Know Your Enemy #16: The Windbag City, with Marshall Steinbaum
Know Your Enemy #16: The Windbag City, with Marshall Steinbaum
Matt and Sam and are joined by Marshall Steinbaum for a deep dive into the Chicago school of economics and the baleful influence of libertarian ideas.
Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe, rate, and review to the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.
Matt and Sam are joined by Marshall Steinbaum for a deep dive into the Chicago school of economics and the wreckage it’s supported—from welcoming the birth defects caused by deregulating the pharmaceutical industry to justifying massive resistance to desegregation to being put in the service of coronavirus truther-ism. Where did this iteration of libertarianism come from, intellectually and institutionally? Who are the key figures in the Chicago school? How have their ideas infected the way we all think about economics and politics? It’s a sordid, depressing tale of right-wing money, intellectual dishonesty, and a gleeful desire to discipline the forces of democracy.
Further Reading:
- Marshall Steinbaum, “The Book That Explains Charlottesville,” Boston Review, August 14, 2017
- Marshall Steinbaum, “Economics after Neoliberalism,” Boston Review, February 28, 2019
- Isaac Chotiner, “The Contrarian Coronavirus Theory that Informed the Trump Administration,” New Yorker, March 30, 2020
- Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains (Penguin Random House, 2017)
- Edward Nik-Khah, “Neoliberal Pharmaceutical Science and the Chicago School of Economics” (Social Studies of Science 2014, Vol. 44(4) 489–517)
