Economic Geography

20 years later
Since the late 1980s, there has been a complete reversal in the political
consciousness of the nation. It is no longer easy to find legitimate critiques of the
status quo, particularly in policy circles in Washington. The economic crisis in
Japan and the stagnant labor market in Germany diminished enthusiasm for and
belief in the efficacy of alternative economic paradigms. In the early 1990s,
Washington policy discourse became dominated by ideologically driven think
tanks with tremendous sums of money deliberately deployed to shape policy
conversations in the nation’s capital.
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Organizations like the Heritage Foundation
and the Cato and American Enterprise Institutes all have budgets in the millions
of dollars and dwarf liberal policy research think tanks like the Economic Policy
Institute and Brookings, with large well-paid and well-supported research staff
and savvy media consultants aggressively weighing in on contemporary issues in
a sustained manner.
Progressives hoped that the Clinton administration would help reverse some
of the regressive social policies promulgated in the Reagan era. But soon after
Clinton entered the White House there was further erosion of liberal ideals 
as conservatives made inroads in a number of areas and neoclassical economic
reasoning began to once again dominate policy discourse. The problems that
confronted the Clinton administration on the eve of taking office and the
increasingly important role played by Wall Street financial advisers in national
politics and economic policy enabled Neoliberalism’s creeping reach to define
both macro economic and domestic policy designs.
The Clinton administration ushered in many important policy innovations in
the areas of housing, environment, and labor policy, but by the end of the second
year of the first Clinton administration, the die was cast. The remainder of the
1990s consisted of Democratic attempts to hold the line against Republican
encroachment on liberal policy values and goals. By the late 1990s, economists once
again ruled policy discourse, and there was little room for alternative conceptual-
izations of policy problems, let alone practice.
On the intersection of policy and economic geography
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