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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   2373 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 3, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I usually describe myself as a classical liberal with libertarian tendencies.

Is that uh, the same as being neoliberal?

Doing my due diligence (looking at the Wikipedia article), I lean against "austerity", at least in most contexts that aren't Greece, I'm agnostic on privatization of everything, and while I think less regulation is directionally good, I have no idea how far they take it.

My impression is that "neoliberal" is a phrase invoked to describe people and not one they usually chose themselves, not that that's a particular deal breaker. If the shoe fits, albeit with some pinching, I'll wear it.

There's a post-ironic reclamation of the term over in /r/neoliberal which is similarly more on the 'state-capacity libertarianism' train (see tyler cowen) than austerity, though besides the austerity associations SEP has a fairly even-handed take. The sub's sidebar scratches the surface of the many attempts to navigate all the polysemy and pull out something coherent (see, e.g. genesis of a political swearword) but ideology would only be half of the coin. The other half would be the culture, particularly the internet-situated culture of it all which shares some genealogical roots with 2000s EA/rationalism/atheism/dev/techno-optimist blog culture but largely inflected via yimby/urbanism and the economics profession (the sub is a political shit-posty spinoff of /r/badeconomics). This differentiates them from the standard run-of-the-mill SSC readers by drawing much more from economists, particularly Acemoglu and Robinson in Why Nations Fail and The Narrow Corridor (though SSC's anti-ancap faq remains seminal). There's a Fukuyamist thread running through there as well, that marks their foreign policy apart from the more isolationist tendencies typical to libertarianism.

For another angle, Liam Bright also identified the sub, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as a synecdoche for one of a few different trends in anglo-american analytic philosophy here.

Someone once asked me to cross-post a popular essay I wrote on the SSC sub (and here) to /r/neoliberal, which I suppose is evidence of something I guess! It also got like 10 upvotes there, which is an entirely different kind of evidence but maybe more that nobody read it haha.

The faster-paced discursive soul of the sub is in the daily discussion threads: https://neoliber.al/dt

Last I checked NL's daily discussion threads were actually by an order of magnitude the most active on all of reddit. The ping groups for special interests are part of that.

If your post wasn't posted to a ping group it'd be easy for it to get lost.

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