At its worst, neo-liberalism takes a dynamic system like free market capitalism, which is capable of spectacular creativity and ingenuity, and reduces it to a boring exercise in ‘how we can buy these widgets 10 per cent cheaper’. It has also propelled a narrow-minded technocratic caste into power, who achieve the appearance of expert certainty by ignoring large parts of what makes markets so interesting. The psychological complexity of human behaviour is reduced to a narrow set of assumptions about what people want, which means they design a world for logical rather than psycho-logical people.
...more
