Neoliberal policy experiments are preconditions that make economic research findings possible

Evidence

This outline of the history of neoliberal experiments in Peru indicates the extensive work involved in reorganizing the country in ways that made the subsequent research experiment possible. Contacts were made, advocacy training was organized, funding was arranged, fieldwork was undertaken, goals were established, political alliances were formed, elections were won, technologies were put in place to survey properties and record their ownership, and questionnaires were distributed and returned. All this experimentation and programming belongs to the work of economics. It organizes the world in ways that provided neoliberal economics with the opportunity to produce its facts. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1955

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: how the ‘natural experiment’ framing launders deliberate political intervention into seemingly passive observational data.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that fieldwork, advocacy and political wins are all ‘the work of economics’ — that policy shaping precedes and enables fact production — inverts the standard fact-then-policy sequence and deserves sustained reflection.
• XREF: connects to: NSF-funded research helped originate the conservative economic ideas now used to justify cutting NSF. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 805; Neoliberal restructuring programs served as whole-economy experiments producing economic facts. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1917; Economics tests claims by treating the world itself as a laboratory. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1915 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Economic ‘natural experiments’ depend on prior policy programs, not nature #corroborates (0.95) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1985
• Neoliberal policies produced experiments whose results fed yet more neoliberal projects #expands (0.90) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1983
• Prior experiments determine which economic facts even become available and plausible #expands (0.90) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1986
• Economists’ natural experiments depend on infrastructure built by real-world projects #corroborates (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1940