Tag: neoliberalism

Liked https://thoughtshrapnel.com/2025/06/18/our-society-is-in-the.html (thoughtshrapnel.com)

It’s not easy to summarise this 13,000-word article by Ed Zitron, nor decide which parts to pull out and highlight. The main gist is that our economy is dominated by managers who lack real understanding of their businesses and customers. Their poor decisions are fueled by decades of neoliberal thinking, which promotes short-term gains over meaningful contributions. The name Zitron gives to these managers is “Business Idiots” who thrive on alienation and avoid accountability.

Our society is in the thrall of dumb management, and functions as such | Thought Shrapnel by Our society is in the thrall of dumb management, and functions as such | Thought Shrapnel

Read https://global.oup.com/academic/product/neoliberalism-a-very-short-introduction-9780198849674

Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction

  • Explores the origins, evolution, and core ideas of neoliberalism
  • Discusses the impact of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the related European Sovereign Debt Crisis on neoliberal ideals and systems
  • Considers the global variations of neoliberalism
  • Part of the Very Short Introductions series – over ten million copies sold worldwide

New to this Edition:

  • Includes a new final chapter focused on the impact of resurgent national populism on neoliberalism

Source: Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction by @OUPAcademic

I am not sure what I expected when I dived into Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy’s Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction (2nd Edition). Over the years I have read a number of these books, but never really ventured far into the unknown. For me, neoliberalism was a topic that I felt I knew enough about, but had never actually properly considered it in its own right. What was interesting was there isn’t really anything as such that one could state as defining as ‘neoliberalism’, rather it is is made of four strands that produce their own interpretation depending on context.

Neoliberalism is a rather broad and general concept referring to an economic model or paradigm that rose to prominence in the 1980s. Built upon the classical liberal ideal of the self-regulating market, neoliberalism comes in several strands and variations. Perhaps the best way to conceptualize neoliberalism is to think of it as four intertwined manifestations: (1) an ideology; (2) a mode of governance; (3) a policy package; (4) a particular form of capitalism.

The book walks through the history of liberalism and then neoliberalism. It then documents the various ways it has been taken up around the world.

One thing that was interesting was the way in which Trump’s measures can be construed as “nationalist volves in neoliberal sheep’s clothing.”

Our assessment of Trumpism reveals a messy ideological mixture that advances some core principles of economic nationalism while also furthering significant items of the neoliberal agenda. For this reason, it might be apt to characterize his economic stance in contradictory terms as ‘nationalist neoliberalism’, or, as other commentators have suggested, as ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’. While this contradictory concept indicates that neoliberalism is now suffering from a deepening legitimation crisis that has buoyed the fortunes of national populism, it also reveals the uncanny staying power of some major neoliberal tenets.

In the end, the book could have been easily been retitled, what we talk about when we talk about neoliberalism.

Liked Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis FukuyamaFrancis Fukuyama ([object Object])

Liberalism’s present-day crisis is not new; since its invention in the 17th century, liberalism has been repeatedly challenged by thick communitarians on the right and progressive egalitarians on the left. Liberalism properly understood is perfectly compatible with communitarian impulses and has been the basis for the flourishing of deep and diverse forms of civil society. It is also compatible with the social justice aims of progressives: One of its greatest achievements was the creation of modern redistributive welfare states in the late 20th century. Liberalism’s problem is that it works slowly through deliberation and compromise, and never achieves its communal or social justice goals as completely as their advocates would like. But it is hard to see how the discarding of liberal values is going to lead to anything in the long term other than increasing social conflict and ultimately a return to violence as a means of resolving differences.

Listened Modern Monetary Theory and its challenge to Neoliberalism from Radio National

After more than four decades of dominance, free-market capitalism is facing a challenge.

It’s rival, the rather blandly named Modern Monetary Theory, promises to return economic planning to a less ideological footing.

It’s also keen to strike a blow against the “surplus fetish” that many economists now blame for declining public services and growing inequality.

This episode of Future Tense explores Modern Monetary Theory as an alternative to neoliberalism. Antony Funnell leads a discussion of the promises and problems associated with the idea.

📓 Neo-Liberalism

In Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy’s Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction (2nd Edition), they conceptualise neoliberalism as four intertwined strands:

Neoliberalism is a rather broad and general concept referring to an economic model or paradigm that rose to prominence in the 1980s. Built upon the classical liberal ideal of the self-regulating market, neoliberalism comes in several strands and variations. Perhaps the best way to conceptualize neoliberalism is to think of it as four intertwined manifestations: (1) an ideology; (2) a mode of governance; (3) a policy package; (4) a particular form of capitalism.

Source: Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction by Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy

In a discussion of NBC’s The Good Place, Robin James provides a definition of ‘neo-liberalism’:

Michael’s big moral surveillance apparatus is a correction, or perhaps update, of Sartre: hell isn’t other people, it’s neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is the practice of transforming everything, even traditionally non-economic phenomena like friendship or learning, into deregulated, financialized markets. Financialized markets are ones built on investment rather than commodity exchange; deregulated markets nominally allow for any and all behavior, but tightly control background conditions so that only a limited range of behavior is possible. Privatizing formerly public things such as infrastructure or schools or prisons is a common method of transforming things into markets. Setting up the season 1 neighborhood so that the quartet of dead people torture each other, Michael is a technocrat  who effectively privatizes hell by contracting the work of abuse out to independent, uncompensated laborers. (After all, his whole approach is to disrupt eternal damnation by superficially flipping the good/bad script…It’s Uber, but for hell.)

Doug Belshaw explores some of the different iterations of neoliberalism, arguing that none of them are the answer:

We might be witnessing the end of progressive neoliberalism, but it’s not as if that’s being replaced by anything different, anything better. source

Discussing the choice to ban all research involving the word ‘systemic’, Cory Doctorow makes the link between neoliberalism and conspiracism:

The mirror-world warps reality, but that warpage has the same curvature as neoliberalism’s “There is no such thing as society.” Conspiracism – like neoliberalism – insists that the world runs on individual virtue and wickedness, not the systemic properties that make it easier or harder (or impossible) to do the right thing.

Source: Pluralistic: Conspiratorialism and Neoliberalism by Cory Doctorow