The average Latin American citizen embraces globalization while disapproving of privatization, but this average Latin American is surrounded by massive variation in attitudes toward the Washington Consensus. In other words, some people are more enthusiastic about market reforms than others. Of course, this observation is not at all novel or controversial. For example, many scholars, journalists, and even politicians assume that the politics of neoliberalism is the politics of class and inequality: The poor are ravaged by the region's newfound taste for rugged individualism and savage capitalism, while the local rich and foreign investors benefit at their expense. (See this chapter's epigraph for an example.) Beliefs about market policies are widely thought to be stratified along class lines. Indeed, in countries with such unequal distributions of wealth, many of which experienced violent struggles over economic ideologies and resources during the Cold War, it would be surprising if the poor were not more likely to favor state-sponsored protections from marketization.

In this chapter, I consider whether wealth and other factors that vary across individuals explain why some Latin Americans are more enthusiastic about market reforms than others.