Reality Bites

Now, this really does surprise me.

 

From the 1980s the policymaking elite has waved away the notion that they were acting ideologically – merely doing “what works”. But you can only get away with that claim if what you’re doing is actually working.

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[W]hen the Bank of International Settlements, the central bank’s central bank, warns that “the global economy seems unable to return to sustainable and balanced growth” [, the ideology underpinning contemporary capitalism is failing].

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In the IMF’s flagship publication, three of its top economists have written an essay titled “Neoliberalism: Oversold?”.

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At last a major institution is going after not only the symptoms but the cause – and it is naming that cause as political. No wonder the study’s lead author says that this research wouldn’t even have been published by the fund five years ago.

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For so long mainstream economists and policymakers have denied the very existence of such a thing as neoliberalism, dismissing it as an insult invented by gap-toothed malcontents who understand neither economics nor capitalism. Now here comes the IMF, describing how a “neoliberal agenda” has spread across the globe in the past 30 years.

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In this way, the public sector is replaced by private companies, and democracy is supplanted by mere competition.

The results, the IMF researchers concede, have been terrible.

  Guardian

I never understood why this has been called neoliberalism. The first time I heard it actually named was when Hugo Chávez started railing against it. What" I thought.  The forced austerity, privatization schemes are neoliberalism? In light of what the putative liberal party in the US has become (or returned to), I can see the reason now.

Neoliberalism hasn’t delivered economic growth – it has only made a few people a lot better off. It causes epic crashes that leave behind human wreckage and cost billions to clean up. [...] And, they say, its costs “could be large – much larger than the benefit”.

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Two things need to be borne in mind here. First, this study comes from the IMF’s research division – not from those staffers who fly into bankrupt countries, haggle over loan terms with cash-strapped governments and administer the fiscal waterboarding. Since 2008, a big gap has opened up between what the IMF thinks and what it does. Second, while the researchers go much further than fund watchers might have believed, they leave in some all-important get-out clauses. The authors even defend privatisation as leading to “more efficient provision of services” and less government spending.

That's more like it.

Last year the rich countries’ thinktank, the OECD, made a remarkable concession. It acknowledged that the share of UK economic growth enjoyed by workers is now at its lowest since the second world war. Even more remarkably, it said the same or worse applied to workers across the capitalist west.

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[W]hat you’re witnessing amid all the graphs and technical language is the start of the long death of an ideology.

Much too late. Better late than never? Too late might is never for millions and millions of people and for the environment.



That, too.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.