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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2674 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 3, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I usually describe myself as a classical liberal with libertarian tendencies.

Is that uh, the same as being neoliberal?

Doing my due diligence (looking at the Wikipedia article), I lean against "austerity", at least in most contexts that aren't Greece, I'm agnostic on privatization of everything, and while I think less regulation is directionally good, I have no idea how far they take it.

My impression is that "neoliberal" is a phrase invoked to describe people and not one they usually chose themselves, not that that's a particular deal breaker. If the shoe fits, albeit with some pinching, I'll wear it.

The only group of people who described themselves as neoliberal offline were a group of left-wing foreign policy wonks centred around The New Republic who thought that Reagan was right and the left was wrong about the Soviet Union. This has nothing to do with the modern meaning.

At some point neoliberal became a hostile term used by opponents to describe the pro-free-market movement that grew up around the Austrian and Chicago schools of economics, the Mont Pelerin society, various British libertarian thinktanks etc. and would inform the Thatcher/Reagan/Pinochet governments. Because people are not careful about the precise meaning of insults, it gradually became a snarl used by lefties to mean "Someone with economic policy views to my right who I dislike" in the same way that "fascist" now means "Someone with social policy views to my right who I dislike."

As far as I am aware, and Wikipedia agrees, nobody called themselves "neoliberal" during the early 21st century period when the term entered the popular consciousness in a big way.

/r/neoliberal is an ironic reclamatory use of the term by a bunch of internet autists. A few very online public intellectuals, notably Matthew Yglesias, have joined in, but in general namefags with prestigious platforms avoid the term and call themselves things like "classical liberals", "liberaltarians", "state capacity libertarians", or outside the US just "liberals". The politics of /r/neoliberal are basically pro-establishment and pro-globohomo, but less cucked about it than pro-establishment politicians. If I had a short way of summing up /r/neoliberal's politics, it would be "Globohomo is 90% correct on social issues*. On economic issues, explicit tax-and-spend redistribution is better than left-wing regulation." For various sizes of the redistributive state, this is consistent with everything from Thatcherism to Blairism to Swedish Social Democracy - and the /r/neoliberal crowd understand this, and find all of the above sympathetic. The big areas where the consensus on the sub differs from Blair/Clinton/Macron centrist mush in practice is that they want to abolish stupid-but-popular regulations like NIMBY zoning and that they tend to favour simple-but-probably-effective policies like LVT-funded UBI over policies which are heavily wonkified to produce no sympathetic losers or unpopular winners.

It is worth noting that the platform of "Free product and labour markets, competent government, regulation for health/safety/environment issues but not to promote economic fairness, appropriate redistribution designed to minimise distortions." is not novel - from a non-American perspective it is just the same old liberal tradition going back to Adam Smith (the British and Continental European traditions did support the New Deal/Keynesian economic model when it was the current thing, but they never made it part of their identity the way the American liberal tradition did). It is American libertarianism that is weird - every society that was super-Dunbar scale and rich enough to afford it has had coercively funded poor relief, government roads etc.

* And the culture on /r/neoliberal would so own being described as globohomo

I've always understood neolibs and neocons as being ready and willing to expand their ideas abroad. As in, "other countries should adopt free markets and free elections for their own good or else"

There's a post-ironic reclamation of the term over in /r/neoliberal which is similarly more on the 'state-capacity libertarianism' train (see tyler cowen) than austerity, though besides the austerity associations SEP has a fairly even-handed take. The sub's sidebar scratches the surface of the many attempts to navigate all the polysemy and pull out something coherent (see, e.g. genesis of a political swearword) but ideology would only be half of the coin. The other half would be the culture, particularly the internet-situated culture of it all which shares some genealogical roots with 2000s EA/rationalism/atheism/dev/techno-optimist blog culture but largely inflected via yimby/urbanism and the economics profession (the sub is a political shit-posty spinoff of /r/badeconomics). This differentiates them from the standard run-of-the-mill SSC readers by drawing much more from economists, particularly Acemoglu and Robinson in Why Nations Fail and The Narrow Corridor (though SSC's anti-ancap faq remains seminal). There's a Fukuyamist thread running through there as well, that marks their foreign policy apart from the more isolationist tendencies typical to libertarianism.

For another angle, Liam Bright also identified the sub, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as a synecdoche for one of a few different trends in anglo-american analytic philosophy here.

Someone once asked me to cross-post a popular essay I wrote on the SSC sub (and here) to /r/neoliberal, which I suppose is evidence of something I guess! It also got like 10 upvotes there, which is an entirely different kind of evidence but maybe more that nobody read it haha.

The faster-paced discursive soul of the sub is in the daily discussion threads: https://neoliber.al/dt

Last I checked NL's daily discussion threads were actually by an order of magnitude the most active on all of reddit. The ping groups for special interests are part of that.

If your post wasn't posted to a ping group it'd be easy for it to get lost.

Perusing /r/neoliberal tells me it's not a fit for me, though I might use it as a slur. Though it seems many willingly apply it to themselves.

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