ABSTRACT

The degrading of planning – and therefore our ability to face the future – needs to be understood as a result of the dominance of neoliberalism, particularly the arguments of thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek that ‘central planning’ is an impossibility in complex societies, and that attempts at it lead to a ‘road to serfdom’. The notion of building a better society for the long term has been particularly eroded in countries such as the UK and US, countries which were at the forefront of the market revolution, replaced by an ‘unplanned utopianism’ of supposedly self-regulating markets. This is despite the fact that neoliberalism’s planning pessimism has been behind some of the most significant Western government failures over the past 15 years.