Don’t Let a Crisis Go to Waste

Matias Vernengo explains how economic crises reveal the nakedness of neoliberal policies. After the Great Depression, global capitalism underwent serious reform. Why didn’t that happen after 2008? Matias Vernengo, Professor of Economics at Bucknell University, explains how a crisis can reveal that the dominant neoliberal orthodoxy is in fact based on a shaky theoretical foundation. But for new economic thinkers to capitalize on that requires a clearly articulated alternative—one that existed during the Cold War, but is just coming into public discourse now.