Over at TheMoneyIllusion I occasionally recommend that people look at the the excellent posts done by Lorenzo. His essays tend to be relatively long, but well worth reading in full. His newest post exposes the ignorance and ideological bias that leads non-economist intellectuals to sneer at neoliberalism. Unfortunately I can only excerpt a few paragraphs, which don’t do justice to the essay:

This reflexive contempt performs a moral-status-and-opinion-conformity signalling function-it expresses one’s cultural placement. Hence it applies to non-“progressive” Westerners (against whom the status games are played), but rarely to non-Westerners, no matter how wildly their views diverge from progressivist norms, as the non-Westerners are much more likely to function as moral mascots-people for whom moral concern is signalled. Thus, contrast how the views of US evangelicals are treated as distinct from the views of more emphatic Muslims. The former are people against whom status is signalled, the latter people for whom moral concern is signalled, even though the actual views of the latter are likely to diverge far more from progressive norms on matters such as gender and sexuality than do the former. (To put it another way, the US evangelicals are to be culturally defeated, the Muslims culturally “respected”: though such “respect” often glosses over winners and losers from various conceptions of what precisely is to be “respected”.)

Westerners involved seriously in commerce are also a status-signalling target. There is little doubt that the irritation with, and antipathy to, “neoliberalism” is deeply connected to longstanding antipathy to commerce and to those who make their living by it. Hence, that “neoliberalism” expands the ambit of commerce is one of its defining sins.

Here’s one more:

That the anti-“neoliberalism” literature presents us with Western intellectuals and academics more hostile to expansion of private commerce, markets and private property than the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party is somewhat striking, but said Central Committee has to struggle with genuine policy problems. (Just as dependency theorist Fernando Cardoso engaged in economic liberalisation and privatisation as President Cardoso.) All the academics hostilely pontificating on “neoliberalism” have to worry about is their own glowing moral soundness. Where the failure of command economies also goes down the memory hole, creating no problem they have to wrestle with. These are people who are so tied up in a proper conception of History that they cannot see history right in front of them. (And folk who habitually analyse the motives of others in the most hostile and dismissive terms will, of course, be outraged at their own obvious moral nobility being treated somewhat sceptically.)

When I see philosophers discuss neoliberalism I’m reminded of economists doing philosophy. Occasionally enlightening, but more commonly cringe-inducing.

HT: TravisV, Nick Rowe