> The best answers are contained in the WB/IMF's own data. They show
that
> per capita growth in the neoliberalized zones has crashed and burned
since
> 1980, while non-neolib regions (Taiwan, S Korea, China, and yes,
even
> India, which still protects much of its internal market) have done
much
> better. Hang 'em with their own rope!
>
> -- Dennis
========
Well, Robert Naiman and others have done a great job making the noose.
< http://www.cepr.net/ > But this is not about data, ultimately. Or
even such technical economic arcana as intertemporal smoothing. It's
about an emotional/cognitive zone of terror at the interface of
ethics-economics-ecology; a zone called humility; the admission that
both power and powerlessness corrupts; whether the rentier class is
ready to accept the demand that the debt be repudiated and that the
forms of calculating time-wealth be dramatically reconfigured so that
we don't revisit these problems in 10, 20, or 50 years. In a world of
indeterminacy and uncertainty, that's a tall order. Otherwise we'll
continue to have a holocaust in slow motion just like we do now. As
the elites have found out over the last two years of street heat;
lying is inflationary and will become more costly in terms trying to
produce reputational and positional goods such as expertise. All of us
have to become a hell of a lot *smarter* if we're to globalize our
efforts to eradicate poverty. It's one of those contradictions of
humility that we have the knowledge, but do we have the *desire*?
Ian