideologies of authoritarianism is meaningless. These ideologies are local, aiming at the preservation of power and of the status quo. This does not make them averse to the old imperialist temptation. But that temptation can never be extended to the world as a whole nor can various authoritarianisms work together to accomplish that. Moreover, since they lack universal principles, they are likely to clash. The only way for authoritarians not to fight with each other is to accept a very narrow set of principles, essentially those of non-interference in domestic affairs and absence of aggression, and leave it at that. Xi Jinping’s proclamation of five such narrow rules at the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting may be based on such a calculation…
Neoliberalism in crisis: “Defeated by reality,” from @brankomilan.bsky.social.
For a less certain perspective: “Will Trump Bring Neoliberalism’s Apocalypse, or Merely a New Iteration?” (source of the image above).
And apposite: “Why Neoliberalism Needs Neofascists,” “Has Liberalism’s Very Success in Delivering Human Flourishing Doomed It?,” and “The future of the world economy beyond globalization – or, thinking with soup.”
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As we rethink, we might recall that it was on this date in 1975 that New York City came within two hours of bankruptcy. The city had payments due of $350 million, but had only a fraction of that available. Washington had refused craft a bailout package. It was estimated by some that 100 banks would fail if the city went bankrupt. A notice had been drafted and signed by the mayor:
But at the last minute, as creditors were lined up at government buildings and teachers were being notified to stay home, the teachers union pension fund came to the rescue, buying city bonds and giving the city the lifeline it needed to avoid default.
More at: “The Night NYC Saved Itself”
“I have said before that metaphors are dangerous”*…
… still, metaphor animates much of our thought and of the received wisdom that it can become. Quinn Slobodian unpacks the ways in which metaphors of the natural sciences loom large in the neoliberalism conception, then walks us through its myriad permutations, concluding with metaphor’s corrosion at the hands of Silicon Valley’s reactionary accumulation regime…
Polyps confounded political theorists in the 18th century. The creatures that collectively make up coral reefs acted in ways that defied both expectations of divine design and the established hierarchy of the animal kingdom. How could these lowest of organisms create such enormous structures—especially ones that appeared to be the product of one mind? How could microscopic creatures obstruct the ships of the most powerful forces on Earth, rupturing their hulls and forcing them to chart their way around polyp metropoli risen into islands? It’s no wonder that the anarchist anthropologist James C. Scott later drew an analogy between polyps and peasants. “Just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef,” he wrote, “so do thousands upon thousands of individual acts of subordination and evasion create a political or economic barrier reef of their own.”
The historian of science Whitney Barlow Robles quotes Scott in her wonderful book, Curious Species, where she explains how coral unsettled certainties. Fed by sunlight like grass, plants with their tentacles laid down layers of limestone. The power of polyps turned ideas of agency on their head, a molecular sightless mass acting as architect. Robles imagines it would be like “suddenly learning that butterflies, not people, planted all the trees in Central Park.”
It was a similar wonder at the endless events of the natural world that led classical liberals to draw connections between the order of nature and the order created by human exchange in the profane world of political economy. Philip Mirowski reminds us that natural metaphors serve double duty: they are “reassuring and graphically concrete images of order, situating humanity squarely at home in ‘its’ universe” while they also tame the disorder of nature, making “an unintelligible alien world comprehensible.”
Nature offered what Deirdre McCloskey calls the ”metaphors economists live by.” Because so much of our politics relies on an explicit and implicit understanding of economics, this means we live by those metaphors too. The intellectual movement of neoliberalism arrived at its ideas of the good society by thinking with and through nature. As the post-Cold War consensus around neoliberal globalization crumbles and the boundaries of individual freedom narrow, new metaphors might help us understand the successor ideology…
[Slobodian outlines the intellectual history of neoliberalism, from Friedrich Hayek, its intwined connection with he sciences, and the centrality of the “garden” metaphor in economics. He describes the displacement of the graden with the “swarm” and argues that it is now being wrestled into a mechanistic, surveillance-centric vision of control– a factory…]
… In Curious Species, Whitney Robles reminds us that the polyp agglomerations—those coral structures built by tiny, collective labor—were dubbed “colonies” in the language of the European merchant empires and the Romans before them. The metaphor was no accident. Colonial science mapped political fantasies onto biological forms.
Robles insists that the polyps were never docile subjects. Yet, however resilient, the polyps are not immortal. When the waters around them acidify and warm, these vast reef-structures bleach and break apart. The microorganisms that once formed a community detach from the whole and float away—winking, fluttering, nearly invisible. A nothing. A dispersal. Polyp politics does not just teach us about creation. It teaches us about endings, too.
The neoliberal imagination, when it looked to nature, saw spontaneous order, unplanned complexity, and the beautiful unpredictability of emergent systems. But it often underestimated the possibility of collapse—not as failure of planning, but as a systemic consequence of the very freedom it prized.
What happens when the waters change? When the reef dissolves?
In our current moment, we are no longer just asking how order emerges, but how it vanishes. We are watching the garden trodden underfoot, the swarm militarized, the factory reinstalled as a total system of command. And in this long shift—from polyps to protocols, from butterflies to drones—there is a profound political lesson.
Freedom, when real, is fragile. So is spontaneity. So is improvisation. The forces of order may begin in a coral reef or a Central Park meadow, but they can end in a codebase, a drone cloud, or a boardroom with no windows.
The question is no longer whether we can find metaphors from the natural world to describe human society. It is whether we can preserve the kinds of life that those metaphors once made thinkable…
As Robert Frost once said, “unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world”: “Garden, Swarm, Factory,” from The Ideas Letter and @open-society.bsky.social.
Apposite: “Artificial intelligence” as we’re being encouraged to understand and accept it is a lie that depends on a worldview the richest people on the planet need you to believe in, namely that intelligence is “measurable and hierarchical” “Toolmen.”
And further: “A Reality Check for Tech Oligarchs.”
* Milan Kundera
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As we analyze our analogies, we might send lyrical birthday greetings to a master of metaphor, Walt Whitman; he was born on this date in 1819. A poet, essayist, and journalist; he also wrote two novels. Whitman is considered one of the most influential poets in American and world literature. He incorporated both transcendentalism and realism in his writings and is often called the father of free verse. His work was controversial in his time, particularly his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described by some at the time (and again, more recently) as obscene for its overt sensuality.
Whitman grew up in Brooklyn, where over time he moved from printing to teaching to journalism, becoming the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1846. He began experimenting with a new form of poetry, revolutionary at the time, free of a regular rhythm or rhyme scheme, that has come to be known as “free verse.” In 1855, Whitman published, anonymously and at his own expense, the first edition of Leaves of Grass— which was revolutionary too in its content, celebrating the human body and the common man. Whitman spent the rest of his life revising and enlarging Leaves of Grass; the ninth edition appeared in 1892, the year of his death.
Whitman and the Butterfly, from the 1889 edition of Leaves of Grass (source: Library of Congress)
“It turns out that we’re actually capable of something other than neoliberalism and actually we’re really capable of enjoying ourselves more than we do under neoliberalism”*…
… but the path from here to there, the estimable Brad DeLong warns, could be overcast. In notes for his lectures to his Econ 135 class at Berkeley (“The History of Economic Growth,” shared in his terrific newsletter, Grasping Reality) he begins with an explanation of neoliberalism [also explained here– source of the image above], then considers what might be next…
So what is coming after neoliberalism?
First, one thing that is coming, at least here in America, is renewed or perhaps novel attention to places. Places have never been important in American identity. American identity has, instead, long been defined by a focus on mobility and opportunity. Americans are people who have moved to new places—undertaken errands unto the Wilderness—precisely because of the mistakes being made in and the limitations circumscribing their choices where they were. Americans are people who have abandoned some Old World because of its mistakes, and have moved to a New World to remake themselves and make a new society that will at least make different mistakes. The promise of more abundant resources and the chance to build a better life has driven this pattern of migration and reinvention. Thus the advice given to those who find their birth-region constraining or insufficiently prosperous has always been “go west!”: move to opportunity.
My Richardson ancestors were farmers in the hilly, rocky terrain of New England in the 1840s. Farming the land was difficult. To say that New England soil is “stony” is to greatly understate the case, as you can see even today from the ubiquitous stone walls found throughout New England all built from rocks that had to be removed from the fields before farming could even begin.
The Richardson family decided to leave New Hampshire and traveled down the Ohio River to St. Louis, where they established a pharmaceutical company: the Richardson Drug Company. The family story is that they specialized in cocaine—legal at the time, and their cocaine products were very low concentration, nothing like lines or crack. But, still, my ancestors became the very first cocaine pushers west of the Mississippi in St. Louis. The company was quite successful for two generations. Then, one New Year’s Day, a catastrophic fire destroyed their chemical plant. The fire department was, the story goes, slow to respond, as they were recovering from New Year’s Eve. And how does a catastrophic fire start when the plant is entirely shut down for the holiday. I am suspicious of my ancestors.
Rather than rebuild the plant, the Richardsons opted to take the large insurance settlement and shift their focus to banking. The course of the Richardsons is thus a very American story: change who you are and what you are doing and where you are doing several times over the course of even a few generations.
The Neoliberal Order was about capitalism but it was also about freedom. And one aspect of this freedom was freedom to successfully organize to resist being dominated by the behemoths of the New Deal Order: Big Government, Big Business, Big Labor, and also Big Cultural Expectations. The assumption that your husband should get a job with a large corporation and commute by car as you moved to suburbia and that you alone should raise the children was an essential part of the New Deal Order. And it called forth a middle-class feminist rebellion. The assumption that Blacks should largely stay in their place and be happy with slow advances toward equal rights and a small share of the benefits from social-insurance programs was an essential part of the bargains in the 1930s that formed the New Deal Order. The Black Civil Rights movement was not in itself neoliberal, but was an expression of the underlying anti-system anti-bureaucracy current. And with respect to land-use planning—Big Government bureaucrats should not be able to assist Big Finance money and Big Business bulldozers to order you around and bulldoze and “renew” your community. It was individual unbureaucratic enterpreneurship that was supposed to be beautiful. Hence NIMBYism (Not In My Backyard-ism) as we know it today is an important piece of the Neoliberal Order, as it actually was on the ground.
Consider San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway, an 8-story, 90-foot high structure that blocked views of the ocean and bay. Residents preferred to maintain the open views rather than prioritize faster commutes for drivers from Marin County. This was seen as a victory for rational, people-centered development at the time. And the post-1989 earthquake removal of the initial parts of the Embarcadero Freeway was a huge win—it resulted in a much more pleasant and open waterfront area for residents and visitors to enjoy.
But in the long run NIMBYism has been a disaster. Berkeley houses no more people now than it did fifty years ago. So housing prices have skyrocketed, and the guy who runs the Little Farm Children’s Center in Tilden Park has to commute from beyond the Altamont Pass.
NIMBYism killed America’s tradition of moving to opportunity stone dead. This has been a very powerful if indirect cause of rage against The Neoliberal Order Machine. Thus the growing call for place-based policies to make opportunity move to where people are, instead of assuming people will move to opportunity. The Polanyian right to the land—to keep Schumpeterian creative-destruction from destroying your community as a side-effect of its pursuit of profit—is and will take a more prominent role in whatever comes after the Neoliberal Order.
Second, the “after” will include explicit industrial policies. The Neoliberal Order was about hyperglobalization. Under the Neoliberal Order it was assumed that free trade and laissez-faire policies were beneficial for all. They were beneficial for the Global North as they heightened the concentration of high-value and high-externality activities like science, engineering, and worthwhile manufacturing within itself. And they were beneficial for the Global South because only the threat that economic activity and talented people would leave could curb the predatory instincts of Global South governments. The concerns of economists like W. Arthur Lewis that trade in a globalized market on terms increasingly tilted against primary products actually developed the fact of underdevelopment were pushed to one side.
But now the assumption that free trade works to concentrate high-value and high-externality activities like science, engineering, and worthwhile manufacturing in the United States is very much in doubt. The CHIPS Act of the Biden administration signals the end of the belief that the global market was working in America’s favor. The CHIPS Act represents a shift away from the implicit acceptance of the global market’s inequities now that they no longer seem to be working so strongly in America’s favor. Instead, there is now a demand for more explicit industrial policies as an alternative..
Third, the “after” will include a strong demand for champions of the people. There is growing recognition that neoliberalism has led to an unfair domestic plutocracy. The 2008 Republican presidential and vice-presidential ticket was almost composed of individuals who collectively owned 20 houses—John McCain owned 12 houses, and Mitt Romney owned 8. Political advisors felt that that foreclosed choosing Romney as likely to make the ticket look ridiculous, and so they prevailed on McCain to choose the very odd Alaska Governor Sarah Palin insted.
What to do about plutocracy, where there is a growing belief that the system is working not for the people but for the super-rich and for their rootless cosmopolite allies and clients? Power requires countervailing power. Hence what is needed is someone powerful to vindicate the interests of the common people, rather than of some privileged élite: a strongman to disrupt the status quo and the inertia of “business as usual”.
It has never been the case that the “strongman” has to come from the people. Indeed, often in history a plutocrat, oligarch, or aristocrat has been preferred—a “class traitor” as other members of Harvard’s Porcellian Society whispered about their fellow member, New Deal President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The idea is that only someone who has thoroughly benefitted from being in the system and knows it inside and out will know enough about its vulnerability to be able to disrupt it.
Analogously, consider Andrew Jackson. He positioned himself as a defender of the common people against the system—land speculators, Philadelphia financiers, and corrupt politicians who together made sure that the people could not prosper as America grew.vJackson presented himself as an outsider who would protect the interests of the “Kentucky frontiersmen” against the domestic élite, even though he himself was no true frontiersman.
Indeed, the earliest examples of strongman politicians overthrowing existing oligarchic systems to vindicate at least the short-run interests of a broader “people” come from the early days of Classical Hellenic civilization. Peisistratos, Tyrant of Athens in the -500s, is the prime historical example. The Tyrants abolished debt slavery, canceled the debts of the overindebted, and redistributed land more equitably—paving the way for the establishment of Hellenic democracy, which was a very attractive civilization as far as the societies of domination of those days went.
Unfortunately for us, the champions of the people being chosen today appear more fascist than populist—more interested in telling people what to do to make them followers to burnish the glory of the leader than in lifting the burdens from the people by cancelling the debts and redistributing the land—and more kleptocrat than plutocrat, with the leader’s skills more in running a con game than in understanding the workings of the system.
Fourth, what is coming after the Neoliberal Order appears to be a politics of fear: fear of the diverse, fear of the woke, fear of the other—whatever the other is, people who seem strange and weird—and fear of the rootless cosmopolite.
In the last analysis, the Neoliberal Order fell because it did not deliver the goods. Free markets and largely ineffectual gestures at freeing-up individual autonomy from bureaucracy were not enough to create a society where people felt at home, even if there was a great expansion of individual freedom to choose elsewise than commanded by formerly-dominant social norms. But the failure of the past Order did not in itself bring a new one into existence. In this sense we are in a similar period of uncertainty to that of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Back then, before he died in Mussolini’s jail, the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci observed: “The Old Order is dying, and the New Order appears perhaps to be stillborn: now is a time of monsters”…
Oh, to be able to go back to school… Eminently worth reading in full: “Neoliberalism & After,” from @delong.bsky.social. See also the notes from a proximate lecture: “Post-2010 “Polycrisis”: Culture, Communications, Politics, & War.”
* “It turns out that we’re actually capable of something other than neoliberalism and actually we’re really capable of enjoying ourselves more than we do under neoliberalism. It feels that if neoliberalism is first about privatizing desire and imagination before the economy, then we’re in this process of publicizing it again.” – Rebecca Solnit
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As we fumble with the future, we might recall that it was on this date in 1968 that 60 Minutes, which had premiered two months earlier, introduced its trademark “ticking stopwatch” opening logo/transition. 60 Minutes is, of course, the most-watched television news show in history.
Since near the show’s inception in 1968, the opening of 60 Minutes features a stopwatch. The Aristo (Heuer) design first appeared in 1978. On October 29, 2006, the background changed to red, the title text color changed to white, and the stopwatch was shifted to the upright position. This version was used from 1992 to 2006 (the Square 721 type was changed in 1998). Source
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