{"id":4508,"date":"2012-02-02T20:00:40","date_gmt":"2012-02-03T00:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=4508"},"modified":"2012-02-09T13:56:04","modified_gmt":"2012-02-09T17:56:04","slug":"an-historians-messy-attempt-to-understand-neoliberalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=4508","title":{"rendered":"An historian’s messy attempt to understand neoliberalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
\n“To talk of many things:
\nOf shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
\nOf cabbages–and kings–
\nAnd why the sea is boiling hot–
\nAnd whether pigs have wings. ((Lewis Carroll, The Walrus and the Carpenter<\/a>, in Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872))<\/p>\n

“… And\u00a0homo economicus<\/em>,
\nand sanctions that might sting
\nthe many college presidents
\nwho’d rather dance and sing
\nfor supper from the wealthied class.
\nGrab not the brassy ring! ((Blame me for the add(l)ed doggerel and for the twisting of the twisted end below.))<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At the risk of bloggy immolation, I’m going to jump into the boiling water of ongoing debates over President Obama’s few words on higher education in the 2012 State of the Union Address, wherein he said nothing of Pell Grant awards and yet talked about constructing new policies to make it easier to afford college, especially ones attempting to give institutions incentives to slow down tuition hikes. While I define neoliberalism here in fairly bold strokes, focusing on market rhetoric, public disinvestment, and inconsistencies between rhetoric and reality, this is a tentative judgment for someone who is not an intellectual historian. I am well aware that many terms of political economy are fuzzy or malleable, and my understanding of neoliberalism as a post-WW2 construct is tentative. Yet the term has some core uses in understanding how people talk about and use talk about markets.<\/p>\n

New School professor Clare Potter (aka Tenured Radical<\/a>) quickly called Obama’s State of the Union proposal a piece of neoliberalism. Ed Sector staffer Kevin Carey thought Potter was nuts<\/a>, and Wisconsin-Madison professor Sara Goldrick-Rab is dressing down Carey<\/a>\u00a0for his snarky rejection of Potter and his rejection of the term neoliberalism to apply to Obama.<\/p>\n

“But stop!” the Walrus added,
\n“We haven’t yet the math
\nto weigh the souls of students
\nand to measure grassy paths
\nthrough Walker and Hieronymus
\nand Milton and DuBois.
\nLet’s quantify philosophy,
\nthen leave it all to choice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Trying to pin down a useful definition of “neoliberal” is not quite like nailing jello, but I can understand if folks can be frustrated by it. ((If you want<\/em>\u00a0to be frustrated, peek at Paul Treanor’s attempt<\/a> at a purist definition of neoliberalism.))\u00a0At the end of the 1980s, the Peterson Institute’s John Williamson described what he termed the\u00a0Washington Consensus (of debtor countries’ fiscal policy reform)<\/a>, and his quasi-manifesto is one reasonable definition of neoliberalism in the international NGO context. In Williamson’s view, policy mandates opened capital flows and markets in the 1980s as well as restricted public spending in debtor countries. What is striking about Williamson’s condensation of this alleged neoliberal consensus is not just its macroeconomic rigidity but its fundamental untruthfulness at the level where many people live: while International Monetary Fund staffers and others imposing these reforms on debtor countries in Latin America and elsewhere had legitimate concerns about corruption, the crackdown on public spending undermined rather than supported critical public investments in education and public health. I try to keep my eye on this type of inconsistency: the rhetoric of investment and human capital frequently turns into imposed disinvestment in practice.<\/p>\n

“We have to live more frugally
\nand to that end decree
\nthat monitors of spending
\nwill henceforth be free
\nto roam the towns here and yon
\nuntil the spendthrifts flee
\nthe good people who will watch and save
\nuntil they’re screaming ‘squee!'”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In industrialized countries’ domestic policy, neoliberalism is more closely associated with a narrower version, the abandonment of social welfare policies and explicit balancing acts addressing the interests of people in different social classes and positions. In some cases, proposals for abandoning social welfare and regulation came with proposals for using markets to advance the same goals. Milton Friedman’s proposal for a negative income tax fits in that category, and after various twists and turns we have the Earned Income Tax Credit–a pretty efficient income-transfer program if not a panacea for poverty. So, too, with proposals for a pollution market instead of pollution regulation, which has seen success in a market for sulfur pollution but political blockage of carbon cap-and-trade policies. Again, as with the role of the Earned Income Tax Credit in anti-poverty policy, a pollution market does not<\/em>\u00a0eliminate the need for environmental regulation and should best be seen as an added tool in the kit available for policy ends. ((The topic of school vouchers is relevant in the broader context but a distraction at this point. My goal is not to address where market mechanisms work or don’t but how the rhetoric of markets works.))<\/p>\n

But much industrial-country rightward policy movement in the 1980s and 1990s did not create markets to solve social problems; instead, it used the rhetoric\u00a0of the market to justify the shrinking of the public sphere and regulatory protections without compensating market-like mechanisms. At the same time, the rhetoric of the market became a crutch to justify policies that putatively serve\u00a0market mechanisms. Attacks on union rights in the 1980s were justified by reference to competition and were\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0accompanied by any clever market-like devices to protect people who would suffer a diminishment of protection in one realm. Nor were there any mechanisms that would encourage demand-side labor market turnover; the division of health care from employment at the time would have been an example of that type of tradeoff, but it didn’t happen in the U.S. Creating a national right to one or two years of college would have been another compensatory investment, but it didn’t happen ((A right to some college could be consistent with neoliberal rhetoric (even if I am skeptical of panaceas–the point here is the inconsistent application of principles).)).<\/p>\n

To the inconsistencies of investment rhetoric\/disinvestment reality and the paucity of new-market creation, one should add the mirage of a shrinking government authority, something both Reagan and Thatcher advocated (the rhetoric, not the observation that it was a mirage). In his review of Raymond Plant’s\u00a0The Neo-Liberal State<\/em>,\u00a0John Gray points out<\/a>\u00a0that among the inconsistencies of Thatcherism was the bloating of government authority.<\/p>\n

An increase in state power has always been the inner logic of neoliberalism, because, in order to inject markets into every corner of social life, a government needs to be highly invasive. Health, education and the arts are now more controlled by the state than they were in the era of Labour collectivism. Once-autonomous institutions are entangled in an apparatus of government targets and incentives. The consequence of reshaping society on a market model has been to make the state omnipresent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One tiny fragment of this inconsistency is the illusion of fewer public employees. As the federal government has sloughed off officially-counted federal employees in the past 40 years, it has shuttled billions to various contractors who hire people who do public jobs, often enough just to avoid their being called public employees. An acquaintance of mine worked for several decades at the Ames Research Center in California doing NASA work under a rotating set of contractors. But he was not allowed to call himself a NASA employee, no matter that he really was, with the fig leaf of a contractor who skimmed off a profit so politicians could claim that my acquaintance was Not a Federal Employee. There are plenty of Fig-Leaf private employees in the D.C. area who really are doing the work of the U.S. Department of Education, and likewise in many states.<\/p>\n

“I weep for you,” the Walrus said:
\n“I deeply sympathize.”
\nWith sobs and tears he sorted out
\nThose of the largest size,
\nHolding his pocket-handkerchief
\nBefore his streaming eyes.<\/p>\n

“O Students,” said the Publisher,
\n“You’ve had a pleasant run!
\nShall we be trotting home again?”
\nBut answer came there none–
\nAnd this was scarcely odd, because
\nThey’d eaten every one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Where do we see neoliberalism in education? In the past two years, Wake Forest University professor Scott Baker has been drawing a line between the end of commitments to desegregation policies in the 1970s and 1980s, on the one hand, and the rise of accountability, on the other. I would be skeptical of an argument that there was a crude and conscious swap–I certainly don’t think that former Florida Governor Rubin Askew encouraged the beginnings of school accountability policy in 1970s Florida as a deliberate switch. But on the other hand, there has<\/em>\u00a0been an important substitution in the past 40 years, away from the explicit regulatory and balancing of interests involved in desegregation and towards top-down mandates that have often been justified as serving the needs of the market… and a tiny bit by civil rights without reference to desegregation. You see the parallel in higher ed with the erosion\/abandonment of affirmative action and the rhetoric of serving the labor market (often regardless of the evidence on whether a particular program is likely to benefit either the specific labor segment involved or students). In the early 1980s, advocates of school reform used the spectre of German and Japanese supremacy just a few decades after World War 2 (albeit economic supremacy):<\/p>\n

Our Nation is at risk<\/a>,
\nOur giant lead erased,
\nAnd worse is with our schools,
\nfor all their flaws we just efface.
\nA tide of mediocrity,
\nour future, and great threats!
\nDear reader: please panic
\nand then our goals abet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To use trade competition as the lever for massive social change was fallacious then and is still fallacious now: our largest trading partner today is Canada, and the $50 billion in total annual trade with the Beast of the North compares to a total GDP of $14.5 trillion in 2010. There are plenty of reasons why we should improve education, but it shouldn’t be out of fear of Canada, Germany, Japan, India, or China. ((The international competition smacks loudly of old-fashioned xenophobia. We want Germany consumption to grow to be a markets for our goods, and that means the Germany economy has to grow. We want Indian engineers to invent lots of stuff, because we might not be able to save the world from global warming just with American scientists and engineers. Much of the displacement of jobs has happened because other countries have lower wages and fewer protections for workers, and then the type of convenience clustering you see with Apple suppliers, not because their secondary-school graduates are better educated than our high school graduates.)) The truth is that most of the output of economic activity is sold within internal markets. ((Most of our public and private debt is also internal; you can ignore the hysteria about either Japan or China owning New York City.)) Yet the bogeyman of failure in international economic competition has become the Erectile Dysfunction of education politics, justifying all sorts of advertisement for educational nostrums. ((Make sure to ask your consultant about Test Enhancement Formula today.))<\/p>\n

Beyond the argument that one must reform schooling to serve international market competition, where can you find the signal traits of neoliberalism: a combination of market rhetoric with public disinvestment and the end of explicit protections for public goods or for disadvantaged groups?<\/p>\n