the great debate

Ian Murray seamus2001 at home.com
Tue Aug 21 19:15:33 PDT 2001



> 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



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