Neoliberals reject market-failure theory, so they cannot see crisis as market glitch
Evidence
With regard to the crisis, one wing of neoliberals has appealed to natural science concepts of “complexity” to suggest that markets transcend the very possibility of management of systemic risk. However, the presumed relationship of the market to nature tends to be substantially different under neoliberalism than under standard neoclassical theory. In brief, neoclassical theory has a far more static conception of market ontology than do the neoliberals. In neoclassical economics, many theoretical accounts portray the market as somehow susceptible to “incompleteness” or “failure,” generally due to unexplained natural attributes of the commodities traded: these are retailed under the rubric of “externalities,” “incomplete markets,” or other “failures.” Neoliberals conventionally reject all such recourse to defects or glitches, in favor of a narrative where evolution and/or “spontaneous order” brings the market to ever more complex states of self-realization, which may escape the ken of mere humans. This explains why the NTC has rejected out of hand all neoclassical “market failure” explanations of the crisis. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 154
Categorization
- XREF: Explains why the neoliberal response to 2008 never adopted mainstream ‘market failure’ framing - ties to Mirowski’s description of the NTC and the shift from static neoclassical ontology to evolutionary/spontaneous-order narrative. — connects to: The financial system failed to foresee crisis because its risk theory denied catastrophes — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 100; Crises recurring across eras implies neoliberalism may not cause them — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 1787; Neoliberals disagree sharply among themselves about what a market is — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 151 (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- Crises have not discredited neoliberal governance
#contradicts(0.85) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 749