How Chile became home to the world’s most radical free-market experiment—and what its downfall suggests about the fate of neoliberalism around the globe
In The Chile Project, Sebastian Edwards tells the remarkable story of how the neoliberal economic model—installed in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship and deepened during three decades of left-of-center governments—came to an end in 2021, when Gabriel Boric, a young former student activist, was elected president, vowing that “If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave.” More than a story about one Latin American country, The Chile Project is a behind-the-scenes history of the spread and consequences of the free-market thinking that dominated economic policymaking around the world in the second half of the twentieth century—but is now on the retreat.
In 1955, the U.S. State Department launched the “Chile Project” to train Chilean economists at the University of Chicago, home of the libertarian Milton Friedman. After General Augusto Pinochet overthrew socialist president Salvador Allende in 1973, Chile’s “Chicago Boys” implemented the purest neoliberal model in the world for the next seventeen years, undertaking a sweeping package of privatization and deregulation, creating a modern capitalist economy, and sparking talk of a “Chilean miracle.” But under the veneer of success, a profound dissatisfaction with the vast inequalities caused by neoliberalism was growing. In 2019, protests erupted throughout the country, and in 2022 Boric began his presidency with a clear mandate: to end neoliberalismo.
In telling the fascinating story of the Chicago Boys and Chile’s free-market revolution, The Chile Project provides an important new perspective on the history of neoliberalism and its global decline today.
"After a modest increase in Metro fares in Santiago, Chile, last October, twenty Metro stations were simultaneously set on fire. The fare increase was the tipping point of years of social malaise. Days later there were more than a million protesters on the streets. The people of Chile were rejecting low pensions, highway tolls, school segregation, low-quality education, and poor public-health services-the result of decades of neoliberalism. Chile was the prototype for neoliberal policies, first set up under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet with the first-hand guidance of economists from the University of Chicago. Under neoliberalism Chile was long seen as an exemplary developing economy, and a testament to the power of privatization and free trade. But all was not well. Sebastian Edwards tells the story of how Chile went from being the posterchild of market-oriented reforms and capitalist modernization to a nation rocked by violence and political upheaval. He narrates the origins of neoliberalism and the role of the 'Chicago boys' in designing and implementing these reforms. He explains the tension between poverty reduction and income inequality, which led to seething discontent under the surface of strong economic numbers. The book tells the story of the signature policies first enacted in Chile that came to define the neoliberal way more broadly: the replacement of a traditional pension system with a privately managed system of individual savings accounts, openness and globalization, the fiscal rule, the taming of inflation, and austere health, education, and environmental policies. As Chile now sets out to draft a new constitution, and other countries come to terms with the same set of policies, all under the looming specter of reactionary populism, the book is an authoritative and important assessment of the success of neoliberalism at a pivotal moment in its history"--
"An outstanding review of the rise and fall of the pro-market consensus and the neoliberal project undertaken in Chile since the 1970s. . . .The book’s prose is so well-crafted, it reads almost as fluidly as a novel."
---Pablo Paniagua, Public Choice
