Post-Neoliberalism

Pathways for Transformative Economics and Politics

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Did We Do MMT During COVID? A Comment on Pavlina Tcherneva’s “Whatever It Takes”

L. Randall Wray

In this comment on Pavlina Tcherneva’s piece, L. Randall Wray examines how the COVID pandemic and subsequent policies reinforced the neoliberal order. He rejects the critics’ claim that the COVID response was informed by MMT and describes what adopting an MMT informed approach to “whatever it takes” would actually look like.

26 April 2024. Rubric 5
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Industrial Policy Is a Good Idea, but So Far We Don’t Have One

James K. Galbraith

In this piece originally published by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Galbraith writes about how “The American state has lost the capacity for concentrated and decisive effort at the forefront of technology and the associated science”.

25 April 2024. Rubric 3
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Labour in a Post-Work Society: How Should It Be Organized?

Peter Fleming

Paid employment within the formal economy is facing an uncertain future. Prognoses range from tragic joblessness condemning us to a life of poverty, precarity, and maddening isolation, to lives emancipated from the drudgery of labour. Critical examinations of this post-work condition focus almost solely on the non-work side of the equation (e.g. free time, leisure, etc.). There is little sustained consideration of the work that will remain, who will do it, or how it will be organized.

02 April 2024. Rubric 4
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Whatever It Takes: How Neoliberalism Hijacked the Public Purse

Pavlina Tcherneva

The spectacular government spending post-2008 and post-2020 appeared to upend the neoliberal logic of the past decades, enabling bold public action and opening the door to a more just and democratic social order. Specific policy choices stamped out this opportunity. These pivotal moments did, however, point to policy levers that can facilitate a breakthrough.

01 March 2024. Rubric 5
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A Comment on Albena Azmanova’s “Precarity for All”

Arjun Appadurai

The turn to the populist right, and the implicit rejection of liberal democracy, are a form of doubling down on precarity. Counter to the widespread opinion that the growth of right-wing populism is caused by rising inequality or, alternatively, the need for security and stability in uncertain times, it should be viewed as an expression of a new found popular appetite for risk, transferred from the economy to politics. Right-wing risk-taking is a by-product of financialization and the revolution of rising expectations that it inflames.

08 February 2024. Rubric 1
Phillip Medhurst - Apocalypse 5, Opening the Seals, Wikimedia Creative Commons, attribution share-alike 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apocalypse_5._Opening_the_seals._Revelation_cap_6_v_9-11._Mortier%27s_Bible._Phillip_Medhurst_Collection.jpg

Entropy, the Theory of Value and the Future of Humanity

James K. Galbraith

In a keynote address to a conference on “Geopolitical Changes” at Kozminski University, Warsaw, on January 29, 2024, Professor James Galbraith called for economics to break with equilibrium dogma and re-found itself on the life principles that govern physics, biology and every existing mechanical and social system. Noting the distinguished presence of Professors Francis Fukuyama and E.S. Phelps, Galbraith called attention to the spectacular fallacies of “an end to history” and a “natural rate of unemployment,” arguing that these doctrines have helped blind our generation to the damage inflicted by rising resource costs and neoliberal policies of austerity and precarity, with dire consequences for households in wealthy societies, for their reproduction rates, and for the long-term viability of the species.

02 February 2024. Rubric 7
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How Capitalism Deforms the Logic of Work – and How to Reclaim It

Lisa Herzog

Work can be a source of identity and meaning, empowering people to be self-confident citizens, willing to stand up for themselves and others – but only if it is not subjected to the logic of capitalism, but to that of democracy. To counter the pressures of competitiveness and profitability that harm our relation to work, infusing it with precarity and inequality, we need solid social protections, a job guarantee, and workplace democracy. 

30 January 2024. Rubric 4
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Polymorphous Populism

Arjun Appadurai

As we witness populist insurgencies across the globe, we must ask why has the Left been so inept, and the Right so masterful, at capturing the terrain of emotion – anger, passion, love, desire. We must move away from the ‘hydraulic theory’, in which the rise of the Right is directly connected to the decline of the Left and ask, instead, which particular demagogic claims find emotional resonance among ordinary people in as different contexts as Trump’s America and Modi’s India. What makes them equally propitious terrains for the capture of the anti-democratic psyche?

10 January 2024. Rubric 1
Portrait of Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834)

Will Austerity and Precarity Finish Off the Human Species?

James K. Galbraith

The ultimate fate of a human society rests on its ability and willingness to reproduce itself over the long run. The combination between population decline and increase in longevity that is typical for wealthy societies can have consequences far more destructive than the explosion of a few bombs, writes James Galbraith. Growing economic insecurity exacerbates these tendencies. Yet the economics of the decision to reproduce has been of marginal interest to economists.

30 November 2023. Rubric 6
Black and white photo of cabin on a cliff

Precarity for All

Albena Azmanova

An epidemic of precarity has beset our societies. This is a condition of vulnerability — disempowerment rooted in social threats to lives, livelihoods and lifeworlds. It is experienced as incapacity to cope due to a discrepancy between responsibilities and power, between our growing obligations and the deficient abilities or resources we have to fulfill them. Precarity has become omnipresent — it is a transversal social injustice that cuts across differences in social class, education, employment, and income. Ubiquitous precarity is thus the hallmark of the 21st century. It harms people’s material and psychological welfare and hampers society’s capacity to manage adversity and govern itself. Precarity is politically produced and therefore can be undone. Will the precarious multitude find its way out of neoliberalism’s quagmire?

29 November 2023. Rubric 1
Aerial of a river

A Comment on Dani Rodrik’s “New Paradigm for Economic Policy”

James K. Galbraith

Galbraith argues that the neoclassical doctrine has taken over mainstream economics to the point where the two cannot be separated.  With this in mind, he challenges Rodrik’s argument that his “productivism” can be “mainstream,” except to the extent that the ideas are in fact neoclassical, which in key respects they are.  He further argues that Rodrik’s goals — good jobs at fair wages — can be pursued effectively only outside the mainstream/neoclassical paradigm, with or without its productivist variation.

21 November 2023. Rubric 7
Black and white image of the internals of a factory

Robert Reich, in Interview: Bringing Industrial Policy Back In

Robert Reich

As the faith in free trade withers, industrial policy is back in. Robert Reich traces the shifting views on industrial policy among the US political class since the Great Crash of 1929, surveys the damage the free trade dogma has done over the past four decades, and discusses the economic revolution President Biden has launched. As the imperative of competitiveness in the global economy persists, how far can we really deviate from the neoliberal policy formula of free markets and open economies? And what else can we do to stay the course?

20 November 2023. Rubric 3
A couple on a tight rope between buildings

Insecurity, Not Inequality

Ian Shapiro

The advent of populist politics has much more to do with the rise of insecurity than with the growth of inequality. The vast majority of working people are facing growing vulnerability and downward mobility. Understanding this is vital for finding the best political response. Economists who focus exclusively on inequality, and particularly income and wealth at the top, do the left a disservice.

19 November 2023. Rubric 1
Low-angle photograph of skyscrapers

A New Paradigm for Economic Policy and the Role of Mainstream Economics

Dani Rodrik

‘Productivism’ is a new approach to economic policy that prioritizes the dissemination of productive economic opportunities throughout all regions of the economy and segments of the labor force. In contrast to neoliberalism, it gives governments a significant role in achieving that goal. In contrast to the Keynesian welfare state, it focuses less on redistribution, social transfers, and macroeconomic management. And unlike both neoliberalism and Keynesianism, it is more skeptical towards technocrats and less hostile to populism in the economic sphere. Mainstream economics can be this paradigm’s ally, rather than its enemy.

18 November 2023. Rubric 7