How Neoliberalism Worms Its Way Into Your Brain

• I have a few reasons for disliking the term: it’s imprecise, it’s misleading, and it is unintelligible to the majority of literate adults. And yet I’m torn, because I also think that it captures a very real tendency. I worry that overusing shaggy theoretical terminology can both alienate readers and result in vague or meaningless writing. But the underlying phenomenon that “neoliberalism” describes has occurred
• It captures the tendency of people who are nominally “on the left” to make arguments based on conservative premises.
• traditional liberalism, before the “neo” variety emerged, would have made its case [against reducing taxes on higher incomes] on the basis of some quite different premises. Instead of arguing that Democrats are actually the party that will reduce the middle class' taxes, it would make the case that taxes are important, because it’s only through taxes that we can improve schools, infrastructure, healthcare, and poverty relief. Instead of participating in the race to cut taxes and the deficit, Old Liberalism is based on a set of moral ideas about what we owe to one another.
• Education example
  • Argument given by libertarian economist Bryan Caplan in The Case Against Education that the skills taught in public schools are not directly used in the labor force, and a degree serves mostly as a form of “signaling”
  • a “liberal” response from Kevin Carey rebukes the credentialism-only argument, but only to say that high degrees of achievement are correlated with high economic performance in a country
• quote from Mike Rose about why vocational education must be more than just job training, also from a utilitarian premise
  • Intellectual suppleness will have eto be as key an element of a future Career and Technical Education as the content knowledge of a field.
  • students will need to learn the conceptual base of those tools and techniques and how to reason with them, for future work is predicted to be increasingly fluid and mutable. A standard production process or routine of service could change dramatically. Would employees be able to understand the principles involved in the process or routine and adapt past skills to the new workplace?
• Our defense of a liberal education remains instrumental.
• Goldman Sachs produced a report suggesting to biotech companies that curing diseases might not actually be profitable, because people stop being customers once they are cured and no more money can be extracted from them. The liberal response to this would be an empirical argument: “Here’s why it is actually profitable to cure diseases.” The leftist response would be: “We need to have a value system that goes beyond profit maximization.”