Tag Archives: democracy

The last 10 years have seen the collapse of neoliberalism. The question now is, what comes next? For 40 years, we have lived in a neoliberal era, an era defined in public policy by deregulation, liberalization, privatization, and austerity. Starting with the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions, neoliberal ideas spread to capture the center and even the left, ultimately becoming the reigning policy consensus by the mid-1990s.But over the last decade, that neoliberal consensus has collapsed. We...

For 40 years, elites in rich and poor countries alike promised that neoliberal policies would lead to faster economic growth, and that the benefits would trickle down so that everyone, including the poorest, would be better off. Now that the evidence is in, is it any wonder that trust in elites and confidence in democracy have plummeted?... Trickle down or pissing on? I am not sure about his blanket recommendation to restore Enlightenment values. Enlightenment values led to bourgeois...

More than one million people marched in Santiago on October 26 to protest the Government’s security response to Chile’s current political crisis and to demand structural economic reforms to reduce inequality and increase social services. In this post I analyze these grievances from a quantitative perspective and explore what it would take to translate them into policy. This is my fourth inequality-related post. I use the same sources of data and framework of analysis as in my initial...

More than one million people marched in Santiago on October 26 to protest the Government’s security response to Chile’s current political crisis and to demand structural economic reforms to reduce inequality and increase social services. In this post I analyze these grievances from a quantitative perspective and explore what it would take to translate them into policy. This is my fourth inequality-related post. I use the same sources of data and framework of analysis as in my initial...

The Brexit issue in Britain has been marked by many different estimates of GDP (income) loss arising from different configurations of the Brexit. The media is flush with lurid headlines about the catastrophe awaiting Britain. As regular readers will appreciate, I am not convinced by any of those predictions. But as I said the day after the Referendum in this blog post – Why the Leave victory is a great outcome (June 27, 2016) – that when I tweeted it was a ‘great outcome’ I didn’t say that...

Agnès Labrouse quote.  The most revelant sentence:  While Duflo and Banerjee are in line with a technocratic democracy, the Ostroms sustain a Tocquevillean democratic self-governance. For the latter, institutions emanating from democratic processes, far from being straitjackets, are the core of economic processes. They simultaneously constraint and enable human action. Paternalism versus democracy.  That's pretty much the "compassionate conservative," liberal divide. Lars P. Syll’s...

Modern Europe’s political structure is based on the supposition that capitalism and democracy can be compatible – so the most urgent challenge of our times is reconciling the two. In short, economic liberalism and political liberal generate paradoxes that require a comprehensive worldview (systematic set of presumptions) that balances social, economic and political liberalism for Western liberalism to survive. New StatesmanCapitalism vs democracy: Europe’s hard problem Mark...

Some social & political theory. Focuses on Walter Lippmann, The Good Society. Although Eric Schliesser doesn't mention it in this post, Aristotle discussed these issues in detail in his Politics.Digressions&ImpressionsOn Demagogues and DemocracyEric Schliesser | Professor of Political Science, University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences

So, here's my hypothesis. The road to serfdom thesis was if not inspired by Lippmann, at least prompted, in part, by him. But Lippmann did not hold the thesis; it is articulated by Knight in his review of Lippmann and (mistakenly) ascribed to Lippmann. Knight, however, thinks there is nothing inevitable about the thesis because he thinks the future is still very much open. I cannot prove that Hayek read Knight's review of Lippmann. (Knight was later a somewhat ambivalent referee for The...

I’ve just reviewed Eric Weissman’s book on intentional homeless communities. Points made in the review include the following: -Intentional communities in general are communities built around specific goals. But in the case of this book, I mean small communities of housing sometimes made from discarded, donated and recycled material, and sometimes purpose-built, to address homelessness. -Intentional communities are not the same thing as tent cities or tiny home communities. The former...