John Williamson, oče “Washingtonskega konsenza”, leta 1999 o reviziji lastnega otroka oziroma o nujnem izgonu ideologije iz njegove tržno – fundamentalistične (neoliberalne) verzije v rokah Reaganovih vernikov:

Ten years ago I invented the term “Washington Consensus”. While it is jolly to become famous by inventing a term that reverberates around the world, I have long been doubtful as to whether the phrase that I coined served to advance the cause of rational economic policymaking.

My initial source of concern was that the phrase invited the interpretation that the liberalizing economic reforms of the past two decades were imposed by Washington-based institutions like the World Bank, rather than having resulted from the process of intellectual convergence that I believe underlies them. […]

However, I have gradually developed a second and more significant concern. I have realized that the term is often being used in a sense significantly different to that which I had intended, as a synonym for what is often called “neoliberalism” in Latin America, or what George Soros (1998) has called “market fundamentalism”. When I first came across this usage, I asserted that it was erroneous since that was not what I had intended by the term. […]

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These examples suggest that, in the minds of many economists, the term has become a synonym for “neoliberalism” or what George Soros (1998) has called “market fundamentalism” (which is far and away my favorite term for this set of beliefs). Now anyone who read the preceding section of this paper will recognize that this was hardly the sense in which I originally used the term. On the contrary, I thought of the Washington Consensus as the lowest common denominator of policy advice being addressed by the Washington institutions to Latin American countries as of 1989, a year when the market fundamentalism of Reagan’s first term had already been superceded by the return of rational economic policymaking and it was pretty clear which of the ideas of the Reagan years were going to survive and which were not (monetary discipline but not monetarism, tax reform but not tax-slashing, liberalization of trade and FDI but maybe not complete freedom of capital movements, deregulation of entry and exit but not a casual attitude to prudential supervision of financial institutions or the suppression of regulations designed to protect the environment).

Can one explain how a term that was invented to summarize the lowest common denominator of policy advice that survived the demise of Reaganomics came to be used to mean the most extreme version of Reaganomics, a set of doctrines that may have temporarily conquered many of the commanding heights of Washington in the early 1980s but that neither the Fed nor the Bank5 ever endorsed, which makes it pretty difficult to argue that it ever commanded a consensus? How is it that a term intended to describe a technocratic policy agenda came to be used to describe an ideology?

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In trying to identify policies from the Reagan-Thatcher era that had not won consensus support, I wrote in 1996: “it [the Washington Consensus] did not declare that the only legitimate way to restore fiscal discipline was to slash government expenditure; it did not identify fiscal discipline with a balanced budget; it did not call for overall tax cuts; it did not treat as plunder the taxes raised to raised to redistribute income; it did not say that exchange rates had to be either firmly fixed or freely floating; it did not call for the proscription of capital controls; it did not advocate competitive moneys or argue that the money supply should grow at a fixed rate” (Williamson 1997, p. 50).

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We in the Bank should recognize and emphasize that the term Washington Consensus has been used in very different ways, one of which summarizes policies that are pro-poor, but another of which uses it to describe a policy stance that offers the poor very little. Make it clear that we have no sympathy with this version (what I have called the populist or market-fundamentalist version).

Say that we in the Bank believe it is appropriate to go beyond the Washington Consensus by emphasizing the importance of the institutional dimension as well as of the sort of policies embodied in the original version of the Washington Consensus, of policies that will promote an equitable distribution of income as well as a rapid growth of income, and of caring for the environment as well as for income.

Reject the hopeless quest to identify a consensus where there is none, and instead engage in debate on what policy changes are needed to achieve a rounded set of objectives encompassing at least the level, growth, and distribution of income, as well as preservation of a decent environment.

John Williamson (1999), What Should the Bank Think about the Washington Consensus?