"It Seems Plausible Þt þe Neoliberal Era Is Over..."

I now wish that I had said "possible" rather than "plausible", but alea iacta est...

Benjamin Wallace-Wells: Larry Summers Versus the Biden Administration’s Coronavirus-Stimulus Plan: ‘“It seems plausible,” Brad DeLong, an economic historian at Berkeley and a Clinton Treasury official, said, that “the neoliberal era is over”…. [He] guessed that about half of the leftward turn within this universe [of economists] was… [because] “there is not nearly so much trust in the ability of the market to heal itself”…. The other half, he said, was the part that tended to isolate Summers. DeLong ascribed it to politics, and to the general feeling (“in my view, twenty-seven years too late”) that Republicans would never be willing partners for expansive economic intervention.

There was little disagreement among liberal economists, he emphasized, over how the Biden Administration ought to spend the money in an ideal world: “Most of us would say infrastructure rather than checks—if we had that option. Only Larry believes we have that option.” DeLong’s own view is that if the Biden Administration had pared back the stimulus in the hopes of building a bipartisan consensus for infrastructure, it would find that no such consensus existed. “In the absence of Republican negotiating partners, center-left Democrats have got to look to the left,” DeLong said. “This is an example of that actually happening”… 

LINK: <https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-populism/larry-summers-versus-the-stimulus>