Making sense of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath
is a daunting task. While there have been a number of popular press attempts
like Michael Lewis’ The Big Short or
the documentary Inside Job, the
latter of which took painstaking details to paint a picture of the connections
and players involved in the crisis, Philip Mirowski asks in his recent book Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How
Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown why the aftermath of the 2008
crisis did not spur some broad based legitimation crisis in the dominant
channels and organs of the world’s economic and intellectual elite. Mirowski’s
answer is well reasoned but also somewhat depressing: economic intellectuals
take for granted the scientific elements of economic theory, and, reading
deductively, understand the crisis as expressing not some retroactive judgment
of economics as a discipline but instead as expressing a sort of intrinsic
unpredictability with which those interested in markets and economics will just
have to live.
The book proceeds to make four arguments that are of vital
interest to rhetoricians and those studying the intersection between
argumentation and social theory. 1) Demands for “consensus” reinforce orthodoxy
within economic thought, 2) Economics departments and economics faculty suffer
from a feedback loop problem wherein the economic incentives from coming to
conclusions that will sound good to private sector employers in the financial
sector pollute academic conclusions, 3) “Everyday neoliberalism” is sustained
through quotidian vectors of representations and encounter that naturalize
economic decisions as proceeding from some godlike mantra as opposed to effects
of human action, and 4) Public interventions by public intellectuals in the
area of economics like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman were counterproductive
insofar as they reproduced the notion that there were a limited number of
“sides” to the debate over the crash while also suggesting a minor economic
corrective rather than a wholesale philosophical corrective was needed to
explain not only the crash but also the failure of those who helped cause it to
reflect on their role.
I was very taken by Mirowski’s argument regarding “everyday
neoliberalism,” because while it is, in some ways painfully obvious, he does
lay out some compelling evidence worthy of consideration. For example, phenomena
like the Freakonomics series, which
tries to explain almost every sector of society in economic terms, induce a
certain kind of talking about the economy as something natural. Or, as a friend
and I routinely discuss, the rise of advanced statistics movements in sports,
emblematized by Moneyball, brings
left-progressives over to the side of the market with sexy talk of “market
inefficiencies” and opposition to troglodyte scouts and coaches who just can’t
understand the links between economics and progress. Another good example
Mirowski cites, and one worthy of further study by rhetoricians, is the utter
invisibility of any class outside the “middle class” in the vocabularies of
news media, pundits, and politicians. Again, another rather obvious point, but
stunningly demonstrative: could you go through the roster of leading
politicians in the two major American political parties right now and find a
dozen references to “the poor” or “impoverished” in their speeches and prepared
materials? One wonders if this signals a deep, deep internalization of the
market mantra: don’t mention the poor because those who are impoverished are so
as a matter of their nature as opposed to their will?
The book’s argument with respect to the drive for consensus
as a factor evading substantive engagement with the poverties of economic
theory is also powerful. Mirowski is not only a professor of economics but also
of the history of philosophy. Hence it comes as little surprise that he makes a
claim about the relationship of how knowledge is presumed to work within expert
spheres. Specifically, he argues that there is a tendency to assume that
“expertism” implies “consensus.” Thus where there is absence of consensus, we
do not have expertism as such but
instead failed knowledge production wherein all claims are suspect. Reading
from the famous Frank Luntz global warming memo which suggested that a
consensus on climate science would force legislative action on global warming,
Mirowski suggests that this thinking has proven especially pernicious in the
case of economics, because while public intellectuals like Paul Krugman lob
bombs at central members of what Mirowski calls the “Neoliberal Thought
Collective” the work this does is often to assure the public that there is no
economic consensus while the existence of a thing called “the market” (in the
public view, I mean: Mirowski is very clear that for mainstream neoliberal
economists “the market” does not exist, but is something which makes its own
way in the world independent of economists) continues unabated. Thus the market
continues to do its work even as what “economists” think comes to be
represented as presumptively uncertain. If the central task for those concerned
with the sustainability of the global system and especially those concerned
with the massive inequalities and injustices that exist in the world is to
challenge the mantra that “what markets say is
reality” then minor repairs and rescue operations only emphasize that while
markets do know, humans, even
experts, cannot.
If I had to say a couple things critical of the book, they
would be that Mirowski insufficiently theorizes the history of “expertism” as a
concept in American public life and also that he struggles to locate the
argument of the later Michel Foucault found in The Birth of Biopolitics, which Mirowski cites extensively. Regarding
expertism, Mirowski assumes that the distance between the deliberating public
and the realm of experts is one made by the confusion and misinformation
circulated in public disputes about the economy. This is, as far as it goes,
correct. But Mirowski could do more to highlight how politicians and pundits
navigate the constitutive distance between “economics” and something like a
fluid conception of “the public” (thought of as a discursive figure as opposed
to a demographic) by pointing to how the existence of things as they are
ratifies them retroactively as expressions of a general economic will. That is,
simply by being, things are as “the market” says they are, which bakes in a
certain level of presumption about the status quo. Mirowski seems, in many
parts of the book, to understand this, which makes it all the more puzzling
that he insists on reading the Foucault of The
Birth of Biopolitics as descriptive rather than prescriptive: he insists
that “Foucault…declines to allow that agents are somehow bamboozled by
power/knowledge, since the market is posited to exist in a privileged
epistemological space with special position in the regime of truth.” (p. 100). In
fact, the Foucault of these later lectures provides one of the best possible
answers to the classical dispute about false consciousness that has dogged
progressives, because he argues that the market comes to function as if it were the only site of knowledge
to explain the characteristics of a vast set of “non-economic” sectors i.e.
cultural, familial, etc. Nothing in Foucault says it has to be this way, only that it is.
Overall, this book was very helpful for pushing one to think
about the aftermath of the political crisis. It’s also very accessible:
Mirowski has taken pains to write in a manner accessible to more than just
theory-minded academics. And for the
more academically inclined he makes a host of interesting points, like his
ability to connect the influence of Carl Schmitt to the Chicago School of
economics. I would recommend it to anyone interested in neoliberalism, the 2008
financial crisis, social theory, or the rhetoric of science/rhetoric of
inquiry.
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