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The 2019 IPE Annual Lecture - Little Failures and Doubtful Successes: Rethinking Neoliberalism in a Post-truth Era

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Location: L5 (Science Concourse)

The 2019 IPE Annual Lecture: Thursday, 17th January at 17:00 in L5 (Science Concourse)

Title: Little Failures and Doubtful Successes: Rethinking Neoliberalism in a Post-truth Era

By: Professor Jacqueline Best, University of Ottowa, Canada, and Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Sheffield

Abstract:

Even its greatest critics have tended to see the early days of the rise of neoliberalism as an almost mythical time, when Thatcher and Reagan swept into power and turned their back on decades of Keynesian orthodoxy with a series of dramatic and ruthless policies that put Friedman and Hayek’s ideas into practice. Monetarism, supply side economics and the rational expectations revolution turned economic theory and policy upside down. Or did they? In this talk, I join a growing chorus of scholars who have begun to question the tidiness of this particular historical narrative. My attention is on the little-discussed but incontestable failure of early efforts to put these three economic theories—monetarism, supply side economics and rational expectations theory—into practice. To recapture the logic and significance of these little failures, we need to shift our attention away from the politics of big “I” ideas—like Neoliberalism and Keynesianism—and focus instead on the more mundane practices and devices that key policymakers in the United States and United Kingdom used to try to transform their economies in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By doing so, we will begin to appreciate how fraught and contested the early days of neoliberalism were, and to recognize the complex politics of little economic failures both then and now.

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