Before discussion:
From David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism:
Neoliberalism is … a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade.
From Frank Knight’s The Economic Order and Religion (pg. 5-6):
The later nineteenth and the twentieth centuries have seen the development of a school of thought which has insisted on using the name of liberalism, but which advocates to a large extent a reversal of the original liberal attitude towards governmental regulation of economic activities and relationships. As against leaving these to the control of the free or competitive market, operating through the pricing of goods and services, in consumption and production, various degrees and forms of political control are proposed. The more extreme proponents of this new liberalism, or “neo-liberalism”, advocate a large measure of collectivism — replacement of exchange transactions by direct administration of economic affairs by political agencies. The argument of the neo-liberals is that political action is capable of securing a much larger degree of “ real ” liberty or freedom to the individual. Thus its claim to the designation of liberalism is logically unquestionable, since it does not go back on or abandon liberty as a moral principle or ideal. The issue is reduced to a twofold question of the meaning of freedom and the facts as to the effective way to realize it.
https://mobile.twitter.com/evgenymorozov/status/838329128399036416
"Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” by Lina M. Khan: example of the triumph of individualism and consumer welfare, as applied to anti-monopoly regulation (pg. 717-721).
The second consequence of the shift away from structuralism was that consumer prices became the dominant metric for assessing competition. In his highly influential work, The Antitrust Paradox, Robert Bork asserted that the sole normative objective of antitrust should be to maximize consumer welfare, best pursued through promoting economic efficiency.
“The Taming of Tech Criticism” by Evgeny Morozov
Summary:
Thus, technology critics of the romantic and conservative strands can certainly tell us how to design a more humane smart energy meter. But to decide whether smart energy meters are an appropriate response to climate change is not in their remit. Why design them humanely if we shouldn’t design them at all? That question can be answered only by those critics who haven’t yet lost the ability to think in non-market and non-statist terms. Technological expertise, in other words, is mostly peripheral to answering this question.
“The Paradox Of Socially Responsible Computing” by Jessica Dai
What’s missing with teaching ethics in a computer science course?
After all, what is often decried as the core harms of the tech industry today are not necessarily intrinsically about the technology itself, but about the ways in which the industry has taken advantage of its unique position in the American economy.
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https://twitter.com/akbirthko/status/1541516402451877889?s=20&t=SY4GqbinCT12YsQKaKrIOQ