DIAS Guest Lecture: Architects of the Mixed Economy

Jenny Andersson, Professor of the history of ideas at Uppsala University, PI of research programme on Neoliberalism in the Nordics and author of The Future of the World: Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle for the Post-Cold War Imagination (Oxford UP).




Invited and presented by DIAS Senior Fellow Jeppe Nevers



Architects of the Mixed Economy




This talk reexamines three well-known figures in Sweden’s turn to neoliberalism, the economists Assar Lindbeck, Ingemar Ståhl, and Gösta Rehn. They were all social democrats.


Rehn was an active social democrat and trade union economist all of his life, ending his career as a professor of labor economics in the Institute for Social Research. Lindbeck and Ståhl were also active social democrats, but Ståhl was a maverick who provoked in socialist student debates in Lund with great oratories on the equalizing effects of the price mechanism.



Ståhl was eventually ejected from social democracy and became a hardcore market liberal associated with the Swedish Business Federation’s thinktank Timbro. Lindbeck remained a social democrat until the wage earner funds debate in 1975.



My talk focuses on their thinking of the so-called "mixed economy" as a particular form of capitalism and argues that it served as a meeting space between the intellectual histories of social democracy and neoliberalism.



The lecture takes place in the DIAS Auditorium, Fioniavej 34. Everybody is welcome and no registration is needed.