The market and neo-liberalism

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The Global Pillage: Whose ‘world economy’ is it, anyway?
By Tim Wheeler, People's Weekly World, 9 November 1996. NAFTA and the World Trade Organization (WTO) are tools with which powerful corporations manipulate the “free market” to control the flow of goods and money around the globe.
The Essence of Neoliberalism
By Pierre Bourdieu, Le Monde diplomatique, December 1998. This tutelary theory of neoliberalism is a pure mathematical fiction. From the start it has been founded on a formidable abstraction. For, in the name of a narrow and strict conception of rationality as individual rationality, it brackets the economic and social conditions of rational orientations and the economic and social structures that are the condition of their application.
Pry Loose the Cold, Hard Fingers of the Market's ‘Invisible Hand’
By Frederick H. Borsch, Lost Angeles Times, 5 February 2001. Blind faith in an invisible hand becomes a form of piety. One of the wonderful things about faith in the hand is that it absolves humans of the responsibility of doing the work of hard thinking and cooperative planning.
What is Neoliberalism? A Brief Definition for Activists
By Elizabeth Martinez and Arnoldo Garcia, CorpWatch, 22 March 2001. “Neo-liberalism” is a set of economic policies that have become widespread during the last 25 years or so. Although the word is rarely heard in the U.S., you can clearly see the effects of neo-liberalism here as the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer.
The Capitalist Market
By Frank Scott, Coastal Post, March 2001. Our supposedly free market is really a fundamentalist religion, with the strengths and weaknesses of any faith-based system. Its foundation is equal parts mythology, creativity, greed and stupidity. Believe that private initiative, despite increasing signs of failure, is superior to social control of life supporting institutions.
The Enron of the Developing World
By Robert Weissman, Washington Post, 25 September 2002. The era of market fundamentalism is over. Marketization, deregulation and privatization, and the opportunities for market manipulation offered by inadequate regulation—all central elements in the rise and fall of Enron—are now discredited in the United States. And in developing countries, where their effects have been most devastating, they are the object of widespread public opprobrium.
There Is No Invisible Hand
By Joseph Stiglitz, Guardian, 20 December 2002. This year's Nobel Prize celebrates a critique of simplistic market economics, just as last year's award (of which I was one of the three winners) did. Last year's laureates emphasised that different market participants have different (and imperfect) information, and these asymmetries in information have a profound impact on how an economy functions. This year's winners discuss market irrationality.
From Keynesianism to Neoliberalism: Shifting Paradigms in Economics
By Thomas I. Palley, Foreign Policy in Focus, May 2004. For the last 25 years, economic policy and the public's thinking have been dominated by a conservative economic philosophy known as neoliberalism. Contemporary neoliberalism is principally associated with the Chicago School of Economics, which emphasizes the efficiency of market competition, the role of individuals in determining economic outcomes, and distortions associated with government intervention and regulation of markets.
Super-sized: What happens when two billion workers join the global labor market?
By Thomas Palley, At Issue (United Auto Workers), Thursday 29 September 2005. There is a famous theorem in international economics—the Stolper-Samuelson theorem—that says when a rich capital-abundant country (such as the U.S.) trades with a poor labor-abundant country (such as China), wages in the rich country fall and profits go up.
Baroque fantasies of a peculiar science
By Philip Ball, The Financial Times, 29 October 2006. It is easy to mock economic theory. Any fool can see that the world of neoclassical economics, which dominates the academic field today, is a gross caricature in which every trader or company acts in the same self-interested way—rational, cool, omniscient. It is tempting to infer that the dominance of neoclassical theory has political origins. But while it has justified many rightwing policies, the truth goes deeper.
The Road from Serfdom: Milton Friedman and the Economics of Empire
By Gred Grandin, Counterpunch, 17 November 2006. Milton Friedman had no idea that his six-day trip to Chile in March 1975 would generate so much controversy. The “Chicago Boys” began to gain real influence in General Augusto Pinochet's military government. Critics of both Pinochet and Friedman took Chile as proof positive that the kind of free-market absolutism advocated by the Chicago School was only possible through repression.