Chicago Boys

Known by the name Chicago Boys, this influential international network of economists advocates limited governments and unhindered markets. In the mid-1950s, the U.S. government and private foundations funded the first cohorts of Latin American economics students at the University of Chicago to counter the prevailing development-ist thinking in the region that favored state interventionism and economic nationalism. Some Chicago professors, most prominently Arnold Harberger, advised transforming economics education along neoclassical principles to offset the influence of Marxist and other heterodox currents of economic thought. Twenty years later, under Pinochet's military dictatorship, Chilean government ministers Sergio de Castro, Pablo Baraona, Miguel Kast, and Rolf Lüders and a large group of other Chicago-trained economists implemented radical market reforms. Results were mixed, but conservatives everywhere, including University of Chicago Nobel laureates Milton Friedman and Friedrich August von Hayek, extolled the virtues of Chile's neoliberal revolution. Since then, neoliberalism has been the blueprint for marketization around the world.

See alsoNeoliberalism .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Harberger, Arnold C. "Good Economics Comes to Latin America, 1955–95." In The Post-1945 Internationalization of Economics, edited by Alfred W. Coats, pp. 301-311. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1996. Annual supplement to History of Political Economy, vol. 28.

Valdés, Juan Gabriel. Pinochet's Economists: The Chicago School in Chile. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995 [La Escuela de Chicago: Operación Chile. Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Zeta S.A., 1989].

                                   Veronica Montecinos