At the dawn of the twenty-first century, parts of the world appeared stunningly new as US citizens and Latin Americans had reordered their political–economic systems following the economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on their memories of this period, businessmen and economic advisors told a story about how features of the mid-century capitalist orders were extinguished and neoliberalism emerged as a moment of rupture with the preceding era. Amy Offner's book is an outstanding historical piece that challenges this narrative, showing that, although new, the world at the turn of the twenty-first century was rather made from ‘familiar materials’ (p. 275).

Her book transcends national borders to tell a story of how developmentalist and welfarist ideas and policies travelled across space and time, making and unmaking the mid-century Latin American developmental and US welfare states. Offner uses ‘mixed economy’ as a powerful category for historical analysis. Policymakers and intellectuals of the First and Third Worlds used this term to describe mid-century capitalist orders in which US citizens and Latin Americans debated competing ideas and practices about laissez-faire and socialism, private competition and state ownership. By showing that ‘they sorted out the elements of midcentury mixed economies, destroying some practices, redeploying others, and retrospectively redefining them all as emblems of two different eras’ (p. 2), Offner develops a novel and compelling argument that connects developmentalist and welfarist ideas and practices of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Her detailed and in-depth examination of the interchange between US and Latin American societies shows that, rather than representing a moment of rupture, the origin of ideas and practices that emerged as new in the final decades of the twentieth century lies in the mid-century world.

Offner focuses on the Colombian case and relies on interviews and extensive archival research across the United States and Colombia to show that the making and unmaking of the Latin American developmental and the US welfare state resulted from societal interchange and should not be interpreted in isolation. To tell this story, she examines how distinct notions of poverty prevailing in the United States and Latin America in the post-Depression era facilitated the circulation of ideas, people and policies throughout the hemisphere. The peoples of the Americas regarded poverty in Latin America as a ‘poverty of nations’ (p. 4) – i.e. measured in macroeconomic terms. In the United States, in turn, poverty was seen as an aberrant feature that existed within the nation. In the 1940s and 1950s, lessons about US capitalist recovery travelled south with US officials who had been involved in the New Deal of the late 1930s and the post-World War II Marshall Plan to solve what they saw as the problem of capitalist development in Latin America. Latin American countries became international laboratories for testing new thinking about political economy and applying lessons only partly implemented in the United States. US citizens flooded Latin American universities and planning agencies and collaborated with Latin Americans, who embedded their own ideas about their role in the nation and the definition of national interest into national policies, providing competing possibilities and processes of state-building and crafting political economy. Likewise, in the 1960s, lessons of Latin American developmental states flowed back north with veterans of the Third World, who drew on their experiences to propose policies aimed at delivering welfare to poor communities in the United States amid rising social contestations.

Offner begins her story with the trajectories of US citizens who worked in Colombia's Cauca Valley in the early post-war period and, together with Colombians, translated Depression-era policies, remaking the economy, landscape and class relations. Chapter 1 traces how New Dealer David Lilienthal's idea of state decentralisation melded with the conceptions of local capitalists, giving rise to a new jurisdiction and a new idea of legitimacy: regional autonomy and the combination of public and private authority could shield economic development from politics and enable it to operate independently of the central government. The success of Lilienthal's Cauca Valley Corporation (CVC), a regional development project founded in 1954, would later encourage Colombians, the World Bank and the US government to take its lessons abroad. Chapters 2 and 3 examine Colombia's 1961 land reform and Ciudad Kennedy, Latin America's largest private home ownership programme under the Alliance for Progress, a programme launched in 1961 to channel US aid to anti-communist development projects across the hemisphere. Offner dissects the way in which economists taught non-economists how to address public policy using economic terms and how they later employed this new knowledge to different ends. By introducing a new economic vocabulary to Cauca Valley's landowners, who had never studied economics, the CVC played a crucial role in popularising economic thought. Defending inequality and reasoning about social and ethical issues in economic terms, landowners influenced Colombia's 1961 land reform which, in the end, did not equalise the distribution of property. Similarly, housing policy increased the use of economic reasoning in public policy and produced varied ideas about private home ownership. While old New Dealers sought to adapt US public housing law, Colombians cultivated a popular vision of private homes, and economists and businessmen competed for roles as public planners. The changes in Colombian housing policy ultimately created a middle class that planners had not expected, and Ciudad Kennedy brought into relief competing ideas of Depression-era policies by creating a state that was developmentalist and austere at the same time.

In Chapter 4, Offner dives into the debates about the boundary between economic and non-economic at the Universities de los Andes and del Valle in the 1950s to illuminate the contradictions of decentralised states and the mixed economy. Scholars at both institutions disputed the responsibilities of the private and public sectors and the relationship between economists, the state and private capital. They attempted to distinguish themselves from business administrators claiming that economics was associated with statecraft and the public good, while businessmen pursued private interests. However, in a state in which the government increasingly relied on decentralised private initiatives to fulfil its mandate, the distinction was blurred. Chapter 5 further elaborates how the management programme at the University del Valle, which assembled international funders and faculty, became a crossroads for tendencies in post-war management education and business mobilisation, showcasing disagreements about the nature of management in the United States and US managerial development projects. By the 1970s, many Colombians had degrees in economics and businessmen competed with economists for authority in public life.

Amid rising social conflicts that put the legitimacy of businessmen at risk and challenged the notion of US society as a model, Chapters 6 and 7 show how US President Lyndon Johnson's ‘War on Poverty’ programme enabled foreign advisors to integrate their ideas into public discussion and declare themselves able to solve the problems identified by social movements. Debates revolved around the role of the state and voluntarism, of for-profit and non-profit activity, and national and local policy to provide welfare. Having witnessed businessmen as public stewards in the Third World, foreign advisors claimed that the private sector was able to meet public needs. By the late 1960s, veterans of post-war development programmes and the idea of ‘social entrepreneurship’ enabled private capital to expand to new niches within the welfare state. In Chapter 7, Offner further explores how ideas and policies crossed national borders to show the influence of global shifts in self-help housing in US statecraft. Self-help housing, a US foreign-policy initiative in austere home ownership programmes in the Third World, became federal anti-poverty policy in the United States within a few years.

In Chapter 8 Offner traces the trajectory of Eduardo Wiesner, a Colombian International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank economist who pushed a range of Latin American countries to adopt IMF-based adjustment programmes in the 1980s and 1990s. Offner takes us back to the CVC in the 1950s, when Wiesner began to write about state decentralisation while pursuing his PhD at the University de los Andes, to show that he was a product of developmental state-building. He analysed the form of government that CVC represented and found that autonomous regional/decentralised agencies operated more efficiently than central government. Reversing the direction of travel of old New Dealers like Lilienthal in the 1950s, Wierner went north to join the World Bank and adopted it as a new international platform. By analysing Wierner's journey from Colombia to Washington DC and the transformation of the concept of decentralisation over time, Offner shows how prolonged international exchange and the practices of developmental states shaped liberalisation after the 1970s. Just as Latin American elites engaged with their North Atlantic connections to advance their interests at home, Offner argues that international financial institutions ‘were imperial institutions, and imperial power is never simply produced in metropoles’ (p. 251).

Offner's book is an exceptional contribution to the fields of US history, history of economics, Latin American state-building and US social welfare policy, and of the cataclysm of the final decades of the twentieth century. By showing that the ideas that emerged as new in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s had roots in the repertoire of mid-century ideas and practices, Offner makes a highly persuasive, compelling and interesting argument.