Yet another Polanyiesque critique of the modern neoliberal order: Wolfgang Münchau: The Crisis of Modern Liberalism Is Down to Market Forces: "Kartte was an old-fashioned German ordoliberal.... The macroeconomics of German ordoliberalism is somewhat dodgy. But they excelled at one particular thing. Their intellectual leaders explained better than anyone else how the German liberal order of the 1920s collapsed and how it drove a majority of the population away from supporting it. The short, flippant answer is that the Weimar Republic favoured the big guy...
...When the ordoliberals finally came to power in postwar Germany, they began by tilting the playing field in the other direction by creating a corporate and financial infrastructure to support small and medium-sized companies. Germany’s Mittelstand is both a reason for German robustness, but also for stagnation. And one of the main lessons of modern economic history is we cannot be oblivious to the distribution of income and wealth. This is not an argument about redistribution. This is about actively managing capitalism’s playing field to ensure that the majority of the population stays on it....
What often leads the supporters and defenders of modern liberal democracy astray in their analysis is their addiction to macroeconomic aggregate variables such as gross domestic product and the officially recorded rate of unemployment. The decade before the Brexit referendum was a decade of reasonable GDP growth.... [But] household income after housing costs stagnated for the 60 per cent of households towards the bottom of the income distribution between 2002 and 2015. The current wave of discontent in France also contrasts with relatively solid GDP growth since the financial crisis. But a study by the McKinsey Global Institute showed that income growth came to an abrupt halt for almost all households in the advanced economies.... Any system that leaves behind 60 per cent of households will eventually fail. It is the ultimate irony: liberalism is failing because of market forces...
#noted
