This week on my podcast, I read my recent @medium column, "Ideas Lying Around: Milton Friedman was a monster, but he wasn’t wrong about this," which I describe a #TheoryOfChange for unrigging markets, addressing the climate emergency, building worker power and fixing the imbalance between news publishers and #BigTech:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
What is this amazing theory of change, that can do so much to right the world's wrongs? Fittingly, it's the same theory of change that got us into this mess. It's #MiltonFriedman's theory of change.
Friedman was the archduke of #neoliberal economics, the man who led the counter-reformation that destroyed the gains of the New Deal and the Great Society, restored corporate monopolies to primacy over democratically accountable government, gutted labor power, and put the world in the hands of mediocre, narcissistic billionaires who are determined to set it on fire.
We live in Friedman's world, but it wasn't always thus. When Friedman set out to restore America's deposed oligarchs to their Gilded Age thrones, his ideas were incredibly unpopular. The post-war reforms - #trustbusting, #unions, environmental and labor protections, #SocialSecurity, etc - were wildly popular.
Year after year, these reforms grew, and the groups who had be excluded from them - women, racialized people, queer people, colonized people - launched liberation movements demanding (and winning) inclusion in this broad prosperity.
Friedman's financiers and acolytes - plutocrats and the temporarily embarrassed millionaires who aspired to join them in despotic rule - loved Friedman's vision, but they were naturally skeptical that he could make it into reality.
> Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.
Even the best-run society is subject to exogenous shocks - pandemic, invasion, natural disaster, meteor strike - and in the reeling dislocation of the crisis, people will turn to the loudest, most persistent critics of the failed status quo, desperate for alternatives.
Friedman got his crisis. In 1973, #OPEC cut off the global supply of oil, and plunged the world into recession.
The source of the recession was obvious: OPEC didn't keep it a secret. But Friedman and his pals were able to convince the people shivering in the dark that their pain was caused by women's lib, labor unions, civil rights and the EPA. In the crisis, his ideas moved from the periphery to the center.
#JimmyCarter got the ball rolling, adopting Friedman's proposals for coddling monopolies and forcing workers out of guaranteed pensions and into the market's rigged casino, where they would bet their 401(k)s against shrewd stock brokers for the chance of a dignified retirement:
Next came #RonaldReagan, who incinerated whole libraries' worth of regulations that protected the American people from corporate predators, gutted unions and ripped out society's steering wheel and brakes and set it rolling towards extinction's cliff, whose brink we can see growing closer daily:
His ideas are firmly rooted in the center, and the ideas that delivered environmental regulation, decent jobs, and progress on gender and racial equality have been banished to the periphery.
But there will be crises. As #SteinsLaw goes, "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." In every domain of human endeavor, we lurch from crisis to crisis: labor, climate, discrimination, corruption.
Each of these crises is terrible, and each one is an opportunity for ideas lying around to rush into the center currently occupied by Friedman's intellectual descendants.
80 years on, #WoodyGuthrie's 1943 New Year's Resolutions are a hell of a read, and not a day goes by that I don't think of number 19: "Keep hoping machine running."
My hoping machine runs on the creation and spreading of ideas lying around. Last year, #RebeccaGiblin and I published #ChokepointCapitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back:
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