Varieties of ignorance in neoliberal policy: or the possibilities and perils of wishful economic thinking

Jacqueline Best

Review of International Political Economy, 2022, vol. 29, issue 4, 1159-1182

Abstract: We might be tempted to view the recent efforts by political leaders to cultivate certain convenient forms of economic ignorance as characteristic of a novel ‘post-truth’ age. This article suggests instead that we take this troubling trend as an invitation to examine the role of ignorance more generally in political economic thinking and practice. Whereas many scholars have treated uncertainty and other unknowns as external challenges that can be resolved through expertise and learning, this article instead endogenizes ignorance, treating it as a key tool in the development of policy knowledge. Drawing on archival material from the early Reagan and Thatcher years, this article examines a moment when many of the contemporary assumptions about economic ignorance and strategies for coping with it were first developed and tried out. I introduce a typology of the practical role of ignorance in economic policymaking, ranging from wishful thinking, to confusion, fudging, denial and puzzling. Mapping the space between learning and lying, this article contends that ignorance plays two very different roles in the trajectory of many economic policies, allowing policymakers to discount the political effects of their economic actions while also opening up the possibility of genuine reflexivity about the limits of expertise.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09692290.2021.1888144 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rripxx:v:29:y:2022:i:4:p:1159-1182

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rrip20

DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2021.1888144

Access Statistics for this article

Review of International Political Economy is currently edited by Gregory Chin, Juliet Johnson, Daniel Mügge, Kevin Gallagher, Ilene Grabel and Cornelia Woll

More articles in Review of International Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().