Category: Global economics

Beholding 2014

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By Richard Falk
Written on December 31, 2013

2013 was not a happy year in the chronicles of human history, yet there were a few moves in the directions of peace and justice.

What follows are some notes that respond to the mingling of light and shadows that are flickering on the global stage, with a spotlight placed on the main war zone of the 21st century – the Middle East, recalling that Europe had this negative honor for most of the modern era except for the long 19th century, and that the several killing fields of sub-Saharan Africa are located at the periphery of political vision, and thus their reality remains blurred for distant observers. Read More »

Good cheer at the end of the year – 2013

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By Jonathan Power

We have a lot to be thankful for in 2013.

Look at the protests now going on in Bangkok. After some initial clashes at the beginning both sides have become non-violent. One can praise the government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra for this. She ordered the gates and doors of the ministry of the interior, of the police and the Thai equivalent of Scotland Yard/FBI to be opened. The protesters poured into the buildings and then left – bored.

In the Ukraine after a couple of nights of police brutality President Vikto Yanukovych ordered the police to restrain themselves. Both sides now use peaceful tactics.

Non-violence à la Gandhi and Martin Luther King doesn’t always achieve its objectives, but it keeps the political temperature down and avoids many deaths. It is more likely to work when there is a grave injustice. This is not the case either in Thailand or Ukraine. Indeed in Thailand it is the middle class protesting at the government’s policies of favouring the poor and the rural peasantry, although the demonstrators are not trying to take away the progress the poor have already made. Read More »

Where is the global economy heading?

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By Johan Galtung
Washington-DC

Charles Darwin, in The Voyage of the Beagle, has a passage where he condemns an egalitarian native people on the tip of South America to stay primitive. Development presupposes inequality, having chiefs – human, animals, races – to look up to and learn from; no word wasted on the humans, animals or races at the bottom. And the evolution theory emerging from a mind thus pre-programmed is obvious: competition, struggle for survival, not mutual aid, as the substitute narrative for Genesis 1:20-28, 4th to 6th day–but without God.

However, a man of God, Pope Francis – if anyone is saving Western civilization from itself it is he, not economic growth presidents/PMs – comes out and decries inequality and “trickle-down economics” in particular as a “crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power” (Washington Post, 27 Nov 2013, p. 1). Or, maybe “those wielding intellectual power”, the servants, the economists, rather?

Look at BRICS, 45 percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of the Gross World Product, GWP. NO to inequality and trickle-down: Brazil under Lula-Rousseff, Russia with revolution, China lifts the bottom up, South Africa breaks down Apartheid. India has some trickle-down, but social walls are too strong to break. The Social Protection Index of the Asian Development Bank is three times higher in China than in India (Japan is almost three times China–starting distribution already in the 1870s).

But the USA and EU have increasing inequalities. Read More »

The U.S. calamities: There are solutions

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By Johan Galtung

Political terrorism failed. The House Republicans used voting in one US chamber to put millions of people inside and outside the US at livelihood risk for their own political goals. And made the mistake of most terrorists, non-state or state: when people suffer they will join us, against our enemy; to find out that people turn against the terrorists instead. And they were not a small group of Tea Party extremists but a clear majority of the House Republicans: 144 voted NO in the end, only 87 YES.

Obama has himself to thank for the general House Republican majority; having betrayed most groups voting for him in 2008 he was punished in the 2010 mid-term elections. Like the Republicans will be in 2014 for their political terrorism.Read More »

BRICS: The real “Global South” today

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By Johan Galtung

Keynote European Center for Peace and Development, Beograd, 12 Oct 2013

Two basic facts stand out in the world economic development, leaving aside military, political, cultural and social development:

* The BRICS – an acronym becoming a social fact–are emerging;

* The USA-EU are declining; not only as markets, also as producers.

Another way of saying this is that the West has been outcompeted, not by the Rest but by – so far – a select part. The world market is not constant but increasing sum, but much demand may be met by domestic production, not by import-export. As part of the story.

The West got the definition of development wrong, still clinging to economic development = economic growth (measured by annual GNP/capita increase). The BRICS understood development differently, adding economic distribution (measured by the ratio in acquisitive power between the top and bottom 20%, and between the CEO and average worker salary; at the macro and micro levels). No growth spells recession-depression, no distribution spells worse: death. For economic, like for geographic, positioning, at least two dimensions are needed. A professor in latitudes, or growth, only, is simply not good enough.

Development becomes increasing growth and increasing equality. Growth alone may lead to flagrant inequality at the expense of those at the bottom and nature–a system we know only too well–distribution alone may lead to the shared misery of some human past. We need both.

The map of the world was also wrong. Read More »

Mankind’s lifestyle in the year 2250

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By Jonathan Power

In 1776 Adam Smith published his “Wealth of Nations” which has guided economists and political thinkers ever since. It marks the start of the Industrial Revolution that began in England and then spread throughout most of the world. That was 237 years ago.

It is not that long ago – only 4 life-spans or so, the time of your great, great, great, grandparents. Where will we be 237 years hence? Presumably just as today we listen to Mozart, born 257 years ago, and watch or read Shakespeare, born 439 years ago – they have survived all changing tastes and spread well outside their original orbit of European culture to countries as varied as Japan, China, Argentina, Tanzania and South Korea – we can be sure that generations to come will have much the same cultural interests.

In all likelihood in 2250 we will probably still enjoy tastes picked up from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – perhaps the Beatles, Picasso, some of the outstanding Nigerian and Indian novelists writing today or the pristine recordings of the magnificent Chinese classical violinists and pianists now emerging. We won’t have better artists – who can ever rival Tchaikovsky, Leonardo da Vinci, Tolstoy or Shakespeare?- but a handful who are as good.

Our religions will persistRead More »

Mrs Merkel should read the history of Hitler’s economy

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By Jonathan Power

My family is in a bit of a crisis. My earnings are cut by 25%. Writers never did earn a lot and now we have this economic catastrophe. We’ve cut our expenditures severely.

This is what happens to families in financial trouble. Cut. Common sense, eh? But when it comes to our country being in trouble we have to be counter-intuitive. Then a country must spend more. It has to grow faster to produce the wealth that when taxed can pay down the deficit. As the world’s greatest economist, John Maynard Keynes, wrote: “The boom not the slump is the right time for austerity”.

The Germans and the European Union Commission continue to push countries to cut and squeeze. Yet despite the evidence that the patient is not recovering, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany seems determined not to allow the Euro-zone members to let up. (The British government is following the same counter-productive policy.)

President Barack Obama has taken a different tack. Keynesian to his finger tips, he has saved the American economy and now growth has returned. Unemployment is falling, housing starts are up and people are spending. He saved the banks from going bust. Also the big auto companies. He won passage of a new health act, “Obamacare”, that will ensure that most of the poor are taken care of.Read More »

Humankind 2050: Making peace with our futures

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By Johan Galtung

Keynote Speech, World Futures Studies Federation 40th anniversary – Bucuresti, România

Future studies, like peace-development-environment studies, is an inter-disciplinary, inter-national effort to get a grip on key issues; divided into preferred futures–utopias–whose?; predicted futures–forecasting–who does it for whom?; and future practice–scenarios bending the predicted toward the preferred–by and for whom?

The title of Ravi Morey’s Looking Backward: 2050-2013 catches future studies in a nutshell: exploring intermediate stages between a fully democratic world government and our 2013 present. The road may pass through a bankrupt USA bailed out by a democratic China in 2025. Some may argue that is already happening, with China – more democratic than the West knows – being creditor No. 1, and the USA – more bankrupt than the USA admits – debtor No. 1; Nos. 1 and 190 among 190 countries.

Like in 1967, in Oslo, for the predecessor organization Mankind 2000 this keynote is on international futures. Preferred futures:Read More »

Reinventing Fascism

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By Johan Galtung

The atrocious Second World War left behind lasting damage by lowering our standards for what is marginally acceptable. War is bad; but if it is not nuclear, the limit has not yet been reached. Fascism is bad; but if it does not come with dictatorship and the elimination of a category of people, the limit has not yet been reached. Hiroshima, Hitler, Auschwitz are deeply rooted in our minds, distorting them.

Hiroshima makes us disregard the state terrorism against German and Japanese cities, killing citizens of any age and gender. And Hitler and Auschwitz make us disregard fascism as the pursuit of political goals by means of violence and the threats of violence. It takes two to make a war, by whatever means. But it takes only one to make fascism, against one’s own people, and/or against others.

What is the essence of fascism? Read More »

What Obama will see in Africa this week

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By Jonathan Power

In June,1994, Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black president, spoke at a summit meeting of the Organisation of African States: “We must face squarely that there is something wrong in how we govern ourselves. It must be said that the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves.” At last Africa seems to have taken his words of wisdom to heart.

This week President Barack Obama will be in Africa to see for himself how most of Africa over the nine years since that speech has taken the high road.

One by one throughout the 1990s governing elites began to come to their senses. Twenty-five States established multi-party democracies.

Approximately two-thirds of the people of Africa own a mobile phone. In many African countries phone technology is ahead of Europe and North America. Read More »