Neoliberalism’s sleight of hand
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 22 May 2024
⏱️ 38 minutes
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Summary
Over the last 50 years, an ideology known as neoliberalism has transformed the American economy — for better or worse. The concept is often associated with Ronald Reagan, free markets and deregulation. But legal scholar Mehrsa Baradaran says there’s a lot we get wrong about the origins of neoliberalism and its true impact on society. On the show today, Baradaran, author of the new book “The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America,” explains what neoliberal ideology promised to do for the American economy, what it actually did and why she believes that looking to the free market might, ironically, be the only way forward.
Then, why actress Scarlett Johansson isn’t cool with OpenAI’s new chatbot. And we’ll hear the sounds of cicadas!
Here’s everything we talked about today:
- “Opinion | The Neoliberal Looting of America” from The New York Times
- “What is neoliberalism? A political scientist explains the use and evolution of the term” from The Conversation
- “Opinion | Time is up for neoliberals” from The Washington Post
- “Learning how to use AI could boost your pay by 25%, study finds” from CNN Business
- “Scarlett Johansson says OpenAI chatbot voice ‘eerily similar’ to hers” from Reuters
We love to hear from you. Send your questions and comments to makemesmart@marketplace.org or leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart where none of us is as smart as all of us. |
| 0:13.8 | And I'm Samantha Fields in for Ky Rizdahl. |
| 0:16.4 | It is Tuesday, which means it's time to dive deep into a single topic. |
| 0:21.0 | Today we're talking about neoliberalism, an ideology that has shaped our economy, our laws, and our politics. |
| 0:27.0 | For better or worse, it gets associated neoliberalism with free market capitalism, deregulation, Reagan, and on and on. |
| 0:38.5 | But our guest today says there's quite a bit that people get wrong about neoliberalism. |
| 0:44.2 | So here to make us smart is legal scholar, |
| 0:47.2 | Marr saberadron, law professor at the University of California Irvine, |
| 0:51.1 | and author of the new book The Quiet Koo, |
| 0:54.6 | Neol liberalism, and The Looting of America. |
| 0:58.2 | Welcome back to the show. |
| 1:00.1 | Thank you so much for having me. |
| 1:01.3 | It's great to talk to you again. |
| 1:03.6 | So I want to get to definition of terms first. |
| 1:07.2 | What is neoliberalism and also why the looting of America? |
| 1:25.0 | Okay, so neoliberalism, it was an ideology that emerged sort of in the 1940s from Austrian economists and really, you know, the typical timeline is that from that era, it was kind of expanded |
| 1:27.6 | and by the Reagan era, it became like the policy worldwide |
| 1:31.0 | neoliberalism is the political order that the world economy basically runs on. |
| 1:36.0 | It's this sort of pseudo free market ideology that applies to, you know, lower regulation and things like that. I challenge some of that story and talk |
| 1:47.1 | about neoliberalism as first and foremost a legal project and not sort of |
| 1:51.4 | of economic ideology. |
| 1:53.0 | And secondly, that was a response to the racial uprisings of the 1960s. |
... |
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