This week, Nick and Goldy are joined by political scientist Brian Judge, author of “Democracy in Default: Finance and the Rise of Neoliberalism in America.” They delve into the historical roots of our current democratic crisis, exploring the role of liberalism in depoliticizing distributive conflicts and paving the way for the rise of neoliberalism. Judge sheds light on the impact of neoliberal ideologies on American policymaking and how liberalism’s attempts to manage distributive conflict through the market have shaped our economic and political landscape—which gave leaders the opportunity to use the economic slowdown of the 1970s to install neoliberal policies that enriched the wealthy few for decades.
Brian Judge is an author and policy fellow at the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence and the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is recognized for his recently published book, “Democracy in Default: Finance and the Rise of Neoliberalism in America,” which delves into the intricate relationship between finance and politics in shaping the neoliberal economic landscape in the United States
Twitter: @realbrianjudge
Further reading:
Democracy in Default: Finance and the Rise of Neoliberalism in America
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Nick Hanauer:
The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
Speaker 2:
It’s time to build our economy from the bottom up and from the middle out, not the top down.
Nick Hanauer:
Middle out economics is the answer.
Speaker 2:
Because Wall Street didn’t build this country. Great middle class built this country.
Nick Hanauer:
The more the middle class thrives, the better the economy is for everyone, even rich people like me.
Speaker 3:
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 4:
We talk a lot on this podcast, Nick, about neoliberalism, how it’s responsible for many of the economic, political, and social crises we’re facing today. But have you ever thought about the role of liberalism, not the neo sort, but good old-fashioned liberalism in these crises?
Nick Hanauer:
Not much, not much.
Speaker 4:
Well, it turns out I read a book recently that was recommended to me by my daughter because it was written by her cousin, Brian Judge, my nephew, my ex-wife’s eldest brother’s eldest son, who is a recent PhD in political science. And its title was right up our alley, Democracy in Default: Finance and the Rise of Neoliberalism in America, and raises some questions I’d never considered before that, in fact, the historical roots of our crisis, our democratic crisis is a lot deeper than I ever thought it was.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, he makes a couple of really interesting observations in the book, certainly centrally that liberalism was a way to depoliticize important conflicts, particularly distributional conflicts and polities, I guess you’d say. And certainly, that’s the central effort of the neoliberal project is to make distribution something that people don’t think about or worry about.
Speaker 4:
Right, it’s the market. The market does it. It’s a perfect equilibrium system in which if you interfere with it at all, you can’t make anybody better without making somebody worse, that anything the government does is going to destroy efficiency and end up hurting the people you’re trying to help. It’s just physics. And so really, politics should stay out of it.
Nick Hanauer:
And what Brian is trying to do, I think, is tell a cause and effect story, which is slightly different from the one that we tell, which I think is really worth examining. So let’s talk to Brian about his book.
Brian Judge:
So I’m Brian Judge. I’m currently an AI policy fellow at the Center for Human Compatible Artificial Intelligence at UC Berkeley. And so the book is called Democracy in Default: Finance and the Rise of Neoliberalism in America. And what it aims to do is reverse the usual story that we have about the relationship between financialization and neoliberalism in the United States.
Speaker 4:
We talk a lot about neoliberalism on the podcast and throw a lot of dirt at it deservingly, but you argue that this crisis is inherent in liberalism, not just in neoliberalism. Before I get you to answer that, can we just start with some basic definitions? How do you define neoliberalism and liberalism?
Brian Judge:
Yeah, great. So they’re huge in contested terms. We’re trying to capture something like 400 years of modern political and economic history at these terms, much like, say, capitalism or democracy. So these big capital letter terms have these contested definitions. And so I have to preface the ways that I think about these terms with that preface, that these are just inherently contested by nature. But I think about neoliberalism as having three components. So the first, it’s an intellectual movement centered on the Mont Pelerin Society, this neoliberal thought collective of North Atlantic intellectuals that first sprung up in the 1930s and 40s and really came to prominence several decades later. Secondly, it’s a political movement of definite actors, Thatcher and Reagan being the most obvious, many other candidates people have included Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, this bipartisan movement that sees markets as being broadly preferable to political processes.
And finally, I think it’s a historical epoch, and this is really how I think is the most useful way of defining neoliberalism and that it’s really the historical era in especially the United States, but I think more broadly the “western world” from roughly 1979 to 2008, maybe 2016, depending on how you want to bookend it. But those four decades as being the neoliberal era. And I think it’s really helpful to think about it in those terms. And, of course, people can disagree with there’s lots of contestation there, but at the broadest level, that’s how I understand the term.
Speaker 4:
And liberalism, obviously, we’re not talking about it in the American political sense of the term.
Brian Judge:
Right, exactly. So this liberalism, it’s an even messier term than neoliberalism in some sense because in the American context it means progressivism, more or less. But I understand it starting with Locke, liberalism of being limited government most basically. So it’s limited government both in the political realm, so particularly where it has its historical origins in the exclusion crisis in England, the conflict between Catholics and Protestants. And the basic idea is that well, by jettisoning the object of conflict, in this case religion, out of public and political life, you can have some workable compromise that you get people who otherwise very much don’t get along to work together roughly over a set of common interests, rather than having sectarian violence all the time.
And what I do in the first chapter of the book is I extend liberalism to what we currently think of as the economic sphere, that I argue in part that that separation between politics and economic is itself downstream of liberalism by identifying distributive conflict is being this parallel to religious conflict. And that the way that liberalism handles the problem of distributive conflict is by, essentially, shunting it into the market. And you can see Locke is also the first modern thinker to use the notions of supply and demand in our contemporary commonplace usage of the term. And I think that’s no accident.
So I trace these three different episodes in liberal political thought, so Locke, John Stuart Mill in the 19th century, and then John Rawls in the post-war era in the United States. And there you see three broadly similar movements about using the market, and Rawls is the most explicit in this sense, but it’s also there as I try to show in Mill and Locke as well, that by relying on the market, you’re not relying on public processes to determine things like what people’s salary should be, what rates of investment should be.
And by depoliticizing these what we now would say is economic questions, you are reducing the surface area of political contestation, and this helps provide the possibility of maintaining something like political and economic order with a limited government. So somebody like Hobbes would say that it’s a contradiction in terms, limited government is an oxymoron because you need this absolutist, tyrannical monarch, or it doesn’t have to be monarch, but you needed an absolute sovereign in order to maintain order amidst the conflicts that inevitably arise between people who want incompatible things.
And what liberalism is about, in some sense, is establishing economic and political order without absolute government. And so what I try to show is that the market is a key component of that, and I try to approach this outside of the usual framing of capitalism because I think the set of conflicts that are really motivating this are broader than just the one axis that’s usually talked about between workers and owners, but it’s a more general condition.
Nick Hanauer:
What do you mean by general condition?
Brian Judge:
Yeah, so in Hobbes, we start in the war of all against all, and there’s many axes to that. And so particularly in the historical era that I’m looking at in the book, taxpayers versus beneficiaries is really the crucial access of political conflict in the 1970s in California and then in the American context more broadly. And as many scholars have shown, that combination is not as simple as, well, you have owners on the one hand and workers on the other hand, but rather it’s this complex mix of suburban middle class homeowners versus inner city renters. It is all this melange of different things. And so it just is not as simple in that way. And it has religious component, it has a racial component, it has environmental and feminism and just all of these different elements combined together to produce the familiar axes of conflict that have defined American politics since the 1970s.
Nick Hanauer:
Your thesis is really interesting. And, of course, this is a chicken and egg problem a little bit, but finance didn’t produce the proposition of shareholder value maximization. That theoretical construct, the notion that the only legitimate purpose of the corporation was to increase profits for shareholders and equally that by so doing you make the economy more efficient and better for everyone, that wasn’t a product of finance. That was a product of the academy. That was Milton Friedman and his pals, right?
Brian Judge:
Absolutely.
Nick Hanauer:
And the propositions, the heuristics of neoliberalism, the idea that by focusing on profits alone, we make the economy more efficient, better for everybody, that if we raise wages for working people, we’ll have fewer jobs, that tax cuts for the rich create growth, that limiting regulation on businesses we’ll make them more productive and grow faster. All that pro market, market fundamentalist stuff that people are reliably-
Speaker 4:
The technical term, Nick, is not stuff. It’s bullshit.
Nick Hanauer:
Okay. But that stuff created a permission structure, I guess that’s our view, that those ideas created a permission structure, encouragement for the financialization of the economy and the demise effectively of conversations about distributional conflict, right?
Brian Judge:
Yeah, absolutely.
Nick Hanauer:
To us, you don’t have to have a conversation about distributional conflict. If you can get everyone to believe, for example, that if you raise the minimum wage, there will be corresponding job loss and that the more you raise it, the more job loss they’ll be. If you can-
Speaker 4:
More than a rising tide lifts all boats and we just trust the market to grow the economy, we’ll all prosper from it.
Brian Judge:
So what I see my account as is very much a supplement rather than a replacement to those accounts. And I think at the level of elite policymaking ideology, absolutely, but what the book tries to identify is the political crisis that those ideas attach themselves to. And so for example, in the case of shareholder value, as I chart in the chapter on the California Public Employee Retirement System, that the big public pension funds were instrumental in the shareholder value revolution. CalPERS has always been on the vanguard of focusing on financial returns as being the summum bonum of publicly traded corporation.
So it was Jesse Unruh who was the California State Treasurer who created the Council of Institutional Investors in the mid 1980s. And CalPERS would send these questionnaires to all of their portfolio companies and would publish corporate governance report cards where what we think of as being the standard shareholder value ideology, that that was precisely what they were driving at. And the reason why they were doing that is not only that they were captured by this ideological counter movement against Keynesian economic policymaking, broadly speaking, but they were an underfunded pension fund that needed to drive financial returns so they didn’t have to cut benefits or raise taxes, but that was really the political dynamic that was driving the adoption of those views. And so in that way, I see that’s how my account supplements the story that you just outlined.
Nick Hanauer:
One of the really interesting examples is the property tax revolt in California. That wasn’t driven by neoliberalism, that was driven by the very real problem of being on a fixed income and all of a sudden having to pay five times as much in property tax, right?
Brian Judge:
Yeah, absolutely. And the story there is, it’s got another interesting wrinkle to it that there was this guy, Russell Walden, who is the assessor in San Francisco who essentially was running a protection racket that if you hired his consulting firm, he would give you favorable assessments. And so that blew up in the 1960s, and they tried to modernize this system by replacing it with market valuation, the idea that it’s this impartial, more democratic way of determining how much the value of someone’s property is.
And the problem was when you had a housing boom, because you had tremendous population growth in California in that time, you’ve had the beginnings of the California slow growth policymaking regime or slower growth I should say. And so what that meant is that property prices shot up. And yeah, of course, that was not a neoliberal story at all. That was just this particular outcome of the political forces operating in that particular conjuncture. But then it was widely interpreted as a general mood against taxation. And that was really what launched Reagan to the White House in the 1980s was by capitalizing on Prop 13. And even Jerry Brown himself, he ran on Proposition 13, that voters in the ’78 election saw Jerry Brown rather than the Republican as the primary proponent of Proposition 13. So it was very much a bipartisan embrace of that political mood.
Speaker 4:
Where did we go wrong?
Brian Judge:
Oh, that’s such an important question. I think what I’m trying to do in the book is suggest that the problems are very deep-seated, that it’s not only a matter of policymaking ideology. I think that’s absolutely a component of it, but I think it really goes back to this basic Hobbesian question of how do you have a political economic order with people who don’t get along with one another? And I think there’s a story that I think that [inaudible 00:15:25] ish progressivist history of the United States in which we become this happy melting pot in which people of all kinds happily live together and are all part of this wonderful multicultural body politic. And of course, scholars and activists of every walk of life has contested this neat just so story. But to a large extent, it was the rising tide lifts all boats and in a growing economy that those divisions and distinctions and conflicts become much less relevant.
And the thesis that I have in the book is that financials, and I’m not the only one to say this, obviously, it’s a huge literature on how finance comes to supplement growth in the wake of the stagnation of the 1970s and de-industrialization. And that regime hits a crisis, an air pocket in 2008, and we’ve been living in the interregnum ever since, that to a great extent, the Federal Reserve succeeded in blowing air into the system faster than the real economy could deflate by absorbing all sorts of financial risk onto the public balance sheet at the Federal Reserve. And I think that’s really what has kept things going.
And now the question is what happens from here? So I think it’s really hard to say where we went wrong because it was this bipartisan pragmatic solution. It’s hard to see what the alternative was beyond, besides the exact thing that I’m arguing that liberalism is built to avoid, which is managing these conflicts on the basis of public values in an open political way where you really have to embrace that contestation and conflict. And it’s very hard. I don’t think there’s many examples of it.
Speaker 4:
Is this an Anglo-American crisis uniquely? For example, have the Scandinavian countries done a better job? They’re still liberal democracies.
Brian Judge:
Absolutely. Well, I think it is a distinctly Anglo-American problem for a few reasons. But I think just to compare, and you look at the baseball card of, say, Norway versus the United States, you’re talking about a country of four to six million people that’s 90% ethnically, religiously, linguistically homogeneous that has tremendous natural resource wealth. And so just the scale, and many scholars of the welfare state have written about this, that it’s just easier to maintain robust social democracy in those conditions, that it’s much harder to maintain a generous welfare state when you have the exact kind of conflicts that still define American politics, where you have us versus them, makers versus takers, however you want to define those conflicts.
The idea that your tax revenue is going to go to pay for benefits for people who aren’t like you, there just aren’t that many examples of those systems. And I think the US has a few shining examples in the form of, say, social security or Medicare, and it’s complicated by the exact funding structure that those have. But those are precisely what’s under threat, especially where we are in 2024 in American political history.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. One of the things that your analysis makes me want to consider more carefully is a little bit more about why people believe what they believe. Because having litigated this stuff for 20 years or more now, I have a huge amount of firsthand experience with people who took the neoliberal way of understanding economic cause and effect literally and seriously, but who shouldn’t have and have seen the ways in which those beliefs manifested themselves in the policy and politics.
When we got to work on the minimum wage, for example, there was unanimity among Democrats that raising it a lot would be a catastrophe, because they had all taken an econ 101 course that told them that there was this inverse mechanical relationship between the amount you pay people and the number of jobs. And if that’s the consensus about economic cost and effect, it is very, very difficult to pass laws that increase the minimum wage. But what your analysis makes me think of is that there were deeper reasons for people preferring to believe that, which had to do with distributive conflict. It does get you out of your box. If you don’t want to pay, in particular, brown people more, poor and brown people more, than believing that paying them more will be bad for them is the moral out that is very useful.
Brian Judge:
Yeah, absolutely.
Nick Hanauer:
But anyway, it’s super interesting. Obviously, this is a chicken and egg problem. There were problems that we dealt with in a particular way that knitted themselves to particular ideologies, and those ideologies had babies and other problems, and it’s hard to tease it all apart.
Brian Judge:
Yeah, I think that’s such an important point. And I think what I would hope one of the contributions of the book is to see that this is, to a great extent, not really an intellectual or academic argument. And I think what you’ve just outlined, I think is an all too familiar story about how certain segments of the bipartisan policymaking elite has really embraced certain nostrums and things is being this inherent truth about the economic world in a way that’s just simply false.
But we’ve also seen, particularly on the right, a very open eval of the fact that this is all opportunistic to begin with. And I think this was so striking about the 2016 to 2020 period, in particular, of all of the ways in which the ideological terrain had been completely scrambled very, very readily, that the magnets all realigned themselves with very little resistance because it ultimately was a matter of material interests, that it’s really easy to shift those ideological commitments because everyone shares those same underlying positions in the distributive tug of war that we fight over in Congress and the federal government more broadly.
And I think many people have been frustrated by the extent to which you’ve had these policymakers who have been in particularly democratic administrations being the keepers of that orthodoxy. Because as you point out, that’s a story. These arguments originally came to be from distributive conflicts of an earlier period. And so these ideas have this history. They don’t just fall fully formed out of a textbook, but they’re the product of real political conflicts.
Speaker 4:
Brian, you start your book, you give us a little history lesson, and as I understand it, you point out liberalism’s great contribution was in depoliticizing religious conflict, ending those wars of religion in Europe. This need to depoliticize and moving on to depoliticizing distributive conflict, is this something that liberalism just cannot address? You clearly are not anti-democratic, but can liberal democracies actually deal a liberal democracy like the US? Can it actually address distributive conflicts through the political realm?
Brian Judge:
Yeah, that is the million-dollar question, probably many more than million dollars in many respects that I think many of the political crisis of the present have that at the root of the problem for whether we’re talking about fiscal policymaking responding to climate change, that it’s really this form of conflict that’s at the root of it, that in the triad of the liberal democratic capitalism that we’ve been familiar with since 1945, more or less, I think my analysis would, I guess, be unsurprised in a sense that it’s the liberalism part of it that seems the most under threat. Capitalism, not so much, and democracy also not so much, that to the extent that anti-liberal politicians and political parties have become more predominant over the last few years, that has been the result of democratic processes by and large. And the conditions under which you can depoliticize distributive conflict and have this rising tide lift all boats in an era of climate change, stagnation, increased flows across borders of all kinds, that that regime just becomes harder to sustain.
And so the question is how do you respond to that in a way that’s consistent with liberal democratic values? And we’ve certainly seen a version that’s not consistent with liberal democratic values. And so that’s why I think addressing, thinking through that problem and through this prism of liberalism distributive conflict, I think, can be really helpful if somewhat worrying prism for the many conflicts that define politics of the present.
Nick Hanauer:
So Brian, what should we do?
Brian Judge:
Well, I have no idea. I don’t claim to have any particular answers. I think many books like this tend to end with a short chapter at the end that gives the 10 point program for restoring everything. But I think the first thing that we should do is just acknowledge the scale and the historical extent of the problem, that all of our political and economic institutions have this really long history. And this is something that’s especially obscured in the era of social media and the 24-hour news cycles, that we’ve just really lost any and all historical sense. And I think that is one place that we can start is understand how have we come to inherit the exact institutional configuration that we find ourselves in. For better or for worse, that’s the hand that we’ve been dealt in responding to the many interlocking crises of the present and understanding why those institutions have the form that they have.
And I think going back to someone like a Locke or a John Stuart Mill, or even a Rawls, going back to the politics of the English restoration in the 1660s, going back to the politics of the American Revolution or the Civil War or the Progressive Era, can be really useful in understanding what these institutions are really capable of. How are they made? What were they made for? What have they been able to do? What have they not been able to do? And to really get an inventory of what horizon of possibility is. So I think that’s one thing is just to be honest with ourselves about the nature of our predicament in some sense, and focus on what I would argue is one of the key underlying problems of distributive conflict, that it just has more dimensions to it than I think the sometimes simplistic way in which it’s framed of this is this general condition, is just an indelible facet of human existence in some sense.
And to the extent that we think we are liberal Democrats and want to resolve that in a way that’s consistent with individual rights and the rule of law and respect for diversity and difference, and just responding to the fact of pluralism and the world of 2024, it requires reckoning with those sorts of questions. And that’s a tall order in many respects. Just maintaining the status quo seems to be challenging enough. So some grand public reevaluation of the inheritances of liberal democratic capitalism is probably too much to ask, but that’s why I think it’s important that people who think about these things for a living make sure that they’re really asking the right questions.
And so that’s why I begin the book with this great quotation from a Thomas Pynchon novel, where he writes that if they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers. And so the book is really an effort to start asking the right questions, so at least we can begin to think through what some of those answers might be. And obviously, that’s more than any one person can really hope to have a comprehensive answer to.
Speaker 4:
But Brian, it’s so much easier and satisfying just to punt these difficult questions and rely in total faith in market fundamentalism.
Brian Judge:
Of course. Well, right. But I think that’s such a key point of why market fundamentalism has come to play the role that it has in American politics and economics since the early 1980s, that it’s a way of avoiding exactly these political questions, that if you can just punt to the market, then you don’t have to think through all of these things. And so that’s why I want to supplement that story of elite ideological capture with these deeper structural institutional reasons why those arguments end up winning out. So why is it that there doesn’t seem to be an alternative, that it’s not just because the neoliberals have the “right answer”, but it’s because that they’re responding to this fundamental feature of liberal politics and economics that needs to be addressed in the customary ways we’ve had for thinking about these questions over the last four decades. Especially if you’re interested in a greener, more egalitarian world, there haven’t really been a lot of great answers to or much political success in favor of, and I think it’s important to confront that puzzle squarely.
Nick Hanauer:
So a couple of final questions or one final question, Goldy?
Speaker 4:
One final question.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Why do you do this work?
Brian Judge:
Well, the short answer is because I couldn’t not do it. It’s like if I were on one of these billionaire tropical islands and this is just what I would be doing, it’s just the things that I’m interested in and thinking about. For better or for worse, it’s no great virtue on my part. It’s how I’m wound because I think it’s really interesting. I got into this because I was taking classes from the great Mark Blythe who really got me thinking about finance and political economy and institutional power. And I worked in finance and consulting, and I was blown away by the fact that what I was seeing didn’t resonate a whole lot with a lot of my orthodox political science and economics training, but rather it was the way that Mark Blythe and other political economists were thinking about the world, that that really seemed to have the most resonance.
And so in many ways, this project was about explaining that gap between theory and practice. And that’s the puzzle that really drives me in wanting to understand, go behind the pages of the newspaper every day and understand what are these deeper structural features that really contour our economic, political and social lives. And for me, I wish I had hobbies, I guess in some sense, a happier existence.
Speaker 4:
This is a hobby.
Brian Judge:
Yeah, absolutely. But being a politics nerd, being an economics nerd, it scratches an itch for sure. And I guess in your darker moments, you can convince yourself that you’re at least helping push things in some direction.
Nick Hanauer:
Well, fantastic. Well, thanks for being with us, Brian, and it’s a fascinating thesis. I’m not sure you’re all right, but you’re at least partially right.
Brian Judge:
Good, I’m glad to hear it. It’s such a privilege to join you guys today. It’s a real honor.
Nick Hanauer:
So Goldy, that was a really interesting conversation, and I have to think about it more carefully. I am so persuaded by my firsthand experience dealing with policymakers who were so captured by these neoliberal ideas, that these common neoliberal heuristics about the efficiency of markets and the peril of government intervention in the market and how taxes are bad and raising wages is bad, and all this stuff, that I’ve always very much believed that it was those ideas that created the policy quagmire that we’re trying to dig our way out of right now. But I certainly do agree with Brian that there were circumstances which may have driven us towards some of those things. And I think the example of the property tax freak out in California, when was that? Was that in the 70s?
Speaker 4:
In the 70s, in the 70s, yeah.
Nick Hanauer:
Which wasn’t precipitated by ideology, it was precipitated by the reality of California growing so fast that housing prices went berserk, and people on relatively fixed incomes all of a sudden found themselves paying property tax at a rate that they couldn’t afford. And it was just a rational response to a circumstance that, I don’t know, it would’ve been hard to have avoided. Certainly we have, in many ways, similar problems with housing all over the country now. It’s not-
Speaker 4:
Yeah, it’s spread, but part of that is it’s this feedback loop where it’s result of the financialization. Financialization uses these neoliberal stories as a tool to justify themselves and then creates the further crisis, which is how we got that housing bubble. It was the policies of the Fed following the .com crash to keep the economy going and the economy inflated, set up that housing bubble, which allowed people to take money out of their equity, to meet their needs and keep consumption strong. Well, wages were stagnant or declining, and then when that burst, here we are now because we’ve never fully recovered from that.
Nick, though, you asked Brian a question, why do people believe in this bullshit, as I called it, this stuff as you said, why do people believe in it? And I think that’s not a useful question, and I’ll go back to this parallel he makes with depoliticizing religious conflict. These wars of religion were over things like when you take communion, is it really the body and blood of Christ? Or is it symbolic of the body and blood of Christ? Is transubstantiation, has it really become that or are we just symbolically referencing it? And you had wars fought over little things like that, the nature of the Trinity historically. And it did not matter in the end, which was right, if any of it was right, and there was no way to reason through it because none of it is rational.
Faith is non-rational. We take that leap of faith or we don’t take that leap of faith. And so in the neoliberal era, the majority of people took that leap of faith. It wasn’t about ration. It was in the end about faith, and they believed it for so long because it was a faith. It is a religion. Market fundamentalism is a religion. And so, of course, if you lose your faith, it’s easy to just go and it’s a hard thing to do, but when you do lose your faith, people tend to just pick up another one. And I think that’s what we’re fighting. That’s why it’s so hard because you can’t reason people out of these beliefs because they’re not based on, ironically, considering that neoclassical economics and neoliberalism insists that we are these perfectly irrational creatures. Ironically, you can’t argue them out of that because we are not. We’re storytelling animals who just so much easier to believe in a set of heuristics bound up in a great story than it is to try to think for ourselves in the moment.
Nick Hanauer:
You can change some people’s beliefs.
Speaker 4:
You can, some.
Nick Hanauer:
The more aligned with your self-interest those beliefs are, the harder it is to change your mind about it. But the Achilles heel of neoliberalism is that there are very few people who benefit from the arrangement. And if you can get the other people to begin to question those beliefs, then you may be able to make some progress.
Speaker 4:
Well, if the arrangement is avoiding political violence in civil war, then we all benefit from the arrangement. That’s what I find disheartening about this is if this is all about depoliticizing conflicts that would otherwise tear this country apart, oh my God, what are the options?
Nick Hanauer:
No, scary.
Speaker 4:
Anyway.
Nick Hanauer:
Smart nephew.
Speaker 4:
And I can’t claim blood though, so he didn’t get it from me. The book is Democracy in Default: Finance and the Rise of Neoliberalism in America by Brian Judge. You can buy it at that big online monopolist or your favorite local bookstore. And of course, we’ll provide a link in the show notes.
Speaker 6:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook at @civicaction and @nickhanauer. Follow our writing on Medium @civicskunkworks and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram @pitchforkeconomics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.