[RobertoG]

>"I have never met a Neoliberal"

That's because neoliberalism is not an ideology, but a label used to try to understand a historic period.

Neoliberalism would be the bastard child of neoclassic economics and liberal ideology and it can be defined by events and people that definitely exist.

The intellectual parents would be the economist in the orbit of Milton Friedman and the 'Chicago school' and the political parents would be Reagan and Thatcher. The playground rules would be the Washington Consensus [1].

The foundational charter would be the Powell Manifesto [2], that I recommend to read to everybody that want to get and insight about the last forty years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus [2] http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/

[nickik]

> That's because neoliberalism is not an ideology, but a label used to try to understand a historic period.

No its not. Its a term that is used by pretty much anybody for whatever they felt like.

> The intellectual parents would be the economist in the orbit of Milton Friedman and the 'Chicago school' and the political parents would be Reagan and Thatcher.

That is just false. Friedman never called himself a neoliberal.

The actual word is derived from Post-WW2 German economists, but that term is not used today.

It was after the Pinochet coup that the political left has started to use the term 'neoliberal' as a politcal slur against anybody who they don't like. The use of the term has exploded since then and has be now become to mean about the same thing as 'evil'.

There is no actual 'neoliberal' philosophy or any neoliberals. Only people who leftists politics accuses of such, that includes everybody from some left supply-siders to crypto-anarchists.

The amount of different polices and ideas that are 'neoliberal' by some definition are so broad that the term is meaningless. This has been shown in research on the use of the term across many fields.

> > The playground rules would be the Washington Consensus [1].

The idea that the 'Washington Consensus' derive from the same basic ideas as the classical liberal ideas (such as Friedman) are also wrong. Classical liberals have been among the people who have very much opposed things like IMF and World Bank.

You make your live very easy by just throwing everything you don't like into some big evil 'neoliberal' bucket without an detailed understanding of the different people, schools of thought, historical events and so on that influenced and/or shaped any one or all of the things you don't like. This is not all part of some grand 'neoliberal' conspiracy.

[RobertoG]

Well, of course, now that the label it's fashionable, it's going to be used by everybody for everything. A little like using "nano" a few years ago, or "AI" nowadays. That doesn't mean that the term was originally void of meaning as you claim.

>"This is not all part of some grand 'neoliberal' conspiracy."

I beg to differ. Perhaps, conspiracy it's not the word, but very concrete policies have been imposed all around the world by very powerful actors. Those actors are clearly defined, and the times when this happened are also clear. So we can talk of a "neo-liberal" period. After all, we have to call it something.

>"The idea that the 'Washington Consensus' derive from the same basic ideas as the classical liberal ideas (such as Friedman) are also wrong"

Maybe they don't derive from the same basic ideas, but, for sure those ideas have been used to justify it.

[nickik]

> That doesn't mean that the term was originally void of meaning as you claim.

Historically it goes back to Post-WW2 German economist. You are also not using that definition.

The point is that the word 'neoliberalism' has gone threw a number of different definitions, and you are just focusing on one that was coined and almost exclusively used in a far left political movement, because they were unhappy with all classical liberals, everybody on the right and even the center left.

To be more exact the research shows pretty clearly that it was after the Coup in Chile where the left started criticizing that government any anything they saw related to it as 'neoliberal' and after that the term exploded and became ever broader in meaning.

There are a few papers that study the history and use of the word that you can search for.

> I beg to differ. Perhaps, conspiracy it's not the word, but very concrete policies have been imposed all around the world by very powerful actors.

Yes but if you look at those then you will notice that is was implemented by a wide variety of different parties with different ideologies. The reasons given were also different in different places with different goals.

The people who recommend the polices also came from different schools of economics and different backgrounds.

If you sum this all up as 'neoliberalism', is a waste oversimplification that mostly serves as a political 'its was better before neoliberalism' and has not much content otherwise.

> Maybe they don't derive from the same basic ideas, but, for sure those ideas have been used to justify it.

Again, sure, but if you just throw all into the same 'neoliberal' bucket then you will never understand the differences between the wide variety of opinion on these things. Development economics has a long an complex history with many different economists giving their input, the 'Washington Consensus' was one particular idea written down by one set of people with a wide variety of opinions inspired by lots of different ideas from the history of development economics and economics more broadly.

This of course includes Friedmans and many others. Many economists would agree with part of the WC and others would agree with the idea but not with the way it was implemented. Others disagree with the whole approach. All of them are often called 'neoliberal'. The opinions are very different, labaling it all 'neoliberal' is only helpful for politics, not for understand the how and why of individual polices.

[RobertoG]

>"Historically it goes back to Post-WW2 German economist. You are also not using that definition."

I don't know about other users of the word. Part of the wikipedia definition, that I agree with, and I think reflects the current consensus of the word is:

"These market-based ideas and the policies they inspired constitute a paradigm shift away from the post-war Keynesian consensus which lasted from 1945 to 1980."

So, what make neoliberalism, as a word, informative is that it represents a change from another period. That makes, in my opinion, the word useful and informative. If you recognize there was a change, how do you call this period if not 'neoliberal'?

>"Yes but if you look at those then you will notice that is was implemented by a wide variety of different parties with different ideologies. "

Maybe we are looking to different things, but when I look to it what I see, for instance, is the IMF and a few other "american and european" institutions imposing development paths, that they didn't follow in the past, as the 'obvious' solution. And keep insisting in it, never mind the results.

[nerfhammer]

though I otherwise agree with your points, a minor nitpick:

Lack of self-identification with the term doesn't necessarily matter. The terms "mercantilism" and "capitalism" were popularized by their critics (Smith, Marx) without anyone calling themselves a "mercantilist" etc.

Otherwise, yea "neoliberal" just seems to mean "the parts of more or less mainstream economics that I am feeling cranky about at the moment and would feel validated if it were reified into a bogeyman that we should all be outraged at."