See insets below. But for the control of government by business (leading
technological change); if there are not curbs placed by governing bodies
on the piece-meal market deployment of technologies under the guise of
'we haveto recoup our investment' when the process seems now to be a
production of product D which is then broken down to products A, B, C,
and finally E which all together have generated more massive returns
than of selling only the original D technology, the problem of business
controlling government will not be solved, the 'old system' will remain
and the 'rhyming' (see Ray's other post re: Thomas I. Palley) will begin
anew.
Darryl
On 1/9/2011 3:04 AM, Keith Hudson wrote:
Futureworkers might be interested in the following article about a
book by Dambisa Moyo from today's */Sunday Telegraph/*. Although she's
an economist she is arguing mainly from political and governmental
trends with scarcely any mention, it would seem, of tomorrow's
employment structure and technology. I think she's profoundly wrong
because I believe that policies -- and indeed the forms -- of
government follow, don't lead, technological change. If we are going
to have great technological changes in the next century -- which I
believe we will -- then we might well have forms of governance that
are as different from today's as today's is from, say, Medieval England.
Keith
*-------------
Dambisa Moyo: without change, US will almost certainly become a
socialist nation
*
*Economist Dambisa Moyo predicts in her new book that the West's
economic dominance will collapse unless some very difficult
choices are made. *
Moyo achieved a chemistry degree and MBA at Washington DC's American
University, a doctorate in economics from Oxford and a masters from
Harvard before working as a consultant at the World Bank and then for
nearly a decade at Goldman.
*Andrew Cave*
Dambisa Moyo is that rare type of person -- an economist who makes
waves. Her first book, */Dead Aid/*, angered many in the charity
sector by arguing that foreign aid has harmed Africa and should be
phased out.
Likely from her work with the World Bank which in the 70's had been
recognized as a front to instigate U.S. trade control over countries in
need.
Her second, which is published in London on Thursday, accuses America
and other Western powers of squandering their world economic dominance
through a sustained catalogue of fundamentally flawed policies.
No disagreement there.
*/How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly -- And the
Stark Choices Ahead/* goes so far as to predict that the US will be a
bona fide socialist welfare state by the latter part of this century.
Indeed, if nothing else changes it from its current path,writes Moyo,
it is almost certain that America will move from a fully-fledged
capitalist society of entrepreneurs to a socialist nation in just a
few decades.
The trouble is, it won't be just any socialist welfare state . . . the
US is on a path to creating the worst and most venal form of welfare
state [poorly developed and designed] -- one born of desperation from
many years of flawed economic policies and a society that rapaciously
feeds on itself.
There's plenty more. If current trends continue unabated, Moyo goes
much further than the usual surveys predicting when China will surpass
the US in GDP -- she suggests China's new hegemony could include the
redback renminbi replacing the greenback dollar as the world's
favourite currency.
Think about it, she urges Americans. Foreign exchange share prices,
the price of copper, the price of oil, all in Chinese renminbi.
The US and other Western powers will be reduced to second division
players and the new global powerhouses will not just be China. Forget
East versus West. It's now the Rest versus the old West.
If */Dead Aid/* was labelled provocative and incendiary, */How the
West Was Lost/* will likely see reviewers' lexicons raided for even
more emotive language. However, Zambian-born Moyo, 41, is not afraid
of being a pioneer. The London-based former Goldman Sachs economist is
arguably one of the most powerful women in British business, sitting
on the boards of FTSE 100 constituents Barclays and brewing giant SAB
Miller.
Last year, she featured in */Time/* magazine's list of the world's 100
most influential people and also appeared in Oprah Winfrey's power
list of 20 remarkable visionaries. She is also one of the World
Economic Forum's young global leadersand last year took part in the
power-broking Bilderberg Conference, frequented by the world's movers
and shakers.
Find there as well Bill Gates.
So what has led her to aim fire at the West's leaders, struggling as
they are with budget deficits and waning economies? The answer, she
says, is that she believes the global economy is at an inflexion point
in terms of where it goes from here.
I wanted to write a book that is one-stop shopping for where we are in
the world today, she says. There's so much focus on dealing with
tactical issues to do with the emergency solution, which are all
necessary of course. But people are missing the bigger issues because
the way the political structure is set up encourages you to focus on
the immediate, rather than what I would say are the important issues,
the structural things which have been going on for 50 odd years.
I hope the book will be picked up by people who are saying: "I dont
want to hear all this noise. I just want a clean perspective on what
the heck is going on around the world and how is it that we have got
to this point."
So how have we? Apparently with the best of intentions. Moyo says the
idea of unintended consequences is a running theme in both */Dead
Aid/* and */How the West Was Lost/*, with policies that Western
populations have rallied around as great ideas turning out to produce
detrimental results.
See Ray's post on Warfield.
In this way, she says, Western governments have implemented laudable
notions like the idea that everyone should have a roof over their
head, receive access to food and be supported in old age by pensions.
These have led to unfortunate outcomes in terms of capital, labour and
productivity, the key ingredients for economic growth.
Here, it would appear her education in the 'old light' has blinded her
better considerations.
It's not just the US. There are tons of examples of UK and European
mistakes,she says. A classic one is pensions. That's obviously not an
America-specific thing. The British and European economies are
suffering under the weight of what is to come. The next great Ponzi
scheme after Madoff is probably pensions. Also, it's not just the
United States where performance is declining in a very detrimental and
rapid way in maths and science and reading. It's also very much a
problem in the UK.
Now it appears that she is shooting out the support of the elderly,
sounds neo-liberal to me.
And if you compare 1950-1980 with 1980-2000, in terms of GDP growth in
the US and many European countries, it's been exactly the same. Yet
between 1950 and 1980, people were living in pretty protectionist
regimes and between 1980 and 2000 there was much more capital and
trade flows. In addition, real wages have been relatively flat in the
US and Europe, so taken together you have a question about whether
globalisation, which is another great idea on paper, has actually
worked in practice. _Has it helped Americans? Has it helped the
British people?_
Two good questions for many countries.
Is there still time to fix these problems? Yes, she says, but the
choices are going to be very difficult and may need to be facilitated
through political changes, for example in the terms of governments, so
they have more incentives to think longer-term.
Oh. Does this mean further loans from those within the Bilderberg complex?
We all know what the problems are, she says. Which is why I actually
think the Coalition Government [UK] is brilliant because so far they
have been able to implement some of the hardest choices of the
austerity measures in an environment where it's much less politicised
than if it was just a left-wing or right-wing government in power. You
kind of need to strip out the politics.
It also may require a change of mindset, with Moyo arguing that
governments need people who are absolutely focused on long-term
structural issues such as education, deficit management, energy, food
commodities, longer-term productivity and infrastructure. The problems
have been highlighted but where's the plan for those issues? There
isn't one.
It's these sorts of awkward questions that Moyo seems to most like
posing. In */Dead Aid/* she argued that more than $1trillion of
development aid from Western governments to Africa over the past 50
years has not helped Africa but has ruined it, with millions of people
poorer because of aid. _Destroying the myth that aid works, she said,
means making charity history. _
Sounds very 'Bush-ite' to me. The idea of aid is not wrong, it is the
way it was offered (to increase the coffers of those in industry through
slave labour and trade).
Former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan agreed, saying that
Moyo made a compelling case for a new approach to Africa, while
Rwandan president Paul Kagame bought copies of */Dead Aid/* for his
entire cabinet. Some others were not so complimentary, however, with
David Roodman, a research fellow at the Centre for Global Development,
calling the book sporadically footnoted, selective in its use of
facts, sloppy, simplistic, illogical and stunningly naive. The pro-aid
organisation ONE claimed */Dead Aid/* was reckless.
Moyo is unmoved. I was actually pleasantly surprised,she says. I
thought it would be much more fractious and that there would be many
more NGOs and governments that would be incredibly hostile to the
message, but it was actually to the contrary.
I think there's clearly a fringe group. I can probably count on one
hand the organisations that took a lot of offence and I would argue
that many of them have a bigger agenda than trying to help resolve the
Africa problem. But a lot of NGOs have approached me. Some asked me to
join their boards.
Many of them just asked for advice because they genuinely want to see
a turnaround. I think there's no doubt in anybody's mind, whether you
love or hate aid, that there's clearly something wrong. There's
clearly a problem with a system that has not delivered economic growth
and reduced poverty for 50 years. Nobody can tell me that things are
working swimmingly in Africa. They ain't.
Born and raised in Lusaka, Moyo achieved a chemistry degree and MBA at
Washington DC's American University, a doctorate in economics from
Oxford University and a masters from Harvard University's Kennedy
School of Government before working as a consultant at the World Bank
and then for nearly a decade at Goldman.
I don't think my background in Zambia has really affected my lens
because _my classical training has been Western-style_, she says. But
it's fantastically fortuitous to have been born African because I
don't feel I have a vested interest to the US or China or wherever.
And therein would be a problem with perspective
I feel like I have an impartial perspective on the way the world
works. Coming from a continent that's arguably on the bottom rung,
it's just amazing to see how things operate.
It certainly hasn't stopped her from becoming a pronounced free
marketeer.
This is what the Bilderberg group is more interested in than anything else.
I think the markets can work in a managed way, she says. If they're
left to run rampant it's obviously problematic, but I think they are
the best way of delivering economic benefits and have been shown to be
the method to generate the biggest economic benefits to the highest
number of people.
Controls on a 'free-market' system??? She appears to flip-flop a lot
unless there are miss-reads of her work.
What does she make of the current furore over banker bonuses? I think
some of the proposals coming from Europe are quite interesting, she
says with understatement.
Perhaps another one for the 'hit list' currently being drawn up in the
U.S. see news on Gabrielle Giffords (Rep. Arizona).
I've seen that theyre going to require vesting schedules on how you
get your bonus and there will be caps on what proportion you can earn
in cash. There are some interesting things but bonuses are on the
whole a red herring. They were an easy target.
Both outrageous pay *and* bonuses i.e. excessive profiteering by any
other name has the smell of --Oh I'm not supposed to use those words...
how about Bovine faeces.
Yes, there might be a need to change things but I think there are more
serious things to be addressed. It may be a negative externality of a
system but theyre not illegal.
They're the creation of a system and the only reason that government
might be involved in this type of discussion is because they did bail
out the banks.
More Bilderberg rhetoric.
But beyond that what relevance is there to a broader economy which has
some very serious problems in education and health care? I think they
are more interesting [than those issues].
Again she approaches common sense and community mindedness or is it just
a way to keep the 'free market' flowing?
That will please Barclays' new chief executive, Bob Diamond, but Moyo
won't discuss her non-executive jobs or her time at Goldman, which she
clearly doesn't view as a great vampire squid, as Rolling Stone
infamously described the investment bank.
She's already focusing on her next book. Which urban myths does she
want to demolish next? I know what it will be about but Im not
telling,she smiles.
First, she'll have to deal with a backlash from proud Americans who
dont agree that the West has been lost.
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/01/
_______________________________________________
Futurework mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
_______________________________________________
Futurework mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
