Neoliberalism

In the heated year of 1968, the Chicago economist and Nobel Prize winner George J. Stigler jotted down some thoughts on how to introduce the “price system” into the process of democracy. Stigler had been one of Milton Friedman’s closest friends and part of his neoliberal “thought collective” since its inception. Both men participated in […]

In 1989, only one in five Americans aged 75 or older were in debt; by 2016, almost half were, according to the most recent US Federal Reserve survey of consumer finances. The rise in senior debt comes at a time when the wealth gap between rich and middle-class or poor Americans is at an all-time […]

The United States has a long history of manipulating global markets to the benefit of extremely wealthy, but where did it all begin? And how can we learn from that past and the current moment to save the planet and its population? T.J. Coles, author of Privatized Planet: Free Trade as a Weapon Against Democracy, Healthcare […]

Since the late 1970s, we’ve had a grand experiment to test the claim that free markets really do work best. This resurrection occurred despite the practical failure of laissez-faire in the 1930s, the resulting humiliation of free-market theory, and the contrasting success of managed capitalism during the three-decade postwar boom. Yet when growth faltered in […]

In November 2008, as a financial mudslide that had slowly been accelerating for months accumulated increasingly persuasive comparisons to the collapse that triggered the Great Depression in 1929, Time magazine ran a cover showing Barack Obama’s smiling face inserted in place of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s. The soon-to-be forty-fourth president sits in the thirty-second’s open-topped car, wearing Roosevelt’s lucky campaign […]