Join us as Brian Judge (Policy Fellow at the Center for Human-Compatible AI, UC Berkeley) discusses his new book and its bold account of neoliberalism as the product of a fateful response to a crisis within liberalism itself. That response was financialization.

Judge explains how liberalism disavows the problem of distributive conflict, leaving it vulnerable when conflicts over resources, access, and equity erupt. By the 1970s, when the postwar growth engine began to slow, finance promised a way out of the resulting political impasse, allowing liberal democracies to depoliticize questions of distribution and sustain the existing social and economic order. Financialization was both a nearly spontaneous response to a crisis within liberalism and the mechanism that allowed neoliberalism to take root.

Democracy in Default offers a new perspective on the rise of neoliberalism, showing that the common narrative confuses cause and effect. Financialization was not the offspring of deregulation but the midwife for a new moral and political order. Elected officials were not simply captured or co-opted but willingly embraced financial solutions to their political problems. Unleashing the financial imperative to generate monetary returns, in turn, ushered in an all-encompassing transformation. Vivid case studies—the bankruptcy of Stockton, California; the investment strategy of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System; and the 2008 financial crisis—illustrate how the priorities of financial markets radically altered liberal democratic governance. Recasting the political and economic transformations of the past half century, Democracy in Default offers a bracing new account of the relationship between two daunting forces that came to define our world.

November 14th, 2024 | 4:00-5:30pm | 8th floor Social Sciences Building | Register to attend here