No Laissez-Faire Revolution in the 80s

Which POD would be needed so that Keynesianism remains as the top economic "school", and is never displaced by so-called Neoliberalism in the 1980s?
 
I'll go backwards in time, and start at the later point first: An important thing is to limit Monetarism, or at least keep the new Conservative economic thought to Monetarism and keep it from going into supply side and laissez faire and all that. In the 70's and 80's, the Monetarists kinda became the new sexy thing. Maybe you can't reverse that, but you can keep it in check and keep it from turning into Reaganomics.

Going back further in time, prevent the clusterfuck of the 1960's spending-wise. You had LBJ spending domestically with the Great Society, in the foreign arena with Vietnam, and in the Space Race. That messed up the economy pretty badly because you could afford either Vietnam or the Great Society (with the Space race somewhere in between) and LBJ wanted both. Likewise, Vietnam and the chaos of the 60's didn't just realistically hurt the economy, but it created perceptions. It shook the faith in the Liberal Consensus, and all these things that had been assurances of the majority gave way to doubt, and Conservative ideas, already kind of the rebellious thing, started to take root. We went a bit to the right with Nixon (though he was not a Conservative) and once Nixon was shamed, we had someone who filled the same niche Nixon was, but in a far more extreme Right wing fashion; that person being Ronald Reagan.
 
The only requirement is to prevent the Carter depression. Arguably, the precipitating element here was the oil shortage. Therefore: James Earl Carter declares his support for Iranian revolutionaries against Shah Rezi Palavah. Congress fumes, but no hostages are taken. Moderate 'Leftists' remain in control of Iran, but neutral in the Cold War and anxious to stay friendly to both sides. Iran steps up oil production to raise capital. With no Energy Crisis and no depression, incumbent Carter narrowly wins re-election in spite of the Panama Canal Treaty. By 1984, after a period of severe inflation, the economy is thriving and the Goldwater/Reagan 'rednecks' are all but forgotten.

A few years later, Soviet Premier Gorbachev is ousted and President Mondale claims credit for victory in the 'Cold War'.
 
I think what Norton says is good for an early POD. For a later POD that would achieve something similar, I remember a while back there was a thread on WI Reagan won in '76. My idea is that Reagan wins in '76, then faces a bad economy similar to Carter (and presumably fucks up in all kinds of other ways too), and the perception is that Reagan's extremist and half-baked economic theories have caused the hardship the American people face. He loses in 1980, and conservative and neoliberal ideas are discredited. Oh, and the world is a much better place too.
 
This is all the US. You're forgetting what's happening across the pond in Britain with the Thatcherite revolution, though that's monetarism and not voodoo. Unless you have a '50s POD with both parties realizing their policies are unsustainable, the UK postwar consensus will collapse and neoliberalism will be birthed there.
 
This is all the US. You're forgetting what's happening across the pond in Britain with the Thatcherite revolution, though that's monetarism and not voodoo. Unless you have a '50s POD with both parties realizing their policies are unsustainable, the UK postwar consensus will collapse and neoliberalism will be birthed there.

That's a fair enough point, so perhaps a better question is, is there any way to prevent neoliberalism from becoming a pseudo-religious orthodoxy in the United States and keep the pro-freemarket conservatives in this country, well, sane? As in more like the post-Thatcher conservatives in Britain who seem to accept that public institutions like the NHS should continue to exist instead of like American tea party "conservatives" who seem to think all public institutions should be abolished?

Maybe a better way of putting that is, is it possible to have a *neoliberal right in the US that believes its task is to manage the welfare state more economically, rather than seeking to abolish it?
 
Well you need to get rid of the two experiments first.

No "Boys from Chicago" conspiring to throw trade unionists out of helicopters in Chile.

No UK abandonment of New Zealand for the EEC.

If you can prevent these two, then you can prevent the experiments which allowed Thatcher to gesture at successful economic resolutions to the crisis of Fordism.

Or, you know, we could actually solve the problems with Fordism—ha.

The largest problem is that the cycle of capital accumulation in the post-war world had failed, there were signs of growing working class strength based on Fordist working classes, and that Keynsianism didn't offer any access to primitive accumulation. Neo-liberalism did: the privatisation of social democracy has been one of the largest grabs at a "commons" since the enclosures.

We could always just hold a world war instead to solve the problems of Fordism.

yours,
Sam R.
 
That's a fair enough point, so perhaps a better question is, is there any way to prevent neoliberalism from becoming a pseudo-religious orthodoxy in the United States and keep the pro-freemarket conservatives in this country, well, sane? As in more like the post-Thatcher conservatives in Britain who seem to accept that public institutions like the NHS should continue to exist instead of like American tea party "conservatives" who seem to think all public institutions should be abolished?

Maybe a better way of putting that is, is it possible to have a *neoliberal right in the US that believes its task is to manage the welfare state more economically, rather than seeking to abolish it?
You can do both with a POD in '76...
Ford or Reagan wins in '76.
Falklands War happened in '76 or '77 as it almost did. Or Heath wins in '74.
 
You can do both with a POD in '76...
Ford or Reagan wins in '76.
Falklands War happened in '76 or '77 as it almost did. Or Heath wins in '74.

Lets not forget one of the far outposts of Laissez-Faire - New Zealand.

A good PoD might be the 1975 election - if an accord can reached between the two major parties to keep Labour's compulsory superannuation scheme, it'd be a good start.

However the turning point is Think Big

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Big

With less Government debt, there's no pressing need to pull back spending all of a sudden in the mid 1980s, and maybe, just maybe we avoid Rogernomics.

Perhaps the Government bankrolls the Clyde dam & some installations of wind farms, and leaves the natural gas & synthetic fuel ventures up to private enterprise, charging royalties for exploration? If there's no money in it, companies just won't do it.
 
The only requirement is to prevent the Carter depression. Arguably, the precipitating element here was the oil shortage. Therefore: James Earl Carter declares his support for Iranian revolutionaries against Shah Rezi Palavah. Congress fumes, but no hostages are taken. Moderate 'Leftists' remain in control of Iran, but neutral in the Cold War and anxious to stay friendly to both sides. Iran steps up oil production to raise capital. With no Energy Crisis and no depression, incumbent Carter narrowly wins re-election in spite of the Panama Canal Treaty. By 1984, after a period of severe inflation, the economy is thriving and the Goldwater/Reagan 'rednecks' are all but forgotten.

A few years later, Soviet Premier Gorbachev is ousted and President Mondale claims credit for victory in the 'Cold War'.

Oh, this is silly! When does the US abandon one of its long-standing allies, even though he is a megalomaniac dictator?
Wait, oh yeah. Obama. Mubarak. Tahrir Square.:D
So, we have found two ways(Reagan '76; no energy crisis of 1979) to really discredit laissez-faire in the US.
In the UK, it seems a bit harder, but maybe one way would be to butterfly away the Falklands War; I read somewhere that this basically handed the election to Thatcher.
Still, would "no falklands" butterfly away Labour's... ahem, incompetent campaign in 1983, in which they advocated nuclear disarmament?
 
A question - if Laissez-Faire economic policies are removed from US & UK politics, is there a greater chance that they'll be trialled in a smaller economy?

Would the frustrated "free-market" advocates focus instead on another country to try and prove their theories? If so, what nations would be good candidates for such a trial?
 
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