Introduction

When I started this blog I didn’t expect to be writing about neoliberalism. In my brief account of Mrs Thatcher’s macroeconomic failures and successes in Post 9.2, written shortly after her death, I did not mention the term. I first had to think about it when trying to understand its German variety (Post 9.3) when puzzling over German attitudes to Keynesian economics. I think part of my initial reluctance to mention the term was that I found popular usage confusing, and political economy was not my field.

By 2016 I felt it necessary to write about neoliberalism and its relationship to economics, in Post 9.7. A key issue is whether neoliberalism has become embedded in economic theory, or whether, as I suggest, economics is essential to critique neoliberal ideas. Posts 9.4, 9.5 and 9.6 are specific examples where economic theory is used to critique three neoliberal ideas: that high executive pay just reflects performance, that choice over pensions has to be good, and that the growing incomes of the 1% do not matter to ordinary people.

Posts 9.8 and 9.9 are some of the most recent posts I’ve included, and both attempt to make sense of recent events as part of the history of neoliberalism. Post 9.8 talks about both austerity and Brexit as neoliberal overreach, by which I mean extending neoliberal ideas way beyond anything that is sustainable. But if neoliberalism has become unstable, what are we heading towards? The answer given for the US and UK in Post 9.9 is a form of plutocracy, which critically can be consistent (at least initially) with democracy because of the influence of the media. I only became aware in putting together this book that some of the ideas in Post 9.9 I had anticipated far earlier in Post 9.1.

9.1

Information, Money and Politics

Wednesday, 28 March 2012

A post that helps put the mainly in mainly macro

A Conservative Party Treasurer is caught on camera trying to solicit £250,000 from businessmen by offering to, among other things, feed their suggestions into the policy process at No. 10. Having just passed NHS Reform that will greatly increase the involvement of the private sector, David Cameron suggests privatising parts of the road network. Are we seeing either end of a single process here?