The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism

"Growing up, one topic of debate at the dinner table (other than World War II) was Chile. My father and his brothers were all Delft-trained Dutch engineers, and one of them ended up living in Chile in the 1980s, as part of his work. He was sympathetic to the economic prosperity Augusto Pinochet had brought while my dad (who also ended up working in Chile in the 1980s, though he didn’t live there) focused on the human rights horrors and indignation at the role of the CIA in supporting Pinochet in his military coup against Salvador Allende. The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism would have added useful fuel to their debate. The book is by Sebastián Edwards, himself one of the Chicago boys—a Chilean-born economist trained at the University of Chicago—but he tries to be even-handed. Visiting Chile during the 2019 demonstrations he notes the furious crowds and graffiti around Santiago: “Neoliberalism was born and will die in Chile!” The book has a broader interest, beyond Chile, for the debate on neoliberalism generally and what it does and does not mean. Two final books I want to mention are on inequality. In Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War e conomist Branko Milanović (who did a Five Books interview in 2011 on inequality ) looks at how various economic thinkers looked at inequality, from Francois Quesnay and Adam Smith down to Simon Kuznets and Thomas Piketty. Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton offers a more personal account in his book: Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality . It’s a collection of essays written over a quarter of a century but updated for the book. It’s a wide-ranging reflection on economics and the economics profession but ultimately downbeat about his adopted country: “The United States has become a darker society since I arrived in 1983. The hopes of the immigrant have been tempered by reality, but even more by the corruption of the American economy and its politics, a corruption that threatens our democracy.”"