Geographies of circulation and exchange III: The great crisis and marketization 'after markets'

Abstract

This report is a plea for ‘geographies of marketization’, a perspective that rests on the assumption that a world ‘after markets’ will only emerge on the terrain of ‘markets’ themselves. To sustain this claim we speculate about the role of economics in the breakdown and stabilization of neoliberal marketization. In an attempt to re-establish their discipline at a time of crisis and a loss of faith in information-efficient markets, economists increasingly turn to behavioural economics. Starting with the observation that people do not act as neoclassical theory says they do, behaviouralism allows mainstream economics to keep the core foundational principles intact. With an assemblage of ‘reinforcement learning’ and well-timed ‘nudges’ the choice architects of libertarian paternalism once again try to conform individual behaviour to the assumptions of the neoclassical laboratory. In so doing neoliberalism may have entered a new stage we tentatively call ‘neoliberalism after markets’, an era where radical market orientation has not come to an end but where the belief in the forces of free markets is restabilized by a shift of regulation. Emphasis is moved from the context of regulation/deregulation of markets to regulating human behaviour through ‘technologies of calculation’ that render the self an effect of sociotechnically distributed rational action.