The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

by Naomi Klein

The colonization of the World Bank and the IMF by the Chicago School was a largely unspoken process, but it became official in 1989 when John Williamson unveiled what he called “the Washington Consensus.” It was a list of economic policies that he said both institutions now considered the bare minimum for economic health—“the common core of wisdom embraced by all serious economists.”25 These policies, masquerading as technical and uncontentious, included such bald ideological claims as all “state enterprises should be privatized” and “barriers impeding the entry of foreign firms should be abolished.”26 When the list was complete, it made up nothing less than Friedman’s neoliberal triumvirate of privatization, deregulation /free trade and drastic cuts to government spending. These were the policies, Williamson said, “that were being urged on Latin America by the powers-that-be in Washington.”27 Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and one of the last holdouts against the new orthodoxy, wrote that “Keynes would be rolling over in his grave were he to see what has happened to his child.”