Doug asks:
Hmm, well, how would you update that lecture? What's missing? What would a lifting of laziness uncover?John replies:
Well, I've overrun my posting quota... and it's time for bed... I'd better go... see you!
"Seriously" though, here would be a few starting points. As you know, in the 1990's the World Bank got involved big time in designing and funding and oversseing capitalist market-friendly poverty alleviation programs, social safety nets, conservation ecology schemes, etc. You might call it a more sophisticated version of neo-liberalism or you might call it something else... it was certainly cosmetic repair of the damage wreaked on the national developmental model, but it was much more than straight up privatization, deregulation and export promotion. And then as you know the IMF has been essentially irrelevant since the early 2000's. Its portfolio and its power have shrunk considerably. Many peripheral raw material exporters have done well these last few years from inflated world market prices for minerals, fuels, foods. The windfall may not have trickled down to the popular classes but you need political sociology to explain why, not the WashCon mantra. Then there's the plethora of South-South FDI, infrastructure projects, development loans, capital flows, a lot of it coming from China, not necessarily good, not necessarily bad, but defintinely not the global rule of neo-liberal capitalism as customarily defined. Then there's the paradoxical scenario of the G20 countries demanding the G7 actually practice the free trade they preach! Maybe this demonstrates the neo-liberal bona fides of the "emerging market countries" (bleccch!), or maybe it's a deliberate attempt to blow up the GATT... but of course it exposes that the 1990's were a lot less "neo-liberal" in practice than commonly assumed.
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