Near-starvation made Germans fear economic planning and accept markets

Evidence

For Phillip Herder-Dorneich (1993, 13), the success of liberal reforms goes back to the German people, “who had experienced three years of social learning while almost starving to death.” Economic planning experienced then reflected a kind of “children’s fear” (Wallich 1955, 13). But the reforms were also facilitated by massive neoliberal propaganda, which denounced all manner of economic planning as another step toward poverty and deprivation. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 549

Categorization

• QUESTION: The starvation-as-social-learning thesis is striking — worth pursuing how trauma and deprivation shape political-economic preference formation.