This talk is based on the book, “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway.
Throughout the 19th century, the U.S. government played a major role in economic life, promoting economic development through infrastructure and education and regulating many markets. In the late century, Americans realized that an even larger hand was needed to address the failures of laissez-faire capitalism, from slavery and child labor to anti-union violence and monopolistic practices. But then something changed. Americans started to reject “big government” and to believe in the “magic of the marketplace.”
Why? How did so many Americans come to have so much faith in markets and so little faith in government? The short answer: a longue-durée propaganda campaign, organized by American business leaders.
In the 1910s and ’20s, businessmen bristled at efforts to make life better through government action, particularly regulation. Trade associations, wealthy powerbrokers, and media allies worked to build a new orthodoxy, insisting that government regulation was both economically unproductive and a threat to liberty. Before World War II, their efforts included initiatives to rewrite textbooks, re-shape and create academic curricula, combat unions, defend child labor, and fight the New Deal. After the war, they promoted the work of neoliberal economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, arranging for them to come to the United States and paying for them to teach at New York University and the University of Chicago. At Chicago, they supported “The Free Market Project,” where George Stigler reframed Adam Smith as an anti-government extremist and Milton Friedman reframed Hayek for an American mass audience. They also worked to promote market fundamentalism in popular culture, through children’s books, radio, film, and television, including a General Electric company -sponsored television show that beamed free-market doctrine (and the young Ronald Reagan) to millions, and launched Reagan’s political career.
By the 1980s, this crusade had succeeded. It was not merely that Reagan–with heavy support from General Electric and other American corporations had become President. It was that the ideology of “limited government” would define the next half-century across Republican and Democratic administrations, giving us a housing crisis, the opioid scourge, climate destruction, and a baleful response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Naomi Oreskes is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. She is an internationally renowned earth scientist, historian, and author of both scholarly and popular books and articles on the history of earth and environmental science, including most recently, Why Trust Science? (2019) and Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know about the Ocean (2021), which was awarded the Patrick Suppes Prize in the History of Science by the American Philosophical Society. Her opinion pieces have been published in leading media outlets around the globe, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times (London), and the Frankfurter Allgemeine. In 2015, she wrote the Introduction to the Melville House edition of the Papal Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality, Laudato Si.
Professor Oreskes is a leading voice on the reality on anthropogenic climate change and the history of efforts to undermine climate action. Her 2004 essay “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” (Science 306: 1686) has been widely cited, including in the Royal Society’s publication, “A Guide to Facts and Fictions about Climate Change,” and in the Academy-award winning film, An Inconvenient Truth. Her 2010 book with Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt, has been translated into nine languages, sold over 100,000 copies, and made into a documentary film. She is an elected fellow of the Geological Society of America, the American Geophysical Union, the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2018, she became a Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2019 was awarded the British Academy Medal for “her commitment to documenting the role of corporations in distorting scientific findings for political ends.” Her new book, with Erik Conway, is The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loath Government and Love the Free Market, published by Bloomsbury Press.
