Some individuals had great influence in changing the cultural background during the years of market fundamentalism. The first of these individuals was Milton Friedman who in those years acquired a prominent status as a public intellectual. With his writings and public pronouncements, he made individual economic liberty and economic efficiency the only goals worth pursuing in a market economy. He gave no role to the pursuit of collective goals. The second individual was Jack Welsh. He had enormous influence on behavior in the corporate sector with his pursuit of profits at any cost and at much cost to workers. He created a corporate culture that became predominant, and that totally ignored the welfare of workers. The third individual was Newt Gingrich, who changed political relations transforming them into a contact sport. Political opponents became enemies to be defeated and not colleagues who just had different political views. Politics in the United States never recovered.

In Chapter 5, I address self-interest as a foundation for capitalism by discussing the development of the Chicago School and the life and writings of Ayn Rand. Neoclassical economists after Alfred Marshall continued the narrowing of their discipline begun by classical economists. Whereas Polanyi and Keynes emphasized responsibility and duty in their moral foundation based on humanism, neoclassical economists associated with the Chicago School eschewed all social and moral responsibility and made narrow self-interest their reigning behavioral assumption. I begin by discussing the continued narrowing of neoclassical economics in the twentieth century and the rise of self-interest as the defining principle in economics. I discuss how the assumption of self-interest gained momentum and eventually conquered the Chicago School of Economics. I then discuss Ayn Rand’s glorification of self-interest in her novels and her interaction with the political right in America. I show how Rand’s moral foundation for capitalism based on narrow self-interest (rational egoism) represented a natural extension of the straightjacket of self-interest out of Chicago. This sets up a discussion of self-interest as a moral foundation for capitalism based on the seminal writings of the Chicago School and Ayn Rand.

As scholars and activists seek to define and promote greater corporate political responsibility (CPR), they will benefit from understanding practitioner perspectives and how executives are responding to rising scrutiny of their political influences, reputational risk and pressure from employees, customers and investors to get involved in civic, political, and societal issues. This chapter draws on firsthand conversations with practitioners, including executives in government affairs; sustainability; senior leadership; and diversity, equity and inclusion, during the launch of a university-based CPR initiative. I summarize practitioner motivations, interests, barriers and challenges related to engaging in conversations about CPR, as well as committing or acting to improve CPR. Following the summary, I present implications for further research and several possible paths forward, including leveraging practitioners’ value on accountability, sustaining external calls for transparency, strengthening awareness of systems, and reframing CPR as part of a larger dialogue around society’s “social contract.”

In the years following FDA approval of direct-to-consumer, genetic-health-risk/DTCGHR testing, millions of people in the US have sent their DNA to companies to receive personal genome health risk information without physician or other learned medical professional involvement. In Personal Genome Medicine, Michael J. Malinowski examines the ethical, legal, and social implications of this development. Drawing from the past and present of medicine in the US, Malinowski applies law, policy, public and private sector practices, and governing norms to analyze the commercial personal genome sequencing and testing sectors and to assess their impact on the future of US medicine. Written in relatable and accessible language, the book also proposes regulatory reforms for government and medical professionals that will enable technological advancements while maintaining personal and public health standards.

Chapter 5 provides a fragmentary introduction to macroeconomics that shows that highlights some of the philosophical questions macroeconomic models raise and relates them to equilibrium theory. Section 1 discusses how growth theory is linked to equilibrium theory. Section 2 considers how growth theory can be adapted to address questions about economic fluctuations, including recessions. Section 3 focuses on a simple influential Keynesian model of economic fluctuations. Section 4 discusses a specific relationship between employment and the rate of inflation (the Phillips Curve) that highlights methodological issues concerning causal inference and microfoundations that have led many economists to reject Keynesian economics. Section 5 develops these methodological issues further, highlighting the role of identities in macroeconomics.

In the second half of the Twentieth Century, Mill’s deductive method was criticized by defenders of more positivistic or modernist views of economic methodology, which I criticize in chapter 11. A number of economists, including Terence Hutchison, Paul Samuelson, Fritz Machlup, Milton Friedman, and Tjallings Koopmans argued that Mill’s deductive method is insufficiently empirical and that economic models should be judged by the agreement of their implications with economic outcomes. Yet they rarely practiced what they preached. This chapter thus highlights the methodological schizophrenia of many economists, in which methodological pronouncements and practice contradict one another.

Market freedom consists in the ability to impose costs on other people without being responsible to them for doing so. A market is a domain of conduct in which people who enjoy this privilege interact with each other. This understanding of market freedom has three notable advantages. First, it clarifies and broadens our conception of what a market is by showing that market freedom is enjoyed in a wide range noncommercial contexts, and that rights of possession and exchange, systems of incentives, and so on are not constitutive features of markets but contingent constraints on them. Second, it clarifies and broadens our understanding of the value of market freedom by showing that it is a necessary condition for the pursuit of traditional liberal ends such as limited government, social progress, and personal development. Third, it clarifies our understanding of the limits of market freedom by showing that in a liberal polity markets have to be authorized by republican means and constrained by various republican (responsibility-promoting) mechanisms.

Because of continuing capital controls in the core countries during the immediate postwar period, the action in international monetary economics was initially mainly in the periphery, where the new IMF played a leading role. As the market system recovered, academic economics began to take an interest, with Robert Mundell (among others) working to extend the economists’ preferred macroeconomic modelling framework (the so-called IS–LM), to include the balance of payments. In time, the logical endpoint of these academic efforts was revival of the empirically discredited specie-flow model by Harry Johnson and others. Kindleberger’s practitioner wisdom resisted all these academic developments as distraction from real world financial developments.

At root, the problems with the Federal Reserve (and many other central banks) are institutional. The repeated recessions and crises in the era of the Fed show that we need a radical reimagination of the basic institutions of monetary policy. In this chapter, we survey the work of the three great classically liberal Nobel laureates of the twentieth century – James Buchanan, F. A. Hayek, and Milton Friedman – to show that each of them gave serious consideration to monetary-institutional fundamentals. Our focus is not on their particular conclusions, but on how they thought about the problems of monetary institutional design. This represents a very different style of scholarship than macroeconomists and monetary economists currently practice. Unless scholars engage the research projects of Buchanan, Hayek, and Friedman, research in monetary economics will not be of much help in achieving lasting macroeconomic stability.

Monetarism was at the core of the ideological and policy wars of the 1980s, and of the strategy of the Conservative government headed by Margaret Thatcher. The UK had the highest rate of inflation in the industrialized world. By the 1970s, inflation was tearing the British social fabric apart: especially in its interactions with a government-imposed prices and wages policy. The British policy-making community could not agree whether money should be an overall objective of policy, or simply a target for an indicator that might be a temporary expression of how far the objective was being met, or an instrument for the conduct of policy in pursuit of the target. The Bank was initially quite sceptical about monetary targeting and hostile to monetarism. It believed that proposals for monetary base control ignored the structure of the British banking system, the knowledge of whose complexities and intricacies formed the core of the Bank of England’s professional competence. The keystone of the UK government’s approach was to target a range for £M3 growth as part of a Medium Term Financial Strategy. Meanwhile the Bank felt that it was shut out of policy formulation.

In practice, the early 1980s UK policy involved sporadically – but surprisingly often – responding to exchange rate movements, even when the exchange rate was specifically not designated as either a policy goal or an instrument, as well as raising interest rates as a way to cool down inflation but also economic growth. The 1981 budget, the most controversial of the Thatcher years, was accompanied by the attempt to take the pressure off manufacturing industry by lowering interest rates. The Bank responded to a surge in broad monetary aggregates by overfunding, that is, selling more than the amount of long-term debt (mainly gilts and National Savings instruments) required to finance the government. In 1983, a new Governor, Robin Leigh-Pemberton, who seemed more aligned with Thatcher’s view, came to the Bank of England, replacing Gordon Richardson, whose relationship with the Prime Minister had been strained. In the same year, a new Chancellor the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, began a slow move away from monetarism and the application of monetary targets. The exchange rate came to play an increasing role in policy.

This chapter explores cultural and literary representations of the ending of the gold standard, the so-called Nixon shock of the early 1970s. It focuses on the ways in which this move to floating exchange rates was represented through a nationalist, often militarised, language and argues that this discourse functioned as a paradoxical alibi for the increased ascendancy of private capital that was actually occurring in this moment. It explores the rhetorical move from crisis to discipline as it was simultaneously appearing in political, economic and popular literary genres of the early 1970s. The first two sections contrast the difference between a political and an economic use of the language of discipline, emphasising the ascendancy of a neoliberal definition of the ‘real’ of the money economy. The final two sections examine the ways in which genre writers deployed the twinning of a military and economic crisis to explore the ironies of this moment. It specifically focuses on the work of Don DeLillo and traces the shift in his own ironical sense of the efficacy of genre itself.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of theories and empirics of recession and depression, reviewing Austrian, Keynesian, and monetarist financial theories, and secular stagnation approaches to economic slumps. It looks at international , national, and regional recessions and the different shapes of business cycles (V, U, L and W). The chapter also discusses international dimensions of slumps and the scope and limits for undertaking countercyclical policies.