Nine Lives of Neoliberalism by Philip Mirowski & Quinn Slobodian

Author:Philip Mirowski & Quinn Slobodian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Conferences, Think Tanks and the Nixon Administration: Freedom Fighters in Action

When Milton Friedman published his article calling for flexible exchange rates in 1953, fewer than 5 percent of economists worldwide shared his opinion; by the end of the 1960s, approximately 90 percent of economists did, and they were joined by powerful figures within government and the banking community.65 The early neoliberal debates and later campaign to promote flexible exchange rates thus laid the epistemological and organizational groundwork for the end of Bretton Woods. During the 1960s and early 1970s, the campaign manifested an astonishing degree of activity and became one of the early high points of neoliberal influence.66 The organizational background of the protagonists of the agenda within the MPS is key to understanding the breadth and coordination of their activities. These included a large series of lectures, academic and journalistic articles, pamphlets and books, public calls in daily newspapers, public debates and appearances in the media, and international conferences in all Western countries, all targeting not only the general public but, more importantly, academics, private bankers, and politicians.

The origin of the collective effort to push for flexible exchange rates can be dated to 1963, when an international reform debate took off after a series of publications by Robert Triffin, and the policy-makers of the large industrialized countries initiated a fundamental study on the international monetary system at that year’s IMF meeting. The study, they argued, was to be written by government economists, since academics in their view could not agree on anything, and it should be based on the consensus that the fundamental structure of fixed exchange rates and the established gold price should remain the foundation for future arrangements.67 This sparked the ambition of a group of academics around Machlup, Fellner, and Triffin to organize what became the Bellagio conferences to regain authority for academics in these debates and, equally important but largely overlooked in the literature, to broaden the scope of the debate by integrating both flexible exchange rates and the gold standard as two of four options discussed.68

Charles Kindleberger later labeled this a “new industry”: “the holding of conferences on the international monetary system by academic economists with an occasional admixture of central and commercial bankers.”69 Neoliberals were the prime motors of the new industry. From the wealth of conferences that followed, three are regarded as the most important ones of the postwar era: The Bellagio conferences by the Group of 32 economists in 1963 and 1964; the Bellagio conferences that followed from 1964 onward, targeted at a dialogue between economists, central bankers, and politicians; and the Bürgenstock conferences in 1969, which were aimed mainly at international private bankers and business representatives.70 MPS members not only initiated and organized all of these conferences, they also dominated in personnel and content, comprising eight of the thirty-two participants of the Bellagio conference, four out of fourteen central economists of the following conferences with politicians, and eight out of seventeen economists at the Bürgenstock conference. The only economists that

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