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Notes Introduction 1. This literature has focused overwhelmingly on two aspects of the neoliberal period: the economic consequences of neoliberal reform in the global south, and the formation of new kinds of subjectivities, both market-ready entrepreneurs and the alternative cultural and indigenous categories that have been produced by these new strategies of government (see Hale 2006; Shever 2008; Colloredo-Mansfield 1998). The lit­­­­ erature is by turns bleak about the economic prospects for much of the world’s population (e.g., Gill 2000; Gledhill 1995) or sanguine about the possibilities opened up by contestatory practices (e.g., Postero 2007; Sawyer 2004). 2. JosephStiglitz(1998)beganusingtheterm“post–Washington Consensus” in 1998, a sign that mainstream international de­­­­­ velopment practitioners were entering a period of autocritique . In Latin America, Taylor (1999) and Hershberg and Rosen (2006) have used “post-neoliberalism” as a lens for exploring current economic and political conditions. An alternative reading is that provided by Peck and Tickell (2002; also Hart 2002), which suggests that neoliberalism has not really ended, but can be divided into two phases, a “roll-back” phase of drastic cuts to public spending, and a “roll-out” phase in which policy and public spending is aimed at reconfiguring state institutions. Although I don’t use the same language, it should be clear from the pages ahead that I largely agree with this latter view. 3. Figures are from the Ministerio de Agricultura y Ganaderia agricultural census of 2006. This was the first census to be undertaken in Paraguay since 1991, and the figures are striking 234 Notes to Introduction in that they show a considerable concentration of land occurring over that period, with a decrease of 6 percent in the overall number of smallholdings and a remarkable drop of 27 percent in the number of medium-sized farms between twenty and fifty hectares. 4. Campesino struggles date from much earlier, but with considerable changes over time. As I argue herein, campesino struggles in the post–Cold War period are related directly to strategies undertaken in the 1960s. 5. Just as, for a time, Soviet scientists claimed that the Western obsession with information was a symptom of idealism, and therefore complicit with capitalism (Gerovitch 2002). This was an ideological battle that the West would win, with many claiming that it was information that killed the Soviet Union (see Stiglitz 1994; Shane 1994). 6. In this respect one of the most damaging mistakes of Stroessner’s in the waning years of his regime was not so much the repression of dissidents, which had become routine, but the censorship of the country’s major national newspaper, abc Color, in 1983, which won him international condemnation. 7. Economics of information was not formalized until the early 1960s (Stigler 1961; Vickrey 1961). 8. One of the most common ways to “fix” information gaps is the commodification of risk in the form of insurance. See chapter 4 for a more extended discussion. 9. For examples of this line of argument, see the articles in O’Donnell et al. 1986 and Diamond, Linz, and Lipset 1988. The fall of the Berlin Wall was accompanied by a flurry of writing that celebrated the fusion of democracy and capitalism, including articles in the Washington Quarterly by Diamond (1989), de Soto (1989a), Gershman (1989), and Fukuyama’s (1989) infamous article on the end of history. For an excellent review of all of this ideological production, see Abrahamsen 2000. Transparency had its role to play in mature democracies as well, as the audit explosion of the 1980s and 1990s created new forms of bureaucratic rituals meant to regularize and technicalize governance in Europe and North America (Power 1997; Strathern 2000; Miller 2003). 10. In Latin America the most influential version of this argument appeared in Hernando de Soto’s best-selling book, The Mystery of Capital (2000), which argued that the greatest problem faced by the slum-dwellers of Third World megacities was “missing information.” 11. This peculiar formalistic definition comes from midcentury information theory and cybernetics, and has had enormous influence in a number of disciplines, from economics to psychology to biology (see especially Mirowski 2002). I explore its workings in Paraguay in much more depth elsewhere (Hetherington forthcoming). 12. See especially Day 2008. It is not that economists believe that it is possible to have complete knowledge of the economic world, nor do they forget that written information is different from information in the mind, and many in fact build complex models of mediation...

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