Prisoners Of Reason: Game Theory And Neoliberal Political Economy Book Pdf

[Vonnie Halcon]

<div>S. M. Amadae is conducting research on how neoliberal capitalism anticipates the political illiberalism which stoke national populism. She is currently a University Lecturer in Politics at the University of Helsinki, Finland and is studying the Nordic welfare model and its cooperative business form as a non-utopian alternative to neoliberal forms of political economy. Current work also includes research on the impact of systemic discrimination. She also holds appointments of Research Affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge; and Research Affiliate in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. Her publications include Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy (Cambridge University Press 2016) and the award-winning Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (University of Chicago Press, 2003).</div><div></div><div></div><div>S. M. Amadae is conducting research on how neoliberal capitalism anticipates the political illiberalism which stoke national populism. She is currently a University Lecturer in Politics at the University of Helsinki, Finland and is studying the Nordic welfare model as a non-utopian alternative to neoliberal forms of political economy. She also holds appointments of Research Affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge; and Research Affiliate in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. Her publications include Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy (Cambridge University Press 2016) and the award-winning Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (University of Chicago Press, 2003).</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>Prisoners Of Reason: Game Theory And Neoliberal Political Economy Book Pdf</div><div></div><div>Download Zip: https://t.co/RbHe2GqFCq </div><div></div><div></div><div>In sum, hermeneutics urges an end to philosophical naiveté in the use of rational choice. Any researcher who picks up this tool in light of the foregoing discussion must ask careful questions like: What are the ideological ramifications of modeling social, economic, and political reality in this way? What are the limits of this idealized formalism? What does it hide from the economic situation in question? What does it illuminate? How do the formal heuristic elements relate back to the world of thick cultural and historical selves? Is there a good fit with the self-interpretive situation of the particular individuals being studied? How does the articulation of economic theory fit inside a particular historical instantiation of economy and the meanings and practices of a given community?</div><div></div><div></div><div>Because economics is not conducted in isolation from its object of study, economists must remain aware of the role economic discourse has in shaping political reality. To study economics always has the potential to reshape economies in nontrivial ways. The case of Marxist economics is dramatic in this regard but at this point so should neoliberal uses (and the same point holds for Keynesianism, mercantilism, and every other kind of economic paradigm). The study of economics is itself a practice internal to economic and political reality.</div><div></div><div></div><div>Current research explores the seeds of illiberal political movements in post-1970s neoliberal capitalism consistent with the Washington Consensus, and also investigates contemporary threats to nuclear security posed by cyber attacks.</div><div></div><div></div><div>Now, after nearly half a century, the verdict is in. Virtually every one of these policies has failed, even on their own terms. Enterprise has been richly rewarded, taxes have been cut, and regulation reduced or privatized. The economy is vastly more unequal, yet economic growth is slower and more chaotic than during the era of managed capitalism. Deregulation has produced not salutary competition, but market concentration. Economic power has resulted in feedback loops of political power, in which elites make rules that bolster further concentration.</div><div></div><div></div><div>The existential threat of global climate change reflects the incompetence of markets to accurately price carbon and the escalating costs of pollution. The British economist Nicholas Stern has aptly termed the worsening climate catastrophe history's greatest case of market failure. Here again, this is not just the result of failed theory. The entrenched political power of extractive industries and their political allies influences the rules and the market price of carbon. This is less an invisible hand than a thumb on the scale. The premise of efficient markets provides useful cover.</div><div></div><div></div><div>As the great political historian Karl Polanyi warned, when markets overwhelm society, ordinary people often turn to tyrants. In regimes that border on neofascist, klepto-capitalists get along just fine with dictators, undermining the neoliberal premise of capitalism and democracy as complements. Several authoritarian thugs, playing on tribal nationalism as the antidote to capitalist cosmopolitanism, are surprisingly popular.</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>Market failure was dismissed as a rare special case; government failure was said to be ubiquitous. Theorists worked hand in glove with lobbyists and with public officials. But in every major case where neoliberal theory generated policy, the result was political success and economic failure.</div><div></div><div></div><div>Human capital theory, another variant of neoliberal application of markets to partly social questions, justified deregulating labor markets and crushing labor unions. Unions supposedly used their power to get workers paid more than their market worth. Likewise minimum wage laws. But the era of depressed wages has actually seen a decline in rates of productivity growth. Conversely, does any serious person think that the inflated pay of the financial moguls who crashed the economy accurately reflects their contribution to economic activity? In the case of hedge funds and private equity, the high incomes of fund sponsors are the result of transfers of wealth and income from employees, other stakeholders, and operating companies to the fund managers, not the fruits of more efficient management.</div><div></div><div></div><div>There is a broad literature discrediting this body of pseudo-scholarly work in great detail. Much of neoliberalism represents the ever-reliable victory of assumption over evidence. Yet neoliberal theory lived on because it was so convenient for elites, and because of the inertial power of the intellectual capital that had been created. The well-funded neoliberal habitat has provided comfortable careers for two generations of scholars and pseudo-scholars who migrate between academia, think tanks, K Street, op-ed pages, government, Wall Street, and back again. So even if the theory has been demolished both by scholarly rebuttal and by events, it thrives in powerful institutions and among their political allies.</div><div></div><div></div><div>As free-market theory resurged, many moderate liberals embraced these policies. In the inflationary 1970s, regulation became a scapegoat that supposedly deterred salutary price competition. Some, such as economist Alfred Kahn, President Carter's adviser on deregulation, supported deregulation on what he saw as the merits. Other moderates supported neoliberal policies opportunistically, to curry favor with powerful industries and donors. Market-like policies were also embraced by liberals as a tactical way to find common ground with conservatives.</div><div></div><div></div><div>The failure of neoliberalism as economic and social policy does not mean that markets never work. A command economy is even more utopian and perverse than a neoliberal one. The practical quest is for an efficient and equitable middle ground.</div><div></div><div></div><div>The neoliberal story of how the economy operates assumes a largely frictionless marketplace, where prices are set by supply and demand, and the price mechanism allocates resources to their optimal use in the economy as a whole. For this discipline to work as advertised, however, there can be no market power, competition must be plentiful, sellers and buyers must have roughly equal information, and there can be no significant externalities. Much of the 20th century was practical proof that these conditions did not describe a good part of the actual economy. And if markets priced things wrong, the market system did not aggregate to an efficient equilibrium, and depressions could become self-deepening. As Keynes demonstrated, only a massive jolt of government spending could restart the engines, even if market pricing was partly violated in the process.</div><div></div><div></div><div>Nonetheless, in many sectors of the economy, the process of buying and selling is close enough to the textbook conditions of perfect competition that the price system works tolerably well. Supermarkets, for instance, deliver roughly accurate prices because of the consumer's freedom and knowledge to shop around. Likewise much of retailing. However, when we get into major realms of the economy with positive or negative externalities, such as education and health, markets are not sufficient. And in other major realms, such as pharmaceuticals, where corporations use their political power to rig the terms of patents, the market doesn't produce a cure.</div><div></div><div></div><div>The political reversal of neoliberalism can only come through practical politics and policies that demonstrate how government often can serve citizens more equitably and efficiently than markets. Revision of theory will take care of itself. There is no shortage of dissenting theorists and empirical policy researchers whose scholarly work has been vindicated by events. What they need is not more theory but more influence, both in the academy and in the corridors of power. They are available to advise a new progressive administration, ifthat administration can get elected and if it refrains from hiring neoliberal advisers.</div><div></div><div></div><div>Neoliberalism, also neo-liberalism,[1] is a term used to signify the late-20th century political reappearance of 19th-century ideas associated with free-market capitalism after it fell into decline following the Second World War.[2][3][4] A prominent factor in the rise of conservative and right-libertarian organizations, political parties, and think tanks, and predominantly advocated by them,[5][6] it is generally associated with policies of economic liberalization, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society.[7][8][9][10][11] The neoliberal project is also focused on designing institutions and has a political dimension.[12][13][14][15] The defining features of neoliberalism in both thought and practice have been the subject of substantial scholarly debate.[16][17]</div><div></div><div> dd2b598166</div>