Curmudgeonous thoughts: No, really, it is crap
A few years ago, I went to a fairly poor Academy of Social Sciences conference in Canberra on indigenous issues (there was much denunciation of "conservatives": naturally, none such were invited to speak for themselves). As a result, I am on the mailing list for its publication, Dialogue.
As a publication written by social science academics for social science academics, I rarely find it of much profit. But I happened to glance at the latest version, and found an article so startlingly bad that I examined the issue more thoroughly. Readers will be aware that I have a fairly low opinion of the output of much contemporary social science and humanities academe, but even I was startled at just how low a standard the articles reached.
The particular passage which gripped my attention was:
Just how concerted this campaign [of neoliberals and their funders to transform relations between human beings and the market] has been is, of course, a matter of dispute, with sociologists generally unwilling to explain any changes as the result of a conspiracy. That there has been a transformation [compared to fifty years ago], however, is not disputed. That the market has greater weight than people’s lives is not disputed. That there been a massive redistribution of wealth in favour of rich countries, and of corporate leaders is not disputed. And neoliberal systems of government are now the new and favoured forms of government on both the left and right sides of politics. Neoliberalism, one way or another has achieved cultural hegemony.
This packs so much nonsense in one passage it is hard to know where to start. If we check Tanzi and Schuknecht’s Public Spending in the 20th Century, we will find that the average general government share of GDP in 14 developed countries was:
1913: 13%
1920: 20%
1937: 24%
1960: 28%
1980: 42%
1990: 43%
1996: 45%
Markets play less role in the operation of Western societies than they did 50 years ago. The rate of increase in the government share of economic activity has slowed considerably. But that is not even remotely a "transformation".
Income distribution data is harder to come by, but the same source provides the following data on the average income share of the lowest 40% of households:
1930s: 15%
1960s: 17%
1980s: 19%
There has been some shift in the opposite direction more recently. For example, consulting Cox and Alm’s Myths of Rich and Poor, the change in shares of national income in the US between 1975 and 1997 of the top and bottom fifth of income earners was:
1975: 43.2% (top), 4.4% (bottom)
1997: 49.4% (top), 3.6% (bottom).
What that misses is mobility in income. A University of Michigan study looked at people’s income over time. What it found was that the people on the lowest incomes in 1975 had the highest absolute gains in average income by 1991. In 1997 dollars, the results were
Bottom fifth: +$27,700
Second fifth: +$24,200
Third fifth: +$10,200
Fourth fifth: +$9,700
Top fifth: +$4,400
This is mainly a function of life cycle changes. In 1951, the highest median income were for 35-44 year olds, and they received a bit over 1.5 times the median income of 20-24 year olds. In 1993, the highest median incomes were for 45-54 year olds, and they received a bit over 3 times the median income of 20-24 year olds. A product of the increasing importance of intellectual capital in incomes - all those poor university students becoming highly paid professionals.
If we consult Angus Maddison’s The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, we find estimated per capita incomes (in 1990 dollars) of developed countries (Western Europe, Western offshoots, Japan) compared to the rest of the world is as follows:
1000: Developed $405 Rest $440
1500: Developed $704 Rest $535
1600: Developed $805 Rest $548
1700: Developed $907 Rest $551
1820: Developed $1,130 Rest $573
1998: Developed $21,470 Rest $3,102
Latin Christendom and Japan had already managed a notable average income lead by the end of the medieval period but, once the real great transformation - the Industrial Revolution - took place, the developed world shot ahead, a process which has continued. (With the obvious addition that the so-called "Tiger" economies - Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan - have effectively joined the developed world.) Nevertheless, there has not been a transfer of wealth from poor countries to rich ones: both sets of countries have got richer, it is just those with the better institutions have got richer (much) quicker.
It is certainly true that governments are much less inclined to be owners of firms than they used to be, that they are much less inclined to try and set prices and quantities in narkets than they used to be and that the (much bigger) public sectors are more likely to engage in contracting out than they used to be. But government also spend a much larger section of the national income than they used and social regulation has continued to increase markedly.
As for "neoliberalism’s" alleged cultural hegemony, given that the bulk of humanities and social science academe, most NGOs, much of the commentariat and most of the literati despise "neoliberalism" and all its works - indeed, that the author takes it as read that her academic audience will not be in favour of "neoliberalim" - this is serial nonsense.
The article started by citing Susan George essentially blaming "neoliberalism" on Hayek, Friedman and the University of Chicago economics school and the burgeoning network of think tanks and others they gave birth to. There is no wider context given to any policy shifts. In the absence of any such context, we are offered classic magical thinking of malign intent by mysteriously influential groups.
The article contains further gems such as:
an extensive audit system is needed since, in a neoliberal philosophy, trust and commitment to the collective well-being have been made redundant
Yes, that’s right, the coercive transfers and rules of the state are, of course, signs of much greater trust than consensual exchanges in the market place. There is a vast literature on the benefit of consensual interactions for trust. I am sure our author is entirely ignorant of them, however.
The piece is full of assertions about (malign) intentions and (false) beliefs of "neoliberalism" and "neoliberals" without one such person being cited, quoted or even named. The author complains about "neoliberal" notions being:
both ubiquitous yet strangely intangible.
Yes, well, assertions picked out of the aether are like that.
Then there is the statement of her pedagogical aim:
I wanted to produce astute critics of all forms of hegemony
Informed, capable of incisive reason? I can see how our author might have the odd problem in achieving her aim: a higher form of ignorance is what is most obvious in her piece. But notice the poverty of this pedagogical goal - hegemony as the key subject, criticism as the required stance.
There is, of course, the ubiquitous criticism of (other) people for "othering" folk while our author seriously "others" "neoliberals". The whole discussion is notably not anchored in a concrete understanding of reality yet has a very naïve view of "proper" relations behind it.
These are the pontifications of a seriously ignorant person. This seriously ignorant person is Professor Bronwyn Davies, Chair of Narrative Discourse and Pedagogy Research Concentration in the College of Arts, Education and Social Sciences at the University of Western Sydney, and the quotes are from her article Winning the Hearts and Minds of Academics in the Service of Neoliberalism. It is so obvious she believes she is displaying her virtuous knowing, when what she is displaying is her ignorance and scholarly inadequacy.
The next article, Chilla Bulbeck’s Stifling Freedom of Thought in the Information Age? shows much the same level of ignorant, contextless paranoia.
Market populism blames ‘elites’ for growing income inequality, thus shifting attention away from the effects of globalisation, economic rationalism and a retreating welfare state in creating inequalities of wealth and power.
Since the welfare state has got bigger - in absolute size, share of GDP and coverage - under every single PM (including the present one: over the last 30 years, the proportion of the working age population in income support as gone from 3% to over 16%) - we are dealing with higher ignorance again.
That there are gaps between the typical views of knowledge class and the general public is by now thoroughly documented. Indeed, projection onto the general populace as being ignorant and deceived while being primarily concerned with the obsessions of people like, well, Chilla Bulbeck (Professor of Women’s Studiets in the School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Adelaide), being a petite example.
The main complaint in the article is that the Howard Government has proved reluctant to spend taxpayer’s money providing advocacy resources to people who hate them. What a shock. This is passed off as making people like well, Chilla Bulbeck, voiceless.
Oh, the horrible persecution of it all!
Actually, the real problem is that self-important academics who patently are quite ignorant of key features of the public policy and economic history of the last 50 years are likely not to have any useful or helpful to say.
This is not scholarship: it is pretension, polemic and propaganda parading as scholarship,
To be fair, most of the articles in the issue of Dialogue are workmanlike in quality (though the sameness of the perspective would make Conformity a better title: there is a complete lack of conservative or economically liberal views). Scalmer’s article (Labour Intellectuals Today) is a sensible survey of the past and present of labour intellectuals. Jaysuriya’s piece (Australian Multiculturalism and the Politics of a New Pluralism) at least manages to cite the odd dissident voice, though it is a bit of a hard slog in its language and very much has the shared "goodies and baddies" view of the world. Connell’s Not The Pyramids: Intellectual work and its politics in a neoliberal era has a solid empirical base, though both his and Sharp’s Not By Words Alone (particularly Connell’s) could have done with some intellectual engagement with views outside the narrow academic mainstream and both (especially Connell’s) display the normal, narrow, moral sensibility of the same (e.g. the dark valley of neoliberalism).
Agitprop parading as analysis
Connell, Davies and Bulbeck all cite approvingly Michael Pusey’s dreadful book Economic Rationalism in Canberra in which Pusey demonstrates little understanding of policy processes, the ideas he is allegedly discussing or pressures on policy makers but an excellent understanding of what would be, and clearly has been, congenial to his fellow academics. (A thoughtful discussion of economic rationalism is provided here. A more caustic commentary is here.)
The term neoliberal is agitprop parading as analysis. Among economic liberals, the term ‘neo-liberal’ is generally regarded at best with disdainful amusement, often with derision and contempt - a sign of how ignorant, self-righteous and prejudiced (with consequent scholarly inadequacy) much of contemporary academe is. If contemporary humanities and social science academe was not so cognitively narrow, the term would have never got up because alleged "neo-liberals" would have derided it. It is precisely because such views are so rare in academe - at least outside economics departments - that such an agitprop term has become an academic staple.
There is nothing "neo" about contemporary market liberalism. Leaving aside advances in economic knowledge, trying to work out the differences in basic intellectual outlook between John Stuart Milton and, say, Milton Friedman would mostly be an exercise in fine distinctions. The market-liberal tradition is continuous, with no break. Its policy influence certainly went through a strong dip over several decades, but that is a different issue. Nor was that dip even remotely a total eclipse - consider, for example by Ludwig Erhard’s 1948 bonfire of the regulations in West Germany or the economic liberalising intentions built into the creation of the European Union and the GATT.
Of course, there have been changes in language and context - history happened. But the continuity of the intellectual tradition is clear.
The term "neoliberal" was coined by opponents. It attempts to put "liberal" in permanent shudder quotes. Books, essays and articles which use it seriously typically show a lack in their citations and bibliographies of economic liberal writers. There is a very strong tendency to engage in systematic misrepresentation of what economic liberals think and the purposes of economic reform.
The shift to market liberalism in product markets is fairly simply explained. As the welfare state has increased in size faster than populations and faster than economies, the policy premium on economic efficiency has increased. At various times, policy makers have "cashed in" on that policy premium: particularly left-of-centre governments precisely because they are interested in keeping the welfare state sustainable.
By claiming a break in the market liberal intellectual tradition where none exists, "neoliberal" cuts events off from their history. There is a long history, in periods of economic crisis going back centuries, of shift to markets and property rights because they provide better incentives and lower transaction costs. It is a pendulum that has been swinging back and forth in Western history right back to the Dark Ages.
"Neoliberal" in particular cuts social democracy off from its history. Social democracy is a mixture of liberalism and socialism. The long-term tendency has been for the liberal element to increase and the socialist element to decrease because of the basic problem - socialism doesn’t work. Thus, social democracy started with the adoption of liberal (parliamentary) politics, then moved on to the abandonment of further nationalisation, then privatisation and deregulation and now - having thoroughly abandoned nationalisation of the firm, and of the market - it is wrestling with the problems from "nationalisation" of households.
The failure of socialism (except for Scalmer’s reference to the collapse of communism discrediting the "revolutionary mode" of labour politics) is very much the dog that doesn’t bark in these articles. It is an event without resonance, or reason. One can see that the delusion that the direction of history is known to the virtuously knowing (hence nonsense terms such as late capitalism and late modernity: we have no idea how long modernity or capitalism have to run - we could easily be in the early stages of both) is very much part of the reason for "neoliberalism" - it’s all just an unfortunate phase we will get over, don’t you know.
How did economic liberals make such headway against the hostility of the dominant ideas? (All the authors clearly presumes audience will not share pro-markets-and-private-property views.) Without the provision of the policy, social and economic history context, there is nothing but contextless paranoia and free-floating malignity to fall back on as "explanations".
Of course, the lack of genuine consideration of pressures on decision-making also eliminates any possibility that "neoliberals" might have been influential from being correct (or at least potentially so).
It is quite clear that, for even prominent contemporary academices, sadly often, self-important sense of moral superiority is central to their identity, not the humility of genuine truth-seeking. Mutual esteem as a substitute for understanding is, in fact, no such substitute. Such pontifications and pontificators are useless for policy makers and policy formulation. The consequent lack of policy influence is hardly surprising.
There seems to be a deadly mixture of a serious inability to properly read dissenting views, projecting into such writings and actions opinions and intent their authors clearly do not have alternating with a frequent failure to bother to read such writings in the first place.
It is the inherent (though not absolute, there can be countervailing tendencies) tendency of government production to suffer decreasing quality. There is certainly evidence of it in these offerings. A cognitively narrow academe which treats beliefs as status-markers is an intellectually incompetent academe.
I could go on but the point is clear. Self-righteous, very one-sided and often deeply ignorant with patent failures of scholarly and pedagogical integrity dissolving any claims to moral (or even intellectual) seriousness: I so understand why students who do not share the prevailing orthodoxy might come out of contemporary academe angry and resentful. Their anger and resentment might come to be the political cause of tax-funding of higher education declining in future years, but one has to look no further than the inadequate quality, based on self-serving ignorance, of what so many contemporary humanities and social science academics produce for more than adequate justification for such cuts.
As a publication written by social science academics for social science academics, I rarely find it of much profit. But I happened to glance at the latest version, and found an article so startlingly bad that I examined the issue more thoroughly. Readers will be aware that I have a fairly low opinion of the output of much contemporary social science and humanities academe, but even I was startled at just how low a standard the articles reached.
The particular passage which gripped my attention was:
Just how concerted this campaign [of neoliberals and their funders to transform relations between human beings and the market] has been is, of course, a matter of dispute, with sociologists generally unwilling to explain any changes as the result of a conspiracy. That there has been a transformation [compared to fifty years ago], however, is not disputed. That the market has greater weight than people’s lives is not disputed. That there been a massive redistribution of wealth in favour of rich countries, and of corporate leaders is not disputed. And neoliberal systems of government are now the new and favoured forms of government on both the left and right sides of politics. Neoliberalism, one way or another has achieved cultural hegemony.
This packs so much nonsense in one passage it is hard to know where to start. If we check Tanzi and Schuknecht’s Public Spending in the 20th Century, we will find that the average general government share of GDP in 14 developed countries was:
1913: 13%
1920: 20%
1937: 24%
1960: 28%
1980: 42%
1990: 43%
1996: 45%
Markets play less role in the operation of Western societies than they did 50 years ago. The rate of increase in the government share of economic activity has slowed considerably. But that is not even remotely a "transformation".
Income distribution data is harder to come by, but the same source provides the following data on the average income share of the lowest 40% of households:
1930s: 15%
1960s: 17%
1980s: 19%
There has been some shift in the opposite direction more recently. For example, consulting Cox and Alm’s Myths of Rich and Poor, the change in shares of national income in the US between 1975 and 1997 of the top and bottom fifth of income earners was:
1975: 43.2% (top), 4.4% (bottom)
1997: 49.4% (top), 3.6% (bottom).
What that misses is mobility in income. A University of Michigan study looked at people’s income over time. What it found was that the people on the lowest incomes in 1975 had the highest absolute gains in average income by 1991. In 1997 dollars, the results were
Bottom fifth: +$27,700
Second fifth: +$24,200
Third fifth: +$10,200
Fourth fifth: +$9,700
Top fifth: +$4,400
This is mainly a function of life cycle changes. In 1951, the highest median income were for 35-44 year olds, and they received a bit over 1.5 times the median income of 20-24 year olds. In 1993, the highest median incomes were for 45-54 year olds, and they received a bit over 3 times the median income of 20-24 year olds. A product of the increasing importance of intellectual capital in incomes - all those poor university students becoming highly paid professionals.
If we consult Angus Maddison’s The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, we find estimated per capita incomes (in 1990 dollars) of developed countries (Western Europe, Western offshoots, Japan) compared to the rest of the world is as follows:
1000: Developed $405 Rest $440
1500: Developed $704 Rest $535
1600: Developed $805 Rest $548
1700: Developed $907 Rest $551
1820: Developed $1,130 Rest $573
1998: Developed $21,470 Rest $3,102
Latin Christendom and Japan had already managed a notable average income lead by the end of the medieval period but, once the real great transformation - the Industrial Revolution - took place, the developed world shot ahead, a process which has continued. (With the obvious addition that the so-called "Tiger" economies - Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan - have effectively joined the developed world.) Nevertheless, there has not been a transfer of wealth from poor countries to rich ones: both sets of countries have got richer, it is just those with the better institutions have got richer (much) quicker.
It is certainly true that governments are much less inclined to be owners of firms than they used to be, that they are much less inclined to try and set prices and quantities in narkets than they used to be and that the (much bigger) public sectors are more likely to engage in contracting out than they used to be. But government also spend a much larger section of the national income than they used and social regulation has continued to increase markedly.
As for "neoliberalism’s" alleged cultural hegemony, given that the bulk of humanities and social science academe, most NGOs, much of the commentariat and most of the literati despise "neoliberalism" and all its works - indeed, that the author takes it as read that her academic audience will not be in favour of "neoliberalim" - this is serial nonsense.
The article started by citing Susan George essentially blaming "neoliberalism" on Hayek, Friedman and the University of Chicago economics school and the burgeoning network of think tanks and others they gave birth to. There is no wider context given to any policy shifts. In the absence of any such context, we are offered classic magical thinking of malign intent by mysteriously influential groups.
The article contains further gems such as:
an extensive audit system is needed since, in a neoliberal philosophy, trust and commitment to the collective well-being have been made redundant
Yes, that’s right, the coercive transfers and rules of the state are, of course, signs of much greater trust than consensual exchanges in the market place. There is a vast literature on the benefit of consensual interactions for trust. I am sure our author is entirely ignorant of them, however.
The piece is full of assertions about (malign) intentions and (false) beliefs of "neoliberalism" and "neoliberals" without one such person being cited, quoted or even named. The author complains about "neoliberal" notions being:
both ubiquitous yet strangely intangible.
Yes, well, assertions picked out of the aether are like that.
Then there is the statement of her pedagogical aim:
I wanted to produce astute critics of all forms of hegemony
Informed, capable of incisive reason? I can see how our author might have the odd problem in achieving her aim: a higher form of ignorance is what is most obvious in her piece. But notice the poverty of this pedagogical goal - hegemony as the key subject, criticism as the required stance.
There is, of course, the ubiquitous criticism of (other) people for "othering" folk while our author seriously "others" "neoliberals". The whole discussion is notably not anchored in a concrete understanding of reality yet has a very naïve view of "proper" relations behind it.
These are the pontifications of a seriously ignorant person. This seriously ignorant person is Professor Bronwyn Davies, Chair of Narrative Discourse and Pedagogy Research Concentration in the College of Arts, Education and Social Sciences at the University of Western Sydney, and the quotes are from her article Winning the Hearts and Minds of Academics in the Service of Neoliberalism. It is so obvious she believes she is displaying her virtuous knowing, when what she is displaying is her ignorance and scholarly inadequacy.
The next article, Chilla Bulbeck’s Stifling Freedom of Thought in the Information Age? shows much the same level of ignorant, contextless paranoia.
Market populism blames ‘elites’ for growing income inequality, thus shifting attention away from the effects of globalisation, economic rationalism and a retreating welfare state in creating inequalities of wealth and power.
Since the welfare state has got bigger - in absolute size, share of GDP and coverage - under every single PM (including the present one: over the last 30 years, the proportion of the working age population in income support as gone from 3% to over 16%) - we are dealing with higher ignorance again.
That there are gaps between the typical views of knowledge class and the general public is by now thoroughly documented. Indeed, projection onto the general populace as being ignorant and deceived while being primarily concerned with the obsessions of people like, well, Chilla Bulbeck (Professor of Women’s Studiets in the School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Adelaide), being a petite example.
The main complaint in the article is that the Howard Government has proved reluctant to spend taxpayer’s money providing advocacy resources to people who hate them. What a shock. This is passed off as making people like well, Chilla Bulbeck, voiceless.
Oh, the horrible persecution of it all!
Actually, the real problem is that self-important academics who patently are quite ignorant of key features of the public policy and economic history of the last 50 years are likely not to have any useful or helpful to say.
This is not scholarship: it is pretension, polemic and propaganda parading as scholarship,
To be fair, most of the articles in the issue of Dialogue are workmanlike in quality (though the sameness of the perspective would make Conformity a better title: there is a complete lack of conservative or economically liberal views). Scalmer’s article (Labour Intellectuals Today) is a sensible survey of the past and present of labour intellectuals. Jaysuriya’s piece (Australian Multiculturalism and the Politics of a New Pluralism) at least manages to cite the odd dissident voice, though it is a bit of a hard slog in its language and very much has the shared "goodies and baddies" view of the world. Connell’s Not The Pyramids: Intellectual work and its politics in a neoliberal era has a solid empirical base, though both his and Sharp’s Not By Words Alone (particularly Connell’s) could have done with some intellectual engagement with views outside the narrow academic mainstream and both (especially Connell’s) display the normal, narrow, moral sensibility of the same (e.g. the dark valley of neoliberalism).
Agitprop parading as analysis
Connell, Davies and Bulbeck all cite approvingly Michael Pusey’s dreadful book Economic Rationalism in Canberra in which Pusey demonstrates little understanding of policy processes, the ideas he is allegedly discussing or pressures on policy makers but an excellent understanding of what would be, and clearly has been, congenial to his fellow academics. (A thoughtful discussion of economic rationalism is provided here. A more caustic commentary is here.)
The term neoliberal is agitprop parading as analysis. Among economic liberals, the term ‘neo-liberal’ is generally regarded at best with disdainful amusement, often with derision and contempt - a sign of how ignorant, self-righteous and prejudiced (with consequent scholarly inadequacy) much of contemporary academe is. If contemporary humanities and social science academe was not so cognitively narrow, the term would have never got up because alleged "neo-liberals" would have derided it. It is precisely because such views are so rare in academe - at least outside economics departments - that such an agitprop term has become an academic staple.
There is nothing "neo" about contemporary market liberalism. Leaving aside advances in economic knowledge, trying to work out the differences in basic intellectual outlook between John Stuart Milton and, say, Milton Friedman would mostly be an exercise in fine distinctions. The market-liberal tradition is continuous, with no break. Its policy influence certainly went through a strong dip over several decades, but that is a different issue. Nor was that dip even remotely a total eclipse - consider, for example by Ludwig Erhard’s 1948 bonfire of the regulations in West Germany or the economic liberalising intentions built into the creation of the European Union and the GATT.
Of course, there have been changes in language and context - history happened. But the continuity of the intellectual tradition is clear.
The term "neoliberal" was coined by opponents. It attempts to put "liberal" in permanent shudder quotes. Books, essays and articles which use it seriously typically show a lack in their citations and bibliographies of economic liberal writers. There is a very strong tendency to engage in systematic misrepresentation of what economic liberals think and the purposes of economic reform.
The shift to market liberalism in product markets is fairly simply explained. As the welfare state has increased in size faster than populations and faster than economies, the policy premium on economic efficiency has increased. At various times, policy makers have "cashed in" on that policy premium: particularly left-of-centre governments precisely because they are interested in keeping the welfare state sustainable.
By claiming a break in the market liberal intellectual tradition where none exists, "neoliberal" cuts events off from their history. There is a long history, in periods of economic crisis going back centuries, of shift to markets and property rights because they provide better incentives and lower transaction costs. It is a pendulum that has been swinging back and forth in Western history right back to the Dark Ages.
"Neoliberal" in particular cuts social democracy off from its history. Social democracy is a mixture of liberalism and socialism. The long-term tendency has been for the liberal element to increase and the socialist element to decrease because of the basic problem - socialism doesn’t work. Thus, social democracy started with the adoption of liberal (parliamentary) politics, then moved on to the abandonment of further nationalisation, then privatisation and deregulation and now - having thoroughly abandoned nationalisation of the firm, and of the market - it is wrestling with the problems from "nationalisation" of households.
The failure of socialism (except for Scalmer’s reference to the collapse of communism discrediting the "revolutionary mode" of labour politics) is very much the dog that doesn’t bark in these articles. It is an event without resonance, or reason. One can see that the delusion that the direction of history is known to the virtuously knowing (hence nonsense terms such as late capitalism and late modernity: we have no idea how long modernity or capitalism have to run - we could easily be in the early stages of both) is very much part of the reason for "neoliberalism" - it’s all just an unfortunate phase we will get over, don’t you know.
How did economic liberals make such headway against the hostility of the dominant ideas? (All the authors clearly presumes audience will not share pro-markets-and-private-property views.) Without the provision of the policy, social and economic history context, there is nothing but contextless paranoia and free-floating malignity to fall back on as "explanations".
Of course, the lack of genuine consideration of pressures on decision-making also eliminates any possibility that "neoliberals" might have been influential from being correct (or at least potentially so).
It is quite clear that, for even prominent contemporary academices, sadly often, self-important sense of moral superiority is central to their identity, not the humility of genuine truth-seeking. Mutual esteem as a substitute for understanding is, in fact, no such substitute. Such pontifications and pontificators are useless for policy makers and policy formulation. The consequent lack of policy influence is hardly surprising.
There seems to be a deadly mixture of a serious inability to properly read dissenting views, projecting into such writings and actions opinions and intent their authors clearly do not have alternating with a frequent failure to bother to read such writings in the first place.
It is the inherent (though not absolute, there can be countervailing tendencies) tendency of government production to suffer decreasing quality. There is certainly evidence of it in these offerings. A cognitively narrow academe which treats beliefs as status-markers is an intellectually incompetent academe.
I could go on but the point is clear. Self-righteous, very one-sided and often deeply ignorant with patent failures of scholarly and pedagogical integrity dissolving any claims to moral (or even intellectual) seriousness: I so understand why students who do not share the prevailing orthodoxy might come out of contemporary academe angry and resentful. Their anger and resentment might come to be the political cause of tax-funding of higher education declining in future years, but one has to look no further than the inadequate quality, based on self-serving ignorance, of what so many contemporary humanities and social science academics produce for more than adequate justification for such cuts.