The Chile Project

"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"--