After Neoliberalism
That’s the title of my new book from ANU Press, as part of their Global Thinkers Series. It’s not strictly new, since it’s a collection of articles I’ve written over the last 40 years, with a bit of editing and formatting. In reproducing them, I feel I’m taking something of a victory lap: they stand up a lot better than most of what was being written on economic policy at the time.
This extract from the introduction sets the scene
My own academic career has coincided almost exactly with the era of neoliberalism. My first journal article was published in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (UK) and inaugurated the program of radical reform that became known as Thatcherism. I began work on this retrospective volume in late 2022, just after Liz Truss ended her brief and disastrous stint in the same position. Her sole accomplishment in that period was to demonstrate that a Thatcherite policy program was no longer acceptable, even to financial markets.
Between those endpoints, neoliberalism surged around the world, taking different forms in different countries and reaching a triumphal high point in the 1990s. Successive financial disasters, culminating in the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008, discredited the central ideas underlying neoliberalism.
But these ideas remained part of the mental equipment of the political and policymaking classes. As soon as the immediate crisis was over, neoliberalism re-emerged in zombie form,1 driving disastrous policies of austerity that produced a decade of miserable economic performance throughout the capitalist world.
It is only in the last five years or so that new thinking has begun to fill the gap left by the failure of neoliberalism. Ideas like universal basic income, a four-day working week and autonomous remote work have moved from the margins to the centre of the policy debate. The movement towards gender equity has extended to encompass measures including parental leave and expanded provision of childcare. Privatisation has been replaced by an expansion of public enterprise in a variety of fields. Serious efforts are finally being made to bring global financial markets under control.
Over the 40 years of neoliberalism, I have written hundreds of journal articles, book chapters and opinion pieces presenting a critical view of the dominant ideology and, more recently, advocating alternatives. In this book, I have picked a representative selection of these, running from the 1980s to the last couple of years.
Here’s the cover design I submitted, using DALL-E. The published version is a bit more restrained
You can buy the physical book, or get a free electronic version, here
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I read your book “Zombie Economics” back in 2020/21 when we all had lots of time for reading, mainly from a copy I picked up from the library. I could not return it for months because the Library was closed down. Having done so, I wanted my own copy to reference, so I searched through second-hand sources till I found someone online who would sell me a hard-cover copy. His loss, my gain! It is on my study shelf in my office now. I am reminded of this by your reference to the “ neoliberalism re-emerged in zombie form” comment, very much like the tone you took to Orthodox economics in that book.
One of my other borrowed books was Elizabeth Humphry’s 2020 book “How Labour Built Neoliberalism”, for which, once returned, I never acquired a hard copy. Not for the lack of looking but it is a tad expensive, new. I did, although, appreciate how she spent time examining the various definitions of neoliberalism that Friedman/Hayek and others brought to us, which ended in her describing it as a State-backed class-based project to restore capital to the ruling class in response to the post-war boom to the middle class.
She then demonstrates how the proto-neoliberalism stage started with Whitlam (which I must say was the most disappointing part of the book, to read how she explained that Whitlam opened that door). In her analysis, the proto-neoliberal stage from 1973–1983 was followed by the vanguard neoliberal stage from 1983–1993 with Hawke’s introduction of the Accord. Neoliberalism was blatant under Hawke and Keating as they implemented the Accord and privatisation to really screw over Australian working-class folk. Labor has frequently been at the forefront of introducing regressive change. The Liberals just say thank you because, like Menzie and his reluctance to overturn Curtin’s full employment policies, the Liberals only ratchet the door wider after Labor is tempted to take a peek in the Pandora’s box of neoliberal policies. It was Whitlam who abandoned Curtin’s full employment policies. Sadly, it is always Labor that gets the ball rolling. The rat cunning, Howard, of course, swung the neoliberal door wide open after 1996.
My wife did her PhD on the effects of Neoliberalism on various public service natural monopolies in NSW, and as a dutiful husband, I read all 350 pages of her thesis. Apparently, the book she published on her research is shorter, and I could have saved some time by reading that. 🤔 So, I would love to add your take on this subject to the second book of yours I will have read, and the third devoted to neoliberalism.
Thanks John, I look forward to reading this. I see that you're exploring non-neoliberal economic ideas like UBI (which I think sounds very good), but I want to ask you if we also need some non-neoliberal social and cultural ideas? After decades of neoliberalism, I think this agenda has thoroughly infected our way of thinking on basically any subject. (One example is with cars and traffic, as is brilliantly discussed in Movement by Thalia Verkade.) So how can we help everyday people to appreciate that not everything needs to be outsourced, sped up, and profit-mined into a wasteland? How can we restore the idea of the common public good?