Children, the Great Recession and Shifting Calculi of Risk

Abstract

Neoliberalism is a logic of government that emphasizes the values of personal responsibility and ownership in a context of market deregulation and privatization. Neoliberalism represents and transforms social relations using market-based financial frameworks and problem-solution frames. Neoliberalism seeks to collapse society into an aggregate of enterprising, financially calculable and calculating, risk-assuming individuals. Children and childhood are problematic accounting spaces within neoliberal logics and practices of government. Wealthy children participate in global neoliberal marketplaces of goods and services promoted by libertarian Nickelodeon characters and the morally responsibilized Disney heroines and heroes. Wealthy children therefore are placed within neoliberal tableaus of marketing and consumption. However, most children in the world are not wealthy and have limited potential to participate in the global assembly line of consumption beyond their service as the most basic laborers. This chapter examines childhoods dispossessed by the neoliberal logics of government that have shaped national and international political and economic relations for the last thirty or so years. It particularly emphasizes childhood in relation to the nearly worldwide economic depression brought on by the failure of neoliberal financial risk-management strategies. Childhood will be reconfigured by this depression in ways that erode the twentieth century formulation of vulnerable children deserving of special protections and care. The chapter begins by introducing the idea of neoliberalism as a form of government before turning to explore the economic crisis that now wreaks havoc around the globe. After explaining the nature of the crisis and its implications for the neoliberal state, the chapter discusses effects and future implications for children abroad and for U.S. children at home and at school. This discussion emphasizes austerity's impact on children's living and educational opportunities, suggesting that social-welfare biopolitics will cede to more authoritarian and disciplinary regimes of control.