Philip Mirowski interviewed on This is Hell! and reviewed in Jacobin
In an interview last weekend with This is Hell's Chuck Mertz, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown author Phiip Mirowski discussed the insidious way in which neoliberalism thought has seeped into every area of our lives, including the discipline of economics, environmental denialism, economic policies, and even social media. For example, Mirowski cites Ilana Gershon on how Facebook turns individuals into "neoliberal agents:"
It takes your information for free, and sells it to others for a profit ... I construct a profile on Facebook with stereotypical material and then try to measure my worth by attracting fake friends with an artificial metric. Subtle algorithms force me to continually update my profile, teaching me that there's no stable, coherent self that I must return to. Indeed, I can be anything I want to be on Facebook.
In response to whether or not the lack of criticism of neoliberalism has to do with a fear of being labeled a socialist, Mirowski responds:
What does it mean to be socialist now when the main neoliberal project is to take over the state to create the kind of market they think should exist? That merely running the state for the benefit of society is some kind of different political project? No. What they've done is to confuse what it means to be a socialist. And that's why they're so effective.
In his review of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste for the latest issue of Jacobin, Paul Heideman describes the book as "comprehensive" and "compelling, particularly in regard to the intellectual history of the NTC (Neoliberal Thought Collective)." In particular, Heideman highly recommends the sections where Mirowski "disabuses his readers of the notion that the wing of neoliberal doctrine disseminated by neoclassical economists could ever be reformed."
Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste is now available in paperback.
Visit This is Hell! to listen to the interview in full. Visit Jacobin to read the review in full.