{"id":11301,"date":"2015-08-21T07:36:55","date_gmt":"2015-08-21T12:36:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11301"},"modified":"2015-08-21T07:36:55","modified_gmt":"2015-08-21T12:36:55","slug":"why-is-market-fundamentalism-so-tenacious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=11301","title":{"rendered":"Why Is Market Fundamentalism So Tenacious?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why Is Market Fundamentalism So Tenacious?<\/a><\/h3>\n

One of the great economists of the twentieth century had the misfortune of publishing his magnum opus,\u00a0The Great Transformation<\/em>, in 1944, months before the inauguration of a new era of postwar economic growth and consumer culture. Few people in the 1940s or 1950s wanted to hear piercing criticisms of \u201cfree markets,\u201d let alone consider the devastating impacts that markets tend to have on social solidarity and the foundational institutions of civil society. And so for decades Polanyi remained something of a curiosity, not least because he was an unconventional academic with a keen interest in the historical and anthropological dimensions of economics.<\/p>\n

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As the neoliberal revolution instigated by Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980 has spread, however, Polanyi has been rediscovered.\u00a0 His great book \u2013 now republished with a foreword by Joseph Stiglitz \u2013 has attracted a new generation of readers.<\/p>\n

But how to make sense of Polanyi\u2019s work with all that has happened in the past 70 years?\u00a0 Why does he still speak so eloquently to our contemporary problems? For answers, we can be grateful that we have\u00a0The Power of Market Fundamentalism:\u00a0 Karl Polanyi\u2019s Critique<\/em>,<\/a>written by Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers, and published last year. The book is a first-rate reinterpretation of Polanyi\u2019s work, giving it a rich context and commentary.\u00a0 Polanyi focused on the deep fallacies of economistic thinking and its failures to understand society and people as they really are. What could be more timely?<\/p>\n

The cult of free market fundamentalism has become so normative in our times, and economics as a discipline so hidebound and insular, that reading Polanyi today is akin to walking into a stiff gust of fresh air.\u00a0 We can suddenly see clear, sweeping vistas of social reality.\u00a0 Instead of the mandarin, quantitative and faux-scientific presumptions of standard economics \u2013 an orthodoxy of complex illusions about \u201cautonomous\u201d markets \u2013 Polanyi explains how markets are in fact embedded in a complex web of social, cultural and historical realities.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why Is Market Fundamentalism So Tenacious? One of the great economists of the twentieth century had the misfortune of publishing his magnum opus,\u00a0The Great Transformation, in 1944, months before the inauguration of a new era of postwar economic growth and consumer culture. Few people in the 1940s or 1950s wanted to hear piercing criticisms of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[154,3647,6551,335,2500,8332,8330,8333,736,8331],"class_list":["post-11301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-complexity","tag-culture","tag-david-bollier","tag-free-markets","tag-history","tag-karl-polanyi","tag-market-fundamentalism","tag-neoliberal-revolution","tag-society","tag-the-great-transformation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11301"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11302,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11301\/revisions\/11302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}