“The Big Myth” charts a concerted effort to shape public opinion in favour of free markets. But did it work?
They begin with a richly researched account of the efforts of American businesses in the first half of the 20th century to shape public opinion on issues including child labour, utility regulation and, later, the New Deal. The campaign they sketch is closer to propaganda than mere lobbying, encompassing everything from pamphlets and radio shows to a purge of unfriendly textbooks from universities.
In the end, though, child labour was outlawed, utilities were regulated and the New Deal reshaped America’s economy—suggesting that the bid to convert America to market fundamentalism was by the middle of the century looking like a flop. Greater intellectual credibility was needed, so businesses helped bankrolland bring out “The Road to Serfdom”, his denunciation of collectivism and central planning.
The result, the authors argue, was a society primed for the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. After that, the book shifts into a critique of the past four decades of free-market economic policy, with particular attention to financial and environmental deregulation, the loosening of antitrust enforcement and free trade. Readers familiar with the debates on these issues will find all this less original than the preceding chapters and occasionally one-sided.
Nonetheless, they succeed in chronicling a concerted effort by American business to shift public opinion in favour of free markets. The question remains, though: has it worked? The authors may be right that business helped usher in the golden age of Reaganite economics. Yet America Inc has not exactly secured the people’s love.
Just 14% of Americans say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in big business, down from 34% in 1975, according to data from Gallup, a polling firm. That puts it ahead of Congress but behind the presidency . From the offbeat comedy “Office Space” in 1999, to Lord Business in “Meanwhile a survey released in 2020 by Edelman, a research firm, found that 47% of Americans felt “capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world”, hardly a resounding endorsement.
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