Chile’s future pension privatizer argued markets betrayed Christian human dignity

Evidence

Prior to the coup, a young economics student at the Catholic University wrote a critique of the dominant monetarist perspective of his economics school, whose blindness to social misery, he argued, was an affront to the university’s Christian anthropology. The student stressed that ‘certain economic structures’ could never allow ‘man … to live in conditions which are compatible with human dignity’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 352

Categorization

• QUESTION: What made Piñera flip from Christian critique of monetarism to architect of privatized pensions? A possible line to chase in the literature on the Chicago Boys’ Catholic alliances.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s ADDENDUM material on sacrifice/neocolonialism and to the broader question of how market reformers dressed themselves in Christian morality. — connects to: Neoliberal pension privatization was built by a former Catholic critic of monetarism — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 352; Corporate Catholicism and neoliberalism reconciled in Chile around depoliticizing civil society. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 357; Chile’s 1979 Seven Modernizations privatized social reproduction as a private responsibility — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 354
• STORYSTEM: The young student who critiques the market school in Christian terms, then becomes the world’s first fully privatized pension architect — a character arc for narrative fiction about ideological conversion.

Broader Connections

• Corporate Catholicism and neoliberalism reconciled in Chile around depoliticizing civil society. #expands (0.85) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 357
• Chile’s 1979 Seven Modernizations privatized social reproduction as a private responsibility #expands (0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 354