Back to the Cave: Cold, Hungry and Cruel? An epithet for the World Bank’s neoliberal economy project
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I show that the World Bank, along with other international financial institutions, is the primary architect of neoliberal policy of privatizing the formation of higher education and the migration of skilled labour from the Global South to the Global North. The Bank, through development gurus and theories orchestrating the pro-North development agenda, systematically manoeuvres the neoliberalization of higher education and migrant labour from the 1980s to the late 2000s with the promise of democracy, equity, justice and prosperity. Despite massive doses of The Bank-prescribed neoliberal development pills, the majority of the world’s population has yet to experience the promise. The Global South, through three selected countries that see the wisdom of wielding strong state roles in delivering social services, is able to partly parry the deadly sting of the 2008 global economic downturn. The South, immersed as it is in the North’s development agenda as shown in selected literature, has become a doppelganger of the North. In determining the South’s dynamic in service delivery, I turn to Habermas’ communicative rationality that likewise brings to bear similarly framed thoughts as the yardstick of the South’s critical voice against the North’s continuing espousal of neoliberal policy. It is this critical voice that further cultivates people’s micropolitics of beliefs, gender and language, and cries out “no” to The Bank-prescribed neoliberalized higher education and migrant labour – a prescription that leads to and simulates a “back-to-the-cave” circumstance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".