The untold story of how welfare and development programs in the United
States and Latin America produced the instruments of their own
destruction
In 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.
