Practical Utopias from Degrowth Pastoralism to Star Trek Futurism

December 16, 2022 8:26 PM

Why the Age of American Progress Ended [ungated] - "Invention alone can't change the world; what matters is what happens next."[1,2,3,4]

Inventions do matter greatly to progress, of course. But too often, when we isolate these famous eureka moments, we leave out the most important chapters of the story—the ones that follow the initial lightning bolt of discovery. Consider the actual scale of Edward Jenner’s accomplishment the day he pricked James Phipps in 1796. Exactly one person had been vaccinated in a world of roughly 1 billion people, leaving 99.9999999 percent of the human population unaffected. When a good idea is born, or when the first prototype of an invention is created, we should celebrate its potential to change the world. But progress is as much about implementation as it is about invention. The way individuals and institutions take an idea from one to 1 billion is the story of how the world really changes.

And it doesn’t always change, even after a truly brilliant discovery. The 10,000-year story of human civilization is mostly the story of things not getting better: diseases not being cured, freedoms not being extended, truths not being transmitted, technology not delivering on its promises. Progress is our escape from the status quo of suffering, our ejection seat from history—it is the less common story of how our inventions and institutions reduce disease, poverty, pain, and violence while expanding freedom, happiness, and empowerment...

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, they did. Almost every generation of Americans was more productive, wealthier, and longer-lived than the one before it. In the past few decades, however, progress has faltered—and faith in it has curdled. Technological progress has stagnated, especially in the nonvirtual world. So have real incomes. Life expectancy has been falling in recent years.

What went wrong? There are many answers, but one is that we have become too enthralled by the eureka myth and, more to the point, too inattentive to all the things that must follow a eureka moment...

The United States once believed in partnerships among the government, private industry, and the people to advance material progress. The Lincoln administration helped build the railroads. The New Deal helped electrify rural America. Dwight Eisenhower signed the Price-Anderson Act, which guaranteed government funds and limited liability for nuclear-energy firms in case of serious accidents, facilitating the construction of nuclear-power plants. John F. Kennedy’s space ambitions made NASA a major consumer of early microchips, which helped reduce their price by a factor of 30 in a matter of years, accelerating the software revolution.

“And then, around 1980, we basically stopped building,” Jesse Jenkins, who researches energy policy at Princeton, told me. In the past 40 years, he said, the U.S. has applied several different brakes to our capacity to build what’s already been invented. Under Ronald Reagan, the legacy of successful public-private partnerships was ignored in favor of the simplistic diagnosis that the government was to blame for every major problem. In the ’70s, liberals encouraged the government to pass new environmental regulations to halt pollution and prevent builders from running roughshod over low-income neighborhoods. And then middle-class Americans used these new rules to slow down the construction of new housing, clean-energy projects—just about everything. These reactions were partly understandable; for example, air and water pollution in the ’70s were deadly crises. But “when you combine these big shifts, you basically stop building anything,” Jenkins said.

To understand how we could do better, it’s useful to compare the story of the first global vaccine to the story of the latest one... These [mRNA] technological breakthroughs, building on decades of basic research, were themselves miracles. But alone, they weren’t enough. The U.S. also needed a policy miracle—a feat of bureaucratic ingenuity that would make, distribute, and administer novel vaccines with record-breaking efficiency. We got just that with Operation Warp Speed, which belongs with the Apollo program and the Manhattan Project as one of the most important technology programs in the history of modern federal policy. It likely saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives...

One regrettable feature of history is that it sometimes takes a catastrophe to fast-forward progress. The U.S. directly advanced airplane technology during World War I; radar, penicillin manufacturing, and nuclear technology during World War II; the internet and GPS during the Cold War; and mRNA technology during the pandemic. A crisis is a focusing mechanism. But it is up to us to decide what counts as a crisis. The U.S. could announce a Warp Speed for heart disease tomorrow, on the theory that the leading cause of death in America is a national crisis. We could announce a full emergency review of federal and local permitting rules for clean-energy construction, with the rationale that climate change is a crisis. Just as it did in the ’60s with smallpox, the U.S. could decide that a major disease in developing countries, such as malaria, deserves a concerted global coalition. Even in times without world wars and pandemics, crises abound. Turning them into national priorities is, and has always been, a political determination.

Operation Warp Speed was ingenious, admirable, and wildly successful. But despite all that, it was not enough.

Having overcome the hurdles of scientific breakthrough, technological invention, and rapid distribution, the mRNA vaccines faced a final obstacle: cultural acceptance. And the skepticism of tens of millions of American adults proved too much for the vaccines to overcome. This is the third lesson of the smallpox story—culture is the true last-mile problem of progress. It doesn’t matter what you discover or invent if people are unwilling to accept it...

The other part is that some Democrats—many of whom call themselves progressives—have in meaningful ways become anti-progress, at least where material improvement is concerned. Progress depends on a society’s ability to build what it knows. But very often, it’s progressives who stand against building what we’ve already invented, including relatively ancient technology like nuclear power or even apartment buildings. Cities and states run by Democrats have erected so many barriers to construction that blue metro areas are now where the housing crisis is worst. The five states with the highest rates of homelessness are New York, Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington; all are run by Democrats. Meanwhile, it is often left-leaning environmentalist groups that use onerous rules to delay the construction of wind and solar farms that would reduce our dependency on oil and gas. The left owns all the backpack pins denouncing the oil industry, but Texas produces more renewable energy than deep-blue California, and Oklahoma and Iowa produce more renewable energy than New York.

One possible explanation is that progressives have become too focused on what are essentially negative prescriptions for improving the world, including an emphasis on preservation and sacrifice (“reduce, reuse, recycle”) over growth (“build, build, build”). At the extreme, this ascetic style leads to calls for permanent declines in modern living standards, a philosophy known as “degrowtherism.” The aim is noble: to save our descendants from climate change by flying less, traveling less, buying less, and using less. But it is a profound departure from progressivism’s history, which is one of optimism about the ability of society to improve lives on a big scale through bold action. It’s self-defeating to tell voters: “My opponent wants to raise your living standards, but I promise I won’t let that happen.” It’s far better—and, arguably, more realistic—to tell voters that building more renewable power is a win-win that will make energy cheaper and more abundant...

In 2022, the medical journal The Lancet published an analysis of which variables best predicted the rates of COVID infection across 177 countries. Outside wealth, one of the most powerful variables was trust in government among the public. “Trust is a shared resource that enables networks of people to do collectively what individual actors cannot,” the authors of the Lancet paper wrote. When I first read their definition, I stared at it for a while, feeling the shock of recognition. I thought of how much that could serve as a definition of progress as well: a network of people doing collectively what individual actors cannot. The stories of global progress tend to be the rare examples where science, technology, politics, and culture align. When we see the full ensemble drama of progress, we realize just how many different people, skills, and roles are necessary.

The last needle to be applied against smallpox, before its eradication almost half a century ago, carried a dose of vaccine smaller than a child’s pupil. Four hundred years fit inside that droplet. The devotion of D. A. Henderson’s disease-eradicating team was in it. So were the contributions of Benjamin Rubin and the Spanish boys, as well as the advocacy of Henry Cline and the discovery by Edward Jenner, and before him the evangelism of Lady Montagu, and the influence of Circassian traders from the Caucasus Mountains, who first brought the practice of inoculation to the Ottoman court. An assembly line of discovery, invention, deployment, and trust wound its way through centuries and landed at the tip of a needle. Perhaps there is our final lesson, the one most worth carrying forward. It takes one hero to make a great story, but progress is the story of us all.

also btw...

• Taming The Greedocracy - "American elites want magical technological fixes to climate change because they refuse to confront the truth that seriously addressing the problem would require limits to their own power and luxury."[5]
• The Abundance Agenda - "A simpler life might be both more pleasurable and more equal."
• People are realizing that degrowth is bad - "The mad schemes degrowthers advocate are a fantasy that distracts us from real efforts to save the planet."
• Disappointing result here in the lame duck session - "Congress is going to need to do something on permitting reform next term or most of the money in the Inflation Reduction Act will be wasted.
• Interview: Ezra Klein, journalist and author - "This, to me, is the central challenge of supply-side progressivism: How do the costs of all this construction not just fall on those without the voice to oppose them? How do we do this in a way that carries some glint of fairness? And that's not just a moral question. If we don't figure that out, we probably cannot do this at all. Long-term. the politics of running over what communities want doesn't work."
• The Progress Issue - "In this inaugural special issue we set out to explore progress — how it happens, how we nurture it and how we stifle it, and what changes are required in how we approach our most serious problems to ensure greater progress for all."
• How we build the future - "Imagine if I had a magic wand, and I could make the world 1% better. You wouldn't be able to tell. Nothing would really change very much. But if I took that 1% and compounded it year by year, over time we would notice that. That very mild 1% progress is 'Protopia.' We are very slowly crawling towards betterment. Protopia is a direction. It's not a destiny. I bought into the hippie perspective. I wanted that small is beautiful, the Henry David Thoreau, simplified 'Walden' life. It was the big systems that I didn't trust. The big technology, the big corporations- but I did go to Asia, and there, things began to change... I would go by a rice paddy, and then I would come back a couple years later, and there would be like factories and people who had money. Right before my eyes, I saw what technology was bringing people... I became interested in how did [the Amish] actually decide which technologies to accept and which didn't... Their criteria is: 'Will this technology keep our communities together and spend as much time with our communities versus going out?'"
• Margaret Atwood Offers Her Vision of Utopia [ungated] - "Corpse disposal will be via a respectful composting process... Nobody really wanted to delve into prisons and law enforcement. Why? Those are unpleasant topics. We like to think that in our practical utopia, things will go so well that criminality will be beside the point."[6,7]
• Techno-optimism for 2023 - "Now, I don't want to be a Panglossian about all the effects of AI on society... the Ukraine war is showing just how important drones are to modern warfare; when these become AI-driven instead of human-piloted, it will be scary."
• Startups Look for Ways to Bring Down the Cost of Green Hydrogen [ungated] - "Green hydrogen currently costs between approximately $3 per kilo and $26 per kilo, according to data from S&P Global. The Energy Department has said it needs to cost about $1 per kilo to unlock new industrial applications. Closing that gap with current technology depends on renewable electricity becoming a lot cheaper."
• Cutting-edge tech made this tiny country a major exporter of food [ungated] - "The rallying cry in the Netherlands started two decades ago, as concern mounted about its ability to feed its 17 million people: Produce twice as much food using half as many resources. The country, which is a bit bigger than Maryland, not only accomplished this feat but also has become the world's second largest exporter of agricultural products by value behind the United States. Perhaps even more significant in the face of a warming planet: It is among the largest exporters of agricultural and food technology. The Dutch have pioneered cell-cultured meat, vertical farming, seed technology and robotics in milking and harvesting — spearheading innovations that focus on decreased water usage as well as reduced carbon and methane emissions."
• One of World's Priciest Cities Turbocharges Affordable Housing -"Paris may convert offices, parking garages and defunct hotels to meet a new target to make 40% of homes accessible to people on lower incomes... after succeeding in making 25% of its accommodation accessible to people on lower incomes by the end of last year."

posted by kliuless (30 comments total)

That very mild 1% progress is 'Protopia.'
We are very slowly crawling towards betterment. Protopia is a direction. It's not a destiny.

This describes the Michigan pothole to a T.
posted by clavdivs at 8:34 PM on December 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

I found some of the article on point, but some of it problematic. Yes, we tend to oversimplify, but the reason we don't have a strong solar industry isn't Vannevar Bush, it's capitalism (not enough profits early on, manufacturing done overseas because it's cheap, pushback from the more profitable oil industry).

Arguing that we need to deregulate nuclear energy would be a recipe for disaster, and arguing that CA and NY have a housing crisis because they are blue states is silly. Bright red MT has a housing crisis, too.

We scaled cell phones just fine because they made tons of money for corporations. But we didn't scale solar because we leave it to the market rather than policy. FDR was great at putting the government to work for the people. Recently, however, between Reagan (all government is bad) and the neoliberals like Clinton (globalization will fix it), the tendency has been to remain hands off except in emergencies like COVID. When presidents want to they can do a lot, though look at all the trouble Obama had with policies HCA and renewables (Solyndra).

It's not that we can't do those things, it's that we've chosen to say it's not the government's job.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:37 PM on December 16, 2022 [21 favorites]

> Democrats—many of whom call themselves progressives—have in meaningful ways become anti-progress... Cities and states run by Democrats have erected so many barriers to construction that blue metro areas are now where the housing crisis is worst. The five states with the highest rates of homelessness are New York, Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington; all are run by Democrats.

This is some bullshit framing. I live in Seattle and am intimately familiar with housing debate in this city and state. Progressives are the ones pushing for affordable housing, social housing, getting rid of zoning restrictions, etc, while the right and center-right landowner class (which calls the shots in local and state politics) fights progress at every turn, seeks to keep housing supply sparse and expensive, and insists that homelessness can be solved by persecuting the homeless.

Blaming progressives for the housing crisis is like blaming oncologists for cancer.
posted by splitpeasoup at 10:07 PM on December 16, 2022 [63 favorites]

Overall, the whole piece reaffirms my impression that The Atlantic in 2022 is strongly oriented towards trashy and contrarian hot takes masquerading as enlightenment.
posted by splitpeasoup at 10:13 PM on December 16, 2022 [25 favorites]

strongly oriented towards trashy and contrarian hot takes masquerading as enlightenment.

AKA the story of the last seven years ... give or take.
posted by philip-random at 11:06 PM on December 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

I thought site policy was not to copy the entire article?
posted by eviemath at 1:18 AM on December 17, 2022 [9 favorites]

Noah Smith is completely disconnected from reality, like other neoliberal economists.

As always, engineering is work arounds, changes of scope, and compromises, which only become possible once we accept physical limits. We avoided Malthus' limit not by wishing plants into growing more, like neoliberal economists wishing for impossible tech now, but by feeding plants fossil fuels via the Haber process.

We do not make quite as much progress now largely because our tech has largely developed along similar lines of throwing more fossil fuel at problems, ala shipping components all over the world. We've only 50 years of oil and gas left so this tech now cannot spread or declines. See the Joe Taimter short links in the Nate Hagen's thread.

Our future tech compromises must take other forms, ala regenerative agriculture, agrivoltaics, etc. Degrowth is a lefty compromise proposal for macro economics. It's imho too idealistic, as world level organization would afaik always target short-term problems, but other less equitable post-growth economics makes sense too. We either accept some post-growth economic model, or else physical limits force us into real collapse, or perhaps even extinction.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:22 AM on December 17, 2022 [8 favorites]

I don't actually need a rising standard of living.

My standard of living has been completely acceptable for 60 years. So the idea that economic growth is desirable in my country has long struck me as somewhere between absurd and obscene.

Every remark that follows applies only to the advanced industrialized countries, not to those as yet incapable of offering their citizens an acceptable standard of living.

Economic growth is essentially a Ponzi scheme. The idea that GDP needs to increase year on year or we'll all be rooned is deluded. We have plenty of economic activity already - more than enough to sustain a fully acceptable standard of living for every Australian.

The economic pie is big enough and growing it now hurts us more than it helps. What we need to do is work on improving fairness of wealth distribution year on year, so that instead of some of us being obscenely rich while others sleep on the streets, everybody gets an acceptable standard of living. And we need to do that while undergoing a slow but inexorable economic transformation toward not merely sustainable but regenerative industrial activity.

More is not better. Enough is better.
posted by flabdablet at 2:40 AM on December 17, 2022 [52 favorites]

Another fantastic kliuless post and fabulous flabdablet comment! Thanks!
posted by evilmomlady at 4:41 AM on December 17, 2022 [4 favorites]

Knock knock!
Who's there?
Externalities!
Externalities who?
posted by lalochezia at 5:29 AM on December 17, 2022 [10 favorites]

Robert F. Kennedy on GDP
posted by jeffburdges at 7:36 AM on December 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

Whoa, this is a whole reading list and it's great! Thank you for sharing!
posted by TheFerridge at 8:31 AM on December 17, 2022

We've so much deception like asbestos, leaded gas, fracking, and opioids that created the "trust gap", so his "culture of progress" flavor wont return, but more distributed less homogeneous progress remains viable.

Also Biden's IRA gave a $25 billion boost to fossil fuels, so assuming it helps cut CO2 emissions sounds premature.
posted by jeffburdges at 9:58 AM on December 17, 2022

The article seems to skip a stone across the pond but doesn't really look much deeper. Like, when Reagan came into office, he had solar panels torn off the White House roof that Carter installed, and immediately started trying to undo much of the regulatory framework that Nixon had established. That kind of direct action AGAINST progress by those at the top of our government has continued under every single Republican administration (and under some Democratic ones too, usually by being held hostage by a GOP congress).

Yes, the government could be doing a lot more to support emerging technologies and with proper investment we could transform the US into a much more forward thinking society. But when the minority party is engineering elections to remain in power while at the same time spending literally decades denouncing any form of real progress that could be made, it's hard to argue that we are lacking anything other than having the right people in power.
posted by hippybear at 9:59 AM on December 17, 2022 [13 favorites]

Overall, the whole piece reaffirms my impression that The Atlantic in 2022 is strongly oriented towards trashy and contrarian hot takes masquerading as enlightenment.

Which is pretty much the direction it's been going since Michael Kelly took over in '99.
posted by OHenryPacey at 10:17 AM on December 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

It's a little bit amazing how the 'market knows best' ideology is so deeply ingrained that you can spend a whole article arguing that leaving everything to the markets has failed and then conclude that the solution is deregulation.
posted by Pyry at 10:21 AM on December 17, 2022 [14 favorites]

A+, terrific, provocative post, and rich discussion. OG mefi.
posted by j_curiouser at 10:31 AM on December 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

I live in a progressive part of the country and the in last election some people tried to make the election a referendum on the current local governments pusb to abolish single family zoning and allow any lot to be used to construct up to 8 units (duplexes to small apartments instead of just single family detached housing). The opposition was extremely vocal and well funded with lots of signs. Yet on Election Day voters embraced the incumbent government’s positives. The anti-density folks got crushed. So it turns out that progressives are mostly pro-housing.
posted by interogative mood at 11:24 AM on December 17, 2022 [6 favorites]

when the minority party is engineering elections to remain in power while at the same time spending literally decades denouncing any form of real progress that could be made, it's hard to argue that we are lacking anything other than having the right people in power.

Okay, sure, but Reagan didn't walk fully-formed from a giant shell in the California surf and thence directly into the White House. He got elected, and not by some bullshit Electoral College shadiness, but by a 10% popular margin or so, plus a crushing margin in the EC.

Blaming "government" only goes so far, when that government is elected and given a strong mandate by the electorate.

The question really becomes: why do people vote for leaders who do such clearly (in retrospect, to reasonable observers) self-defeating, short-term-at-the-expense-of-long-term policies? That's the real question, and as long as people want that, or vote that way, that's what we're going to get.

It's fair to blame individual bad actors in government for lying through their teeth (democracy only works when candidates are reasonably honest and held to their statements), or undermining the system itself (vote-rigging, suppression, etc.), but it's naive to the point of self-deception to believe that conservatives and reactionaries are only elected because of foul play. It ignores the reality that quite a lot of people are very supportive of what they say and do, for a host of reasons ranging from the erroneously stupid to the mendaciously complex.

But it's been my observation as I've traveled around the US that the places and communities that seem to have the highest-trust cultures tend to be the most socially liberal and open to the idea of collective investment in progress, while those places with the lowest trust, or where trust is restricted to family and social boundaries defined by clannishness, that tend to breed conservatism and reject collective effort for collective gain.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:11 PM on December 17, 2022 [4 favorites]

I can't even count how many biases are in that quoted article. Zero usage of Republicans, three of Democrats. Sure there's a token callout of Reagan, but they pick a heck of a lot of examples that sure seems to be blaming Democrats and liberals and leftists. How dare they want to *Checks notes twice* save us from ecological disaster while also still being the financial engine of the country and also largely the world? If they just let us build slums any old place next to nuclear reactors, we don't have to worry about heating! Ick.
posted by Jacen at 1:40 PM on December 17, 2022 [4 favorites]

Real estate prices are exhorbitantly high and housing hard to come by in most blue areas. This is a market-driven phenomenon being driven by rational self-interest that living next to republicans dramatically reduces the value of a given property.
posted by stet at 3:58 PM on December 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

What Happened When the Bay Area Rejected Growth [ungated] - "In the 1960s and 1970s, the region went from welcoming development to opposing it at every turn. How has that worked out?"

Another fascinating historical document, from 1979, offered an explanation for what went wrong:

Resistance to growth began as a very reasonable political shift, concentrating on saving such priceless assets as the San Francisco Bay and Napa Valley wine country. But as it gathered power, and as people discovered they could stop growth at little cost to themselves, the movement became a good deal less reasonable. Soon it turned into general hostility toward homebuilding for the average family, using the rhetoric of environmental protection in order to look after the narrow interests of people who got to the suburbs first.

Those are the words of Bernard Frieden, an urban studies professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who became acquainted with the Bay Area anti-growth movement while spending the 1975-1976 academic year at UC Berkeley. They’re from his 1979 book, The Environmental Protection Hustle, which described how anti-growth activists and sympathetic judges and politicians not only drove up housing prices but harmed the environment by pushing development out to fringe areas “where the new residents will use more gas and pollute more air while they drive longer distances to work.”

posted by kliuless at 10:03 PM on December 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

flabdablet: a rising standard of living isn't why economic growth is required - that's just what they tell the rubes. It's required because otherwise all that interest on all that debt can't get paid.

Compound interest; sooner or later, it's going to blow up, one way or another.
posted by cfraenkel at 10:36 PM on December 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

It's required because otherwise all that interest on all that debt can't get paid.

Right. As I said, it's a Ponzi scheme.
posted by flabdablet at 10:44 AM on December 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

Anyone modeled how our economic system collapses as interest payments slowly collapse?
posted by jeffburdges at 3:40 PM on December 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

"I'd say don't do an economics degree because what you learn is an obsolete technology." - Steve Keen
posted by jeffburdges at 4:39 PM on December 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

(speaking of debts and the ability to repay: Climate Resilient Debt Clauses, a way to give countries some breathing room (and free up their finances) when faced with climate disasters.)
posted by mittens at 5:40 PM on December 18, 2022

I don't actually need a rising standard of living.
Standard of living based on commercial transactions (Gross Domestic Product) is about profit. Standard of living should include people having safe, sustainable homes, access to education, healthcare (including mental health, dental and vision, ffs), clean air and water, safe, healthy food. And how about having a planet on which we can all keep living? with bats, butterflies, plants, coastlines, fish,etc.

Climate Crisis disasters raise the GDP.
Wars and military expenditures raise the GDP.
Rich people investing in real estate trusts that buy up housing and raise rents sky-high is good for the GDP.
A world with fewer wildfires, fewer typhoons/ hurricanes, waters that fish can thrive in, forests, peace, is obv. a better standard of living.
posted by theora55 at 7:00 PM on December 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

Rich people investing in real estate trusts that buy up housing and raise rents sky-high is good for the GDP.

I mean in a sense, yes, but there is research that the US's housing supply shortage is crushing the US GPD by about 25% per year. And the over-expenditure in housing vs other consumables is crushing the GDP by another 10%, and the distribution towards the south is worsening the climate crisis, when moving from dense areas of the northeast US and California. But non-dense areas of the NE to the South is a net energy decrease.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:54 AM on December 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think we should call this the Obama debt deflation because it all stems from 2008 when Obama had promised to write down the junk mortgage debt but as soon as he got in to office, he said, “No, we’re not going to write down the junk mortgage debt. We’re going to write down the debtors. We’re going to evict 10 million American families from their houses because my campaign contributors are my constituency.” And so, he kept the debt on the book.

This is one of the few times in modern history – normally, when there is a business cycle, it peaks and then, there is a financial crash. And the one good thing about the financial crash is it wipes out the savings of the 1%. But Obama said, “The economy is really the 1%. The 99% are overhead and so, we’re going to preserve all of the debts on the book and write down what labour gets in net disposable income. That is, the disposable income after paying taxes and after paying debt service.” And in America and Europe and certainly, in the global sales countries, debt service has gone way up.

...

But in England, the rate goes up from 2% to 6% for everybody who has already taken out a mortgage. There are no fixed rate mortgages in England. And so, there is going to be a wave of up to one third of English home owners thrown out on the street. This is the ideal of what we’ve been calling neoliberal economics but as you notice from what Karl put up today, my discussion with Ralph Nader, he says that neoliberal is an academic term used by economics professors. And he says, “Instead of a neoliberal economy, say bank-run economies.” And that’s probably a clearer term.
— Michael Hudson
posted by jeffburdges at 7:09 PM on December 29, 2022