i was reading through my daily briefing on the NYT when the term “neoliberalism” came up. i know what liberal means in the political sense, and tried googling neoliberalism to get a better understanding, but the explanations didn’t make sense to me. help?
In: 0
For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, many countries pursued laissez-faire economic policies, in which they largely allowed businesses to govern themselves, set low tax rates and generally avoided interfering in the economy. This resulted in an era of unprecedented prosperity for the wealthy, even if ordinary people didn’t see many of the benefits. In those days, laissez-faire economics was associated with the term “liberalism”, and it still is in most places outside the US.
Then came the Great Depression, in which many countries went through a period of extreme economic devastation, placing pressure on governments to intervene. This was quickly followed by the Second World War, in which most of the world’s great powers faced existential military threats and their governments took unprecedented control over their economies in order to focus everything on the war effort. For some time after the war, governments continued to intervene significantly in their economies and to some extent prevented the wealthy from accumulating more and more wealth, resulting in a period of relative equality.
But then came a resurgence in laissez-faire economics, initially led by people such as Pinochet, Thatcher and Reagan, but ultimately coming to dominate politics around the world. This new wave of economic liberalism is called neoliberalism, and it differs from the previous wave in various respects. Many people have written many things about it, but it’s a little hard to pin down its exact nature because it’s still ongoing and developing. This means it’s hard to distance ourselves from it, and we don’t know where it’s going to end up. This has resulted in neoliberalism becoming quite a controversial term that’s more associated with critics of the current economic order than its defenders, who tend to regard it as a natural and inevitable state of affairs rather than just another ideology.
Latest Answers