[Music] Some words have been robbed of all meaning. They've been used, abused, mangled, contorted, weaponized, and stripped of context. If we can't agree on what words mean, then we can't agree on much. This is our written story. In each episode we take a key term from the political or cultural discourse. I tell the story of where it came from, what happened to it and what it means today. By exploring the history of the ideas, we'll try to get a clear understanding of where we are now. My name's Dorian Linsky, author of 33 revolutions per minute, and I'm in the Street of Truth. My name is Ian Dunton, the author of How to Be a Liberal. Ian, this is the last episode of the first series. Why are we talking about neoliberalism? Because we're still suckers for punishment. You know what? For a while, this for me was like woke was. There was a while where I was like, oh, if someone says neoliberalism, it's just going to be an utter load of old hogwash and murderer. And then after a while, I kind of did stop fighting it because there are respected, it's ultimately not like woke. There are respectable people who use it. There's something that use it as a positive, but many, many more who use it as a negative. And it's, you know, fronting, respectable, decent work. And it has, however, become predominantly a slur directed by socialist at anyone from the pretty meaty centre left over right to this or far right. Because I was like, you, I was somebody who became so dismissive of it because it seemed to just be used as an insult. And it seemed to be so broad brush that it just seemed to describe, you know, like all, you know, all capitalism, for example. And then I read a book by the academic Will Davis, whose speciality is the history of neoliberalism. And he's actually a very good reading list that he put online. And when I started thinking about it more as something with an intellectual tradition, with arguments inside it, with actually quite a dramatic arc, as we'll get to. It's kind of, it isn't a maze, even if you're not a fan of the outcomes. You know, it is, it was almost a kind of like the drama of the rise of that idea is fascinating. The individuals involved are fascinating. And it was one where I, I realized, and it's one of the impulses for doing this whole series was, okay, what were the words that I just wasn't, that had become so degraded that I wasn't even asking the right questions about them. I was like, oh, you know, that again. And those are the ones where, where actually, no, you should make an effort to try and understand, okay, what, what does this word mean? What did, you know, who created it? What are the consequences of neoliberalism? What, and so then you can use it accurately. So rather than running away from it, you know, in the certain words that you keep misspelling or mispronouncing, right? And you just avoid them, don't you? So rather than just like looking up, okay, how do you pronounce this word? You just avoid it completely because it's like better not take that risk. And I felt like intellectually I was doing that with neoliberalism. I was like, I don't, I don't quite see what all of these different uses of it. I don't see what they can hear into. And this was a chance, I think, to sort of really understand what it is. One of the problems I find with it when I see it used is that it can be applied to both sort of general pinnashay and Barack Obama and Tony Blum. Do you know what I mean? It's sort of like, it's both something appalling and extreme and something which seems to apply to the leaders of most western countries for the last 40 years. And that I suppose is where I sometimes find it confusing. It's like, well, they can't all be the same and as we'll discuss, even the people who kind of created neoliberalism, they didn't agree with each other. And so it seems to become the more people you use it about, the more useless it becomes. And maybe rather than talking about people per se as neoliberalism, it makes more sense to talk about neoliberalism as this sort of hegemonic, so I had to be all jargony about it. But you know, something that is so dominant that it's just sort of the water you swim in. And so you don't have to be a neoliberal per se to be operating within the kind of parameters of it. There is a more helpful than the East. But there is a similarity in the thoughts of those three people you just described. You know, Blair Obama and Pinochet. And it's obviously it's not to say that there's any moral similarity between Obama and Pinochet. But some of the basic economic assumptions and the political grounding they had as to how we treat the economy did share similarities. Right. And so on that basis, it's not completely unreasonable to use it in that way. Where it sort of sloppy and I guess it is unhelpful, but not necessarily unreasonable. But that's I suppose where we talk about theism more than the individual. Is that maybe when you get away from it being a slur? Is calling someone a neoliberal. A lot of times doesn't really get you anywhere, unless it's like Milton Friedman. It's like it really does. Fair enough. There's I mean ultimately at the heart of the story, I think, there are a set of ideas. You know, and they're an old set of ideas and they're updated in various modern ways, but there's a set of ideas. And I think as you look at the stories, it comes out. What you see is that there is something internally contradictory and flawed about these ideas. And that they produce outcomes. And then these outcomes are the fetishization of economics. To the exclusion of all other political concerns. A kind of atomized view of humanity as these economic agents and really very little else. A suspicion of the state that means that you can't ultimately use it to do anything. So you can't really solve very many problems in society. An aversion towards looking at structural problems in society, whether it's sort of racism or economic disadvantage or mental health problems. And that consistently, when you adopt it, it produces these really ghastly outcomes and funny enough very authoritarian outcomes. Because you can't question the neoliberal commitment to liberty. They are just like all liberals committed to liberty. But the outcomes that they get at the end are always really very authoritarian. And I do think there's a reason for that. So when you tell the stories, these flaws, but ultimately, weirdly enough, it is the story of the world that we live in, of the countries that we've lived in over the last few decades and now. But those paradoxes are so glaring, and they depart so much from some of the original ideas. I don't want to be kind of like, it's like, you know, indelable neoliberalism. But like a lot of things, you know, when it starts off, there are much more sort of, I mean, I must say, I'm not a fan. I'm an a-level agent. But some of the ideas of the kind of the originators, you know, some of those are more sorts, I find more sympathetic, more relatable, but not what it became. And of course, some of these originators actually didn't endorse what it became. But the other words that we've discussed in the series developed in this sort of ad hoc way, but neoliberalism, the word, was coined by the people who founded neoliberalism, the idea, which is very considerate of them, even though the idea revolved. Now, let's turn to the OED, and it's quite confusing. Okay, so the definition is fine, neoliberalism, of relating to or characteristic of any of various modified or revised forms of traditional liberalism, typically based on belief in free market capitalism and the rights of the individual. The term has been applied variously to centrist, left of centre and right wing political standpoints at different points of time in different countries, generally depending on whether the emphasis is on economic or social liberalism. Okay, fair, that's a bit better. This seemed like an entry that took quite a long time. Took a few drafts, a few qualifications there. But annoyingly, because it's the OED, they're often their first citation is not what we now mean by it. So in another episode, we're talking about superheroes and superheroes use during the Drapha's affair. It does not mean that somebody could fly, they just meant that somebody was very heroic. You know what I mean? But that still comes in under superheroes. They're here for neoliberal. We got from 1898. Oh wow. A reference to the neoliberal school from 1930. Neoliberal itself from 1921. Neoliberal's Hobbhausen, Hobbsen. But they all mean different things. They're not very helpful. So what they don't mention, because it's not a artificial citation, like it's not in a public journal, is the guy who invented the word. So in 1938, the French philosopher Louis Rougier organized the Coloc Walter Lippmann in Paris in honor of the American journalist who had just published in French an inquiry into the principles of the good society. He was a huge critic of the New Deal. I mean, this is a kind of founding principles of the New Deal. People at the conference included Friedrich Hayek, Michael Pellani and Ludwig von Mises. Oh, the whole Justice League of Now the German economist Alexander Risto coined the word neoliberalism, although alternatives were thrown about individualism, positive liberalism, sounds great. And even left wing liberalism. Oh wow. Which is, that's just, why? So obviously, Neo, like as somebody, you know, as a sort of former music journalist, I'm used to kind of people just going, oh, a new wave, new wave, new folk. That's what you do when you can't think of a new name. And they'll name you put new or neo on it. It would have been better if it was a new liberalism, a new gas liberalism. But anyway, so what did Risto and those people mean when they said neo liberalism? What was the old liberalism? What were they taking? What were they changing? I don't think that at that stage, there is later. I don't think that at that stage, there's much that's new at all, except for the conditions in which they're operating. So, you have the old classical school of economics, we're going to talk about that in a second. And then you have just this very new scenario, especially after the end of the second one. Well, But even before that, as soon as the new deal is there, of just looking around you and you're like, "Well, you've got. " This is. the three versions of big state, right? You've got fascism, you've got communism, and you've got social democracy, basically, the beginning of the new deal, and the sort of liberal societies that's having we're going to intervene in the market. Now, well, we need to have some kind of response to this. And that predominately, I mean, when you look at the kind of people, you look at, take Hayek, who's there. Hayek is born a few months before the 1800s turns into the 1900s, just at the turn of the century, and feels all the way through his life that he's living in the wrong century, that he was born like a hundred years too late. But he, to him, he's never thinking about it, that it's really new in any way. It's just like, no, return to the good old stuff. You know, the stuff that worked for us before. So I think really it's the circumstances that change, and then a little later, as we'll talk about with Friedman, that there is a new kind of economic assessment, predominantly through monotirism, that comes in that is quite different, but ultimately politically and predominantly economically until the '60s, it's pretty much just classical economics. So is this just, you know, a renewed belief in Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market? Yeah, or in a demand that people go back to it. We mostly, when they talk to each other, like, you know, we'll talk a bit about Manpattery in soon, when they talk about each other, they're like, we were the last liberals left standing. To them, the whole post-war order that takes over if we're going to intervene in the market now, to them, it's just like, well, you've just portrayed liberalism. Rather than, this is an internal debate within liberalism. Yes, because, I mean, the founding principle here is the economic liberalism, is the thing from which all other, economic freedom is the one for which all other freedoms flow. Which turns out not necessarily be the case. This is what they say. It's like, unless you've got the free market, you don't have a liberalism. It doesn't matter how tolerant you are of people or whatever, it's irrelevant. So we've got the war intervened, not many collocs for a while. And then the Lippmann fan club, essentially, reconvenes in Montpellorin, again, near Geneva, in 1947, leading to the Montpelloran Society. Three of the people there were Austrian emigrates. Austrian School of Economics was very, very sort of free market. And then these three founding texts come out in '44 to '45. The Open Society and its enemies by Karl Popper, bureaucracy by Ludwig von Mises, and the rotorsurfdom by Hayek. I can tell you now that only one of these books is worth reading, and it's the first one. I have read the rotorsurfdom, actually. Oh, it is. Batch it. It is quite, quite far out there. Well, there were some good bits, and the good bits are the bits that you sort of anybody, you know, rational, would probably have said in '95 to a talentarianism. It's awful. And we should have more freedom, right? That bit, it's like that's the sort of the basic idea. Where you go, yeah, yeah. Where are you going with this? Oh, no. Oh, you're going over there. Because they're all rejecting what they call collectivism, which is a nice way of covering everything from Stalin to Roosevelt. But they don't all agree with each other. So, Popper actually wanted, I mean, obviously, a lot more to his book than what is relevant here. But he wanted a broad church, which actually included socialists as a progressive alliance. And he said in the '90s, shortly for his death, "Well, I do believe that in a way one has to have a free market, but I also believe that to make a godhead out of this principle of the free market is nonsense. Humanitarianism, that is a fundamental importance." What you've just said is probably the neatest and most elegant encapsulation of the next 50 minutes I'm talking that I want to do, really. But those are the words godhead. It's beautifully put in a really useful one to keep in mind as you think about the way that these guys become enraptured at the sort of altar of the mark. Because you can see some of these guys like Michael Pellani, Hungarian, Emigre. He says that with capitalism sort of unbound, freedom thrusts to generates into a mere advocacy of free enterprise. The fullness of freedom for those whose income, leisure, and security need no enhancing, and a mere pitant of liberty for the people. You may invade an attempt to make use of their democratic rights to gain shelter from the power of the owners of property. So again, going, "Well, you know what? Like, it's not just about economic freedom." And so at this stage, there is a general understanding. There's a lot of disagreement in the group. But there's a general understanding. There's some role for state aid, social safety nets, things like that. And you see that in Risto, the guy coined the word. It was very influential in the social market economy that rebuilds Germany after the war. And these are called "Auto Liberals." A lot of phrase we use much more after the journal, "Auto." Okay. Kind of the German, like, "Neoliberalism became this international sort of alliance." But there was quite a distinct at that point. It was like, "Okay, here's the German version." And then here's the American version. And what's interesting in terms of, "O, it's relative to that, F, so about centrism." Is Milton Friedman, who is the key American in the listening for the University of Chicago, described neoliberalism as a middle road between collectivism and laissez-faire. It's not the same as laissez-faire. And he thought the competition was so great. That he would protect workers, consumers, and citizens in general. Like, he had a way that's just like, "Well, everybody wins from competition." He didn't even believe in sort of certificates for doctors or for pharmaceuticals. So it's really like, when you go into the market side, you go pretty deep with him. He's just like, "No, you know, so this guy chopped up your auntie "didn't know what he was doing." It just means the market now realizes he's not a good doctor or no-one or go back to him. You're like, "Really, mate, are you sure that this is how far you want to go?" Because I kind of would prefer a system when my aunties less likely to get chopped up in the first place before I realize a doctor isn't up to it. - The principle, though, the idea that you had is this sort of, is it naivety? Where he's going, well, obviously, thanks to competition, that will protect workers' rights because if workers aren't being treated well, they'll simply go somewhere else. (laughing) You don't really need unions because of competition. So as we see, some cracks in that. And really about these characters, it's quite fascinating. He's always fascinating, isn't it? These groups of intellectuals arguing with each other. And Von Mises is the hardcore one. And he said to Hayek, "There is no middle way. Either the consumers are supreme or the government." And for him, the only role of the state, the role of the state was like, "Loran order to defense, money supply, and preserving property rights." It is like the most stripped down version of the state imaginable. - And we should mention, I mean, he's kind of the godfather of all of these guys. He's from his much older, he's from the period. - Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. - He's the main influence on that. - He was coming up in the 1920s. I mean, this is it, he was saying this before the Great Depression. Oh yeah, yeah, wait before, yeah, yeah. - Monpeler and his founding statements very exciting, the central values of civilization are in danger. And he's all about protecting the individual and the voluntary group and human dignity and freedom. Which again, in 1947, you can just go, "Well, fair play." Like, yes, we should probably take measures, you know, to avert to authoritarianism. But what you're saying about how economics is everything. As a quote from Hayek, which we've seen some of this up, economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life, which could be separated from the rest. It is the control of the means for all our ends. And there is something totalizing about this idea that there is not the economics. 'Cause even now, having lived with neoliberalism so long, we talk about economics, it's like, okay, well, here are economic issues and here are like culture war issues. And they're kind of separate and they go, okay, well, you can appeal to these, you know, the whole thing about building a coalition like Johnson or Trump and you go, you appeal to them on the economics and them on the culture war. And of course, for someone like, you know, Hayek, it's like, well, what are you talking about? There is nothing but economics. - There's certain times that he feels almost like he's going through some kind of like a religious experience. You know, I mean, for Hayek, for it's worth it, the market is unknowable. It's almost like the hand of God. You know, he doesn't believe in this is a difference between him and Friedman. He doesn't believe that you can ever really understand the market. Just partly an economic argument for him as well. Because you can't understand it, there's no point trying to interfere 'cause you're always going to produce outcomes that you didn't intend to. But it's more than that. It's just like this fundamentally unknowable force. It's so big and vast. It's worth mentioning, by the way, he never actually worked in the market. He never worked in the private sector. There was one point in New York where for a couple of hours it looked like he was going to have to work in a kitchen, but then he managed just to get away from it. So there's not a single, a single scent that he ever made that was in the private sector. You know, it was always an academia. This is a recurring theme. They never have any real experience of it. And I sometimes think that that's not just a funny nugget. Sometimes I think maybe if they could have seen anyone who's had a bit of experience of the private sector will see the inefficiency and waste. Right. That's all the time, you know. But it is an academic idea. It is fun in its origins. So let's just go back to look at what their fundamental ideas actually were, right? So the origin of all this stuff, and indeed at the sort of general Western conception of economics and arguably the world, is Alan Smith, who is born in Cokari, who's got to spend 1723. And this is the first of a series of three great myths that I see in neoliberalism. The first is about Smith and the 1700s. The second is about the Great Depression in the 1920s. And the third is about what happens in the financial crash in 2008. And these three great sets of myths, I think, are what explains the political success of neoliberalism and also some of it sort of fundamental flaws. But let's lay out Alan Smith's economics for how they understand it. OK. And it's predominantly through a book called an inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. Usually we just say wealth of nations, published in 1776. At the heart of it is a view of mankind as this sort of self-interested economic unit. And he says, it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity, but to their self-love and never talk to them of their own necessities, but of their advantages. This is a view of like, look, we're selfish. We want stuff. We want to pay as little for it as possible. We want to get as much for the stuff we have to sell as possible. And that creates this dynamic called supply and demand. Supply and demand essentially operates. I know this sounds basic, but I think we're going to talk a bit of economics in this podcast. So let's make sure we know what we're talking about. There's a bunch of people that want something. It's like a Nike trainer. And there's very little of it around. There are lots of people that want it. That's demand.
It's in this case defined by scarcity because there's very little of it. The price will go up. Other people will look at that and go, "Look at how much money you can make selling these trainers." So okay fine, so we're going to start doing it. They'll be more supply. And then eventually the price will start going down. This is supply and demand. It provides data. It provides information about scarcity. And I think ultimately that view of supply and demand and of the selfishness of the price point where two individuals meet and they agree a price becomes this utterly fetishized almost religious moment for the guys that we're going to talk about. There's one pure understandable thing that's real in a world that's terribly confusing. And it's been a few other bits. I mean one of them is that you need to balance your budgets, which is a nation should act like a household. As you know from our life it's going to become very personal. Oh my God. It shouldn't be borrowing too much, etc. Not more than you're spending. There should be low taxes. And therefore because of the supply and demand mechanism, because of the way that the selfishness, this is done, you know, through the most famous metaphor in economics, the invisible hand, you know, that the person goes in selfishly. He's not trying to achieve this perfect state, but he does so anyway by virtue of his own selfishness. The state needs to get out of the way of the market. There's a couple of things that make this funny. And this is a way to think where the great myth comes up. The first one is that Anonsmith didn't believe in this view of humans. He was talking about economic activity. The second thing is the role of the state. He gives it three roles. You know, fine, the market's there, but you've got to have the state do some stuff. This one is defense, you know, external barriers against invasion, etc. The second one is sort of internal justice, you know, dealing with property disputes or maybe murder or whatever else. But the third one's interesting, because the third role of the state is to deal with market failure. This is not a view of the market as perfect at all. He says, public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be in the interest of any individual or small number of individuals to erect and maintain. These are the things you interfere with. They need to talk about canals, you talk about schools, by the way, free schools or at least schools where you pay very little so that the poor can go to them, the building of roads. These things won't be done by the market and can't be done by the market. Now you fast forward hundreds of years and you get to the Great Depression. So we're in 1929. And this is important because the Great Depression becomes the sort of foundational moment for you know, liberals really in the 20th century. Loads of the debate that takes place whether it's in the 30s, the 40s, whether it's in the 60s, whether it's in the 70s, even in the 90s, is about analyses of the Great Depression and what happened. Well, this is where I got quite confused because the version that I learned at school and really haven't had any cause to revise in all of the subsequent reading was that there was this massive market failure. And initially the Republican presidents were just incapable of doing anything about it. The new deal comes in and realizes that through kind of like, you know, Kenji and stimulus and other mechanisms and building all these new institutions of the state, you know, it got America, the world, you know, out of this whole. And that this was one of those cases in history where it was just like, this was the right economic medicine for this sort of terrible illness. And yet the neoliberals are looking at that and actually looking at the economic recovery brought about by the new deal and going, oh, well, they fucked this up. Like, I find that. I find that weird. Like, what did they think was what do they think was going so wrong? The view from Keynes and the one that's taken on in general, Keynes, the sort of English economist and the view of economy, it doesn't fear in the market was it's a failure of aggregate demand. You basically got banks collapsing. People won't put their money into banks so they start hoarding it. And suddenly there's just this, there's just no demand in the economy for a very, very long time and this sort of shutters out, it hits Germany, Germany, you know, doesn't quite elect the Nazi party, but the Nazi party gets into power on the back of it. And then you start seeing something very interesting, something that Keynes never forgot, which is that lots of these economic effects went away when people started preparing for war. Because suddenly they start pumping money into the economy in the form of the military machines that they needed. And his conclusion was if we can do it for war, we can do it for peace. You know, we can pump, create demand by the state by building roads, cinemas housing, what a high x view is different. High x is born, like I said, 1899 in May, Austrian, when he was growing up, he saw the effects of hyperinflation on his family, on his country. I mean, hyperinflation is really when the world loses all meaning. It's just chaos. It's a jungle. And he was obsessed with inflation throughout his life, really. A big part of the story is the relationship between inflation and employment. It is. Am I right? And it's a lot of work. But they constantly thought that, you know, Rosalind Atley, you know, they were just on the verge of social eternism. Right. When clearly if you studied what they were doing and what they were saying, what they believed, that wasn't going to be the case. Keynes is one of my favorite. He's very good at drive-by shootings, Keynes. And he does one of my favorites. He reads the book when he's on a boat going to the US where he's obviously one of the guys that's really pushing through the new deal. And he writes to him, "Hi, Eck. Your greatest danger ahead is the probable practical failure of the application of your philosophy in the US in a fairly extreme form." It's another very nice way of saying, you're going to look like a fucking madman when the US doesn't fall into this authoritarianism despite huge interventions in the market. Well, fun fact, this is maybe aware of the infamous 1945 election broadcast in which Winston Churchill suggested that Clement Atley's Labour Government would require some kind of Gestapo. Yes. In two and two seconds, I can open up reforms. And that came straight from, "Hi, Eck." Oh my god. I didn't know that. But you mean speaking to him, we'll just take it from a couple of minutes. I can't remember whether it was from reading "Hi, Eck" or from "Torkey Type." But that, "Hi, Eck." Oh my god. It was responsible for that kind of absurd hyperbole. I mean, that makes sense to me. Yeah, I just didn't know it could be that direct, mate. The United States is the weirdest country in the world right now. And it doesn't make any sense to anyone. No, it doesn't, but want to make it a bit less confusing. Oh, I do. Good. Well, our podcast can help. It's called American Friction and it's out every Monday and Friday. We discuss all the big news across the pond and explain it all with world leading experts. That's American Friction. Listen, right now, wherever you get your podcasts, right now, American Friction! So, most of all, I'm just, it was a Montpellar in society set up in 1947. And then you have this long period of about 20 years of ice-based what we call the sort of post-war consensus, economic consensus in Brit-America, many parts of Europe. And the neoliberalism and the fringes, and even some Tories, called them nutters, like literally, that's the word. I'm not paraphrasing. So, do you, Dirk, can I just say one thing? I mean, there's a beautiful quote by his son from this period, from Hayek's son.
His son says his ideas were not fashionable. Nobody seemed to listen to him. Nobody seemed to agree with him. He was alone. Right, and that's basically decades of time. But what Hayek learned from the Fabian society, which set up the London School of Economics, that you have to build institutions to advance your ideas. You build a bridge between academia and policymaking. So they started setting up think tanks, the Institute of Economic Affairs in the UK, the American Enterprise Institute in America. Hence the name. Which sets sort of economists into activists, in his book Masters of the Universe, Hayek Friedman in the birth of neoliberal politics. Daniel Stedman, James, calls them ideological entrepreneurs. And they're playing the long game here. And they're sort of intellectual HQs, the University of Chicago, economics department run by Milton Friedman, Gary Becker. And one student compared it to the appeal of Marxism, neoliberalism. Oh wow. Simplicity together with apparent logical completeness, idealism combined with radicalism. Oh, that's so interesting. It seemed like a wonderful, elegant, simple idea that explains what's wrong and how to fix it. And we see a kind of, I suppose, an Americanisation of neoliberalism. It starts off as rather European. Mm, Austrian, really. Yeah, and then it, and maybe a translensisisation of it. So in Britain, the leading neoliberal MP, Pellerin member, was Enoch Powell. Huh. Bettenown for racism. And your escapism. [LAUGHTER] They loved it. Friedman loved him. Said he was the best MP in Britain. Oh wow. And he was supported by journalists like Peter J. And William Reesmog. So these were the kind of-- The shock troops there. And in America, what happens is that you get the sort of fusionism from William F. Buckley, the conservative, Godfather of modern American conservatism. He's not really neoliberal, but he emerges it with iron-ran style libertarianism, anti-communism, and social conservatism. And so you see this in Barry Goldwater in 1964, very right-wing, famous for being like a Cold War hawk, and very anti-communist and all that. Also very neoliberal, even though we've used that word. And because America was very hospitable to basically this anti-tax, anti-regulation vision. So in America, these think tanks-- and it's just had a lot of money behind them. So I see a lot of these kind of old-school robber barons. So the idea was, as Hayek says in his essay "Intellectuals," it is no exaggeration to say that once the more active part of the intellectuals has been converted to a set of beliefs, the process by which these become generally accepted is almost automatic and irresistible. These intellectuals of the organs which modern society has developed for spreading knowledge and ideas, and it is their convictions and opinions which operate as the siv, through which all new conceptions must pass before they can reach the masses. -Oh, wow. He's quite-- I didn't actually-- You know, I never really realized that politically he was so-- -Well, I guess that's quite smart, I guess. -I guess so. -It's a 20-year process of basically legitimizing these ideas, spreading them, training people at the University of Chicago and elsewhere, so that when things start to go wrong for the post-war consensus in the late '60s, they're ready. So this brings me to quite a famous quote by Milton Friedman that I got from the Shock Doctor in, by name of Klein, but it crops up all over the place. He said, "Only a crisis actual of a sieve produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available, until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable." -Oh, wow. -And whatever you say about neoliberals, it's a bit like what you'd have to say about your escapitix. Right? It's just like they put in the hard yards and they kind of-- they laid the ground when they were completely on the out, and there's a 20-years later, something happens. And oh, here they are, they're ready. And they're always just lying around. So that neoliberalism is lying around. So then, of course, this crisis happens, starting in the late '60s, real sort of strains on economies really kicking up. In the '70s, you have stagflation, labor strife, oil shocks, the Vietnam War, of course. The end of the gold standard, Bretton Woods, the '70s, '76 bailout for the International Monetary Fund in the UK was in real trouble. And I think that we've also talked about this in other episodes. '70s, pretty chaotic decade. And the main message there is that the kind of Keynesians of fine-tuning, as it was described, wasn't working. And the people were basically, you know, chancellors, treasure sectaries were looking in their toolkit at what had worked, and now it wasn't working. And who comes along with a new toolkit? It's the neoliberals. Because the thing is, the main thing that they always said, "You should be worried about this," became a big problem. And that was inflation. You know, if you've spent 20, 30 years going, you guys need to worry about inflation more. It was suddenly an inflationary problem. All those things that you've just mentioned, when it was the Miniscent Trade Union or Vietnam, etc. Or oil prices. They're all inflation drivers. You're paying more and wages in inflation goes up. You spend loads on military equipment. Inflation goes up. You're pumping money into the economy. And of course, oil, which when you drive out the price drives out the price of everything, because it's how you get stuff to places. So it felt like they'd been shown to be right all along. I mean, Hayek wins the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1974. Alongside the Keynesium, they kind of forgot about that. It was treated as this real stamp of approval. And he got up in his speech and basically pronounced the death of intervention in the market. He said, "I regard it as fundamentally false and to act upon it as we now experience as very harmful." Because it's narratively very weird. Because basically the 50s and 60s are the quiet decades. You know, where they're sort of working behind the scenes. And they basically just had those two major think tanks for 20 years. So in the 70s, you've got the Adam Smith Institute, the Center for Policy Studies, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation. What's terrifying is these are all suddenly names that we deal with all the time. All the time we've heard of these. They're really sort of gearing up. And what surprised me narratively, I suppose, is that the basic understanding is like thatcher and Reagan come in and sort of commenced the neoliberal era. But actually, it starts not ideologically, but pragmatically earlier. So you get Callahan, the lay prime minister, who's Callahan. He switched from curbing unemployment to curbing inflation and cutting spending. It's a huge statement. He goes almost like so, "Caensiness is over." And President Jimmy Carter appoints Paul Volcker as head of the Federal Reserve. He immediately likes interest rates by, I think, 20%. It's the Volcker shot. The Volcker shot. It's described by a German chancellor as the level of interest rates not seen since the birth of Christ. Oh, my God. And obviously, Volcker stays on under Reagan. But he is appointed by a Democrat. It is a labor government. Yeah. Now, that doesn't mean that they considered themselves neoliberalism. And they suddenly were kind of like, you know, reading out bits of the road, surfed them to each other. But there was a sense that neoliberalism's breakthrough was not the utopianism. I almost feel it's utopianism marketed as common sense. It was like, it doesn't say, here is this new ideology, which involves, you know, which makes a Godhead of the market. It's like, look, you're in the shed. Your old toolkit isn't working. Here are these new ideas. And guess what, you know, I mean, you can argue about what says they work in which says they don't. They certainly make things happen. And suddenly, it seems like vindication. Well, they do kill inflation. Right. If you raise interest rates, you will kill inflation, as long as you're remorseless about it. But think back to that thing of higher-concanes, one, you know, emotionally affected by inflation, the other emotionally affected by employment. Right. Now you strip out that second part. So employment doesn't matter. We will pay any price. And the vocal shock that rising of interest rates has a price. Right. That is the creation of the Rust Belt in the US. You know, this whole decimated domestic industry, really, that we then start talking about when Trump gets elected as, oh, these people have just been left behind for 30 years. That's where that starts. Okay. You look to the UK, you look at like sort of traditional industrial centres, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, mining areas, and England and Wales, unemployment rising to over 3 million people, 12% of the workforce, by the way. And that end of the factory job as this sort of mechanism for social mobility, you know, your well paid, you've got a factory job, your well paid, skilled labour, you know, your kids go to university, they might become a doctorate, etc. That happens again with those shocks. There's other reasons for it. There's increased competition, particularly from Asia. There's, you could say, the pound is over, the selling is overvalued at that period. But really, that vocal shock is a scar that then is the birth base for the kind of seeping wound of Brexit and Trump. I mean, not to reveal what my opinion that. Right. Right. That's origin story stuff for Brexit and Trump is really in the creation of that decimated industry. Well, for the near levels, there were lots of prices you had to pay, one that was in equality. I mean, I've seen it described as a necessary evil, but I almost thought they didn't even say it as evil. It was just like, well, this is just what the market needs. And, you know, these sort of decimated mining towns or rust belt towns, it's just like, well, that's what the market needs, you know, you know, competitive market, there are winners and there are losers. And there's really not much you can do about the losers. And that's where this kind of, this ruthlessness comes in. So what's, you know, so what sort of starts with the sense of like, how can we get inflation under control? It just seems to then get established during the 80s. Is all of the stuff that we think of as near liberalism, right? So it's tax cuts, spending cuts, deregulation, privatization, control of the money supply. Well, there really some monotism is not what people talk about so much anymore, if that was huge then. And importing market mechanisms into public service provision, you know, trickle down economics. Yeah. Of all of these ideas.
years, selling off council houses as part of that. Everything is fully established and in a very short space of time they've gone from being on the fringes to the new normal. What's amazing is you could see at any moment how the theory fails if you choose to look. This comes down to that view of humans as economic units. According to the theory, it's like, okay, fine, so you've lost your job in mining. Look, there's all this money on Wall Street and Silicon Valley and the city of London. It's going to be a banker or you know, of course, that's not how it works. People don't want to leave their communities. It's very hard to retrain people once they reach a certain age anyway. It's just not how it works. That's not how humans operate. But you've got nothing else. Your theory just says, oh, we're just units. They bounce around. They go bounce into the more profitable bit rather than there should be state intervention to actually try and help these communities as they suffer the ravages. Because we should also point out, I mean, in the name of the guy I don't want to use the word balance, but you did have to deal with inflation. You cannot allow levels of inflation as we were seeing in the 70s like that or ruin people's lives as well. There was an economic crisis. I mean, you know, you know, it was a callahan and Dennis Haley. They weren't going to do this for ideological reasons. Right. Like, there was a desperation. Yeah, there was. Exactly. But then you decide, are you going to do it with a sense of humanity? Are you going to care about employment? Right. Or are you fundamentally an ideologue who would just do anything to slash at? This is where I think the sort of fundamental con of neoliberalism is that it is a belief system and a political system sold as economic science. And that there are certain items in the neoliberal toolkit, which could be useful, which could be really useful in specific areas to deal with specific problems. But then it was almost sold as like, well, you're kind of going to have the whole thing, the same thing. The whole thing. So if you want to fix it, it's almost like, well, if you want to fix inflation, like now in 1978 or whatever, you will unfortunately have to throw all these human beings onto the scrappy for decades to come. Like that, that's what seems really sort of shocking to me. And it was like, well, I mean, if we're talking slippery slope, I mean, that's a slippery slope. Surely it didn't have to be that way. Guys, the point of origin story is to provide independent minded and really rigorously researched information about the world around you that isn't susceptible to the kind of knee jerk cynicism that you may or may not see on social media sites that you're staring at during your working day. If you want more of that kind of thing, if you want to support us, do go to our Patreon page. We've got various tiers of subscription and various goodies that you can get by doing. So you'll make me and Dorian particularly happy and you'll give us some justification for the fact that we haven't seen our family for three or four months. And hopefully there will be a bit of a community vibe, a club vibe where sharing ideas that you're feeding back to us, suggesting topics that we might discuss in future, recommending, materials, documentaries, podcasts, so on about stuff we've already discussed and make it a bit of a two way street. We'd enjoy that. Just search Patreon origin story podcast to find out more. Let's talk about Milton Friedman a bit because at this point it's not really high-eck. Really, as the talisman of this stuff, it's really Friedman. I mean, like I say Chicago from the Chicago school. And just talk about his economics because this is the thing, he's actually really different to high-eck. He does believe you can understand and influence the market. And he does actually believe in a different kind of market intervention and that's called monetarism, which is essentially that you maintain a gradual increase in the money supply. Money supply, what we mean by that is the total amount of money in an economy, cash, currency, bank deposits. And by the way, incidentally, it's really hard to do this because every time you go to like a sofa shop and then like, oh, you can pay monthly installments, that's kind of an increase in the money supply, right, by the creation of credit. So actually how you do it is difficult to say the least. And when it's been tried, this has been an absolute disaster. But in his view, you would have almost an algorithm. I almost you could just set it up and just let it run of how much the money's spoiled increases, small amount of the time. And that's it. You don't do anything else. You just leave the machine, thrombing along. And that's it, no more intervention. But you do have that bit of intervention. So the economics are very different. They spent most of the time arguing about it, but their politics were basically identical. So slippery slopes, stayed out the market, no regulation, hands off. He becomes this lionized figure. Friedman, didn't he? I mean, he was somebody who is a celebrity economist. And he's very charismatic. It's worth pointing out. When you see a speech with him, you feel like he feels quite sage-like and incredibly, he is a charismatic guy. But what we're seeing here, and this is where again, I feel that this kind of idea that it is a science, or even that it's a dogma pretending to be a science, isn't itself a con, right? Because it turned out some of the values that they had expressed early on didn't really count at all. So monopolies were meant to be bad. Bad for competition. Turn out they were fine. After all. [LAUGHTER] There seems to be that every time their principle ran up against what rich people wanted, the principle was disposable. Also, the fundamental idea, all freedoms flow from economic freedom. Collectivism, authoritarianism are bad. Authoritarianism is fine if it's a little bit the right economic. Now I think Naomi Klein overstates her case in the shock doctrine. I sort of reread some of it recently, and I feel like she has a thesis, and she's connecting it a little to doggedly there. But it is true that the first sort of full fat neoliberal experiment was in Chile under Pineshae, where economists from the Chicago School, who had actually been training Chilean economists since the '50s, were given free reign. Even though it was enormously apparent that political freedom was absent, Klein caused this sort of disaster capitalism, the exploiting of a crisis. Again, I think she overdosed the point, but it is definitely true that they were seeking these sort of opportunities for these sort of laboratories abroad. And a lot of time what they did was they broke countries and they kept on doing that. You know, often not, you know, you can say, did they break Britain, did they break America? Well, Unison of Arguably, but I'm talking about countries that were really, you know, really put on the rack by this neoliberal dogma, which appeared to kind of just completely override all these other values that they claimed were important. So I think this is that moment that you're talking about is central. I think it's the moment of moral reality for what neoliberalism became. Now Hayek is a liberal. These guys come from liberalism. They are supposed to believe in individual freedom and freedom from the state. What's extraordinary to me then? I'm probably a bit, I don't know whether people find it because I was partly brought up in Chile. I was in Chile during these sort of periods and like, you know, in the early '80s. I was a kid, right? I didn't really know what was going on in Marami, but my first memories of life are in this country at this time. Like, goes to Chile on two occasions, you guys, in 1977, you guys again, in 1981, when the Mount Pelarine Society holds its regional meeting in the country. He gives it a stamp of approval. He never criticizes Pinochet at any point. He says this, this is a quote. This is the most sick, I mean, I'd rather like Hayek, you know, as a guy, but this is just a moral abyss, this quote. I have not been able to find a single person, even a much maligned Chile, who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under A&D. And I think what you're seeing there is a couple of things. The first one is where that fetishization of the market gets you, where this economic reductionism gets you. There's nothing really matters anymore. You know, it's not even this sort of equation of economic and therefore you get these other freedoms. It's just that they haven't talked about those other freedoms for years. Yeah. They just don't really matter to them. I mean, they never speak about it. All they care about is the price point, the price point. That's supply and demand mechanism. That's the only real freedom they give a shit about. The other is, and you see it in the relationship they have with Thatcher and with Reagan. In a Thatcher at this point, it's obviously nothing compared to what's going on in Chile, but it's still pretty bad in the sense that it's got a politicized, militarized police force attacking miners, right? You know, she's passing regulations against gay people. Where is the liberal outrage from these guys? There it doesn't exist. Why? And I think this is really where you get something key here, that they don't have any structural assessment of limitations to freedom in society through racism, through sexism, through economic disadvantage, through mental health. There's none of that. None of that's there. It's just basically the market, the market, the market. What you've got by the end of the 80s is what's called the Washington consensus. And it is the kind of neoliberalism has infiltrated. I mean, it dominates the IMF, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and it means that when countries are in trouble, they are obliged to, if they want a bailout, they have to institute neoliberal reforms. You also have this incredibly flawed idea that democracy flows from the free market. You know, Russia, you know, the real kind of shocks that happen, economic shocks happen to Russia in the 90s. And again, it was this idea, well, this is, you know, it's tough medicine. But this was certainly on the past democracy. It did not. It did not. And yet another one of this kind of like neoliberalism sort of immunity to failure, like all ideologies, I think. It is incapable of going well clearly, clearly this approach in, whether it be in Russia or Chile, where in fact it was reversed under Pineshae. I think after the 1982, that American kind of financial crisis there, it was kind of rolled back. And they never fucking, you know, the thing that they thought was so important that they would put up with torture. They would give torture to their blessing. It didn't.
even work that well, but it didn't matter, and they just moved on. They're instituting it all the way around the world. You know, I think that's where you can get most sort of angry about this and most see its failings. By comparison, I mean, it's what you say, it's these sort of Blair Clinton, what third way neoliberalism. You know, this and believe in the importance of market efficiency and choice in the public sector and kind of opening, you know, and how that affects areas like education and health. And of course, just rampant financial deregulation. That we're even kind of good social democrats like Gordon Brown are just like, complicit in the financialisation, where basically money is just being created out of money. Like it's not doing anything, it's not useful. It's not like some f*ck, it's not like some mining town has been turned into a kind of like thriving, collateralized debt obligation hub. You know, it's just money for the sake of money. And that of course is pretty atrocious, but it's nothing compared to, of course, what is happening to these other countries that are forced to reforms that they anyway want and which often do not work. So it's constantly breaking its own promises, I think. And worst, perhaps showing my hand here, my precious neutrality has been compromised. Is I think when neoliberalism does to all areas of life? I mean, that's your famously economics of the method, the object is to change the soul. Now, I don't think she was particularly trying to express neoliberalism's creed there, but it kind of is that, because it turns life into a market and everything is a competition. - Yes. - And there are winners and losers. And if you're an eluser, you have no one to blame but yourself and if you're a winner, well done, you have nobody to thank but yourself. - Yes. - It is presumed to be a kind of the underpinning of all human activity. And that I think is what went a lot of time when people, to the younger people now talk about neoliberalism, it's that sense of how it can affect you in everyday interactions, in small aspects of office culture. You know, then it's that, it's that sort of pervasive the way it's sunk itself so deep down into human existence. And that I think is where it becomes, you know, really, rather, center stuff. If you do not believe economics is the foundation of human existence. - Well, where's your belonging, right? Like the whole social element of life is sort of cut away. Even if you think of welfare of how we help one another when we're out, that's gone. Your sense of community decimated one and industry goes, there's no sense that the community has any meaning in its own terms. It's only economic and if the economic case is over, then why are you still here? You know, you basically turn people's sense of identity into, you know, do you like Pepsi or Coke, you know, do you prefer Xbox or PlayStation? And you see those identities grow with that period. People are intensely arguing about this sort of stuff. And if that does mean something to them, you know, something really profound, you strip humanity into these atomized units. And then funny enough, it turns out, well, actually that doesn't really do the job. People want more meaning than that. And then again, I think you need, look at populism when you look at the 2016 stuff. And when you look at what happens on the left with identity politics, it is a break away from that really stale view of humanity of like, no, if you're saying, I've got that, I'm gonna find it in the nation. I'm gonna find it in my race. I'm gonna find it in my gender. You know, only where you can find it. Some sense of belonging that's more impressive and deeper than that offered by this market reduction is. You just want to be a commodity. And we just have the treated, you know, the whole thing is that workers are treated as commodities, facial commodities. Natural resources are, I mean, this is why it's obviously appalling for the environment. You know, 'cause again, the market doesn't care about fucking sustainability. And I like the phrase that people like George Soros, Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, I'm not sure quite sure who came up with it in the first place, but they all use it market fundamentalism. It gives it that sense of a kind of a religious dogma. Krugman says, "Laysay fair absolutism contributed to an intellectual climate in which faith in markets and disdain for government often trumps the evidence, which I like because it gives it a sort of post-truth element." Yeah, you know. It doesn't need to be, it was presented as the basic truth of human interaction, but it's sort of not objectively true. It is a belief system. And I feel that actually what you see, we see it now, it now is in tech. And this kind of like modification of everything, the marketization of everything, but with this kind of utopian gauze over it. And again, a kind of breaking up of people's sense of belonging. I mean, it seems quite bad when we put it like that. What I wanted to ask you is, what is the state of neoliberalism? Because I mean, David Harvey's brief history of neoliberalism. The left wing taken it. Came out in 2005, it ends with a prediction of a serious financial crisis in the next five years. This prediction was made by Paul Volker. No, I think. Well, it's important to mention that Paul Volker was generally a decent, apart from the Volker shot, which is the thing he's most famous for and the most terrible thing he ever did. He was a decent Democrat and progressive. So obviously it did happen in 2008. And this was a shot like 1929. And what happened to neoliberalism? Is it alive? Is it dead? Is it a zombie? Like what happened when it was seen, or certainly financialization, failed catastrophic. Yeah, it failed. What's most importantly, I think, on the terms that it itself set. Right? Like you have Alan Greenspan, classic neoliberal saying, before the crash, the market stabilizing regulatory forces should gradually displace many cumbersome, increasingly ineffective government structures. In other words, let the market regulate itself. By risk assessment, and you'll think, I don't want to have a bad investment, just to work out, just fine. But then this extraordinary thing happens. There is no moment of reckoning for neoliberalism. This wouldn't blow my mind until the day I die. That instead, what was the central attack against labor from George Osborne during the 2010 general election? That labor didn't fix the roof when the sun was shining? That is the most extraordinary thing to me, that your whole world views just collapsed in front of your face. And what do you blame? You blame the state again, just like Friedman did, for the Great Depression. The same process again and again and again, you go, "Oh, it's a public sector's fault." This had nothing to do with the public sector. It was a free market failure, blamed on the private sector, and then you bring up the old Adam Smith, balance of budgets at the state level. We've got to pay back on how all these debts are impossible. Osterity and start shredding the public sector all over again. The extraordinary thing is every failure of neoliberalism is treated as a reason to do neoliberalism even harder. Real neoliberalism hasn't been tried. But I don't think, but the thing is, of course, people lose legitimacy with people because they know that something isn't right and that perhaps in the '80s and the '90s or people who remembered the kind of the real crisis and the '70s are thinking, "Oh, maybe this is kind of working." And if you actually know how it does neoliberalism work, it's like sometimes, but a lot of the kind of growth in sort of world world that's come from China, which is a particular blend, again, not so liberal in other areas. In Asia, you know, South Korea, you know, it did produce a lot of wealth, not so much in Latin America, not so much in Eastern Europe. Like it's sort of, it's checkered, right? It's not like it always fails. But what I object to is the fact that it claims to always succeed. You know, I don't even know if you can, the thing is, Keynesianism took on board. We did need to be more vigilant about inflation. And you do that, you pass it over to the central bank, you should be checking for this alongside employment, you know? And that's, to be honest, a pretty minor quibble for a series of financial crises in the '70s that were quite hard to predict and quite hard to diagnose at the time. That is not a major, I mean, to me, you fit that into a system that still says, right, state or the market, what should be doing what, at which given time? You don't just say, it's always the market. So even where it's sort of like, you know, even a stop to watch tells the right time to us today, even when you suddenly do have inflation running out of control, I don't really think it is a victory for these guys because these guys aren't really engaging in any kind of sensible adult conversation about how an economy should be running their first place. Well, I agree with Joseph Stiglitz, who says unfettered markets often not only do not lead to social justice, which you've discussed, but do not even produce efficient outcomes. Individuals and firms in the pursuit of their self-interest are not necessarily, or in general, led as if by an invisible hand to economic efficiency. Yeah, yeah. You know, obviously, you know, he would say that because he disagrees with journalism. But I mean, I think it's the failures. And again, it doesn't remind me of people that could not accept people on the far left, who could not accept the failure of, say, communism and had to make excuses. And it seems like the same thing now, only there hasn't been the great discrediting. That should be in the Berlin War moment, 2008. And yet it wasn't. And yet most people don't really believe that it's kind of working. And if you pointed out all the ways in which neoliberalism infects the language and the mechanisms of everyday life and your work or your interaction and your public services or public space, you know, most people would say, "Hashtray, no, I'm really quite unhappy with this aspect, this aspect, this aspect." So it sort of failed, but it has not been seen to have failed, or at least not by people in power, maybe because it didn't fail for them. Because I think they'll never, I just think they'll never accept it. I honestly think it is. I think you're right to think of it as a religion that is sort of non-false viable for them. And yet, it's funny to end up wanting to use a quote from Marx, but it does feel like it just creates its own grave diggers. Because you can pretend as much as you like that people are just these atomized economics units. You can pretend that you can make this work on an economic basis, but it doesn't work. It keeps on collapsing, whether it's the late 1920s or whether it's the late 'nauties. It always collapses. And when it collapses, people's seek alternatives. And in that seeking alternatives is wrapped up among the economic questions, a sense of identity.
and wanting something more than is offered. And that is where we are now. Now, you know, if you're on the liberal left, progressive, whatever you wanna call it, it's just, you're probably not happy about Brexit and Trump and all of that. But you know what, the thing is, the new liberal shouldn't be happy either. 'Cause every time these guys come out, even if it's Johnson saying, right, well, we're gonna start interfering, we're gonna build these industries, we're gonna do, well, that's not their agenda either. You know, on that thing, you've got your own gravedigger there and you've created him again. You've done this before, you've done it again now. So over and over, the fundamental failures of the project itself are why it keeps on coming undone, under its own terms. - Well, I like the zombie diagnosis, which I think I picked up from William Davis, he writes very well about neoliberalism. You know, they're actually, it's lost ground. Like in all those ways, you could see, sometimes in ways we find very sinister, for other reasons, it's on the right wing populism. But, you know, neoliberalism has lost ground and yet it hasn't been replaced. - Yeah, hangs around. - That's so true. - And this mindset hangs around. Just before we finish, why went to ask, is I suppose going back to this idea of how the word is used? Do you think that it has, at least on the left, sort of poisoned liberalism itself? Do you wish that it has had this different, well, I mean, neo-conservatism is generally disliked by the same people that dislike conservatism. But just neo-liberalism sort of tainted, even though it is in itself like a travesty. I mean, I wonder why you feel uneasy about the word, beyond maybe fearing that it's a bit sort of jargon-y. - Yeah, I mean, I absolutely do think it's succeeded in doing that. - Well, sorry, I think that liberal should take the blame for that. Because I remember those periods. I remember the early Blair years. I remember how we would sit around and you'd have good liberal people going, "We're just gonna have to take it on the economics." You know, we've just kind of lost that fight. You know, what we can do is we can work on fixing, you know, tolerance in society and gay rights and, you know, all that stuff. So that was, there's no point pretending, oh, it was always, we were always, people often were not fighting that battle. - Okay. - And so I do think it got tainted by it. Absolutely, it got tainted by it. And really, the recognition that comes now is that, the other, which the reason I scoffed at the very beginning of this of a form of traditional liberalism, I mean, the left-wing interventionist, more radical version of liberalism is right there at the very beginning, whether you go back to the English Civil War or in Adam Smith itself. You know, it's always there. This is all traditional liberalism. But that more left-wing needed to come forward to challenge this stuff and must do it now in order to distance itself from it. - I think I'll be intrigued to see the other sort of, what post-neoliberalism version of capitalism, 'cause I do think for people, you know, of our age and younger, you must feel that neoliberalism is capitalism. It's hard to imagine a version of capitalism. I mean, obviously, somebody who don't want any version of capitalism, they fall on socialism, which is totally legitimate. But I mean, there should be something, which is, was something that existed, you know, my parents are growing up. It was like, yeah, and still exists in certain, you know, certain countries. Like, it's more sort of social democracy and more so intervention. And it's almost like if you go back and it's just like, you didn't have to do this. You didn't have to deregulate the banks to that extent and let them fucking destroy the world economy. But you didn't have to do that. That wasn't part of it. And there's so much, which is this whole package, it's like, you got this whole bundle of shit that you didn't have to accept. That has come to define sort of all capitalism in our lifetimes, which I mean, you have to say, I mean, that is astonishing achievements by these people, you know, met in Palarena in 1947. - Friendless and unknown. - Look, I mean, if you want to find a good thing about it, it is proof positive that a small group of people can change the world if they want to. It's just next time I rather hope they do it in a better way. - Thank you so much for listening to the six and last episode of Origin Story for this season. Ian, how have you found this experiment? Shattering. - There's very tiring. - Just maying. (laughing) - Sort of crushing. - Various existential crisis. (laughing) - And I guess, you know what, I would have, if we hadn't done the episode on work, I think I would have a more positive wrap up, 'cause it would be like, look, ultimately anything you dig into it and you find this stuff. And one of the things, you know, the thing that got me in the McCarthy episode, especially reading about him was, you know, you find there's actually some okay qualities there, every so often, right? I mean, we didn't bring a lot of them up, 'cause we had to keep doing it an hour and I don't want to spend it praising him. But even then, you find like, there are positive qualities there, you know, you do neoliberalism today. So these guys weren't venal. They weren't self-interested, you know, as most of the criticisms of them would be. They were just kind of ideologues and lots of them were quite honorable in that thing. And so it's that constant thing of whenever you really look into something, you will find shades of gray, unless you're reading Pierce Morgan's book on work and then you'll give up faith in the human race. What I found quite rewarding was constructing a narrative that perhaps wasn't that familiar to me. So particularly in the case of centristism, 'cause it's such a moving target. Having to put together a kind of chronology where the word just seems to be constantly like flicking about and having something that kind of made sense. What I thought I was learning, there's certain things like conspiracy theories which I feel like I've been studying, you know, for like 25 years. And then there are these other ones like centristism, neoliberalism where I felt like I was sort of, you know, educating myself and then of course, one of the best ways to clarify things in your own mind is when you have to present it, you know, and ask a little bit about it, 'cause you're like, hey, like, what's the story here? What are the characters? What are the turning points? And even on something like superheroes where, you know, I've been reading comic books since I was 10. I mean, not with the same regularity as when I was 10, but I'm reading, I mean, I'm not gonna lie. I'm reading a lot more. I was wondering what's 10. But, you know, looking at superheroes in this very historical context and again, looking for those turning points and it's just like, well, why was that? What were the politics of Superman? You know, why did the kind of initial Marvel revolution mean so much? What were Stanley's politics? All of these things were obviously what I want to convey to listeners, which is, like, isn't this, isn't this stuff fascinating and isn't it full of things which challenge receive wisdom? Things that, like you say, and people are more complicated than you think. And little kind of nuggets that you haven't come across before. And that's like, for me, I mean, that's why I read, you know, that's why I read nonfiction. That's why we want to do this podcast was to try and get, not just to bring clarity to these words and we'll still hang out with you for an hour. But, you know, to sort of, I suppose, make, you know, convey the excitement of these histories because they're, you know, these are big issues. These are big, dynamic and sometimes world changing ideas and arguments. And so there is a kind of real, even when the baddies are winning, which it turns out happens quite a lot in history. It's, you know, it's hugely energizing. You know what I've loved is actually the linkages. Like, it was halfway through researching the comic stuff on the comic code that I realized, I'll shit, this is exactly the same time as McCarthy. And what's happening with McCarthy aiming towards the levels of society is basically happening with comics aimed at the lower levels of society. It's pretty much the same time, presumably out of the same nervousness, that same kind of terror of moral collapse and national decline. And then that sort of gives you a, like, this sense of history that feels very different, it's not all these isolated bits, there's actually the same stuff playing into itself in waves in quite a comprehensible kind of way. Yeah, it feels more panoramic because a lot of time we're going, okay, how are people responding to totalitarianism, to the Second World War, to the Cold War, to a particular, to a moral panic, to the crisis of the '70s? You know, and you do get drawn back to certain, like, the tractor beam of these certain hinge moments in history. And you go, okay, right, well, I can look at this from the point of view of a neoliberal economist, or I could look at it from the point of view of a left-wing politician or a screenwriter or a comic book publisher. And I'm going to have a completely different story, and yet they overlap. And that's, I suppose, one of the things that fascinates me about history is all the overlapping. And you're going, you can get down one path and someone else can get down another path and actually there's all these connections. And the format of this season, I think, has allowed us to be quite surprised by these connections. Well, thanks for listening with us, guys. If you want to email us, we are at
[email protected]. I almost forgot where it was then. Check out our show notes where we talk about the books that we've been reading and what we think of them. And if you look back up the list, you'll be able to see them for all the previous episodes as well. Cheerio. Oh, I do. Good. It's called American Friction, and it's out every Monday and Friday. We discuss all the big news and across the pond and explain it all with world-leading experts. [LAUGHTER]
[Laughter] Origin Story was written and presented by Dorian Linsky and Ian Dunn with music and audio production by me, Jade Bailey. The group editor was Andrew Harrison and Origin Story is a podmaster's production. [Music]
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