BACK IN THE day, columnists for the Financial Times were of a type. They were predominantly pale, male, Oxbridge-educated world travelers. Their politics ranged from centrist to libertarian right. Most importantly, they were fans of neoliberalism.
The term neoliberal has been stigmatized far more successfully than it has been defined. For our purposes, it refers to a set of policy ideas that became strongly associated with the so-called Washington Consensus: a mix of deregulation, trade liberalization, and macroeconomic prudence that the United States encouraged countries across the globe to embrace. These policies contributed to the hyperglobalization that defined the post–Cold War era from the fall of the Berlin Wall to Brexit.
Neoliberalism was embraced by policy makers from both major parties. For free market Republicans, neoliberalism meant scaling back barriers that stunted market efficiency. For moderate Democrats, it was viewed as a set of policies that could lift the poorest of the poor out of poverty. What united those across the political spectrum was the belief that neoliberalism fostered greater economic interdependence, which could, in turn, generate global peace and prosperity. After all, why would China ever go to war with the West if it could get rich by trading with it instead?
In recent years, however, the Financial Times has hired some new voices who share a deep suspicion of neoliberalism. Last fall, economic historian Adam Tooze’s inaugural Financial Times column pushed the idea of a “polycrisis”—a series of disparate shocks that threaten the world as we know it. The neoliberal failure to avert or alleviate the polycrisis has become a central theme in Tooze’s recent work. Meanwhile, another recent Financial Times hire, Rana Foroohar, wrote multiple columns, a book, and a Foreign Affairs article exulting in the demise of neoliberalism as an economic model.
Foroohar’s piece was frankly titled “After Neoliberalism.” In it, she called China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) “a seismic shift that removed the guardrails from the global economy.” She predicted that politics “will have a greater impact, but her philosophy fits snugly with the prevailing sentiment in the world’s major capitals. Anyone advocating neoliberal policies is now in Washington, D.C.
