Amy Offner, "Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas" (Princeton UP, 2019)

New Books in American Studies · Nov 22, 2019 · 1h 1m

The neoliberal 1980s of austerity and privatization may appear as a break with the past—perhaps a model of government drawn up by libertarian economists. Not so, says Amy Offner in her spectacular new book, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas (Princeton University Press, 2019). Offner, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, shows how strategies such as self-help housing, for-profit privatized state-functions, and austere social programs were well-trodded decades earlier in the mid-century “mixed…