Why is neoliberalism still the status quo in (capitalist) economics...

I'd say the left equivalent of cultural Marxism is the mythification of the US as a far bigger evil than it really is. The US is essentially the Jews of the left. Populist social democracy under the red banner goes bankrupt? It's the US (look at Venezuela, which was never embargoed by the US once, and everything is put on the US). Again it's rare for there to be a left conspiracy that is as insane as cultural Marxism or isn't at least a little sensible, but US personification as literally Satan is the biggest and most cringeworthy thing on the left. Neoliberalism is far from as big of a great alibi as the US for the left.

Surprisingly I'm inclined to agree with this although I wouldn't play down the extent to which genuine conspiracy occurred. (And I don't bother having an opinion on the falling rate of profit because if it's not real social democracy works and if it is real there's nothing to be lost by me trying social democracy.)

While Thatcher, Reagan, etc, were abhorrent figures for their enthusiasm for neoliberalism the tide of history was sweeping things in that direction anyway. Would the UK be a much better place if James Callaghan had won the 1979 election? Doubtless. Would the UK still be neoliberal? Highly likely. Carter in particular I feel gets a free hand from the American left here - Airlines were deregulated in 1978. Trucking around the same time. He appointed Volcker to the federal reserve, setting in motion neoliberal policy there.

Looking historically I would partially look at their climb through the lens of policy failures (in particular the disaster that was Breton Woods, but also potentially some poor fiscal policy choices in the 70s) and partially a result of intellectual laziness. (It feels that a lot of laisse-faire cranks were ignored as harmless where they really should've been treated as a serious threat, although this approach isn't without risk.) - the rate of profit may or may not factor here, but as I note that's less of a concern because if it is the rate of profit, then that's basically fucked anyway and it's time for socialists to step up.

The Adam Smith institute, a highly influential free-market think tank identifies itself as neoliberal.
Alternatively, I mean, /r/neoliberal:
>Neoliberals are flexible in their policy prescriptions but are unified in their support for lowering barriers on trade and immigration while also supporting a tax on carbon emissions.
Or just this glurging shite, again from a self-identified neoliberal: https:[email protected]/* *//im-a-neoliberal-maybe-you-are-too-b809a2a588d6#.vblgkqcsw

Sorry, don't believe it. You'd have to tell me the whole world went neoliberal for similar mismanagement reasons just like the US supposedly did and that Keynesianism could have been saved if people just had the right idea, or that they did and just didn't choose it.

What's far more likely is the relevance of TRPF that relatively at the same time started a chain reaction of Keynesianism showing its shortcomings in an economy that was already very globalized and thus mutually dependent already (although far from as globalized as it is today).

Everyone here should peep at PDF related. It is one of several of his pieces that could fit that title, but this might be the most unique. Philip Mirowski's an historian and philosopher of economics. His approach to this neolib question is much more nuanced than the ideas usually floating around in leftists' brains. In his most recent book Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste which is also really good he attempts to historically and theoretically track the entire political project, which is what he claims it was and is, from the first luxury Mont Pelerin party Hayek threw to their success and the conditions that enabled it.

And to a better grasp on our wonderful world now and its capitalist realism, as it's been put; how this conception of market as super information processor has become ubiquitous, etc. None of the political determinism certain other major names throw out with all the blame shoved primarily onto the Malevolent Spirits of Thatcher and Reagan as if that's all there could possibly be to it.

This got my attention last year because he uses Wikipedia of all things to do as the title says. It's so ridiculously obvious in hindsight. Not boring, pretty insightful, worth a look.

...

I mean, the process did operate differently across multiple countries, and in a highly interlinked global economy it's pretty domino-effect-ish after the biggest economy falls.
It's also just occurred to me that I've neglected to mention the financial sector, which is partially key here. (Indeed, poor oversight of the financial sector in general was probably another major failure of the Keynesian consensus period. The whole eurodollar buggery should really have been cut off, even if - under the shit structure of Breton Woods - that to would only delay the inevitable.) The extreme growth in financial sector power is notable and should be more notable.

Increasingly I've been wondering if it could be possible to draw a capitalist path away from neoliberalism by pandering to the interests of industrial capital over financial capital, partially operating on the inverse assumption - that the imposition of neoliberalism was partially a victory of finance capital over industrial capital, with particular reference to the UK where this trend would appear to be most dominant. (Even if one doesn't accept this possibility as part of the international system of capitalism, for this one country it would seem plausible.)

Will read since it's appropriately short.

I lack an understanding of all these particularities you mentioned as deep and as refined as yours, but with what I do know and the more tendential Marxist view of all things in their totality is basically what makes me so certain about the teleology of my judgement, which is decidedly historical materialist. (I also do have a pretty good understanding of liberal orthodoxy and how it came to be and ended because I read a lot on the Austrians, Malthusians and Bukharin's take on them, and it all happened roughly for the same reasons: orthodox liberal policy reached its own limits.)

If you have any texts explaining your view on why Keynesianism died or what allowed neoliberalism to enter the stage I'd be much obliged tho.

I'll try to be as helpful as I can as outlining how my thoughts have come about, but that might not be so helpful because they've come about in a very internetish way. (i.e. lots of disparate information tied together, rather than a few well researched books that I can just share.) and tied together by a basic instinct in favour of left-wing ideas. First pdf might be of some interest. It's notionally about new labour, but talks a lot about the fetishisation of the city of London in the UK, poor fiscal policy in the 70s, etc. It feels somewhat conspiratorial, but the general thrust of the argument would seem nonetheless plausible. It's also conveniently quite short.

There was some good posting here a while back about the influence of the city of London, Eurodollars, etc, that I can't find right now. Also quite a bit about how businesses in 1970s America were plotting to outright propagandise because people were losing faith in the market. Sadly didn't screencap it. Business thing may have been en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.#Powell_Memorandum
Off the top of my head there are also lots of little pieces of information to be gleaned from Adam Curtis' "The Mayfair set" and "The Trap". (Curtis had quite a lot of influence, but I'm aware of how films aren't particularly information dense, and for the most part his films are better for setting a tone than directly providing theory.) There's also the whole Breton Woods thing. I mean, it was fundamentally set up to fail the minute they chose to use the US dollar as a world reserve currency. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma (and looping back to the financial sector, there was the 1973 oil crisis which had two effects - to worsen inflation [amplified by poor monetary policy decisions] and economic crisis - but also to empower banks further, since iirc one of the reasons the US never invaded was basically that Saudis needed something to do with all their dollars anyway, so they put them into US investments.)

Think tanks have been recognized more and more on the parts of the semi-conspiratorial left you referenced, but I'd make the case that without much by the way of a response-in-kind by the Keynesians (or even really a realisation of what was happening.) much intellectual ground was conceded. In some ways their establishment was of course just symptomatic of real shifts that had already occurred, but it would seem that had there been similar intellectual-propagandistic efforts on the part of the Keynesians, progress could have been frustrated. (If that didn't make sense, it's a sort of compromise between the idea that human debate can decide policy and that material forces have more influence. We're not powerless - timetravellers with guns should shoot Hayek - but nor do "economists decide economic policy")

There's also a good chapter - I think in Steve Keen's "Debunking Economics" that explains how neoclassical economists took power over the field of economics, displacing the Bastard-Keynesians that were previously dominant. Keynesian research was increasingly marginalised in economics journals, etc, and without holding to neoclassical ideas at the time of the book being written most "mainstream" (dangerously conspiratorial sounding term, but still) journals would probably not publish given research. A notable part not in the book - and the reason I say Bastard-Keynesian, is that one important thing to remember about the postwar consensus is that most Keynesians were Neo-Keynesians, who sought to rectify what Keynes said with neoclassical economics more generally. So, I mean, by that token too everything was on a very shaky foundation.

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For looking at how things differed across different countries I don't really have any material, just reading the general trends of their elections. New Zealand for example took a huge swing towards protectionism before neoliberalism set in, and it was implemented there (and in Australia) by their Labour parties as opposed to by parties of the right. Australia was weird because the Hawke/Keating governments adopted a lot of the policies you'd expect from, say, the UK's social democratic party (labour right wingers who split off), but still carried things in a neoliberal direction. Operating more cautiously (as I'm quite ignorant outside the anglosphere) it would seem that mainland Europe - while still caught in the general direction of travel - have also diverged. German Manufacturing remains strong, for example, and (at least if I'm to infer from Macron) French Labour unions likewise. (If not strong in terms of practical power, at least strong to the vestigial entities that make up British unions.)

That's not really a coherent explanation, of course - so I'd really describe it as a car crash of circumstances largely as the result of an unstable economic foundation, both political* and to some extent intellectual. There is one question I've been mulling over since Grenfell Tower burned down, though: Do circumstances colour the political landscape, or does the political landscape colour circumstances? (Since for example the socioeconomic aspect of the tower-fire was recognized so closely after Corbyn forced a stalemate in the election - did Corbyn's near win change how we interpreted the tower-fire, or was it the shifting underlying forces that lead both to recognition of the fire, and to the surge in Labour-party support?)

*In perhaps an overly utopian sense, I've maintained the general belief that if we'd had the Bancor implemented - and thus balanced trade and the clearing union, with all the implications for movement of capital internationally, then Keynesianism in one form or another would still be dominant. Since Breton Woods didn't deliver that, it was relatively inevitable that would falter. When it did falter, there was a bloodthirsty set of neoliberals waiting to attack at the weakest moment.** Given that Bancor was revisited in 2008 and there's talk of an increasingly multipolar world, there is perhaps reason to be hopeful in that direction.
**Although "Siege Keynesianism" is an idea I've more or less abandoned - i.e. the idea that had "Keynesian governments" held power into the 1980s then economic problems would have subsided and neoliberalism could have been avoided.

This is probably a total disaster of a post, so when something inevitably needs clarified just ask and I'll try to remember what I was thinking.
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Thanks for this, I'll check it all out.

In the meantime I found and peeked at these which seemed good:
thecharnelhouse.org/2016/07/05/against-political-determinism/
marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1969/marx-keynes/index.htm
thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2015/03/20/keynesian-economics-a-spectacular-success/
(The first especially seems like a really good clarification of my current view with much more detail, the second is Mattick so it's always good and the third is written by Roberts who is usually always very good at the empirics.)

Porky is salty about Keynesianism redistributing their wealth and they're taking revenge on the poormies.

Because it makes the rich the most money.

That doesn't really explain anything, since the economy was actually less globalized than it had been for the better part of a century. The last time globalization had pushed borders open that far for the flood of commodities and human bodies, was the gilded age following the industrial revolution, only halted by the deliberate imposition of tariffs and quotas at the urging of organized labor. And this time, in the 1970s, one of the very first things neoliberalism did was to shred those quota and tariff regimes, recreating the very globalized conditions they once again flog as "inevitable".

Almost all of the financial sector's growth occurred long after the new neolib/neocon order was firmly consolidated, in the '90s.

This is semi relevant and a half decent read. Some parts are fairly disagreeable though.

theguardian.com/news/2017/jul/11/how-economics-became-a-religion

As someone who is a former libertarian/ancap and read a lot of their first and second hand literature the funny thing is they ironically think they aren't listened too enough and that they're constantly besieged by outside economic schools trying to criticize them for doing the "right thing" and sticking to principle. In their literature Hayek was forced out of economics, because mean staists didn't want to hear his sage advice and not because he was a quack who refused to write books by academic conventions and cite sources and back up his claims with real evidence. A lot of them believe he was only given his Nobel prize as charity to conservatives and not because the establishment actually likes their shit ideas.

Mises Nazi/fascist ties are always minimized beyond belief and he is constantly portrayed as being uniquely harmed by the holocaust.

The Netherlands also went the Australia route - Wim Kok (labour party and friend of tony blair and bill clinton) fucked shit up real good.
he was present at my high school graduation cause I went to school with his grandson but didn't dare whisper "srebrenica" in his ear

Neoliberalism in everyplace that is not the West was largely imposed by the imf

As the result of debt negotiations, stipulations, and the debt crises.

Am reading those now. On the final one, I'd adopt some caveats though. Keynes-Hicks is Bastard Keynesianism. Amusingly even Hicks himself turned on IS/LM later in life as a misrepresentation of Keynes. Krugman finds himself closest to New-Keynesianism (i.e. Neoclassical with a human face.) although he's always slightly irritating to pin down.
One other thing I've thought to add recently is an idea that has hit me - whether a correlation of some sort could be drawn between the falling rate of profit and the rising debt levels that result from Minsky cycles. (pic related, no graphs because I'm not sure what exactly the correlation would be and it might not be a simple "high debt level = low profits")

You can have interlinkage without wider globalisation. Remember that from Breton Woods, the entire world found itself shackled to the dollar and to a large degree still does. Not to mention that most countries I'm aware of were suffering similar problems - unusually high inflation co-occurring with unusually high unemployment. - Almost certainly with similar root causes. (Which I hint are somehow economic since one would assume if it was purely national policy failure or such, rather than something international, then you'd have seen much greater diversity in the period of crisis rather than it being the 1970s for nearly all the developed world.)
The financial sector still played hell even if they weren't yet the behemoth they would become in future. Rather than give a litany of small examples I'll just stick to one: Even in that era, Minsky cycles were in effect. US private debt passed 100% GDP in the 1960s or so, even then no effort was really made to pre-emptively deal with the debt problem. (Though debts would get much higher during the neoliberal "recovery".)

because it's enforced by those with the monopoly on violence

I'd point to your earlier aside about thinktanks, honestly. The modern likes of the gilded age colonial crown companies a'la East India and Hudson Bay were coming back into existence as transnational corporations, old trust-busting authorities increasingly asleep at the wheel, and these new transnats were gaining illicit pull on the levers of power at post-WWII governments and international bodies like the UN & IMF, inserting puppets to secure their newfound power.

I don't think it was the economic conditions that came first (there were mini-recessions during the '50s & '60s, but nothing like what happened in the '70s), it was new people filling seats in economic posts around the world. Neolibs created the conditions to justify their own further proposals.

True, the growth of finance (which is much, MUCH more than debt instruments) post-WWII was unprecedented, but it pales in comparison to the skyrocketing madness starting in the '90s. Look at these sectorial graphs:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_position_of_the_United_States

Regarding private debt, much of that too can be traced to deregulation in the 1970s (credit cards, mortgage durations, retail APR limits, etc).

a virus adapts

it triggered the hell out of /r/badeconomics
reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/6n3mfm/economics_is_now_a_religion/

Damn those guys can be pedantic.

They take their shit pretty seriously, whats the boards general opinion on them? They seem pretty hostile to outsiders

What do you mean disastrous? It gave the world rate of profit a little boost that lasted for 3 decades. Tho that seems to be over. No problem, Porky will soon bring us freedonomics, with plenty of think tanks and marketeers in all medias ready to enlighten us in the brave next step of capitalism with a human face.

Look at who actually funds university economic departments and you'll understand.

I probably know the answer, but there's no law requiring higher education institutions to disclose their funding sources, is there?