Being realistic about neoliberalism

Abstract

Yet we find the way blocked by a moral obstacle. Planning and control are being attacked as a denial of freedom. Free enterprise and private ownership are declared to be essentials of freedom. No society built on other foundations is said to deserve to be called free. The freedom that regulation creates is denounced as unfreedom; the justice, liberty and welfare it offers are decried as a camouflage of slavery. Karl Polanyi It isn't that I set out on economic policies; it's that I set really to change the approach, and changing the economics is the means of changing that approach. If you change the approach you really are after the heart and soul of the nation. Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.

Editorial

“…Thus the worries around ‘grade inflation’ are themselves neoliberal concerns. Exam grades are ‘positional goods’, goods that are, as Joseph Dunne expresses in the paper that follows: ‘worth something relative to the position of others in grade placement and access to hierarchies of job, income, and status.’ Education becomes another sphere of life which is dominated by competition and self‐centredness, and hence amenable to the view expressed by Friedrich Hayek that ‘though a man's conviction that all he achieves is due solely to his exertions, skill, and intelligence may be largely false, it is apt to have the most beneficial effects on his energy and circumspection’ (as quoted n Norris, 2020, p. 67).…”

“…Of course, the difficult question remains of how we move beyond the current predominant conception of education: how do we bring about meaningful change? As Andrew Norris has observed, neoliberal world‐views have ‘a sufficiently open texture and is sufficiently robust to be able to accommodate significant changes even the refutation of some of their component parts, while maintaining their identity’ (2020, p. 66).…”