- Title
- Full employment abandoned: the triumph of ideology over evidence
- Creator
- Mitchell, William
- Relation
- 3 Decades of Economic Diversity: Essays on Labour, Technology and Monetary Economics in Honour of Prof. Dr. Joan Muysken p. 95-113
- Relation
- http://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/web/show/id=3349092/langid=43
- Publisher
- Maastrich University
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- The global economic crisis exposed the neo-liberal promise - that markets can self-regulate and deliver sustained prosperity for all - as a lie. But that doesn’t seem to have registered with governments, which have, without exception, built their responses to the crisis on a series of myths - the same myths that caused the crisis. The crisis was the culmination of three decades of policy choices made by governments infested with this neo-liberal lie. The Great Depression showed that markets fail badly if left unregulated and that governments have a strong role to play as an employer and a spender. Unfortunately, in the 1980s, governments abandoned these responsibilities and introduced widespread deregulation. This unleashed the destructive dynamics of capitalism, which mixed greed, criminality (for example, Enron, Libor scandal) and incompetence into a lethal cocktail, and, ultimately manifested as the crisis. Now with millions unemployed, youth jobless rates in excess of 55 per cent in some advanced nations, inequality and poverty rates rising, and massive daily losses of national income being endured, governments have claimed that there is no alternative but to impose austerity by cutting budget deficits. In most nations - whether in government or opposition - the unquestioned dominance of neoliberal ideology has not only homogenised the political debate but also obscured the only credible route to recovery.
- Subject
- GFC; neoliberalism; capitalism; economic theory
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1049627
- Identifier
- uon:15058
- Identifier
- ISBN:9789056814205
- Language
- eng
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