{"id":6382,"date":"2012-12-17T13:56:04","date_gmt":"2012-12-17T18:56:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=6382"},"modified":"2012-12-17T13:56:04","modified_gmt":"2012-12-17T18:56:04","slug":"the-human-cost-of-neoliberalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2012\/12\/17\/the-human-cost-of-neoliberalism\/","title":{"rendered":"The human cost of neoliberalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new study in The Lancet<\/em><\/a> has determined that mass privatization in former Communist Eastern Europe — what was once called “shock therapy,” but is more usefully considered a form of “shock neoliberalization” — resulted in an excess of about a million deaths in that part of the world.<\/p>\n

A few quotes from the Oxford University summary<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Oxford-led study measured the relationship between death rates and the pace and scale of privatisation in 25 countries in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, dating back to the early 1990s. They found that mass privatisation came at a human cost: with an average surge in the number of deaths of 13 per cent or the equivalent of about one million lives.<\/p>\n

The rapid privatisation programme, part of a plan known by economists as \u2018shock therapy\u2019, led to a 56 per cent increase in unemployment, which the study says played an important role in explaining why privatisation claimed so many lives. Many employers provided extensive health and social care for their employees, so through privatisation workers experienced the \u2018double whammy\u2019 of losing not only their livelihood but also their means of surviving the crisis.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

If at least 45 per cent of the country\u2019s population were members of at least one social organisation, such as a church or trade union, they were better protected from the economic shocks, the authors found.<\/p>\n

In other words, countries with less social support, either in the form of social welfare (freely available health care, and so on) or in strong union, church, or other organizational membership, left their unemployed men to fend for themselves. The result was a massive loss of life, sometimes facilitated by the kinds of coping mechanisms left standing — like alcoholism.<\/p>\n

Put another way: Soviet-style communization (slow strangulation of civil society at the hands of a one-party ruling class) followed by rapid capitalization (marketization of everything, accompanied by the destruction of state-supported social welfare) = mass murder.<\/p>\n

Good thing they didn’t have AK-47s as freely available as in this country…<\/p>\n

The study reminds me of the famous Lancet<\/em> survey<\/a> that estimated some 650,000 “excess deaths” from the Iraq War. I suspect its fate will be similar: criticism by those with a vested interest in minimizing the numbers, followed by pooh-poohing or just silence by the mainstream U.S. policy and media establishments.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new study in The Lancet has determined that mass privatization in former Communist Eastern Europe — what was once called “shock therapy,” but is more usefully considered a form of “shock neoliberalization” — resulted in an excess of about a million deaths in that part of the world. A few quotes from the Oxford […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[691215],"tags":[16864,16843],"class_list":["post-6382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics_postpolitics","tag-eastern-europe","tag-neoliberalism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-1EW","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9373,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2017\/07\/05\/inequality-and-environmental-crisis\/","url_meta":{"origin":6382,"position":0},"title":"Inequality and environmental crisis","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 5, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"As part of its Ford Foundation supported Inequality Project, The Guardian is providing a provocative\u00a0glimpse of Oxford geographer Danny Dorling's\u00a0important research into inequality and the environment. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the complexities surrounding causes and potential solutions to the environmental crisis. Read the article here.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1204,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/02\/23\/authoritarian-body-politics\/","url_meta":{"origin":6382,"position":1},"title":"authoritarian body politics","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 23, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"(This post has been sitting in my Drafts folder for several days, but since it mentions The White Ribbon, which I just named 2009's best film, I thought I might as well share it.) I just got around to reading Timothy Snyder's brilliantly lucid article Holocaust: The ignored reality, fittingly\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"wildthings.gif","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2009\/10\/wildthings.gif?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":9730,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2018\/09\/17\/illiberalism-the-utopian-deficit\/","url_meta":{"origin":6382,"position":2},"title":"“Illiberalism” & the utopian deficit","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 17, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"An off-the-cuff essay, written not for any particular occasion, but just to get it out of me. It's probably mostly common knowledge (among people on the green left), just maybe not well articulated yet, and too easily forgotten. Politically, we're all playing a little catch-up these days. Understanding the apparent\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cultural politics"","block_context":{"text":"Cultural politics","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cultural_politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2018\/09\/preview-275x155.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":9151,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2017\/04\/03\/parsing-the-alternative-media-ecosystem\/","url_meta":{"origin":6382,"position":3},"title":"Parsing the “alternative media ecosystem”","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 3, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"We all know the media ecosystem has been changing rapidly, with media scholars scrambling to understand how and where things are headed.\u00a0\"Fake news\" and \"post-truth\" are the glib catchwords of the day; \"filter bubbles,\" \"echo chambers,\" \"ideological segregation,\" \"information cascades,\" \"algorithmic filtering\" (along with the all-encompassing \"Algoricene\"), and \"meme magic\"\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Media ecology"","block_context":{"text":"Media ecology","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/media_ecology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1064,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/04\/26\/chernobyl-may-day-the-revolution-of-risk-society\/","url_meta":{"origin":6382,"position":4},"title":"Chernobyl, May Day, & the (r)evolution of risk society","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 26, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Today was the 23rd anniversary of the nuclear accident in Chernobyl, Ukraine. I had been invited to give a sermon at a nearby Unitarian church connected to both this anniversary and the May Day (Beltane) that's coming up in a few days, and my thoughts, in preparation, revolved around how\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"radar_10.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2009\/04\/radar_10.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":9503,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2017\/11\/12\/fugitive-radioactivity\/","url_meta":{"origin":6382,"position":5},"title":"Fugitive radioactivity","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 12, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"The Washington Post reports that \"Ruthenium-106, named after Russia\" has been wafting all across Europe. Two quick observations here. (1) \"Ruthenia\" is the Latin rendering of Rus', which predates Russia (as we know it) by several centuries. The chemical element Ruthenium was named by its discoverer, Karl Ernst Claus, after\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Carpathians\"","block_context":{"text":"Carpathians","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/tag\/carpathians\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/tubcVylNOa0\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6382"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6389,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6382\/revisions\/6389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}