Monday, August 21, 2017

Bureaucrats

This Guardian essay on neoliberalism is frustrating in some ways (too cloudy at key points, and too prone to ad hominem insults), but it's interesting, and brings out the importance of Friedrich von Hayek, whose work probably ought to be engaged with more just because it has been so influential. With that in mind I started reading the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on him. It contains this gem:
Bureaucrats experience mistakes not as events from which they need to learn but rather as events that they need to cover up. 

4 comments:

  1. from the man who literally wrote the book:
    http://public.econ.duke.edu/~erw/190/Mirowski%20Defining%20Neoliberalism.pdf

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    1. Thanks. "Their readers in Chile may not have known it, but this was pure unadulterated Schmitt" is a good line too.

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  2. sure.
    https://theintercept.com/2017/08/09/atlas-network-alejandro-chafuen-libertarian-think-tank-latin-america-brazil/

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    1. That's depressing, but important. This is more encouraging: http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/docs/2010/chapter6.pdf

      "Clearly, economic growth and structural change are necessary for sustained poverty reduction. Wholesale trade liberalization, however, is not the best strategy for this."

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