Jun 28, 2026 · 1 hr 1 min · 10 segments
"Neoliberalism" has become a epithet applied to almost everything. And yet it represented a real political movement, one captured governance in America for decades. Join Samantha Hancox-Li and Nick…
Nick HanauerGuest
Samantha Hancox-LiHost
So neoliberalism is an ideology, an economic ideology that in turn was abstracted from what we call neoclassical economics.
That's the formal theoretical framework that you would call today the orthodoxy.
And so neoliberalism are the sort of rules of thumb, intuitions, heuristics that the society abstracts from this formal economic theory.
It is effectively the operating system of the world and has been sort of since the mid-'70s, early-'80s.
Yeah, I like that discussion of how there's the high church neoliberalism, right, the kind of stuff you might get from an economist or a classically trained economist.
right, that kind of percolates out into the larger world that you say, like, operates as rules of thumb for different people.
The orthodox theoretical framework would tell you, for example, that the economy is an equilibrium system, which means if one thing goes up, another thing goes down.
and that it's what's called Pareto optimal, which means that basically the stuff within that system has been distributed in the perfectly socially and economically optimal way.
And within that framework, it is true by definition, it's intrinsic to the mathematics of the system, that if one thing like wages goes up, another thing like the number of jobs in the system has to go down effectively by a corresponding amount.
So there is this set of formal technical ideas within the neoclassical layer, the formal theoretical layer, that turns into a heuristic like raising wages kills jobs, that if you raise the minimum wage, it will harm the very people you're intending to help.
Does that clarify the difference between the scientific layer and the social and ideological layer?
I probably were gonna be circling back around these questions all this time, but I also kind of wanna ask a historical question, which is where did these ideas come from and how did they become dominant
So neoliberalism is an ideology, an economic ideology that in turn was abstracted from what we call neoclassical economics.
That's the formal theoretical framework that you would call today the orthodoxy.
And so neoliberalism are the sort of rules of thumb, intuitions, heuristics that the society abstracts from this formal economic theory.
It is effectively the operating system of the world and has been sort of since the mid-'70s, early-'80s.
Yeah, I like that discussion of how there's the high church neoliberalism, right, the kind of stuff you might get from an economist or a classically trained economist.
right, that kind of percolates out into the larger world that you say, like, operates as rules of thumb for different people.
The orthodox theoretical framework would tell you, for example, that the economy is an equilibrium system, which means if one thing goes up, another thing goes down.
and that it's what's called Pareto optimal, which means that basically the stuff within that system has been distributed in the perfectly socially and economically optimal way.
And within that framework, it is true by definition, it's intrinsic to the mathematics of the system, that if one thing like wages goes up, another thing like the number of jobs in the system has to go down effectively by a corresponding amount.
So there is this set of formal technical ideas within the neoclassical layer, the formal theoretical layer, that turns into a heuristic like raising wages kills jobs, that if you raise the minimum wage, it will harm the very people you're intending to help.
Does that clarify the difference between the scientific layer and the social and ideological layer?
I probably were gonna be circling back around these questions all this time, but I also kind of wanna ask a historical question, which is where did these ideas come from and how did they become dominant
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