Tagged "neoliberalism"

Teresa Hayter’s ‘Aid as Imperialism’, was one of the first somewhat critical texts written about the post world-war II monetary institutions, from a so called insider’s view. Having spent some time employed at the Overseas Development Institute, the World Bank financed Teresa’s research on the effectiveness of aid packages provided to Third World countries. Given it was intended as a publication on behalf of the ODI, one certainly encounters a report which offers an objective overview of the various policy approaches that these institutions taken. The first half of the text, is an outline, not a critique. The second half turns to evaluating the implementation of these approaches in several countries. Here is where we find a critical evaluation, which best portrays the inflexibility of foreign aid packages, which, Teresa believed, were given more so as blanket prescriptions, dogmas even. A standard buffet of currency devaluations and austerity measures — liberalize, liberalize, liberalize! It is for this reason that the Overseas Development Institute rejected the original report for publication. Fortunately, it eventually made it’s way to us common readers. The following is an excerpt from the text, focusing on the involvement of these aid agencies in Chile, a country which is emblematic of the deep difficulties of modernization and sovereignty in the global periphery.

In looking to imagine and crystallise potential alternatives to the seemingly unending vortex of underdevelopment and poverty in third and second world nations, an understanding of the deficiencies and insufficiencies of the current macroeconomic arrangement is an obvious starting point. The post-Bretton Woods monetary consensus, which promised to guarantee mutual ‘real growth’ through endless liberalization of domestic markets and fluctuating exchange rates, has in whole been failure for developing countries. Instead, of self-sufficiency and self-confidence, there isn’t even what one one called ‘multi-lateral beneficence’, but rather, a reliance and dependency on the most powerful players in the game, at the mercy of commodities swings and speculative exuberance (rather than being ’liberated’ and domestically sound, buffered from ‘shocks’). One wonders what one would do if they swapped shoes. What shall we do once we take control of these responsibilities?

This is part 2 of the post on Jason Fung’s ‘Cancer Code’. I found this a remarkable case point in the iatrogenic potential of public health interventions in which the effect on mortality is masked by a surrogate of survival; early detection. When tracked for long enough time, early detection does more harm than good, and thus, fails as a successful surrogate. You can find part one here.

I encourage everyone to read the entirety of Jason’s “The Cancer Code”. It’s a terrific work of ‘popular’ scientific writing, a story as much about the biology of Cancer as it is about the sociology of biomedical practice and research.

This post will be in two parts, both of which I find are illustrative of the difficulties of public health strategies. One makes particularly obvious the severe misanthropic consequences of profit seeking drives in the areas of health and medicine, and the second is a remarkable case point in the iatrogenic potential of public health interventions which may be completely benevolent in intention – something that all states irrespective of political structure must address. Part one is contained below, you can find part two (here)[]

This is a chapter out of Graham Harrison’s Book “Neoliberal Africa: The Impact of Global Social Engineering”. Although the book is more of an essay containing fragmentary thoughts, I found this chapter substantial in the sense that it clearly outlined the various institutional avenues in which projects such as neoliberalism cement their ideology.

This chapter considers the global emergence of neoliberalism. It looks at the ways in which neoliberal practice has emerged, expanded and established for itself ‘paradigmatic’ status. In other words, it shows how neoliberalism has shifted from an ambitious and embryonic set of policy interventions to something resembling a framework or set of premisses within which policy is articulated. The practices of neoliberalism have been iterated over such time as to shift the habits, conduct and repertoire of development practice tout court. The layering of large numbers of neoliberal policies has not only led to a progressively more totalising implementation of liberalisation; it has also defined the terms upon which policy and development are thought about and articulated per se. This is, of course, not a completed process (in the last chapter we developed a framework which is anathema to the idea of completed processes, preferring instead a series of practices in place of means–ends distinctions), but it has enabled neoliberal ideas to aspire to ‘meta-development’ status: that is, as the terms upon which development is discussed rather than solely as a predominant model of development. At the level of ideas, this shift or tendency is rather like the analysis of Hay in which neoliberalism moves from normalising to normative (Hay 2004).