Neoliberal economists advocated private credit to deliver inclusion without wealth redistribution

Evidence

The key figures in American neoliberalism cannot of course be held responsible for the enormous liberalization of financial markets that took place from the 1980s onward. But they were certainly some of the first to advocate private over public deficit spending as a way of financing investment in “human capital,” and the first to call for the subsidization of private credit markets as a way of satisfying the minority desires unleashed by the 1960s’ social revolution. Friedman and Becker could not have foreseen how dramatically consumer credit markets would expand in the following decades, nor could they have anticipated how closely the student loan market would approximate their policy prescriptions. Yet they understood very clearly how private credit markets could perform democratic inclusion without disturbing the economic structures of private family wealth. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 259

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: did Becker/Friedman explicitly frame private credit as answering the 1960s social revolution, and what did they write on family wealth preservation as a design goal?
• XREF: connects to: Neoliberal deregulation replaced social protection with credit and indebtedness — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 746; Neoliberalism triumphed through political arguments against redistribution, not market-efficiency claims — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 437

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal deregulation replaced social protection with credit and indebtedness #exemplifies (0.90) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 746
• Neoliberalism triumphed through political arguments against redistribution, not market-efficiency claims #expands (0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 437