 While increasingly intrusive, the decisions of international economic and financial institutions remain largely unaccountable. According to Slobodian, neoliberal globalists actively sought to construct the institutions of the global economy to evade accountability, “to contain potential disruptions from the democratically empowered masses”, so that the global economy could be “protected from the demands of redistributive equality and social justice” (2018: 264). While the Washington Consensus seemed to be based on sound economic principles—that free markets “and competition enable the efficient allocation of scarce resources”—and forecast economic growth based on liberalizing trade, investment, and capital flows, its failure to produce growth or inclusive development in many countries has revealed the importance of empirical analysis to check ideological distortions of economic policy (Rodrik 2015). China’s economic transformation illuminates global challenges arising from the decline of “managerial capitalism”, or Fordism, which generated the regulatory state-model of governance, and the rise of “neoliberal capitalism”, or post-Fordism, defined by the “hollowing out” of the state, reduction of central regulatory capacity, coupled with flexible production processes disaggregated into production chains and networks, and increasing vulnerability of the peripheral workforce (Dowdle 2016: 207–229).