Angel Martinez’s Reviews > Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown > Status Update

Role of the neoliberal state is 3-fold:

1. to becalm & mollify the restive public, provoked to constrain/neutralize the market in response to problems

2. to reiterate & deploy the Neolib panacea that addressing any (falsely) perceived market failures requires more markets

3. to facilitate the market in discovering its own eventual transformations of nature/society which will transcend any biosphere crisis.

"... the core of the neoliberal critique of socialism: no human intelligence could ever understand itself, much less the roiling appearance of chaos which constitutes its natural environment, to a degree sufficient to plan the economy, because the reasons it musters are always less complex than the phenomena it would wish to master" (ch 6).

One neoliberal myth the NTC protected post-2008 was the idea that prices reflected all information available to the "supercomputer" that is the market.

Of course, the NTC had to argue that the market was not at fault and it still is that super information processor the NTC believed it to be

"The signal characteristic of agnotology is that it makes use of ... journalistic inclinations to venture beyond ... difference of opinion ... to promulgate artificial “authorities” & calculated deception, ... to foster the widespread attitude that there is so much unfocused controversy rattling around ... that the poor average citizen might as well believe whatever he pleases."

aka "but it's complicated!"

"The advance of agnotology beyond propaganda is lodged in the fact that its hallmark
techniques thrive off a hermeneutics of suspicion, with the result that the populace can
maintain the comfortable fiction that it is not being manipulated by the obscure interests
funding the initiatives" (ch 4).

Purpose of mainstream neoclassical economists (heavy sway w/in financial institution, both private [think tanks, banks, etc] & public [govt policy, Fed]) produce ignorance. The public's trust of economists AND market (which came under question post-2008). response from the neoclassical economists was to foment confusion.

Enter: "the postmodern phenomenon of agnotology" (ch 4)

Code of ethics for the economics profession? 🤔

Big theme of the book here seems to be: neoclassical orthodoxy/economics =/= "economic theory"

"As in so many other instances, what the neoliberal self loses in continuity, it gains in convenience" (153). re exchange of body parts, enhancements to self (brain), and gametes

no continuity to the neolib self because the neoliberal self is only a collection of isolated fragments, a reflection of Thatcher's claim that there is no society, only "individual men and women & there are families"

"As religion took on more of the trappings of just-in-time provision of entertainment services, and "values" assumed the mix-and-match character of Do It Yourself bricolage, the materiality of rock-solif "interests" melted into thin air" (104).