"Neoliberalism" is a big word that people use for a lot of things, and vanishingly rarely as a complimentary or even neutral term. I tend to think it is a pretty bad analytic tool, but it does capture those ideologies that tend to assume that economics is the basic operating system of the world, the norma normans non normata (the "norm that norms but is not normed"), what Richard Rorty used to call the "final vocabulary" of the culture, the language into which all other languages could be translated, but which itself required no further act of translation into some more basic language; economics is, in neoliberalism, the basic metaphysics of the worldview.
But if it seems sometimes descriptively illuminating, I hesitate to say it is fully analytically adequate. After all, how many people would claim the name "neoliberal"? It seems to me there are, as religion scholars say, "etic"/"emic" problems here--the term seems hard to find in anyone's self-description, which should make it a little uncomfortable for us to use it. Still, it does seem like it's at least partly helpful.
So when the Brookings Institute uses the phrase, and even asks, "What comes after neoliberalism?", you know it's kind of jumped a shark. They say they want "to contribute to the big picture debates currently underway on how to rethink and revitalize capitalism." It's a cunning idea, and one well known in academia: the most innovative thought is not coming from the hegemonic center of things, but from the margins, where extremity sometimes compels people to try things that would be too risky with more to lose. It's not the only piece like this out there, as the other links in that quote above suggest; I found this piece in the Guardian (and from Brookings as well) also stimulating.
And if Brookings has the scent, the New York Times can't be far behind: "Liberal and conservative economists conducted running battles on key questions of public policy, but their areas of agreement ultimately were more important. Although nature tends toward entropy, they shared a confidence that markets tend toward equilibrium. They agreed that the primary goal of economic policy was to increase the dollar value of the nation’s output. And they had little patience for efforts to limit inequality.…Accounts of the rise of inequality often take a fatalistic view. The problem is described as a natural consequence of capitalism, or it is blamed on forces, like globalization or technological change, that are beyond the direct control of policymakers. But much of the fault lies in ourselves, in our collective decision to embrace policies that prioritized efficiency and encouraged the concentration of wealth, and to neglect policies that equalized opportunity and distributed rewards. The rise of economics is a primary reason for the rise of inequality." Thus Binyamin Appelbaum's op-ed of a month ago, derived from his new book.
Even our corporate overlords are getting anxious, if this piece by a columnist cosy with them is any evidence.
At last! I can imagine a thousand literature grad students saying. Economists are getting the blame they so richly deserve, not just libertarians but anyone working within the snug, and smug, idiom (which has more than a passing resemblance to theodicial reasoning) itself
Why is all this happening now? Well, I think the answers aren't hard to find. On the one hand, the financial crisis of 2007-8, and the global recession that followed, really raised fundamental questions about how economists and policymakers are shaping our world. Many people have trusted them for a long time; perhaps we shouldn't trust them quite so much.
Related to that, the growing sense that "inequality" signifies a kind of massive crisis that "inflation" signified at an earlier moment--not so much a problem within the system as a problem with the system as a whole.
Now, the crisis of inequality is actually complicated. In one, aggregate sense, things are getting more equal, across the globe as a whole. It's only when you break down the numbers across countries, that the felt experience of rising inequality gains statistical plausibility. The whole thing is mapped out here, in a pretty effective way: "total global inequality (inequality across all individuals in the world) declined for the first time since the Industrial Revolution (see Figure 1). This reduction was driven by falling between-country inequality, as poor countries became richer.…In contrast, progress on within-country inequality has been mixed (see Figure 2). While 50 countries saw within-country inequality decline between 2000 and 2015, 34 countries experienced an increase, notably some advanced economies where the poor and middle class have seen stagnant income growth."
But all of this is not enough; after all, there was a terrible tech bubble in 1999-2000 and after it burst a lot of markets were quite damaged; there was no massive rethinking of the operating system then, despite many radicals (and a few academics) clamoring for it. What changed?
Well, I'd say two things. First of all, 1989 is far away now, and a generation has grown up who have no sense of an "actually existing" rival for capitalism, and especially a rival that is frankly terrible. I'm not saying that the Berlin Wall, and long food lines, and grey Moscow housing blocks, were the main reasons why people believed in capitalism then, and that the absence of those things enables them to disbelieve in it today. But I'm not exactly not saying that either. (I'll talk about "the return of socialism" in another post.)
Second, the world was distracted after 9/11 for a few years, and economic issues didn't seem so central then. The previous recession happened amidst a number of crises. Whatever you say about the "War on Terror," no one will deny that it doesn't occupy people's attention the way it did fifteen years ago, in the United States and abroad. Nowadays people have a rather larger spectrum of fears to occupy their sleepless nights: Putin, plutocrats, antidemocratic leaders, the environment. Basically everything; but much of that everything seems to be related to wealth and greed and consumerism rather than religious zealotry. The world is aligned around one root threat in a way that seems more durable than earlier threats.
All of this is a big mmmmmaayyyyybe. A hypothesis, at best. Messy and sloppy, too. But perhaps it's at least thought provoking for you.