The 1970s also saw public intellectuals developing powerful solutions to the era’s problems, solutions that were eventually forged into neoliberalism, neoconservatism and various combinations of the two. The American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution, working together, made the case for deregulation, starting with the airline sector. Michael Jensen and William Meckling laid out the solution to the problem of managerial self-indulgence in “Theory of the Firm” (1976), with its vision of an active market in corporate control. Milton Friedman suggested a solution to the problem of inflation in the form of monetarism. Periodicals such as The Public Interest and Commentary spent the 1970s pointing to the ways in which “the loud misrule of chaos,” to borrow a phrase from Milton, generated by progressive policies on policing and law and order, was destroying America’s cities (though it was not until 1982 that James Q. Wilson and George Kelling introduced their “broken windows theory”).
It will not be enough simply to reapply these solutions wholesale to the problems of the 2020s: The neoliberal revolution of the past few decades has produced fresh problems of its own, notably soaring inequality and growing business concentration, that require fresh solutions. But we can take comfort from two things as the comparisons with the 1970s become ever more striking. The first is that we have encountered problems just as bad as the ones we have today and overcome them, through a mixture of intellectual boldness and gritty determination. The second is that the spirit of entrepreneurship can flourish however hostile the terrain and inclement the weather.
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at the Economist, he is author, most recently, of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.