Beyond Neoliberalism: How to Think About Rebuilding the Capacity of the Democratic State

good evening everyone thank you all for coming out and thank you to all of you joining online um tonight we have a real pleasure we have the second um of four lectures um from our visiting Professor Damon Silvers um we're here at the institute for Innovation and public purpose at UCL and I my my great pleasure I'm associate professor Kate roll and my great pleasure is to introduce Damon Silvers so as I said Damon is a visiting professor of Labor markets and Innovation and he was previously the director of policy and special counsel at the AFL-CIO which is a Federation of 60 unions in in the U.S he has had many highlights in his career including being the deputy chair of the oversight panel for tarp as well as work with the SEC and the treasury Department but he also you know he's my office mate at different times and he brings I think sort of the two two things we we like most in our colleagues in particular academic colleagues which is a sense of curiosity he's interested in history he's interested in people he's interested in lots of different parts of the world and compassion bringing a real care for people a real care for students and a care for people the working people of the world so my great pleasure to to introduce Damon Silvers and pass it over to him thank you thank you so much Kate for that very kind uh that very kind introduction and good evening to everybody it's such a pleasure to see you all uh here and welcome back to those who are here for the last lecture um as as uh as Kate said I'm Damon Silvers I'm a visiting professor of all those things Kate mentioned um but um just a sort of a caveat or something about this lecture as with the last I'm a visiting professor of practice and while there will be a number of academic citations here this lecture draws very heavily upon my my experience over the last 30 years or so representing working people in the neoliberal era I warn you this will be a little dense and I urge you to ask questions afterwards to unpack themes and and issues here it is large largely I would tell you pretty much every every factual episode episode in this lecture you're about to hear is something I was involved in personally and I'm happy to share not just analytics but anecdotes about about the about the decline in crisis of neoliberalism as Kate said this is the second of four lectures the first lecture was on the rise of neoliberalism which was a week ago the PowerPoint from that lecture is available online as will the PowerPoint from this lecture as soon as we're done eventually there'll be YouTube videos when the fine crew that is bringing this whole production to the world at the back of the room get through formatting them um let me just give an advertisement briefly for the next two lectures the last lecture in this lecture about neoliberalism as a global as a global political economy the two lectures that follow this are going to be about the United Kingdom about the sort of deep history of the political economic and social crisis surrounding brexit that'll be the first lecture and the second lecture will be about the essentially the the the political economy trap that the United Kingdom is in today and and what might be done about it and so those will be next Tuesday and the following Tuesday so with that introduction let's return to neoliberalism um last week I introduced to you all uh neoliberalism as a global system which emerged out of the economic and political crisis of the 1970s as a as a kind of lived matter but which intellectually was drawing directly on the classical on ideas of classical liberal economics uh from the mid and mid and early 19th century the ideology of neoliberalism was Market fundamentalism the idea that that markets of all kinds are sort of precede the state and can be relied upon for efficient optimal outcomes in every case that was the ideology of neoliberalism but its reality was a political economy of power and in particular a political economy of private power now this is important for those of you in the audience in particular who were students here at iipp because the history of neoliberalism is a history of how it came to be that the Democratic state in developed countries has such a low opinion of itself is so reluctant in so many ways to do the job of a democratic government the first lecture talked about how this how this set of ideas came to be and how it came to capture the Democratic state in the in particular in the developed world now neoliberalism as I went through last week led to radical increases in inequality within societies and a simultaneous weakening of the democratic State both in terms of resources hard money and of political legitimacy and institutional confidence but it is worth noting that this did not happen in every state under neoliberalism that there are very important exceptions around the world where in the neoliberal era the state was strengthened and in some cases radically strengthened I think if you think for a moment it's obvious that I'm talking about China but you ought to give some thought to some other places and in particular Saudi Arabia now the these three graphs are the key graphs from last week I just want to revisit them the first graph and and this the first graph is relevant to the lectures that will come after this one the first graph is the Genia coefficient in the United Kingdom the measure of economic inequality in the country we are all in in this room and this it doubled Between 1979 roughly uh and uh the mid 80s and it has remained there ever since this is a measure it's what we mean when we talk about radical inequality in the neoliberal era secondly this somewhat harder to read graph is a graph of public and private assets in the developed in the major developed country economies the top set of lines is public is private assets private assets the bottom is public assets this again is a very powerful graphic depiction of the shrinkage of the capacity of the state of the democratic state in the developed World Under neoliberalism and then finally on the right is the graph in a schematic sense of economic outcomes this is a measure of global economic growth by year the left hand side is the Keynesian era four to six percent sustained growth the right hand side in the middle is the high neoliberal era of the 1990s two to four percent growth the far right hand side as you look at it is the era of neoliberal crisis when two to four percent growth is punctuated by radical economic crisis those crises are what we're going to talk about today now let's begin with where in retrospect it seems clear the neoliberal order began to decay that decay begins although nobody really saw it in the late 1990s so even as neoliberalism was at its peak sort of triumphant moment big Financial big very uh very well performing financial markets effective full employment in the United States and in many European countries even as this was happening we began to see in the financial markets and in the governance of the financial markets the signs of what was to come and what was to come were a series of crises that revealed each key Concept in Market fundamentalism to be both conceptually and empirically false it was as if a series of experiments were run in economics with the world as the laboratory and the outcome was that the hypotheses that had driven neoliberals neoliberalism conceptually were proven to be wrong in the aftermath of those events came a political crisis of neoliberalism ideas that were assumed and hegemonic meaning that political parties across the ideological Spectrum in developed democracies all bought into them to varying degrees those very ideas came under question and the political structures that underpin neoliberalism in the developed World began to crack and decay and at the same time conflict emerged increasingly in recent years at a global level around these same structures now it's funny this to me seems like a contemporary Thing This Time Magazine cover it's probably not to most of you it's probably ancient history this is a wonderful little image for starters this is the cover of a physical magazine that may be something exotic and sort of uh ancient to some of you this is a cover of a physical magazine and it's the picture of three people on the far left is Robert Rubin who was the treasury Secretary of the United States under Bill Clinton and before that was the head of Goldman Sachs in the center is Alan Greenspan who was a childhood acolyte of iron Rand the libertarian novelist and a white russian emigry and was the chairman of the of the Federal Reserve Board of the United States the chief Central Banker of the U.S and essentially of the world during the high neoliberal era we'll come back to Alan Greenspan momentarily and on the left is somebody who is still active uh in public life that's Larry Summers who was Bob rubin's Deputy at the time of this picture uh and then later served as treasury secretary in the lat in the last years of the Clinton Administration and as one of President Obama's chief economic advisors these three individuals are titled in Time Magazine the committee to save the world now why were they called that they were charged with responding to the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998. and the Asian financial crisis in many respects is the first signal that something is profoundly wrong with the stability of the neoliberal order as a global matter all right and I'm not going to go into all the details of Asian financial crisis I just want to note that this is the beginning right and these people's involvement threads through the the the the degree to which neoliberalism has a financial crisis it's important also to note apropos what I said earlier that while Alan Greenspan is essentially a man a man of the right in American politics Bob Rubin and Larry Summers were perceived at the time to be men of the left this is what I mean by hegemony right that between the three of them at the time they covered the entire space of American economic debate now that's the way it was in 1997 1998 it changed okay now the set the first really serious crack in the neoliberal order that was understood at the time to be such was happened in the United States and was the collapse of Enron now Enron was for those of you who for whom this is again ancient history Enron was one of the largest companies in the United States in the late 90s it was it had a market capitalization of about 80 billion dollars at its peak at the time now today we have trillion dollar companies but at the time that was huge that made it one I think one of the 20 largest companies in the United States but more importantly Enron was seen as the intellectual leader of corporate America it was when I took an advanced Finance course at Harvard Business School in the mid 90s I remember writing on my exam notes the answer is Enron meaning that we were taught at Harvard Business School in 1990s in the spring of 1996 that the most sophisticated use of financial instruments in the corporate world which we should all emulate is Enron now Enron collapsed it collapsed in about five months in the in the fall and winter of 2001. and it collapsed because it had been lying sort of it had it had constructed its financial statements in a way to make its investors and the general public think it had a modest amount of debt whereas in fact using derivative using Financial derivatives it had hidden a gigantic amount of debt and the debt was growing because Enron in truth was losing money but they were hiding that right they were hiding that through financial Ledger domain now why was this so important intellectually Enron collapsed because essentially because a Wall Street Journal reporter um this I went to one slide too far sorry and run sorry this is Enron this is the Enron building um I spent a great deal of time in there representing Enron workers during this period uh that's the Enron building that's an Enron employee one of the people that I ended up actually representing uh in the bankruptcy case that's another employee leaving with their personal effects entire Workforce of Enron not the entire world course five thousand Enron workers were laid off on one night in December of 2001. um enron's finances were fraudulent but they weren't really hidden anyone who took real care in looking at their finances could figure out that in fact there was all this debt and that the company wasn't profitable but the first person who really took that kind of care was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal named Rebecca Smith now why does this matter this matters because a key Concept in Market fundamentalism in the neoliberal era was something called the efficient Capital markets hypothesis now any of you who have taken Corporate Finance have probably heard of this idea this idea has a this idea has different forms but at the time Enron collapsed the popular form in Business Schools and schools of Economics was the strong form of the capital markets hypothesis or the relatively strong form which was the notion that Capital that the capital markets efficiently and accurately to the limits of human ability Incorporated in their prices for Capital assets all available information at least all available public information and some prominent and respected Financial Scholars argued that Capital markets Incorporated efficiently all information public and private now the problem with that was home with Enron was that it proved that that couldn't be true it proved that essentially hiding in plain sight were the facts that showed that Enron was worthless and yet for years and run stock price show had had huge value 80 billion dollars of fraudulent value that anyone who took the trouble that Rebecca Smith took could have figured out the idea that the capital markets are infallible died with Enron although as we're going to come and see right it lives on as a kind of zombie anyone who takes Finance these days may have encountered that zombie wandering around in your classrooms I have to mention here uh you know Mariana mazicato the director of this institute and Rosie Collingwood who might be here with us somewhere I'm not sure but they have a book about consultants and the impact of consulting firms in the neoliberal era and McKinsey the world's largest management consulting firm and by certain measures Enron was McKenzie's largest client Mckenzie was deeply implicated in what happened here and yet kind of kind of skated but it's worth just noting that part of this part of this if part of this story is about Capital markets part of the story is about consultants and if we have time in Q a I'll tell you a story about that now if the if the efficiency of capital markets didn't survive Enron and the tech Bubble Burst that occurred in 2001 the idea that the neoliberal era was really about competitive markets died in the banking crisis so in the uh the Enron the Enron crisis and its aftermath and the collapse of a bunch of other companies from accounting fraud after Enron Enron was not the only major U.S firm or major Global firm that blew up during this period there was a brief Hiatus in the mid-2000s during which most of the UK and American governments were preoccupied with Iraq and then there was a full-on banking crisis which led to a economic crisis a financial crisis that led to an economic crisis much has occurred during the Great Depression in 1929 in 2008. the banking crisis really destroyed the credibility of the second tenet of Market fundamentalism which was that the state the neoliberal state was not in the business of interfering with or shaping markets and that's the the neoliberal state under no circumstances would ever pick winners and losers remember my picture of Larry and and uh and Ben not Ben Bernanke and uh Alan Greenspan and Bob Rubin all of them swore in a stack of Bibles at various times during the 1990s that they would never never ever pick winners and losers and the same thing was true by the way for uh Republican policy makers like Hank Paulson who was treasury secretary under George Bush and the same thing was true both in the labor party and in the Tory party in this country and the same thing was true to lesser degrees but still quite significantly across the developed world well after that what do you think happened when the major when the world's major financial institutions failed we're talking about private Banks not state-owned Banks or parastatals the world's major private banks with a couple of exceptions and even those exceptions I think are questionable the world's major private Banks found themselves unable to continue in business during 2008 and 2009. specifically in case anybody tries to tell you otherwise AIG the world's largest Insurance Company insolvent illiquid Citigroup the one of the world's 10 largest banks Bank of America again one of the world's 10 largest banks in this country um to in varying degrees Barclays Lloyd's other big names Credit Suisse in Switzerland basically every major Bank in Switzerland in a very complicated way involving Greece most of the major German banks all right the what was the response to the failure of these private sector institutions were they was did Market discipline operate no they were rescued I don't mean their depositors were rescued there's a lot it's been very clear for a long time and it's very important in a banking crisis to to save depositors otherwise you have complete disintermediation the financial system I mean that they're stockholders they're bondholders and their Executives were rescued there was how was that done by the public in a variety of ways in the United States it was done both through the the injection of taxpayer I don't like the word taxpayer public equity Equity from the the government of the United States into the banks but it was also done by something that Tim Geithner privately referred to as extend and pretend an extended pretend sounds kind of harmless extended pretend means that you don't actually look at what the bank balance sheets look like you pretend that everything is worth what they say it's worth and you wait around now why was that so toxic because waiting around involved forcing American households to pay full value on home mortgages that were ridiculously priced that was how the banks were recapitalized in part with public dollars directly and in part with householders in the United Kingdom in Ireland in Spain in the EU more broadly public money followed by austerity these this way of responding to the banking crisis right had a couple of very toxic consequences one was prolonged economic distress and prolonged distress in housing markets in labor markets and in small business credit in many respects I think the most destructive thing that happened in the United States as a result of this approach was the was the sustained contraction in small business credit and what that did to small business people's sense of their government as being on their side the it was impossible to say with a straight face after this that neoliberal governments were about a Level Playing Field letting the markets rule the market discipline it was just impossible nobody nobody could really say that with the straight face knowing what had just happened and I have uh two quotes here that I think summarize this one is a quote from Alan Greenspan the man the on the committee to save the world it wasn't quite so confident this time Alan Greenspan was in front of a senate committee and said I I just completely misunderstood how capitalism worked it was I made a mistake when you're head of the Federal Reserve I made a mistake not a good thing to say but specifically he kind of backtracked a little bit on Market fundamentalism and this is something I am particularly personally proud of this is a quote from Elizabeth Warren who's now his United States Senator and was at the time the chair of the Congressional oversight panel for tarp that panel on which I served did a serious economic Financial valuation of the tarp Investments when they were made which is the financially sound way of doing it doing it after the fact evaluating your investment after the fact is like evaluating your chances of winning roulette after the wheel has been spun right you need to evaluate things beforehand and it was very clear when we did that valuation that we that the United States government was subsidizing the largest banks in the country to a very significant degree 66 cents on the dollar right those Investments at the time they were made were worth 66 cents on the dollar and the other 33 cents was being put in the pocket of the shareholders and the executives of the major Banks by the way there has never been a serious attempt to challenge this valuation it's about 3 000 pages long I don't recommend that you read it it was advised by the Yale School of Management and a whole raft of other experts that's the hard Finance behind the political analysis where did this lead Occupy Wall Street um this is Occupy Wall Street was a left-wing response in many respects in the United States the right-wing response was Donald Trump so this notion of this notion that governments don't shape markets this died with the financial crisis question after this for anyone who's being remotely intellectually honest is not do government shaped markets but how do they and in whose interest s third crisis this comes after the financial crisis so a third key tenet of Market fundamentalism was that economic inequality was a Spur to growth this is the this is the key idea underlying Margaret Thatcher's statement there is no alternative right it may be unjust but it's the only way to go all right and the I because and underneath that was the idea that you had to economic inequality was necessary necessary to incentivize entrepreneurship again this should have some Echoes for people who are studying the entrepreneurial state now the financial crisis revealed first that growth in the neoliberal era economic growth remember the the graph I showed you at the beginning economic growth had been propped up to a significant degree by policies that had substituted unsustainable consumer credit for wages so that economic inequality was only made functional by everybody by pretending by lending money to people who you would pretend could pay it back but who in fact could not and when you actually made them pay it back as we did in the United States in the extended pretend period following the banking crisis you crushed demand and you also crushed the ability of households and small businesses to borrow when that kind of became clear after the financial crisis it led to a very fulsome debate in the economics profession about the relationship between inequality and growth now here we're going to do a brief detour into economics as a in a sort of hard way so there was a view in macroeconomics dating back to the 1950s that in development actually it's more development than macroeconomics but it's in both areas It's associated with an American Economist named Simon kuznets who's actually not a neoliberal at all uh kuznets they don't crunched a lot of numbers and showed that in the course of the Industrial Revolution countries tended to grow initially with very high levels of inequality but as they became more affluent inequality diminished theorem was essentially you get more you get more affluent you develop more in your economy develops more you accumulate more capital a whole variety of forces trade unions the Democratic Politics the Dynamics of Labor markets lead to Falling inequality well it turned out that that's actually not necessarily true right it turned out in the neoliberal era that in fact inequality had grown dramatically as I showed you earlier in the genie coefficient map of the United Kingdom most people who had been paying attention had been actually living in developed societies during the neoliberal era were aware of this but economists were shall we say skeptical until this man Thomas picketty a French Economist did a gigantic study using new data of economic inequality and returns to Capital across the developed world in the neoliberal action not just in the neoliberal era going back to the 19th century his book capital demolished the notion that somehow we we weren't becoming more unequal or that somehow becoming more unequal was a good idea amazingly for a book that's like this stick and highly technical it was a bestseller it was it was on the bestseller list with like Stephen King and so forth uh in I think it was 2014. foreign the debate there was then a debate among economists about whether or not growth whether or not increased inequality actually promoted growth was Thatcher right that there was no alternative and I was present at a meal once where Paul Krugman again these are both men of the left Paul Krugman and Joe stiglitz went at it hammer and Tonks with each other about whether or not Rising inequality hampered growth stiglitz said it did and Krugman said it didn't eventually Krugman conceded he conceded because the data became overwhelming by the way Corbin wasn't being particularly ideological about this I don't think he I think he sort of hoped that maybe inequality and was a problem in terms of growth but he was trying to be intellectually independent it turned out he was wrong this chart here shows the degree to which inequality hampered growth across oecd countries during the during the uh the neoliberal era it's taken from an OE it's an oecd report the oecd was a critical intellectual institution in the rise of neoliberalism the oecd changed its mind and this by the way is the kind of flat line of UK GDP growth which I'll come back to in future lectures but in terms of this issue of stagnation and inequality there is actually there is no better case study for it than the United Kingdom so as I think as I hope I'm showing you one by one the kind of intellectual pillars of neoliberalism collapsed but there was more there was something more serious going on sort of underneath and that's climate change climate change was first identified as a clear threat in 1988 this may be somewhat discouraging to those of you for whom 1988 is outside your memory right but in 1988 scientific evidence had accumulated to the point where major newspapers were starting to write about climate change for the next 30 Years during which the 30 years during which we were supposed to have done something about climate change the predominant policy approach by the world's major carbon emitting Nations and by the world's major International bodies in the press and in think tanks was informed by neoliberal Dogma and it was the idea that the way to solve climate change was through market-based Solutions which amounted to either cap and trade policies which essentially tried to run this climate policy through the financial markets or through carbon taxes which essentially sought to punish people who have no choice but to consume carbon in their daily lives by taxing them until they figured out some other option I'm being a bit I'm being a bit unfair to these ideas but they are in fact the principal policy solutions that were offered to climate change in in the neoliberal era and there was a tremendous number if you Google this stuff it's just infinite there was a tremendous number of attempts to suggest that Global corporations on their own or Global Investors or Capital markets would solve climate change on their own because it was the right thing to do and that they didn't need policy push they didn't need Market structuring they didn't and we didn't need public investment by the early 2010s it was clear that this was not working not just it wasn't working a little bit it wasn't working at all and in fact by and and that realization corroded systematically over time The credibility of Market fundamentalism as a way of understanding the world and of structuring public policy and the more concerned you were about climate change the more uneasy you became in my view this reached a Tipping Point a point in which you just couldn't say these things seriously anymore at the Glasgow meeting of cop a year ago in which after 30 years of neoliberal policy responses to climate change the United Nations reported we were on we were on a straight line track to three degrees Celsius which was Far outside what in the U.N would was considered to be a level of warming that was manageable by human civilization and this doesn't have doesn't have quite the sharpness intellectually of the first three but it sure hits you in the gut and it's I think it's impossible to understand the general drift of public policy in throughout the world toward public investment as the response to climate change without understanding the catastrophic failure of neoliberal of the neoliberal political order in dealing with climate change and the bankruptcy of Market fundamentalism as a way of understanding now the final blow and this really was a sort of coup de gras in the near to the neoliberal era as an intellectual matter and to some degree as a political and policy matter was coven now why why was this so a final key tenet of neoliberalism was as the neoliberal publicist Tom Friedman Thomas Friedman writes for the New York Times as as he put it that the world was flat it's titled the book by Tom Friedman which meant that it didn't what he meant by that was that it didn't matter where economic activity occurred or industrial production was concentrated all that counted was open markets productivity and quote efficiency now these are problematic concepts by the way Jose is a great person to read about like why these are problematic Concepts and so is Mariana by the way Mariana mazicato the director of this institute um but this concept just just fell apart when it turned out all of a sudden in February and March of 2020 that we all needed a lot of masks rubber gloves ventilators and ultimately vaccines and only a few countries made them and all of a sudden it's like okay there is no price which I'm going to part with this stuff right that was kind of the initial reaction of the countries that had them eventually sort of you know processes of sharing PPE got in place but then there simply wasn't enough and in many parts of the world there wasn't enough in a really sort of horrifying way and so after that you it turned out that it really didn't matter that authoritarian States controlled large parts of the industrial production chain of the world and then it turned out to further matter because China adopted a zero covid policy which meant that every time there was a minor outbreak of covet in any Chinese City the entire city was closed and that meant that whatever vital Parts in Global Supply chains were made in that City were no longer made and if they were made they didn't move and this has been a critical fueler of global inflation in the post-covet era and the inability to get critical parts to all kinds of things not just consumer goods but critical capital goods and a number of rather hard-nosed people started thinking about the military implications of all of this and as a result the notion that it doesn't matter where Supply chains go as long as they're profitable and efficient or as Tom Freeman put it the world was flat it's just not true and there's nobody in the position of power today in the world who believes it is now I just went through essentially the economic and ideological crisis of neoliberalism people lived through these things people lost their homes in the banking crisis people couldn't get loans to keep their businesses afloat people died in covid people live through these things and there are and they watched while other people who had money and power were protected by a Neil by a neoliberal political order that had promised not to protect them that had promised that the ma that the market discipline was going to work that had promised a whole range of things that turned out just not to be true and those that kind of that kind of lived experience throughout human history has had political consequences and the multiplier the multiplied sort of unraveling of the neoliberal project had very serious political consequences and beginning after the financial crisis I think there's also by the way a story about Iraq and Neil the Iraq War and neoliberalism I just don't have time to tell it but really after the financial crisis challenges arose to the neoliberal order on both the political left and the political right across the developed world and on the right globally in the aftermath of the of the financial crisis politicians of the authoritarian right neoliberalism is a project essentially of the economic right that effectively co-opted the political left what I'm talking about now is the authoritarian right the authoritarian right right gained in strength and visibility by attacking both neoliberal economic policies and the liberal social policies they had become associated with in the 1990s I talked about this in the last lecture that although neoliberalism began as in association with essentially the conservative with conservative politics Reagan Thatcher Pinochet that in the 1990s it became associated with liberal social politics or it covered the whole Space the authoritarian right attacks neoliberalism as it attacks actual neoliberalism and then attacks the social policies that that the authoritarian right doesn't like that they seek to identify with economic neoliberalism on the left the aftermath of the financial crisis sees the collapse of neoliberal hegemony and so left politicians of the left come to prominence whose base is not Finance or Tech right but large numbers of working people who have been the losers in these processes all right and so you see in the United States the rise of Elizabeth Warren whom I mentioned earlier Bernie Sanders melanchol in France Jeremy corbyn in England all of these people major political figures in their countries espousing ideas that have been pushed totally to the margins 10 15 years earlier and on the other hand politicians on the left who had embraced neoliberal economics to varying degrees were pushed to the side Gerhard Schroeder in Germany who had weaken German labor law became a kind of curse word in the Social Democratic party and found new friends in Russia Hillary Clinton in the United States whose story I think is well known to everybody and Tony Blair in the United Kingdom now how did this work on the right because I think a large significant part of what I want to talk to you about today is the implications the relationship between the crisis of neoliberalism and the rise of the authoritarian right and what this means for the prospects for Democratic politics with a small D democracy right in the years in the days and years to come the hegemony of neoliberal politics in the developed World between 1989 and 2008 meant that a number of key economic policies were simply not up for debate there was no discussion if you disagreed with neoliberal policy in this in these spaces you were marginalized trade policy Rising inequality should we have public investment industrial strategy students here at IPP should should recognize some key Concepts that are frequently discussed here were off the table if you didn't agree with neoliberal Concepts in these spaces you simply hadn't you were simply like an outer space what that led to much as something similar that happened in the 19th century led to something similarly Sinister in the early 20th century what that led to was a vacuum as neoliberal policies produce catastrophic outcomes for ordinary people authoritarian politicians gained support and emerged from the Shadows it was a whole set of political ideas of authoritarian and frankly racist political ideas that were pushed out of the the political discourse in the developed World following the Second World War the vacuum that neoliberalism created around essentially issues of economic Justice opened the door for the for the authoritarian right to come out of the basement of developed World politics and the way they did it was by linking explicit racism and anti-democratic politics to critiques of neoliberal economic policies that themselves were growing broadly unpopular in throughout the developed world and so by the early 2020s by now by our time we see in the emergence of an authoritarian Global coalition campaigning and governing campaigning on similar themes in countries where campaigning is necessary and governing and similar Styles the range of political leaders the countries covered by this development is shocking when you just listed when you list them out Trump in the United States and all of his imitators Vladimir Putin the ultimate man on horseback president XI in China if you doubt that she is part of this just think about how he talks about the uyghurs he discusses Islam essentially the same way Donald Trump does Modi in India again the same sort of authoritarian and racist politics Orban and Hungary bolsonaro and Brazil Le Pen and France all the Le pens Melanie in Italy Netanyahu in Israel MBS in Saudi Arabia duterte in the Philippines bukeli in El Salvador and there are more waiting in the wings it's worth paying attention to the fact that while a lot of what I'm saying is about the developed World a very interesting thing goes on in this period in the sort of economic periphery of neoliberalism I talked about neoliberalism as a global system Russia and China were really important parts of the neoliberal global system even though they had China had an authoritarian government throughout Russia's sort of Anarchy and then authoritarianism I mean Russia is sort of hard to describe in these terms in these countries in Russia and China and to some degree in India you see during the Contemporary period pre-existing authoritarian regimes that choosing to challenge the terms of the neoliberal order I think it's fair to say that both Russia and China in different ways they're foreign and economic policies are about saying we no longer wish to be the periphery we wish to be the center China's approach is Russia chose to experiment with military force as the way of getting to the center China waited to see how Russia was doing but the second thing and and I want you to keep this in mind because I think it tells you everything about the conflicts that are roiling our our world today is that an important common theme in addition to racism and authoritarianism that links all these people is their opposition to effective action on climate change you could call them an authoritarian International you could also call them an international of carbon emitters and their political tools and that opposition to climate change is not just visible within the action on climate change and I would say that the exception to that list is she the question if she's attitude toward climate change I think is unclear right which shows why he's a much more serious Global Power Player than the rest of these people right but the that opposition is now no longer limited to domestic policy but is visibly surfacing in un processes at the last comp meetings you saw this you saw the Saudis increasingly visibly right opposing International consensus on climate policy essentially feeling a greater degree of power and capacity in Alliance with some of these other people right which tells you in fact what the real Stakes are in Ukraine now uh here's uh now we come to sort of the denom neoliberalism became what it is as a global system through the Embrace of the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States in the late 70s and early 80s and in the United Kingdom and the United States is where the tie were near liberalism retreats right the end of neoliberal hegemony in the teens and these two individuals which you've certainly heard of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson were the key actors in going from a kind of full crisis of neoliberalism to an actual Retreat from it so the thing that links Boris Johnson and Donald Trump other than sort of some personal habits is that they both broke with key neoliberal ideas that have been dominant in their own political parties until they arise to power in the Republican Party in the United States and the Tory party in the United Kingdom free trade and immigration were viewed as essentially positive things sometimes sometimes they would run anti-immigrant campaigns in the short run but in fact their policy agendas tended to encourage or at least tolerate high levels of immigration and potential and particularly higher levels of immigration of low-wage workers Donald Trump famously attacked both these Concepts in openly racist ways and Boris Johnson was not far behind Boris Johnson led the and Trump talked about the need effectively the need for industrial policy in the United States although he didn't quite use those words Boris Johnson led the push for a radical form of brexit there's Boris and his bulldozer trying to get brexit done and supported and CR in truth and if you ask the people to ask about this are Tories Boris supported an increasingly interventionist state initially in the form of leveling up which was a program of public investment in poorer parts of the United Kingdom and then in the context of covid uh he you know flew on lockdown the man even canceled Christmas right this is not neoliberalism this is an in its own way an activist state however this is the core thing to understand about the rise of the authoritarian right not just in the United Kingdom but worldwide on core issues affecting the distribution of economic power remember neoliberalism is an is an is a a political economy of power and when neoliberalism falls apart when the market fundamentalist ideas Fall Apart what remains is the accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a relatively small number of people and on that question Trump and Johnson remained devotees of neoliberal policies as was true of Italian Fascism and national socialism in Germany in the 20th century post neoliberal authoritarians throughout the world seek to build political coalitions across class lines across ideological lines to protect and expand neoliberal accumulations of wealth and power that's what makes them right-wing authoritarians and that long list of people I showed you in the prior slide every one of them is engaged in that project now what did the collapse of neoliberalism mean in practice the a little little case study from the United States in many ways neoliberal hegemony not neoliberal policies Ronald Reagan had neoliberal policies but neoliberal hegemony the adoption of neoliberal policies by both political parties in the United States begins in Earnest with the North American Free Trade Agreement in the early 1990s which economically integrates Canada the United States and Mexico this agreement was and people forget this initially negotiated by the George H.W bush Administration old bush it was then handed over to Bill Clinton when Bill Clinton defeated George Bush in 1992. many people thought Clinton would drop it he didn't he pushed it forward with a vengeance it had no meaningful social integration provisions labor rights environmental concerns governance concerns all the things that the EU and we'll talk about this next week all the things the EU sort of purported to deal with they didn't even really bother except in the most kind of in the most kind of fig Leaf kind of way it was NAFTA was opposed by the labor movement the environmental movement in the United States but to no avail even though they were core constituents of the democratic party the Democratic party in 1992 with its new Wall Street friends remember Bob Rubin a few minutes ago they the Democratic party rolled its own base and NAFTA became symbolic of the industrialization in the United States and in many in many industrial communities in the United States NAFTA for years was a curse word I can speak personally to the effort to my personal efforts to get various union members to vote for Democratic candidates at various times and be told one word NAFTA the Republican Party supported NAFTA they work together with the Democratic party to pass it it was as much a republican initiative as a democratic initiative until Donald Trump showed up that's what the collapse of neoliberalism means Donald Trump shows up and suddenly he's waving NAFTA like a club he made it the centerpiece of his presidential campaign was the first issue discussed in the first debate between him and Hillary Clinton and at the critical moment live on National Television Donald Trump said it's the worst deal ever cut by anybody in the history of the world and then they turned the camera to Hillary Clinton and Hillary Clinton said that's what you think trade economists kind of simultaneously with that debate concluded that NAFTA had indeed lowered wages in U.S industrial regions this was another kind of intellectual stab in the heart for neoliberalism although it's kind of obvious if you think about it that it had that it had to be true and then 10 weeks after that debate the voters in the in the three states most affected by de-industrialization in the United States since 1992 Michigan Wisconsin and Pennsylvania gave Donald Trump his Electoral College Victory and made him president of the United States by very small margins ten thousand fifteen thousand votes there's no question in my mind that that debate sealed Hillary Clinton's fate Donald Trump becomes president and three years into his presidency with low poll numbers facing reelection he decides to actually renegotiate NAFTA but he doesn't do it alone at that point by that point the Democrats control Congress Trump has to work with Nancy Pelosi to renegotiate NAFTA Nancy Pelosi is the head of the Congressional Democratic party which voted in NAFTA with the Republicans so instead of the Republicans and the Democrats defending NAFTA that they're now both rewriting it so Trump this very unusual group of people Donald Trump Nancy Pelosi Justin Trudeau president Lopez obrador of Mexico the labor leaders of all of these countries um I was involved in the somewhat uh with the late president of the AFL-CIO who was a key actor in this in this in this negotiation they rewrite NAFTA so that it actually has teeth around labor and environmental standards and Democrats and Republicans pass it past the rewrite together here's Trump taking credit for it he um he fills the photo with people who look like they might be industrial workers they're actually all CEOs of different companies and employees of trump uh Nancy Pelosi didn't attend neither did President Trump cut of the AFL-CIO no trade unionists would be seen with Donald Trump Nancy instead talked to the press and this was her quote we ate their lunch how Pelosi got to yes on Trump's trade deal so instead of neoliberal hegemony in which everybody gathers together to promote quote free trade you see essentially I'm not sure what you'd call it anti-neoliberal hegemony everybody in the American political system is on board with the rewrite of NAFTA now so what we have today is zombie neoliberalism zombie neoliberalism is a situation in which an ideology and a political system has failed it's failed catastrophically but yet remains a powerful political force among Elites around the world in universities and think tanks and civil services although actually nobody takes seriously any of its key tenants anymore and this is a very very dangerous situation because in this environment it is tempting for politicians and activists who are trying to defend democracy against a serious authoritarian threat or to try to do something about an issue like climate change which is an existential threat to human civilization it is tempting to think well in order to build a big tent we should embrace Market fundamentalists ideas or rhetoric we should play We Should lean into the neoliberal system in order to show that you're a moderate this is in fact the worst possible thing you could do why because that type of political maneuvering creates openings for authoritarians authoritarians will say oh doing something about climate change that's wall Street's agenda doing something about climate change shows you don't care about working people because your plan for climate change is cap and trade not jobs or you don't seem to know the difference between a good job and a bad job authoritarians can point to neoliberal failings around crony capitalism de-industrialization job loss falling wages economic inequality and their power will grow fighting authoritarianism fighting authoritarianism effectively requires first challenging the plutocracy that neoliberalism created and supporting the kinds of public policy initiatives that only an effective entrepreneurial State a state devoted to shaping markets to ensuring a minimal at least a minimal level of economic equality and most importantly a state devoted to ensuring that its citizens and particularly working people have a voice in what happens in their society this is how you fight authoritarianism not by trying to drift towards zombie neoliberalism and nowhere is this more true than in climate policy which is why the first step toward effectively fighting climate change is not a carbon tax but public policies that support strong trade unions and public investment that's the first step toward an effective fight against climate change leaning into leaning zombie will not will not bring back neoliberalism what it will do is strengthen Vladimir Putin now now in my first lecture I discussed a paradox of neoliberalism arising out of authoritarian governments and political practices about its roots in the Chilean coup of 1973 about the way force was used to break the labor movement in the United States and the United Kingdom in its hate so it so it has this kind of authoritarian Heritage even though it appears to be a sort of libertarian set of ideas and political practices in its Heyday neoliberalism opened the door to a Resurgence of authoritarianism by disconnecting liberal democracy from values of social solidarity and economic Justice and leaving the political response to economic justice injustice to economic Injustice to authoritarians now in it so that was in its decline as a zombie ideology Market fundamentalism the ideology of neoliberalism prevents Democratic societies from effectively resisting authoritarianism now there's no better sort of illustration of this issue then the fight going on in the United States today between the Florida between Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who whom in my opinion is even more of an authoritarian than Donald Trump truly dangerous individual and the Disney Corporation over who should control the government of the area around Disney World and this may seem completely bizarre but it's important to understand if you've ever been to Disney World or heard of Disney World it's a giant complex of amusement parks in the center of the state of Florida the government of that area is not elected foreign the State of Florida years ago allowed Walt Disney to run it as a kind of corporate state it's one of the great sort of hidden scandals of American society that in fact the people who live and work there don't elect the government Juan DeSantis is upset with Disney because Disney actually supports dignity dignity and equality for lgbtq people it's one of the few things I would say I agree with Disney about so Ron DeSantis is at war with Disney's control of this space in Florida he intends to try to punish Disney for holding essentially Humane views this sets up a conflict between an authoritarian and a global Corporation if this is the totality of the political choices we have all right then we are in a great deal of trouble and I think history suggests that if we can't get another option in the space that human societies will pick authoritarians over plutocrats and we don't have time for that because the authoritarians intend not to act on climate change we simply don't have time for this kind of politics apropos of which our iip director Mariana mazakato recently said that the global transition and it's a quote the global transition to a net zero economy simply will not happen at the pace that is needed unless States Embrace their proper role as Market maker and investor in public goods now that is a direct confrontation with neoliberal ideas about climate change but the question we have to ask after that is what are the prerequisites for doing so an effective entrepreneurial state does not simply appear out of nowhere and in Democratic societies which I hope we all aspire to being in Democratic societies political power has to have a social base it has to come from somewhere and an effective entrepreneurial State can't be captive to neoliberal ideology so what do we need to do what is the what is what is what are the implications for the Democratic State the Democratic entrepreneurial state of the collapse of neo-liberalism the first is you've got to throw off the zombie ideology of Market fundamentalism got to embrace the notion that the Democratic state is CR that an effective Democratic state in terms of economics and investment is critical it's not it's not that that is the core role of the state that is not something that is outside what states do secondly we need to ReDiscover democracies proper moral and social con proper moral and social content democracies are not without values democracies are not simply a form of government designed to facilitate Market transactions democracy itself depends on and embodies humanistic solidarity or it doesn't work and is pray essentially to authoritarians who will always be with us waiting and most importantly as an immediate matter the Democratic entrepreneurial state must pursue policies that build the power and voice of citizens and diminish the power of oligarchs and plutocrats and this brings us back to where these lectures on neoliberalism began with trade unions and worker power this is a picture of Starbucks workers in Richmond Virginia where I grew up which was a very conservative place the capital of the Confederacy these young people have voted for a union and they are sitting at the bargaining table with Starbucks is refusing to negotiate now that might I mean they're not literally refusing to negotiate they're they're pretending to negotiate what happens to these young people is is going to determine whether or not it's going to be possible in the United States in a sustained way to build the kind of state that can take on the wicked problems of this world and in particular climate change there's a direct line from what they're doing arguing about how much they get paid to serve a cup of coffee to the question of can we sustain the kind of public investment the Biden Administration has successfully passed that is the at least a first step toward effectively fighting climate change in the end after neoliberalism we face this choice on the one hand authoritarianism plutocracy and runaway climate change alternatively a democratic solidaristic entrepreneurial State capable of taking on the world's wickedest problems poverty and climate change I leave you with these two quotes the fragility of World Systems in the face of the pandemic has demonstrated that not everything can be resolved by market freedom it is also shown that in addition to recovering a sound political life that is not subjected to dictates of Finance we must put human dignity back at the center and on that pillar build the alternative social structures we need that piece of sophisticated political economy comes from Pope Francis whom I think is the most thoughtful person at understanding the linkages between labor and climate change worker power is essential to building our economy back better than before it's just that basic to counter corporate power to grow the economy from the bottom up and the middle out I am so tired of trickle down now that unbelievably is the president of the United States Joe Biden thank you very much [Applause] okay uh uh questions um so what we're going to do as we did last time is one from the room and then one from the larger world and I uh our our Global moderator is going to handle the people from the larger world uh whereas Maddie I think isn't you're in charge of in the room indeed okay um please [Music] thank you so much first of all for a wonderful presentation and the very optimistic presentation which doesn't usually tend to be the case I think um I'm wondering about the extent to which we can really claim a sort of demise of neoliberalism and the two examples that I'm thinking about to question that is first even though you mentioned a lot of these left-wing figures that have become prominent on the political scene in the past few years um the reality is that they haven't been politically successful they're politically present with perhaps is already an improvement over the fact that they were not um and I think here Stormer is an excellent example of this actually because I was just listening to an interview by him yesterday um last week and he kept insisting on how he really thought his policy or his politics was not about government ownership or everything or nationalization or extreme public investment like he really thought the private sector had an important role to play and think that indicates somehow the extent to which the labor party also thinks that it's politically feasible to have some sort of progressive agenda and still be electorally successful and this is despite the fact that they have an amazing lead over the conservatives um and the second example I think is much more Bernal I just think in everyday life neoliberal ideology still has a hold on how people think is the efficient way like the idea of rationality the idea of value for money the idea of efficiency is is present in in much smaller places than National fiscal policy it's present in how think tanks are on its present in-house small corporations run it's presence present in how small businesses do their everyday job and I think if the fight isn't one there then activists or workers on picket lines receive more hatred or abuse than they do support I and I don't think that ideological shift has happened in the public yet what a fantastic question uh and and let me just tell you okay I'm not going to answer your question in full because in many respects in terms of the United Kingdom the next two lectures next Tuesday and the following Tuesday are all about this all right so you have to come to that all right um let me but let me try to let me go back here because as I warned you this was kind of dense where's the zombie and we go back to the zombie uh yeah there's the zombie I want to reiterate this point which I think in part you're making neoliberalism as and Mark Market fundamentalism is is an extreme ideology all right Market fundamentalism is not the view that we should have a mixed economy okay Market fundamentalism is the view that government has no role basically in either investment decisions or in Market shaping right which includes regulation beyond the very minimal sort of like no you know no no watering down the wine kind of thing that that idea of neoliberalism was never the reality but it was a powerful set of ideas and that set of ideas is bankrupt that does not mean that um that the idea that markets have uh a use or that there's a role for business and society that that's a those are different questions but the fact that neoliberalism that market fundamentalism Market fundamentalism the idea the ideology of neoliberalism is bankrupt does not mean it can doesn't continue to live on as a kind of zombie in a lot of places where it's useful for it to live on to various people right Classical liberalism these sort of roughly same set of ideas right was pretty clearly understood to have caused to varying degrees the world wars in the Great Depression and yet it lived on it lived on to some degree at the lse not far from here it lives down at the at Stanford at the Hoover Institute it lived on everywhere there were rich people willing to fund it so so zombieism zombies are dangerous I mean if you've never seen a zombie movie they may be dead but they're dangerous that's why that's what I mean about neoliberalism right it's not that it's vanished it's that it no longer has credibility now the it has to be kind of kept afloat by constant injections of money it's a people know zombie movies there's some weird analogies to that um rather than talk about the United Kingdom because I do want people to come to the next lectures let me just say a word about the United States because I think it will illuminate your question so it is true that neither Elizabeth Warren nor Bernie Sanders nor AOC if you know American politics none of them are president Joe Biden is president he's 80 years old he's a long standing establishment Democrat and yet he is not a neoliberal his administration is not a neoliberal Administration it it's not perfect I have my disagreements with him but it is a significant departure in its core view of the world from its predecessor Democratic administration's post 1980 and perhaps even post 1976. Joe Biden I I I'm a huge fan of Joe Biden I must admit Joe Biden actually remembers in some visceral way the New Deal he carries forward into today the values of the new deal and in some respects the policy ideas of the new deal and that's exactly what we need so um my point is that you that that policy ideas have a way politicians can be very flexible right it's not so much who the the people you see at the head of things it's their teams their ideas their policies and this is by the way not the first time this has happened a a number of historians have pointed out that uh and again this is an American example not a British example a number of historians have pointed out that Franklin Roosevelt was not a particularly left-wing politician and that most of the I if you wanted to understand the policies the New Deal actually adopted were nowhere in the Democratic party platform of 1932 where they were was in the Socialist Party platform of 1932. in uh associated with Norman Thomas that Roosevelt was a very pragmatic person and he died he just picked what he thought he needed Joe Biden is a pragmatist as well I hope that begins to answer your question and please come back for the British version of it uh next week on online um so there is uh this question comes from Ines Costa uh both last week in this week's presentation leaves an acidic taste in one's mouth concerning consultants and Consultants do you agree with the point that without people um willing to grab a bull by the horns to try and change things from within the Consulting industry things will only continue to get worse and for individuals who are working in Consulting in a consulting firm can people change things from within full disclosure this person mentions that they are currently working in one of the big four and then highly relatedly another person asks Anonymous if not by joining a consultancy that may support organizations in reclaiming their political power how can individuals effectively support the repowering of the state all right fantastic I'm so glad that these individuals joined us and thank you in that and and to the uh other personal gather maybe anonymous so let me first say this is uh let me tell you first this little story because it's just so funny uh uh and and um and I will so far first I'll tell you the story and then I'll then I'll give the caveats so just before Enron collapsed so N1 collapsed in it really started collapsing in September of 2001. in July of 2001 when I was a young lawyer at the AFL-CIO through a kind of set of happenstances I got invited to represent the American labor movement at a high-level meeting of um of Business Leaders and NGO leaders at the Aspen Institute in Aspen Colorado which is I have a certain fondness for the Aspen Institute but you can't deny it's a pretty establishment Enterprise discuss the issue of corporate social responsibility in the aftermath of the protests Against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999. which maybe again ancient history for many people but this was again kind of this sort of sign that all was not well in neoliberal land with these protests in which there was a lot of they kind of ended up sort of they what happened in Seattle in 1999 looked a little like what happened in Paris yesterday and it alarmed a lot of people so I got so I got this will I'm going to answer the question but but I got to tell this story about Consultants so I get to Aspen and I'm put in a small group there's a couple of people from the Ford Foundation which is one of the funders of this discussion there's a couple of people from the Aspen institute there's me there's Ken Lay Ken Lay is the CEO of Enron right and there's Rajiv Gupta Raji Gupta is the managing partner of McKinsey now what I didn't know was that McKinsey was enron's largest client so these guys are essentially partners what I also didn't know was that Enron was bankrupt I thought Enron was hugely powerful so so I'm in this small group and we have this bizarre conversation about political influence in which can let Ken Lay asserts that I'm the person that and you know like I'm a 35 year old lawyer right that I'm the person who's the big political power broker and he's just an innocent businessman uh and here's the thing about that conversation I'm the only one who's not been criminally indicted Ken Lay was criminally indicted and probably killed himself before he went to trial some years later rajid Gupta was criminally indicted and convicted of insider trading Securities fraud um now is Raji Gupta typical of McKenzie no most people at McKenzie whatever you think of them are not Crooks all right I've done business with McKinsey and BCG and the big four accounting firms I have friends in all these places I've seen some very important and positive work done by all of them and particularly actually on climate change the problem with Consulting is not a problem of bad people right the problem with Consulting is how these large firms have operated structurally in within large corporations in the context of a larger sort of neoliberal political dynamic and in particular and I think this is what Mariana and Rosie in their book really dig into is the way in which the rise of consulting firms have led to the hollowing out of intellectual capacity inside inside governments and actually inside operating companies a very famous example of this is the old American Telecom Monopoly at T which had one of the greatest research organizations in world history right you can't find something like that internal to a major corporation or at least you couldn't until the the tech platform started accumulating more money than God so what I would say to somebody working in a consulting company is what I would say this to anybody is working anywhere is ask yourself what are you actually doing right what what what is your firm doing what what work are you doing what are you aiding right there are some things in commercial life that are fine it's not it's not a problem there are some things that are good right if you're being asked to estimate uh you know impact of climate change on uh property insurance companies you're probably doing something pretty pretty positive and some things are not positive if you're being asked to break unions to cut people's wages to figure out solutions for authoritarian governments to help some to help pharmaceutical companies gain 40 profit rates at the expense of sick people and you're being asked to do something wrong and you shouldn't do it all right that that's my uh that's my response there I I I I I I don't think there's something intrinsically wrong with working for a consulting company uh sir yeah can I complicate things why not I truly enjoyed what you said about neoliberalism and all its tenets and how they're all disproved over time but when we come to the democracy versus authoritarianism aspect I just want to point out that making policy for the United States must be the the most impossible task for the simple reason the United States is a dual State and it's a dual state in a very exceptional way you've got a nation of 330 330 million people but at the same time you have an overarching atlanticist system that has diametrically opposite needs to the 330 million people in the United States and I dispute the fact that Putin and Jesus being are responding specifically to the neoliberal aspect of our recent history they're responding to the atlanticist veneer on the American state and its policies and I think that engaging and they're too completely different authoritarian States so authoritarianism may sound unified but it is if you look at all the literature the hundreds of different types of authoritarian States so put in inherited amiss that was created by Yeltsin Xi Jinping runs a Lenin estate or like bring I think this is fascinating I'm happy to respond but can you kind of Bring It Together so the question is that that dividing up the the discussion between the Democratic and the authoritarian States is not very fruitful if it wasn't for the Atlantis veneer over on top of the the nation-state of America which is 330 million people whose interests the politicians have at their heart you wouldn't have problems with China and Russia okay um all right this is obviously a gigantic thing um I would just say the following peace first I I think there and I said this a couple of times I I don't I don't think it is correct or even fruitful to conflate the Chinese State and the Russian state they're very very different their societies are very very different but they have something in common which is that they were in the neoliberal order of the 1990s they were um I must put a sort of peripheral uh to the financial center which was in the United States and Europe China was a provider of Labor and Russia was a provider of Natural Resources now they they both would prefer that the authoritarian those authoritarian States would prefer to have more power in the global order than they do now I think that it is actually Putin who has more in common with the other authoritarians that I talked about and she is a different Kettle to fish but what I think what I really want to emphasize here though is two things in response to your question one is I think the moral issues involved in the Ukraine war are completely cut and dried one side is blowing up apartment buildings the other side is not it's that simple as a moral matter but I think as a matter of geostrategy and political economy we need to understand that it's a war whose underlying issues are about climate change that the Russian state is going to is profoundly threatened by effective action on climate change and is seeking to position itself in such a way as to be able to block it and that is the thing that is underneath what's underneath secondly I was once on a radio show in Washington DC where a gentleman who probably had good reason for this kind of feeling said to me I called in and said we live in a we you know we live in a police state today in the United States right we live in an authoritarian state today because I was talking about sort of distinctions and I said to him oh really you really think that so you've just said that you've just accused the United States government being an authoritarian State on the radio in our capital are you at all concerned that the police are coming for you right now not in some abstract thing but you are all concerned that D.C metro was sending a squad car a SWAT team to your house if you were living in an authoritarian State Not only would you be concerned about it they would already be there next uh next question okay this question comes from Ilias costritis what is the relationship between authoritarian neoliberalism and populism to what extent is its Global spread being supercharged by social media specifically myths and disinformation campaigns and relatedly honest in Zhao asks despite the apparent failures of neoliberalism and its proponents its proponents still have a lot of power and continue to hold that power uh in this regard what are the chances of it being defeated okay so the second half of this question really goes back to this issue of zombieism okay um zombies are very dangerous zombies are powerful neoliberalism although as an intellectual structure and in many respects as a political structure has been profoundly weakened and discredited remains a serious threat but the what but in my view what's most the most serious threat is the way in which it facilitates authoritarianism and prevents effective action on issues like climate change where we simply don't have time populism you may notice that there are certain words that don't appear in my presentation and one of them is populism populism is a funny word it can mean all kinds of different things and has often been deployed by neoliberals to try to discredit critics of neoliberalism as somehow being simple-minded populism in Continental Europe tends to have a right wing tone to it people use the word they tend to be talking about right-wing people historically in the United States it's been more of a left-wing term the popular The People's Party the populist movement in the United States was a left-wing movement in 1890s um so I'm sort of suspicious of populism as a term that has a lot of meaning right and and so I've preferred to use the term right-wing authoritarianism um and racism I think racism is really important in understanding what is going on in global society today and what's being mobilized and and by racism I include um I I sort of use it as a catch-all phrase to include religious hatred um uh I I think you know it's being getting all comparative about things like that is just not very useful but but the mobilization the mobilization of hatred across groups right is uh it is sort of a commonality across all of the regimes I was talking about as authoritarian now if one means if one means and I think this is I this is a and I'll stop with this point because the the question kind of opens up into this giant world if one means by populism political States governments that are indifferent or uninterested in expertise science economics you have to be very careful because um as I just went through the committee to save the world where the sort of the world's ultimate experts they turned out to be really fundamentally wrong about just about everything and they admitted It ultimately I'm not sure Bob Rubin would admit it today but Alan Greenspan did in front of a congressional committee so this question of who gets to establish expertise is a politically contested question and populism is a term that's thrown around in the context of arguments about who was really expert who was really smart who's really technically correct about things right what all of my authoritarians have in common though is an assault upon the core ideas of the Enlightenment a an indifference to science not economics but physical science these kinds of things you can call them populism if you wish they are attacks on humanistic values attacks on what Pope Francis talked about in my last slide a refusal to pay attention to science these things are threats to human civilization they are worth fighting all right I don't call them populism I call them what they are right-wing authoritarianism uh do we have time for for more uh I've been I'm being told I'm being told by the authorities that that we've run out of time um I I believe do we have drinks upstairs today yes I'm happy to answer all of your questions upstairs and I urge you to come back next week when we talk about Britain uh and uh if you have questions that are relevant in some way to Britain bring them next week and please give our team a hand here who made this all happen foreign [Applause]

Channel: UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

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Id: TEv0uUx3Byo

Length: 97min 0sec (5820 seconds)

Published: Mon May 15 2023