I encountered it in the preface in the review copy I received of the book Radical Markets, by Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl. On p. xvi, they write
Many on the Right support Market Fundamentalism, an ideology they assume to have been proven in economic theory and historical experience. In reality, it is little more than a nostalgic commitment to an idealized version of markets as they existed in the Anglo-Saxon world in the nineteenth century. . .We contrast Market Fundamentalism with Market Radicalism, which is our own commitment to understand, restructure, and improve markets at their very roots.
I have never heard anyone explicitly say, “I am a Market Fundamentalist,” or “I believe in Market Fundamentalism.” As far as I can tell, the term is only used to disparage and to straw-man others. It does not encourage a conversation with people on the Right. It’s like trying to start a conversation with the Left by calling them Social Justice Warriors.
This calls to mind “Illiberal Reformers.” All we need is for our betters to use their superior wisdom to tell us how we should behave.
Fundamentalism and Radicalism are themselves interesting terms; fundamentalist was actually originally a term for religious moderates who wanted to ‘agree on the core issues but stop fighting and quibbling about everything else.’ Unfortunately, they found that the definition of ‘core issues’ was the next major battleground. Regardless, it was progressives/liberals with little attachment to their own nominal religions who started using it in the accusative.
Radicalism has been alternatively defined as an attempt to reform at the roots or to return to the roots. Much hinges on that distinction.
Anyway… I agree, I’ve never heard anyone claim the title of market fundamentalist. It is a slur on many levels; for one, it suggests economics as religion – and then in turn uses the idea that all religion is bad and that only certain privileged people are intelligent enough to live without one. To quote a recent Star Wars, every phrase in that sentence is wrong.
Think of the Keynesian multiplier. It’s a tradition, like purgatory or the sale of indulgences. And like them it has no basis in scripture. Within the Keynesian church it is of fundamental importance, but it has no foundation. The fundamentalists who protest against it are the recusants, the dissenters, the nonconformists. When the church attacks these “fundamentalists” for going back to the roots, the foundations, the church is shoring up its authority, but the reformers read their bible correctly.
I think they are using it to reassure left wingers that they aren’t the “bad guys”.
The sad fact is that many on the right don’t support free exchange.
It’s used in the same manner as “trickle down economics.”
good point. To me “trickle down economics” tended to be largely empty of semantic content, and it startles me that people think we all know what it means.
I once heard Deirdre McCloskey argue that the Laffer curve could actually exist and one could be on the wrong side of it. She mentioned the Mean Value Theorem and calculus in her treatment. Whether any society is past the maximum tax yield is an empirical question, of course, and should not be a…what’s the term Prof. Arnold likes to use…”Bayesian prior.”
A big problem with many terms is there is a no diagram, no mention of what one is optimizing or preserving or maximizing.
Many on the left self describe as social justice warriors. In fact, having coffee this past week, the table next to me was an interview of some sort, and the person conducting the interview described the current workers as SJWs.
I’ve heard the term many times. Where, I cannot recall.
In much scholarly literature I’m familiar with, a much older term is “neo-liberal”, which is probably easier to define, and started being used perhaps in the 1980s when Thatcher and Reagan were in power. In the current colloquial use of language, “neo-liberalism” might actually be “a thing.” Market fundamentalism is probably just a term of abuse, and not “a thing.”
I would hazard a guess that in the USA the term “fundamentalist” has negative connotations for most of the public, since it conjures the image of a wild-eyed Bible thumping fundamentalist Christian who opposes vaccinations, blood transfusions, and may believe the earth is flat.
When it comes to religion, the more discerning and nuanced thinkers will tease out other terms that might be more accurate or specific such as “evangelical” or “pentecostal.” I would hope we can do the same thing with this term fundamentalist, if it means anything at all. It also begs the question what are we getting back to–what Ur-text or previous state.
John Lukacs wrote a memoir calling himself a reactionary, because he at least could specify what he wanted to get back to (old style Roman Catholicism in part).
There is no shortage of talk on social justice warriors around here.
Even objecting to the term and taking offense at it is avoidance of facing it head on and talking about it. Most don’t label themselves but are labeled by others. That they object to it is no surprise, but to take offense at it is just another attempt at forestall conversation. If you aren’t offended, you probably aren’t learning.
Wikipedia has a entry for “market fundamentalism” that also provides a straw man definition: “Market fundamentalism (also known as free market fundamentalism) is a term applied to a strong belief in the ability of laissez-faire or free market policies to solve most economic and social problems.” This seems inaccurate. I don’t think anyone towards whom the term would be directed claims that laissez-faire will “solve most economic and social problems.” My guess is that most would say that laissez-faire produces less problems than do efforts to correct “market failures.”
Rather than shy from the term, though, I am happy to embrace it:
“You are a market fundamentalist.”
“Yes, all other things being equal, I prefer voluntary exchange to coercion.”
“You don’t care about market failure x, y, z.”
“Let’s look at each situation individually and determine what the options are, compare, and then decide that if coercive intervention is desirable, what is the unit of government closest to the problem that can adequately address it.”
Interestingly, what is now being called “market fundamentalism” has also been referred to as “market radicalism.” https://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-dangerous-politics-of-market-radicalism What is interesting here is that the critique of laissez faire is that it requires massive social control: “It should be added at this point that even while the market was legitimated as the provider of freedom, it was accompanied in much of the Anglosphere by a mounting reliance on coercive social-control mechanisms, one illustration of which is the existence of the highest levels of prison populations in the democratic world.”
I personally don’t agree that free markets require large prison populations, but am sympathetic to the notion there is an inconsistency between advocating economic freedom while tolerating a highly punitive state, such as the US, in which the rule of law is non-existent. The rule of law requries that the law be knowable in advance and that all people be treated equally before. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it: “The most important demand of the Rule of Law is that people in positions of authority should exercise their power within a constraining framework of well-established public norms rather than in an arbitrary, ad hoc, or purely discretionary manner on the basis of their own preferences or ideology.” On this count, the US has the worst legal system in the world.
The better argument would be that legal reform and a move toward The Rule of Law are more consistent with market fundamentalism than with any of the proposed alternatives to it. The notion that if you give people money then they won’t commit crime has never been born out in reality. However, if the state were constrained and forced to comply with limitations on bureaucratic fiat, both voluntary exchange and general human well-being would be enhanced.
The people decrying market fundamentalism and advancing market radicalism appear to be wanting to have their cake and eat it to. Either you are in favor of voluntary exchange or you are not.
Thanks! Wikiworld to the rescue. And I’m far more ignorant that I’d guessed. If Soros and Stiglitz are both using the term, it must have caught on among many people.
Ha, look at the the wikipedia page history. On January 8, 2018, the word ‘pejorative’ was removed from ” ”Market fundamentalism” (also known as ”’free market fundamentalism”’) is a pejorative term …” by someone at the University of Kansas.
It’s obviously a pejorative, with “fundamentalism” meant to denigrate and disparage and to encourage the target audience to draw an analogy to “Christian Fundamentalists” the effect of which is to lower to the same pariah-level social status.
Amusingly, “radicalism” is used in a similar way by anti-progressive writers, but has been used with opposite, positive valence by progressives themselves for generations, (e.g., Rules for Radicals.)
However, at least there is some good news in the use of the term, which is that the use of “market” as a positive, “realist” modifier provides yet another data point of the intellectual defeat of the anti-market Socialists, which while it may not last for too much longer, at least had a very long run and, arguably, a role in saving our civilization by reversing the trend towards central planning and command economies.
When high status authors in economics stop using the term “markets” in their titles, because it makes elite academics roll their eyes, that’s when we’re really in trouble again. But fortunately, we’re not there yet.
“The most important demand of the Rule of Law is that people in positions of authority should exercise their power within a constraining framework of well-established public norms rather than in an arbitrary, ad hoc, or purely discretionary manner on the basis of their own preferences or ideology.” On this count, the US has the worst legal system in the world.
Seriously? You don’t think that happens in other countries, often to a greater degree? Perhaps you should move to Zimbabwe, or Nigeria, or Russia, or …
I’m a bloody amateur but … isn’t market fundamentalism something like an absolute belief in the goodness (efficiency) of markets, in the badness of governments and the social Darwinism, zero-sum, survival of the fittest? I’m inclined to believe this fundamentalism exists by default, because I see little counter-evidence from the right of “compassionate conservatism” or “compassionate capitalism”. Note: I’m not attacking straw-men, I’m really curious in your opinion.
Part of my point.
The ‘goodness and efficiency’ of markets is really just the limit of what markets do, in theory. In other words, this preview might be criticizing the concept that we are compressible fluids, we can buy three eggs when we need them, and return one unused. In the continuum of theory is, this is the limit,the best that can be done, outer bound in the theory of liquidity.
That is why you might he puzzled, he seems to be criticizing his own work because the ‘liquidity in the limit model’, isthething he proves exceptions to, it is his substrate.
Social Darwinism, as an epithet, was a neat reverse of the truth. Socialist eugenicists and central planners were the actual Social Darwinists. Racist Progressives saw themselves, alone, as fit to rule. Zero-sum? Check. Survival of the fittest? Check. Battling and fighting for advantage. Privileges for insiders and penalties for outsiders.
If that’s what “market fundamentalism” is, then almost no one is a market fundamentalist. It is, however, what many intellectuals and media people think that “conservatives” believe. So it is part of how news gets presented.
Of course, in real life, no “conservative” politician talks like that. More to the point, all the “compassionate” social programs survive “conservative” administrations, often with their funding increased.
Ok, I backed thru the author web site and pick off the first three references:
“Imperfect Competition in Selection Markets”
“Price Theory” Treated as a reduced allocation problem
“Product Design in Selection Markets”
Now these are references about fundamental motions in aggregates with free entry and exits. Looks darn like fundamental market models to me.
I think they misconstrue in the preview, bad marketing. Not clear which red herring they aim at.
Bryan Caplan would probably call himself a “market fundamentalist”.
I think the fundamentalist label is meant to mean “support of desired policy goals even if it can be reasonably asserted they are non-optimal compared to an alternative.”
So a Christian fundamentalist might believe the earth is 5,000 years old despite the evidence because the Bible says so. Even though admitting the truth about the world would help him better understand it.
On a more positive note “human rights” are a kind of fundamentalism. They are asserted even when they have no materialistic grounding and can often be negative in pragmatic utilitarian sense given certain situations, but they are asserted nonetheless. I will give a shout out to Christianity here too, its not clear that many of Christ’s assertions or attitudes survive scrutiny in a Hobbesian environment without fundamental belief in Christ. Or we could go and say the same about the constitution “we hold these truths to be self evident (i.e. we can’t prove them)”.
Fundamentalism doesn’t have to mean Westboro Baptist Church. It could mean “any deviation from best guess evidence based rational materialism with a rough goal of utilitarian maximization.” In this reading its not “bad”, its more a potential tradeoff of human values.
Here’s a simple test for people on the right. If you think, as a real world practical matter, you could have done a better job running Singapore then LKY because he was too far to the left…you are probably some kind of market/libertarian fundamentalist.