I posted Gideon Rachman's FT column on oD's The World link-watch page on diigo earlier today. Gideon writes:
Investment bankers, the shock- troops of the Reagan-Thatcher revolution, were allowed to bet their banks on this new market, because regulators and politicians believed so firmly in the magical and self- regulating qualities of the market.
The same process of intellectual overshoot happened with other signature ideas of the Reagan- Thatcher era: privatisation, scepticism about environmentalism and democracy promotion.
Well ... I think there is a kind of "democracy promotion" --- the kind openDemocracy stands for --- that is not neo-liberal and is in the wings, waiting for its open moment, as it were.
That apart, Gideon's judgement of ``overshoot'' is very welcome. I wrote asking him about the idea of "progress" -- did he think that was oversold too? The pessimistic conclusion to his column, in which he saw just a batting back and forth between over-regulation and over-deregulation, suggested that he might be shorting progress too. Can we socially learn from these crises?
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