The neoliberal universe in disenchantment

The bowels of the Neoliberal Universe in Disenchantment.

Neoliberal practices dominated almost the entire world until they caused the greatest economic disaster in history. This book seeks to explain the mathematical and political foundations of neoliberalism, concluding, with astonishment, that its ideological resurgence after this disaster cannot be explained by reason.

One of the authors' mathematics demonstrates that free markets may even tend toward equilibrium, but we are generally unable to determine when this occurs. Therefore, theories based on the fetish of complete equilibrium, such as neoliberalism, are unsustainable from a scientific perspective. They cannot be normative. The other author's political economy describes the socioeconomic processes that led the left in rich countries to abandon civilization's greatest achievement: European social democracy.

For both, however, neoliberalism is definitively dead as a doctrine for organizing social and economic space. It survives only in the minds of conservative politicians, because ideology never dies.

The disenchanted neoliberal universe could be called a dissolving neoliberal universe. In the midst of a crisis that could become eschatological, the only visible way out seems to be that indicated by Chaos Theory, that is, the achievement of some as-yet-unknown type of equilibrium at a higher level, based on new paradigms. Perhaps the Chinese and Indian systems—one basically socialist, the other basically capitalist, both notable for having overcome the crisis with high growth rates—indicate the dialectical synthesis that could govern the future: they are centrally planned economies with a public banking system.