There has been some criticism here of my overuse of the term 'neoliberalism', which, it has been suggested, is not widely understood beyond the environs of those directly engaged with political economic debate.
I do listen to both criticism and suggestions, and have been pondering on this term and alternatives to it.
I decided that this was one of those tasks that ChatGPT was entirely suited to (and you can find our Guide to ChatGPT here), and so I asked it to suggest alternatives because I was not getting far, unaided. This is what it had to say, unedited by me.
Here are several alternatives that avoid the baggage, overuse, or semantic drift of neoliberalism while still naming the system you are critiquing. Each is designed to work in your Funding the Future voice, to be intelligible to the public, and to frame the argument on your terms rather than those of your opponents.
The Extraction Economy
This names the system by what it does: extract value from labour, communities and nature rather than create it.
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Immediately intuitive.
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Avoids abstract theory.
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Works well with your themes of rentierism, wealth concentration and care.
Example:
“We need to replace the Extraction Economy with an Economy of Care.”
The Ownership Class System
Moves attention away from markets and towards power: who owns, who controls, who benefits.
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Fits your wealth series and political economy framing.
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Puts inequality centre-stage.
Example:
“The Ownership Class System has hollowed out our public realm.”
The Rentier Doctrine
Focuses on unearned income, speculation and returns detached from productive work.
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Captures the dysfunction you describe in savings, pensions, property and financial markets.
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Gives a clear villain: rentier power.
Example:
“Under the Rentier Doctrine, speculation is rewarded and care is punished.”
The Austerity State
Names the system by its organising principle: deliberate under-provision of public goods, regardless of need.
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Works for fiscal rules, NAIRU, budgeting and your critique of Reeves.
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Easy for the public to recognise.
Example:
“The Austerity State chooses scarcity where none need exist.”
Market Maximalism
Avoids the ideological term “neoliberal” but signals the belief that markets should dominate everything.
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Neutral-sounding but revealing.
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Works when explaining why it fails in health, care, education, housing.
Example:
“Market Maximalism has no place in essential services.”
The Anti-Social Economy
Blunt, moral, clear. It says the system fails because it corrodes social bonds.
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Fits your “Politics of Care” narrative.
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Frames the issue as ethical, not technical.
Example:
“We must replace the Anti-Social Economy with one designed for human flourishing.”
The Privilege Economy
Highlights how rules, tax systems, and institutions are structured to favour a few.
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Puts power imbalance front and centre.
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Works across tax avoidance, pensions, ISAs, wealth, and political capture.
Example:
“The Privilege Economy guarantees security for the wealthy and insecurity for everyone else.”
The Scarcity Myth System
Targets the core intellectual flaw: manufactured scarcity.
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Directly aligned with your recent series on sufficiency and abundance.
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Easy to explain to the public.
Example:
“Britain is ruled by a Scarcity Myth System – and it is time to replace it.”
Best fit for your work
Given the range of your arguments—rentierism, dysfunctional savings, political economy, MMT, care, entropy and gradients, democratic renewal—the term that gives you the strongest foundation across all of it is:
The Extraction Economy
It is morally charged, empirically accurate, rhetorically strong, and theoretically neutral enough to avoid the “ideology vs ideology” trap that “neoliberalism” creates.
It also lets you frame your alternative as:
The Economy of Care
(or The Care-Centred Economy, The Regenerative Economy, etc.)
I then asked it for more alternatives, without justifications and got these additions:
1. The Extraction Economy
2. The Rentier Economy
3. The Asset-Stripping Economy
4. The Scarcity Doctrine
5. The Privilege Economy
6. Market Maximalism
7. The Deregulated State
8. The Wealth-First System
9. The Predatory Economy
10. The Financialised State
11. The Anti-Social Economy
12. The Speculation Regime
13. The Inequality Machine
14. The Ownership Order
15. The Austerity Order
16. The Corporate Capture System
17. Rentier Capitalism
18. The Concentrated Power System
19. The Profit-Before-People Model
20. The Extractive Order
What do you think?
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Neoliberalism is just a particularly malignant form of capitalism and it is capitalism and it’s predication on unlimited growth that is destroying the biosphere.
Fortunately capitalism is doomed to collapse once the world’s population flips from growth to reduction, which will probably happen before the middle of the century. It would be better to deconstruct it in a planned manner though 🙂
Neliliberalism = typo in title.
(Please don’t post this comment I’m just saying).
Edited. Thanks.
I think these all have their nuances. The problem with descriptions such as “rentier capitalism” is that you have to know what “rentier” means. For me, the obvious choice is “Exploitative capitalism” because we all know that exploitation is bad.
Chicago-style capitalism
Crony capitalism
Disaster capitalism
Extractive Capitalism
Exploitative capitalism
Extraction capitalism
Extreme capitalism
Laissez-faire capitalism
Vulture capitalism
Thanks
The extraction economy is identified as the best fit but for me Austerity state is the one most likely to be easily and most widely recognised.
Rich pickings in this post, Richard! The fine discriminations will repay closer study…
Moving on to the positive alternative, how about…
‘Economics with Ethics’ or EWE
as in ‘we want EWE!’?
🙂
and EWEs are sought by RAMs (Radical Alternative Macroeconomists)!
I’ll stop now…
🙂
I would….
For me, something like ‘how capitalism exploits’ us is a better description.
Neoliberalism is a perfectly valid term. The only people who question it’s validity are those do not wish to see that where we are now is the product of a broken, sordid and corrupt ideology
Not true. Many question it here, quite reasoanbly because it does not resonate beyind economics.
The Profit-Before-People Model.. or ……the profit before people economy.
‘Greedyism’
🙂
Your best post since your earlier ones showed me how the economy really works.
It replaces a private language (“neoliberal”, “rentier” etc.), a fairly academic language used by those “in the know”, with a public one (“extraction”, caring” etc.) that can be used down the pub.
I am opting for replacing the extraction economy with a caring one and I have already started to use it.
https://www.landvaluetax.co.uk/about-lvt/rebuilding-trust
Noted
Extraction Economy: unclear (extracting what and for whom?)
Rentier Economy: who on earth knows what “rentier” means?
Scarcity Doctrine: possibly too narrow?
Privilege Economy: “Oh good, we love privilege”???
Market Maximalism: real turn-off, that one
Deregulated State: too narrow?
Wealth-First System: “Oh good …” (as above)
Ownership Order: doesn’t communicate
Austerity Order: maybe too narrow?
Corporate Capture System: accurate but hardly zippy
Concentrated Power System: ditto
Extractive Order/extractive capitalism: won’t communicate much to people unused to thinking about such things
Economy of care: far too vague
And so?
Richard, why do my deliberate line breaks get removed from the posts I type? How do I ensure they remain?
That is beynbd my control. WordPress does that and you can only keep them if you code in html as Ian Tresman does.
I don’t add an y HTML to my posts. After submission, although the preview loses all linebreak, they reappear when the post is published.
Extraction Economy…. it’s alliterative which would give it traction and self-evident.
When giving it consideration an individual would intuitively know if they are extracting or being extracted from.
Agreed
The Parasite Economy
I like ‘The Extraction Economy’ but feel it doesn’t go quite far enough – something that emphasises inequality and privilege feels more like it gets to the heart of the matter, so I would vote for referring to Neoliberalism in these terms. Replacing it with something like ‘The Inequality Economy’ in common parlance would, perhaps, remind ordinary people that this has been a deliberate strategy to increase the wealth, privilege and thus power of a minority, at the expense of everyone else.
Thanks
“Extortion Capitalism” sounds reasonable. Cheating has been going since the planet consisted only of microbes and this form of perverted capitalism (Secretive Hand not Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand) which extorts for the few rather than benefits the many is simply a continuation of cheating.
http://ankara.lti.cs.cmu.edu/11780/sites/default/files/BacterialLinguisticsandSocialIntelligence.pdf
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mUdisni1J9dGtVA2thBRVHJDb30ciLSx/view
If there wasn’t cheating (which I ascribe mainly to poor parenting) we wouldn’t have the development of the Reverse Dominance Hierarchy which has developed into democracy alongside the development of capitalism as Charles Tilly above has pointed out:-
https://takku.net/mediagallery/media.php?f=0&sort=0&s=20150105180501874
How about Profit Before People economy to replace the term neoliberalism?
I like the “privilege economy”, because it identifies who benefits most from the neoliberal market economy, and the resulting inequality. It is also easily explainable
Sorry, I’m feeling a bit salty this morning.
I am wondering if I can be bothered anymore with a bunch of creatures who cannot get their heads around what it is that is making their lives so shit? This has not always been my reaction – many a time I have empathised with their plight.
But hey, if they choose to watch ‘Bakeoff’ and ‘Strictly’ and ‘GBNews’, well stick a fork in their arses; they’re done.
In Robert Reich’s film ‘Inequality for All’, one American woman said that she did not mind the rich being rich; what she minded was why they needed to have the little bit of economy that she had as well. Eloquence!
This was the smallest way of posing the biggest problem that is Neo-liberalism and it was very effective. Summed ’em up a treat. You could make a whole movement behind that woman’s observation.
The best definition I ever heard of capitalism was in a 1950’s cartoon documentary that said that capitalism was good because it delivered the highest amount of social welfare to be greatest number of people.
That was capitalism in the post war period, and to some extent it worked. However, the passing of time has reified for example the environmental consequences of that, as has the lack of double entry book keeping for the planet.
Modern North American capitalism – like its early European version – is simply empirical in nature – it assumes that everything is there to be taken by those who have the power and the wish to. It is just self justified theft.
Neo-liberalism is all those things above. My advice to people is deal with it. Or face the consequences.
Chuck D of Public Enemy is a hero of mine – he exhorts his black brothers and sisters to have ‘mental health self defensive fitness’ – in other words – see through the bullshit, stand tall with their heads up and see their oppressor for what they are – as oppressors.
I’m afraid a lot of white folks both here, Europe and in the U.S. don’t yet under stand that under Neo-liberalism – a creed with its roots in the Confederate slave economy of the U.S. South, it is now their turn to be – how should I put it? – black.
One part of PSR’s reply, is, I feel, worth reiterating –
“I’m afraid a lot of white folks both here, Europe and in the U.S. don’t yet understand that under Neo-liberalism – a creed with its roots in the Confederate slave economy of the U.S. South, it is now their turn to be – how should I put it? – black.”
Of the alternatives to neoliberalism given I feel the best is
The Extraction Economy
My suggestion might have been The Exploitation Economy, which is curated by Parasite Politicians.
Thanks
And PSR is right
A very simple one is ‘Modern Capitalism’ which imparts that it differs from previous capitalism and whilst used in isolation it’s a neutral term because of the context will also impart that it’s worse than what went before.
One could stick ‘laissez-faire’ in the middle or any adjective relevant to the precise point being made at the time, Ian Tresman provides a good little list above.
Apart from the problem of people muddling ‘liberal’ with socially liberal, sometimes deliberately, a large part of the problem with “Neoliberalism” as a term is that it’s exponents almost invariably deny its existence but they’ll do the same with any other technical label that it’s replaced with and dismiss it as left-wing Jargon.
Another possibility is to use ‘Monetarism’ which perhaps, whilst not absolutely technically correct is not totally wrong, helps message that they are making it all about money, when it shouldn’t be, and many people are already aware of the term and associate it with Thatcher’s policies.
Getting a new label to stick can be quite hard, one that’s already in the public psyche is easier
Bit will any of those work any better?
Monetarism and laissez faire will not, for sure.
Another one to throw into the ring, inspired by Peter Turchin’s book ‘End times’: how about ‘the wealth pump economy’? A system is what a system does.
Its difficult to get one cogent name or phrase which is immediately understood and encapsulates it
Varoufakis seems to like ‘Techno Feudalism’ – which he argues has super ceded capitalism.
“”Profit drives capitalism, rent drove feudalism. Now we have moved [from one system to the other] because of this new form of super-duper, all-singing, all-dancing capital: cloud capital, algorithmic capital. If I’m right, that is creating new digital fiefdoms like Amazon.com, like Airbnb, where the main mode of wealth extraction comes in the form not of profit but of rent.””
But its not really appealing – and immediately seems to need a further explanation.
Agreed
Richard,
A vote for “The Anti-Social Economy” and it was along those lines I had the following published in West Country Bylines in August. https://westenglandbylines.co.uk/business/economy/building-a-society-that-takes-or-that-cares-which-would-you-prefer/
Also relevant to this theme is this Dan Goyle video, which Peter May highlighted on Progressive Pulse, and possibly deserves a wider audience? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkW8acFB874&t=19s
Thanks
> Capitalism
anything/everything else is unnecessary to say and distracts from the fundamentals of our economic system.
Not true
You are over-generalising by far
I like the Extraction Economy best, for all the reasons commenters have already noted, plus the fact that it goes beyond extraction from people.
Also, it prompts useful questions – “Extraction of what?”, “From who?”, “By who?”…
Thanks
I am someone who dislikes the word “neoliberalism” and is irritated every time I see it. For two reasons: it is jargon restricted to use by those criticising the economic model referred to, and there is nothing about the term that gives even the slightest clue as to its meaning to anyone who hasn’t met it before.
(In passing, I should say I have the same problem with “woke” which is almost solely used by those trying to ridicule people who are respectful and considerate of their fellow humans).
One possibility you haven’t included is “exploitation economics”.
Noted
Wealth Extraction Policy?
To keep it simple maybe.
I like No.6, Market Maximalism but I’d shorten (and polemicise) it to Markets Mania.