Overview

The untold story of how U.S. development efforts in postwar Latin America helped lead to the dismantling of the U.S. welfare stateIn the years after 1945, a flood of U.S. advisors swept into Latin America with dreams of building a new economic order and lifting the Third World out of poverty. These businessmen, economists, community workers, and architects went south with the gospel of the New Deal on their lips, but Latin American realities soon revealed unexpected possibilities within the New Deal itself. In Colombia, Latin Americans and U.S. advisors ended up decentralizing the state, privatizing public functions, and launching austere social welfare programs. By the 1960s, they had remade the country's housing projects, river valleys, and universities. They had also generated new lessons for the United States itself. When the Johnson administration launched the War on Poverty, U.S. social movements, business associations, and government agencies all promised to repatriate the lessons of development, and they did so by multiplying the uses of austerity and for-profit contracting within their own welfare state. A decade later, ascendant right-wing movements seeking to dismantle the midcentury state did not need to reach for entirely new ideas: they redeployed policies already at hand.In this groundbreaking book, Amy Offner brings readers to Colombia and back, showing the entanglement of American societies and the contradictory promises of midcentury statebuilding. The untold story of how the road from the New Deal to the Great Society ran through Latin America, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy also offers a surprising new account of the origins of neoliberalism.

Full Product Details

Author:   Professor Amy C. Offner
Publisher:   Princeton University Press
Imprint:   Princeton University Press
Volume:   2
ISBN:  

9780691190938

ISBN 10:   0691190933
Pages:   400
Publication Date:   17 September 2019
Audience:   General/trade ,  Professional and scholarly ,  General/trade ,  General ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable  
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Reviews

Sorting Out the Mixed Economy [is Amy Offner's] epic and field-changing work. ---Quinn Slobodian, Dissent Magazine Sorting Out the Mixed Economy is an ambitious and thought-provoking study that reframes our understanding of both development and neoliberalism and will shape research in many scholarly fields. . . . In terms of the history of relations between the United States and Latin America, Offner inverts one of the field's most important narratives. ---Margarita Fajardo, H-LatAm Co-Winner of the EHS First Monograph Prize, Economic History Society [A] dazzling, transnational history. . . . [The] insights it provides into the link between decentralized development from 50 years ago and contemporary privatization across the Americas is revelatory. ---J. M. Rosenthal, Choice Reviews Finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize Honorable Mention for the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Co-Winner of the Michael H. Hunt Prize in International History, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations The strengths of the book are many, and the originality of the argument and the well-researched chain of events on the micro and meso levels make the book both a page-turner and a real contribution to the discussion on how and why the mixed economy, or the third way, is such a tightrope, both in the Americas and elsewhere. ---Martin Andersson, Economic History Review In telling the story of Lilienthal and other ex-New Deal officials, Amy C. Offner's Sorting Out the Mixed Economy remakes a popular understanding of how today's neoliberalism was built. . . . Offner's book has left us better equipped to understand this past, and to look ahead toward future turbulence. ---Pablo Pryluka, Public Books Winner of the Murdo J. MacLeod Book Prize, Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association

With meticulous research and incisive analysis, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy demonstrates the thoroughly interwoven character of postwar strategies for Latin American economic development and U.S. domestic antipoverty policies. This alone would be a major contribution to the historiography of the Americas. But Amy Offner goes further, and makes a very compelling argument for the way in which corporate influence and private capital paved the way for our current neoliberal order. -Barbara Weinstein, New York University Sorting Out the Mixed Economy is an agile narrative that makes a truly important contribution to the study of twentieth-century history, capitalism, and the state in the western hemisphere. -Marco Palacios, El Colegio de Mexico Persuasively argued and thoroughly documented, Amy Offner's brilliant book is a model of historically embedded political economic analysis-not least in revealing how the best-laid designs of Cold War poverty warriors were continually reshaped by historical contingencies and popular resistance, and ultimately used to undermine the vision of democratic capitalism they were designed to promote. -Alice O'Connor, University of California, Santa Barbara With Sorting Out the Mixed Economy, Amy Offner stakes a claim for a whole new approach to understanding the U.S. development enterprise-and indeed U.S. political economy-in the mid-twentieth century. Startlingly original and deeply researched, the book reshapes our comprehension of the rightward trends in U.S. economic policy since the 1960s, as well as of the nature of U.S. engagement with Latin America. -David C. Engerman, Yale University A most welcome addition to our understanding of public policy in the United States and Colombia, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy shows the deep links between economic and social policy since the mid-twentieth century and also helps to explain the cruel erosion of the welfare state. -Victor Bulmer-Thomas, University College London

Sorting Out the Mixed Economy is an agile narrative that makes a truly important contribution to the study of twentieth-century history, capitalism, and the state in the western hemisphere. Marco Palacios, El Colegio de M (c)xico With Sorting Out the Mixed Economy, Amy Offner stakes a claim for a whole new approach to understanding the U.S. development enterprise and indeed U.S. political economy in the mid-twentieth century. Startlingly original and deeply researched, the book reshapes our comprehension of the rightward trends in U.S. economic policy since the 1960s, as well as of the nature of U.S. engagement with Latin America. David C. Engerman, Yale University

Finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize Sorting Out the Mixed Economy [is Amy Offner's] epic and field-changing work. ---Quinn Slobodian, Dissent Magazine Honorable Mention for the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Co-Winner of the Michael H. Hunt Prize in International History, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Co-Winner of the EHS First Monograph Prize, Economic History Society The strengths of the book are many, and the originality of the argument and the well-researched chain of events on the micro and meso levels make the book both a page-turner and a real contribution to the discussion on how and why the mixed economy, or the third way, is such a tightrope, both in the Americas and elsewhere. ---Martin Andersson, Economic History Review [A] dazzling, transnational history. . . . [The] insights it provides into the link between decentralized development from 50 years ago and contemporary privatization across the Americas is revelatory. ---J. M. Rosenthal, Choice Reviews

A most welcome addition to our understanding of public policy in the United States and Colombia, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy shows the deep links between economic and social policy since the mid-twentieth century and also helps to explain the cruel erosion of the welfare state. --Victor Bulmer-Thomas, University College London Sorting Out the Mixed Economy is an agile narrative that makes a truly important contribution to the study of twentieth-century history, capitalism, and the state in the western hemisphere. --Marco Palacios, El Colegio de M xico With Sorting Out the Mixed Economy, Amy Offner stakes a claim for a whole new approach to understanding the U.S. development enterprise--and indeed U.S. political economy--in the mid-twentieth century. Startlingly original and deeply researched, the book reshapes our comprehension of the rightward trends in U.S. economic policy since the 1960s, as well as of the nature of U.S. engagement with Latin America. --David C. Engerman, Yale University

Author Information

Amy C. Offner is assistant professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania.

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