Healthcare is a wonderful, tragic case of the limits of individual capacity in making consumer choices. Often health and medical decisions are so complicated, so expensive, and have consequences so far in the future that it is practically impossible for ordinary individuals to make informed choices about their medical priorities. Given this, it is a natural reach for expert help (i.e., doctors), and the hand of government regulation (in the form of national insurance schemes). Here, Gersel, Souleles, and Thaning look at two national healthcare systems (Switzerland and the United States) that make use of market-based and for-profit mechanisms to provide healthcare. The crucial difference between them is that the United States remains wedded to the idea that individuals can and should make their own informed choices about their care (see pp. 32–36). In contrast, Switzerland has put a hard limit on what can reasonably be expected of individual choice in healthcare provision and has enacted a number of mandatory regulatory guardrails. It should come as no surprise, at this point in the case book, that citizens are taken better care off in the system that actually recognizes limits to individual consumptive behavior in healthcare, rather than sticking to the presumption of the hyper-intelligent Homo-economicus. It turns out we can in this case predict what people need, better than they themselves can through their purchases in an open market (see pp. 38–44).

When we think about how innovation happens, we’re at a bit of a loss to understand it because our common-sense notions of innovation owe so much to Silicon Valley hype and propaganda. When we imagine innovation, we often think about strong personalities, aggressive and spectacular disruption, and ruthless profit-seeking. Scroggins suggests that much meaningful innovation actually happens beyond attempts at dispruptive innovation and attraction of venture capital where innovation is narrowly seen as a driver of economic activity. Instead, innovation tends to emerge from stable, rather boring groups of people working outside of job markets and for-profit corporations, on projects that are of personal or group interest, valuable to the people working on them for intrinsic, seemingly self-evident reasons. To show this, Scroggins describes two paths both taken in the same Silicon Valley do-it-yourself biotechnology laboratory. A neoliberal approach tried to use the democratization of a technology, in this case synthetic biology, as a lever to implement the classic disruptive strategy of entering low-end and opening new markets. The alternative approach proceeded on a slower and more deliberate path, without market forces and the promise of funding. What separated the alternative from the neoliberal approach is, according to Scroggins, its constant focus on community over commodity, and process over product.

Increasingly jobs are impermanent, insecure, and gig-based. From a neoliberal perspective gig work is imagined as granting more freedom than traditional forms of employment and gig workers are portrayed as entrepreneurs who work for themselves, maximizing their human capital in a flexible manner. In this chapter Elliott writes about what its like to be a tea plantation worker in Kenya, particularly given the rise of gig work in that sector. What Elliott found in the course of her field work is that many tea plantation worker are nostalgic for the permanent job and its attendant benefits, legacies of latecolonial welfare paternalism. In fact, what remaining permanent plantation jobs there are often seem like a good deal compared to gig work, since it may offer benefits absent in the gig economy, such as housing, water, and some kind of pension scheme and health insurance. Elliot does not argue in favor of a return to the “security” and “benefits” of traditional plantation labor, a highly hierarchized, exploitative, and often oppressive system with limited possibilities for social mobility. Rather, she suggests that something is fundamentally wrong with the way work happens and is conceived under neoliberal conditions when traditional plantation offers preferable options to gig work. Human flourishing requires options beyond colonial tyrany and the neoliberal conception of freedom. She thus suggests that we may need to imagine ways of making a living that don’t involve a job.

This chapter looks at the provision of water by two different Southern California water agencies. One jurisdiction seeks to meet its water needs by financing and buying water from an expensive, energy-intensive desalination plant; the other jurisdiction successfully persuades its residents to reduce and change their consumption patterns of water and saves a huge amount of money as compared to the agency that bought into the desalination plant. What’s interesting from our book’s critical point of view is that the water agencies had different ideas about how people behave as water consumers. The jurisdiction that bought the expensive and wasteful desalination plant spent far more money and ended up wasting a huge amount of water because they didn’t even entertain the idea that people’s water consumption habits could change. Like good neoliberals they assumed that people were selfish, that they are attempting to maximize their individual utility, and that they had relatively stable preferences, which it would be foolish to attempt to change substantially. They paid dearly for those assumptions. In addition, the case demonstrates, how even in relation to complex problems such as handling water supplies, conscious human prediction and problem-solving can outperform market-based mechanisms. The case shows, in opposition to neoliberal orthodoxy, that it is possible to plan.

When life throws you a problem, the solution our contemporary market moment proffers tends to be some sort of phone-based computer program, that is, an app. In this chapter, the authors take a look at apps designed to manage menstrual cycles. In so doing, the authors show that apps tend to individualize a problem, prize forms of efficiency and normative ideas of gender, all with a mystifying veneer of utopian market optimization and self-help. What’s interesting for us is the way that apps can individualize the problems they’re trying to solve and in so doing often seek to assist people in enhancing their human capital. The authors close with a contrast to anticapitalist punks seeking not individual optimization but collective liberation. In turn these punks offer those who menstruate a liberatory relationship with their own bodies.

After the end of formal colonialism, numerous neoliberal international organizations stepped in to manage the international affairs of newly independent nations. The presumption of governments was that the best way to create national welfare was to let markets steer production by integrating the nation into an international capitalist order premised on market specialization and debt relationships. Here Freeman looks at the sort of industrial agricultural production that this kind of geopolitical arrangement engenders, focusing on pineapple plantations in Costa Rica. Cost Rican pineapple planatations are monocrops that exhaust the fertility of the land, provide poorly paid dangerous work, and spread toxic pesticides. International neoliberal governance structures with the overriding priority of stimulating market competion have enabled a system where production for the global is the objective. By contrast, Freeman shows what a food-growing setup can look like if it is oriented toward local production and away from international markets by examining “agroecology” in Haiti.

Often when we think about investors we think about a singular heroic individual. This lends itself well to neoliberal ways of imagining people as individual economic agents. In this way of thinking, an entrepreneur with some amount of capital is able to heroically create a business due largely to their own drive, creativity, and hustle. What this accounting misses though, are the historical contexts and social resources that entrepreneurs draw on to make their businesses work. This is a problem too, if we imagine that individual entrepreneurial action will be adequate to pull people out of poverty or to right historical wrongs. In this chapter, Beresford takes us to South Africa to show the different resources that black and white entrepreneurs have when they start their businesses. Due to the legacy of apartheid, white entrepreneurs have access to more capital and deeper support networks that allow them to navigate the earlier, vulnerable stages of a business’s life. By contrast, many black entrepreneurs face a relatively resource poor environment for starting their businesses. Altogether, Beresford shows the limits of individualized thinking when it comes to entrepreneurs, and for using entrepreneurship to lift people out of poverty. The chapter also questions the theoretical assurance of neoliberalism that government should not intervene, but rather wait for the superior knowledge embedded in the market mechanisms to weed out the bad, and adequately increase the chances that good solutions flourish.

It’s easy to assume that all businesses (of any scale at least) are corporations, and that all corporations are run the same. They have executive leadership, boards of directors, and their overriding aim is to make profit for their investors. This is how most large corporations are organized and operate; and you could be forgiven for assuming that this is just the way things work. That said, close readers of this volume have likely intuited that this way of running a business is in fact historically specific, and owes a lot to neoliberal ideas about how a business and how society should work (hierarchically, with a minimum of democracy, and all organized to generate profits and reward shareholder owners). Here, Wood and Palladino take these assumptions apart by illustrating all the different way that other people (even workers!) can in fact own and control companies. One simple thing this chapter shows is that in designing a business or organizing a company, it doesn’t need to be top-down and oriented toward maximizing shareholder value; but can be oriented toward other values, and these values can be reflected in its organization.

The control and ownership of land is one of the surest ways to generate wealth. Moreover, if you own land or treat it as property, you can accumulate it and bequeath it to whomever you like, creating large inter-generational holdings of wealth. This is often why, when revolutions happen, one of the first questions that come up is about land, its ownership, and its potential redistribution. In this chapter, Bafford looks at what happened to land ownership across a number of revolutions in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Bafford identifies how predominantly white landowners in South Africa were able to keep their wealth. They did so with the help of property-protecting neoliberal statecraft that prioritized the protection of the existing regime of property rights rather than challenging inequality of land ownership. In Zimbabwe white landowners lost many of their holdings. Still, Bafford goes on to show the way that international, neoliberal governing organizations punished Zimbabwe’s attempt at racial restorative justice with reference to the protection of property rights and the free flow of investement capital.

Most people who eat aren’t able to see much of our contemporary food system. This is deliberate. As world population has grown, so too has the food system become increasingly elaborate, specialized, and industrialized, all to the point that even those who live near fields or farms can likely only see a part of where our food comes from. This chapter explains a bit of how this system works, and what values it prioritizes. King and Rissing suggest that much of the food system is guided by a sort of market imperialism that values growth in yields and profit over other values that we might associate with food, values such as nutrition, variety, and environmental sustainability. It also demonstrates how neoliberal marketization does not function independently of public government but is sustained and developed by government interventions. By contrast, King and Rissing look at nonindustrial contemporary food systems to show what alternatives might look like, and to illustrate just how well they can address many of the values and aspirations we have for food systems. The alternative approach with its emphasis on food sovereignty, challenges the international frameworks of neoliberal governance that prioritizes the stimulation of market competition.

This chapter introduces the reader to the volume. It presents our conviction that there is a bias toward pro-market, pro-capitalist (which we call “neoliberal”) solutions in how people solve problems nowadays, and how people learn to solve problems in universities. We explain what these default neoliberal biases are, and why they are often harmful. We also explain how the case chapters in this book comparatively lay out a series of alternatives to these neoliberal ways of solving problems.

As we noted in our Introduction, one thing that distinguishes neoliberalism from plain old liberalism was the recognition that the state was necessary to allow market-based activities to occur. There needed to be regulatory and judicial guardrails that allowed for and even encouraged market activity. That said, this conception of the state was meant to indicate that the state creates an arena for market life to happen, not that the state should become a consumer. However, an unfortunate reality of life for neoliberal thinkers is that the state is often an outsized participants in markets. Moreover, the state often attempts to exercise its values (say, reducing greenhouse emissions) in the consumption choices that it makes. Consuming with values in mind is particularly complicated when you have a state and international organizations set up to allow neoliberal market arenas. This chapter attempts to capture just how complicated and confusing this situation can be by hearing about Groot’s experience managing government procurement in an EU nation. What quickly becomes apparent is how vertigo-inducing the whole exercise is, and how easy it is to get carried away by various institutional constraints and priorities that often don’t make much sense. Rather than presenting a viable contrast case, this chapter provides a view from the inside of one our eras biggest market actors, the state.

At school, what should kids eat for lunch? Mundane as this question seems, this chapter suggests that the answer we give can put us anywhere along a political and ideological spectrum. On the one hand, if we feel that people should choose their own meals and that parents, not schools, should police what their kids eat, we run the risk of bringing the larger society’s inequalities into the lunchroom. If, on the other hand, we allow for state-sponsored meals, we run the risk of losing control over a basic aspect of our lives, and ceding it to the whims of outside political actors. What to do?. Patico argues that as things stand, in the United States enshrining individual choice and responsibility around student eating habits has led to a situation in which much school food is suspect and wealthy parents are able to separate their own children from eating it. In the context of a society shaped increasingly by market imperialism, this is the downside of privileging an ideal of consumer choice as well as the ideal of taking individual responsibility for optimizing your children’s meals. One possible corrective to this is to consider what school lunches would look like under several different types of collective planning and alternative moral scrutiny which challenges structural inequalities and corresponding differences in the purchasing power of parents.