In The Chile Project, Sebastian Edwards tells the remarkable story of how the neoliberal economic model—installed in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship and deepened during three decades of left-of-center governments—came to an end in 2021, when Gabriel Boric, a young former student activist, was elected president, vowing that “If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave.”
More than a story about one Latin American country, The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism, is a behind-the-scenes history of the spread and consequences of the free-market thinking that dominated economic policymaking around the world in the second half of the twentieth century—but is now on the retreat.
Author Sebastian Edwards is a Henry Ford II Distinguished Professor of International Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a former chief economist for Latin America and the Caribbean at the World Bank.
