The Other Road to Serfdom: Recovery by the Market and the Affect Economy in New Orleans

Abstract

In 2010, I was told that during the 2008 presidential campaign, the University of Chicago Press had a surprising run on a book by Friedrich Hayek titled The Road to Serfdom. A best seller when it was originally published in 1944, Hayek's book was called "a war cry" against socialist planning, endorsing the idea that private sector investments and free market solutions are more efficient and effective than government spending or planning programs. Hayek argued that centralized planning leads ultimately to impoverishment under the tyranny of authoritarian government (his example is Nazi Germany) -a type of serfdom. 1 Applauded by neoliberalist Milton Friedman and other Chicago School economists, Hayek's work has been perhaps misleadingly called an endorsement of "laissez-faire capitalism" as the best route to both democratic freedom and socioeconomic stability. 2 Hayek received a Nobel Prize in 1974 and a Presidential

Debates—Perspectives on socio‐hydrology: Capturing feedbacks between physical and social processes

“…New Orleans is a case in point. The city is still struggling to recover from the unexpected 2005 flooding [Myers et al, 2008;Adams, 2012]. Larger floodplain societies, such as the Netherlands, have high levels of protection that make the probability of flooding nearly zero.…”

Peripheral vision as anthropological critique

“…Looking beyond the media and government spin, anthropologists and other social scientists have revealed how decades of economic and political marginalization and neglect created the conditions that made Katrina such a catastrophe (Marshall 2005;Masquelier 2006;Marable 2006;Adams 2012). Prior to the hurricane, the state of Louisiana had among the lowest levels of literacy, health, and education in the country.…”

On Precariousness and the Ethical Imagination: The Year 2012 in Sociocultural Anthropology

“…Ananya Roy, in the introduction to a recent special issue of Public Culture entitled “Poverty Markets: The New Politics of Development and Humanitarianism,” has described an emergent global ethic that is expressed in the new ways in which poverty is being encountered: through a “renewal of development through reconstruction, humanitarianism, and bottom billion capitalism” (in the form of, e.g., the global microfinance industry [Roy ; Elyachar ]); through “the struggle to find a moral compass for the forms of market rule associated with poverty interventions” (in the search, e.g., for “responsible finance” or “consumer protection” that mitigates the exploitation of the poor); and through “zones of intimacy where poverty is encountered through volunteerism, philanthropy, and other acts of neoliberal benevolence” (Roy :105–106). The latter includes the “integration of ethics into consumption” through “community‐based” tourism in the global South (Baptista ) or the distribution of life‐saving drugs and other humanitarian goods by for‐profit and nonprofit organizations that “present themselves as an ethical response to failure on the part of states” (Redfield :158; see also Adams ; Samsky ). As Peter Redfield and Roy insist, many of these “ethical subjects” foreground moral and medical rather than market values.…”

“…Yet their shared use of the term does point toward our increased attunement to how a set of factors, including increased economic uncertainty (Cho ; Holt Norris and Worby ; A. A. Johnson ; Prentice ; Razsa and Kurnik ; Sanchez ), the loss of state (and corporate) provisioning (Adams ; Hamdy ; Holt Norris and Worby ; Mains ), and “massive violence, marginalization, and injustice; environmental devastation and industrial recklessness; stunning hubris and shrill ignorance” (Fortun :459) have eroded not just labor and the state but also the possibility of life itself. Precarity, in short, is a shorthand for those of us documenting the multiple forms of nightmarish dispossession and injury that our age entails.…”