>------Original Message------
>From: "Mark Jones" <jones118 at lineone.net>
>To: crl <crashlist at lists.wwpublish.com>
>Sent: September 21, 2000 8:40:45 AM GMT
>Subject: [CrashList] debating the World Bank
>
>
>[Follows an email exchange between Henry Liu and Mine Doyran, followed
>by Doug Henwood's recent article in "The Nation". The subject-matter
>is the fate of the World Bank's "World Development Report". Kanbur got
>pushed out because his draft report was too controversial for World
>Bank panjandrums. As Henwood says, " Ravi Kanbur, an outside economist
>whom Stiglitz brought aboard to supervise the writing of the bank's
>annual World Development Report, resigned "in anger" (as the New York
>Times put it) in June when he was ordered to revise the document to
>conform to the party line that growth is the highest good of economic
>policy."
>
>There are two issues here (at least): when is the continuing evidence
>of chaos and ideological decay in Washington, symbolised by the
>collapse of the "Washington Consensus".
Collapse? Challenges to the consensus have been ruled out of order, even from more or less within the high bourgeois paradigm.
>Mine Aysen Doyran wrote:
>* This piece has emerged on the _International Political Economy_
>listserv today, and originally appeared in the _Nation_ magazine,
>where the author of the article presents an overly positive view of
>the former chief economists of the World Bank, Stiglitz and Kanbur,
Kanbur wasn't the chief economist; he was an outside consultant. Not to nitpick or anything.
>and praise them for being "humane reformers who sincerely care about
>the world's poor".
They are. They're not revolutionaries, but they're humane social democrats who would like little more than to see the world's poor made less poor. She can lecture all she likes about how that's impossible under capitalism, but as a description of what these two men want to see, it's thoroughly accurate.
> I am posting the article as an evidence of the left
>liberal position on international affairs and "humanist imperialism"
>of the World Bank. This is evidently a pro-system journalism, so I am
>telling _in advance_ to avoid another _Business Week_ friction. Since
>this is the trendy position among the left in the US today, It is
>always important to be updated about their views.
God, she is such an idiot. It's "pro-system journalism" to point out that even nonradical reformers are purged by that system?
Doug