The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order

I love the way he explores the interplay between economic ideas and political institutions that culminated in the triumph of market forces in the aftermath of the Cold War. Yet, Gerstle’s most interesting insights lie at the end of the book as he classifies Trump and Modi as ethnonationalist leaders of the same feather as China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Globalisation, however, has not necessarily reached its end, as it may simply be reframed to fit a world whose shape has yet to be defined.

When scholars write about liberal order, they date it to the 1940s, when the reaction against depression, fascism, and war led to the creation of institutions designed to prevent their recurrence.

What this view misses is the recalibration of the liberal order in the 1980s that Gerstle describes. Earlier policies were largely inspired by Keynes, supportive of more government intervention and social provision than was normal in the 1930s, and of trade unions.

What replaced them was neoliberalism—a turn toward (increasingly unregulated) markets, tax reductions that deprived government of the means to intervene in the economy and fund the welfare… show more.

You’d be forgiven for believing that there’s a Left, a Right, and that we fishtail between the two with every election cycle.

It’s easy to equate the word “neoliberal” with names like Reagan and Thatcher, but that doesn’t mean that neoliberals are conservatives. Find out why Milton Friedman himself hated being called a “conservative.”

And why the neoliberal order that most of us grew up with has largely ebbed by 2020. We’re in a new era.