Digifesto

There’s a nice op-ed by Wolfgang Münchau in FT, “The crisis of modern liberalism is down to market forces”.

Among other things, it reintroduces the term “ordoliberalism“, a particular Germanic kind of enlightened liberalism designed to prevent the kind of political collapse that had precipitated the war.

In Münchau’s account, the key insight of ordoliberalism is its attention to questions of social equality, but not through the mechanism of redistribution. Rather, ordoliberal interventions primarily effect industrial organization, favoring small to mid- sized companies.

As Germany’s economy remains robust and so far relatively politically stable, it’s interesting that ordoliberalism isn’t discussed more.

Another question that must be asked is to what extent the rise of computational institutions challenges the kind of industrial organization recommended by ordoliberalism. If computation induces corporate concentration, and there are not good policies for addressing that, then that’s due to a deficiency in our understanding of what ‘market forces’ are.