Mark Setterfield

Mark Setterfield is Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at the New School for Social Research. As a Heilbroner Fellow, he will investigate the ways in which neoliberal capitalism has succeeded in reconciling low wage growth, re-assertion of capitalist control of the workplace, and heightened employment insecurity with social stability. His working hypothesis is that in addition to coercion (e.g., the mass incarceration of young, and especially black, males) and efforts to redirect attention towards divisive social politics, social stability under neoliberalism has had a fundamentally material basis: the ability of households to accumulate debt in order to limit the growth of consumption inequality in the face of burgeoning income inequality. This debt accumulation mechanism broke down in the financial crisis of 2007-09, however. One result appears to be a new “bottom-up” pressure on neoliberal social order, of which Trumpism, Brexit, and the recent (June 2017) British parliamentary elections are reflections.