structural adjustment programs

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pages: 332 words: 106,197

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

In other words, the IMF came to act as a global debt enforcer – the equivalent of the bailiff who comes to repossess your car, only much more powerful.13 This radical shift in the mission of the IMF was only possible because during this period IMF leaders – such as managing director Jacques de Larosière – systematically purged the institution of people who supported the original Keynesian philosophy and replaced them with figures more amenable to neoliberal ideology. This is how the plan was supposed to work: the IMF would help developing countries finance their debt on the condition that they would agree to a series of ‘structural adjustment programmes’.14 Structural adjustment programmes, or SAPs, included two basic mechanisms for debt repayment. First, developing countries had to redirect all their existing cash flows and assets towards debt service. They had to cut spending on public services like healthcare and education and on subsidies for things like farming, food and infant industries; they also had to privatise public assets by selling off state companies like telecoms and railways.

Source: World Development Indicators We can get a better sense for how devastating structural adjustment was by zooming in on particular regions, countries and cities.22 Take Africa, for instance, which suffered a total of thirty-one structural adjustment programmes during the 1980s and 1990s. In Dar es Salaam, public expenditure per person was cut by 10 per cent per year during the 1980s. In Khartoum, 1.1 million people were added to the ranks of the poor, many of whom had lost their public-sector jobs during spending cuts. A structural adjustment programme imposed in Harare in 1981 raised the cost of living by 45 per cent in a single year; 100,000 people ended up hospitalised due to malnutrition.

It dries up too; it cakes all over me; sometimes I feel that there is not enough soap in the whole world to cleanse me from the things that I did do in your name and in the names of your predecessors, and under your official seal. When the failure of structural adjustment programmes became too apparent to ignore, and as pressure from social movements mounted against them, the IMF and the World Bank ostensibly backed down. At the end of the 1990s, they made a show of replacing structural adjustment programmes with ‘Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers’. The new PRSPs were supposed to bring in more local ownership of structural adjustment, and require countries to focus on poverty reduction as a condition for receiving loans.


pages: 232

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, centre right, clean water, company town, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, jitney, jobless men, Kibera, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent control, structural adjustment programs, surplus humans, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor

45 Part of the secret, of course, was that policies of agricultural deregulation and financial discipline enforced by the IMF and World Bank continued to generate an exodus of surplus rural labor to urban slums even as cities ceased to be job machines. As Deborah Bryceson, a leading European Africanist, emphasizes in her summary of recent agrarian research, the 1980s and 1990s were a generation of unprecedented upheaval in the global countryside: One by one national governments, gripped in debt, became subject to structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionality. Subsidized, improved agricultural input packages and rural infrastructural building were drastically reduced. As the peasant "modernization" effort in Latin American and African nations was abandoned, peasant farmers were subjected to the international financial institutions' "sink-or-swim" economic strategy.

Similarly, in the Philippines in the early 1980s, per capita health expenditures fell by half.104 In oil-rich but thoroughly "SAPed" Nigeria, a fifth of the country's children now die before age five.105 Economist Michel Chossudovsky blames the notorious outbreak of plague in Surat in 1994 upon "a worsening urban sanitation and public health infrastructure which accompanied the compression of national and municipal budgets under the 1991 IMF/World Bank-sponsored structural adjustment programme."106 The examples can easily be multiplied: everywhere obedience to international creditors has dictated cutbacks in medical care, the emigration of doctors and nurses, the end of food subsidies, and the switch of agricultural production from subsistence to export crops. As Fantu Cheru, a leading UN expert on debt, emphasizes, the coerced tribute that the Third World pays to the First World has been the literal difference between life and death for millions of poor people. 102 Women's Global Network for Reproductive Rights, A Decade After Cairo: Women's Health in a Free Market Economy, Corner House Briefing 30, Sturminister Newton 2004, p. 8. 103 Shi, " How Access to Urban Portable Water and Sewerage Connections Affects Child Mortality," pp. 4-5. 104 Frances Stewart, Adjustment and Poverty: Options and Choices, London 1995, pp. 196, 203,205. 105 World Bank statistic quoted in Financial Times, 10 September 2004. 106 Quoted in A Decade After Cairo, p. 12.

Indeed, the journalist found out that residents bought water from private dealers and relied on vigilante groups for security — the police visited only to collect bribes.37 The minimalist role of national governments in housing supply has been reinforced by current neo-liberal economic orthodoxy as defined by the IMF and the World Bank. The Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) imposed upon debtor nations in the late 1970s and 1980s required a shrinkage of government programs and, often, the 36 Richard Kirkby, "China," in Kosta Mathey (ed.), Beyond Self-Help Housing, London 1992, pp. 298-99. 37 Andrew Harding, "Nairobi Slum Life," (series), Guardian, 4, 8, 10 and 15, October 2002.


pages: 369 words: 94,588

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, interest rate swap, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, means of production, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precariat, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, statistical arbitrage, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, the built environment, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, white flight, women in the workforce

In trying to deal with serious tremors in the heart of the body politic, our economists, business leaders and political policy makers have, in the absence of any conception of the systemic nature of capital flow, either revived ancient practices or applied postmodern conceptions. On the one hand the international institutions and pedlars of credit continue to suck, leech-like, as much of the lifeblood as they can out of all the peoples of the world – no matter how impoverished – through so-called ‘structural adjustment’ programmes and all manner of other stratagems (such as suddenly doubling fees on our credit cards). On the other, the central bankers are flooding their economies and inflating the global body politic with excess liquidity in the hope that such emergency transfusions will cure a malady that calls for far more radical diagnosis and interventions.

Appendix 1: Major Debt Crises and Bail-outs, 1973–2009 1973–75 Property market crash in US and UK, fiscal crises of federal, state and local governments in the US (New York City’s near bankruptcy), oil price hike and recession 1979–82 Inflationary surge and Volcker interest rate shock forces Reagan Recession, with unemployment rising above 10 per cent in the US and knock-on effects elsewhere 1982–90 Developing Countries Debt Crisis (Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Poland, etc.) sparked by ‘Volcker shock’ of high interest rates. US investment bankers rescued by aid to indebted countries organised by the US Treasury and a revitalised IMF (purged of Keynesians and armed with ‘structural adjustment’ programmes) 1984 Continental Illinois Bank rescued by Fed, Treasury and FDIC 1984–92 Failures of US savings and loan institutions investing in real estate. Closure and FDIC rescue of 3,260 financial institutions. Recession in UK property market after 1987 1987 Hurricane in stock markets, October 1987, met with massive liquidity injections by the Fed and Bank of England 1990–92 Property market-led Nordic and Japanese bank crises.

.: Limits to Growth 72 meat-based diets 73, 74 Medicare 28–9, 224 Mellon, Andrew 11, 98 mercantilism 206 merchant capitalists 40 mergers 49, 50 forced 261 Merrill Lynch 12 Merton, Robert 100 methane gas 73 Mexico debt crisis (1982) 10, 19 northern Miexico’s proximity to the US market 36 peso rescue 261 privatisation of telecommunications 29 and remittances 38 standard of living 10 Mexico City 243 microcredit schemes 145–6 microeconomics 237 microenterprises 145–6 microfinance schemes 145–6 Middle East, and oil issue 77, 170, 210 militarisation 170 ‘military-industrial complex’ 91 minorities: colonisation of urban neighbourhoods 247, 248 Mitterrand, François 198 modelling of markets 262 modernism 171 monarchy 249 monetarism 237 monetisation 244 money centralised money power 49–50, 52 a form of social power 43, 44 limitlessness of 43, 47 loss of confidence in the symbols/quality of money 114 universality of 106 monoculture 186 Monopolies Commission 52 monopolisation 43, 68, 95, 113, 116, 221 Monsanto 186 Montreal Protocol (1989) 76, 187 Morgan Stanley 19 Morishima, Michio 70 Morris, William 160 mortgages annual rate of change in US mortgage debt 7 mortgage finance for housing 170 mortgage-backed bonds futures 262 mortgage-backed securities 4, 262 secondary mortgage market 173, 174 securitisation of local 42 securitisation of mortgage debt 85 subprime 49, 174 Moses, Robert 169, 171, 177 MST (Brazil) 257 multiculturalism 131, 176, 231, 238, 258 Mumbai, India anti-Muslim riots (early 1990s) 247 redevelopment 178–9 municipal budgets 5 Museum of Modern Art, New York 21 Myrdal, Gunnar 196 N Nandigram, West Bengal 180 Napoleon III, Emperor 167, 168 national debt 48 National Economic Council (US) 11, 236 national-origin quotas 14 nationalisation 2, 4, 8, 224 nationalism 55–6, 143, 194, 204 NATO 203 natural gas 188 ‘natural limits’ 47 natural resources 30, 71 natural scarcity 72, 73, 78, 80, 83, 84, 121 nature and capital 88 ‘first nature’ 184 relation to 121, 122 ‘the revenge of nature’ 185 ‘second nature’ 184, 185, 187 as a social product 188 neocolonialism 208, 212 neoliberal counter-revolution 113 neoliberalism 10, 11, 19, 66, 131, 132, 141, 172, 175, 197, 208, 218, 224, 225, 233, 237, 243, 255 Nepal: communist rule in 226 Nevada, foreclosure wave in 1 New Deal 71 ‘new economy’ (1990s) 97 New Labour 45, 255 ‘new urbanism’ movement 175 New York City 11 September 2001 attacks 41 fiscal crisis (1975) 10, 172, 261 investment banks 19, 28 New York metropolitan region 169, 196 Nicaragua 189 Niger delta 251 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) 35, 253–4 non-interventionism 10 North Africa, French import of labour from 14 North America, settlement in 145 North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) 200 Northern Ireland emergency 247 Northern Rock 2 Norway: Nordic cris (1992) 8 nuclear power 188 O Obama, Barack 11, 27, 34, 210 Obama administration 78, 121 O’Connor, Jim 77, 78 offshoring 131 Ogoni people 251 oil cheap 76–7 differential rent on oil wells 83 futures 83, 84 a non-renewable resource 82 ‘peak oil’ 38, 73, 78, 79, 80 prices 77–8, 80, 82–3, 261 and raw materials prices 6 rents 83 United States and 76–7, 79, 121, 170, 210, 261 OPEC (Organisation of Oil-Producing Countries) 83, 84 options markets currency 262 equity values 262 unregulated 99, 100 Orange County, California bankruptcy 100, 261 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 51 organisational change 98, 101 organisational forms 47, 101, 121, 127, 134, 238 Ottoman Empire 194 ‘over the counter’ trading 24, 25 overaccumulation crises 45 ozone hole 74 ozone layer 187 P Pakistan: US involvement 210 Palley, Thomas 236 Paris ‘the city of light’ 168 epicentre of 1968 confrontations 177, 243 Haussmann’s rebuilding of 49, 167–8, 169, 171, 176 municipal budget crashes (1868) 54 Paris Commune (1871) 168, 171, 176, 225, 243, 244 Partnoy, Frank: Ubfectious Greed 25 patents 221 patent laws 95 patriarchy 104 pensions pension funds 4, 5, 245 reneging on obligations 49 Péreire brothers 49, 54, 98, 174 pesticides 185, 186, 187 petty bourgeois 56 pharmaceutical sector 129, 245 philanthropy 44 Philippines: excessive urban development 8 Phillips, Kevin 206 Pinochet, General Augusto 15, 64 plant 58 Poland, lending to 19 political parties, radical 255–6 politics capitalist 76 class 62 co-revolutionary 241 commodified 219 depoliticised 219 energy 77 identity 131 labour organizing 255 left 255 transformative 207 pollution air 77 oceanic 74 rights 21 ‘Ponts et Chaussées’ organisation 92 Ponzi schemes 21, 114, 245, 246 pop music 245–6 Pope, Alexander 156 population growth 59, 72, 74, 121, 167 and capital accumulation 144–7 populism 55–6 portfolio insurance 262 poverty and capitalism 72 criminalisation and incarceration of the poor 15 feminisation of 15, 258 ‘Great Society’ anti-poverty programmes 32 Prague 243 prices commodity 37, 73 energy 78 food grain 79–80 land 8, 9, 182–3 oil 8, 28, 37–8, 77–8, 80, 82–3, 261 property 4, 182–3 raw material 37 reserve price 81–2 rising 73 share 7 primitive accumulation 58, 63–4, 108, 249 private consortia 50 private equity groups 50 private property and radical egalitarianism 233, 234 see also property markets; property rights; property values privatisation 10, 28, 29, 49, 251, 256, 257 pro-natal policies 59 production expansion of 112, 113 inadequate means of 47 investment in 114 liberating the concept 87 low-profit 29 offshore 16 production of urbanisation 87 reorganisation and relocation of 33 revolutionising of 89 surplus 45 technologies 101 productivity agreements 14, 60, 96 agricultural 119 cotton industry 67 gains 88, 89 Japan and West Germany 33 rising 96, 186 products development 95 innovation 95 new lines 94, 95 niches 94 profit squeeze 65, 66, 116 profitability constrains 30 falling 94, 131 of the financial sector 51 and wages 60 profits easy 15 excess 81, 90 falling 29, 72, 94, 116, 117 privatising 10 rates 70, 94, 101 realisation of 108 proletarianisation 60, 62 property markets crash in US and UK (1973–75) 8, 171–2, 261 overextension in 85 property market-led Nordic and Japanese bank crises 261 property-led crises (2007–10) 10, 261 real estate bubble 261 recession in UK (after 1987) 261 property rights 69, 81–2, 90, 122, 179, 198, 233, 244, 245 Property Share Price Index (UK) 7 property values 171, 181, 197, 248 prostitution 15 protectionism 31, 33, 43, 211 punctuated equilibrium theory of natural evolution 130 Putin, Vladimir 29, 80 Q Q’ing dynasty 194 quotas 16 R R&D (research and development) 92, 95–6 race issues 104 racism 61, 258 radical egalitarianism 230–34 railroads 42, 49, 191 Railwan, rise of (1970s) 35 rare earth metals 188 raw materials 6, 16, 37, 58, 77, 101, 113, 140, 144, 234 RBS 20 Reagan, Ronald 15, 64, 131, 141 Reagan-Thatcher counter revolution (early 1980s) 71 Reagan administration 1, 19 Reagan recession (1980–82) 60, 261 Real Estate Investment Trusts (US) 7 recession 1970s 171–2 language of 27 Reagan (1980–82) 60, 261 Red Brigade 254 reforestation 184 refrigeration 74 reinvestment 43, 45, 66–7, 110–12, 116 religious fundamentalism 203 religious issues 104 remittances 38, 140, 147 rentiers 40 rents differential rent 81, 82, 83 on intellectual property rights 221 land 182 monetisation of 48, 109 monopoly 51, 81–2, 83 oil 83 on patents 221 rising 181 reproduction schemas 70 Republican Party (US) 11, 141 reserve price 81 resource values 234 Ricardo, David 72, 94 risks, socialising 10 robbery 44 Robinson, Joan 238 robotisation 14, 136 Rockefeller, John D. 98 Rockefeller brothers 131 Rockefeller foundation 44, 186 Roman Empire 194 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 71 Rothschild family 98, 163 Royal Society 91, 156 royalties 40 Rubin, Robert 98 ‘rule of experts’ 99, 100–101 Russia bankruptcy (1998) 246, 261 capital flight crisis 261 defaults on its debt (1998) 6 oil and natural gas flow to Ukraine 68 oil production 6 oligarchs 29 see also Soviet Union S Saddam Hussein 210 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de 49 Saint-Simonians 87, 168 Salomon Brothers 24 Samuelson, Robert 235, 239 Sandino, Augusto 189 Sanford, Charles 98 satellites 156 savings 140 Scholes, Myron 100 Schumer, Charles 11 Schumpeter, Joseph 46 Seattle battle of (1999) 38, 227 general strike (1918) 243 software development in 195 Second World War 32, 168–70, 214 sectarianism 252 securitisation 17, 36, 42 Sejong, South Korea 124–6 service industries 41 sexism 61 sexual preferences issues 104, 131, 176 Shanghai Commune (1967) 243 shark hunting 73, 76 Shell Oil 79, 251 Shenzhen, China 36 shop floor organisers (shop stewards) 103 Silicon Valley 162, 195, 216 Singapore follows Japanese model 92 industrialisation 68 rise of (1970s) 35 slavery 144 domestic 15 slums 16, 151–2, 176, 178–9 small operators, dispossession of 50 Smith, Adam 90, 164 The Wealth of Nations 35 social democracy 255 ‘social democratic’ consensus (1960s) 64 social inequality 224 social relations 101, 102, 104, 105, 119, 121, 122, 123, 126, 127, 135–9, 152, 240 loss of 246 social security 224 social services 256 social struggles 193 social welfarism 255 socialism 136, 223, 228, 242, 249 compared with communism 224 solidarity economy 151, 254 Soros, George 44, 98, 221 Soros foundation 44 South Korea Asian Currency Crisis 261 excessive urban development 8 falling exports 6 follows Japanese model 92 rise of (1970s) 35 south-east Asia: crash of 1997–8 6, 8, 49, 246 Soviet Union in alliance with US against fascism 169 break-up of 208, 217, 227 collapse of communism 16 collectivisation of agriculture 250 ‘space race’ (1960s and 1970s) 156 see also Russia space domination of 156–8, 207 fixed spaces 190 ‘space race’ (1960s and 1970s) 156 Spain property-led crisis (2007–10) 5–6, 261 unemployment 6 spatial monopoly 164–5 special drawing rights 32, 34 special economic zones 36 special investment vehicles 36, 262 special purpose entities 262 speculation 52–3 speculative binges 52 speed-up 41, 42 stagflation 113 stagnation 116 Stalin, Joseph 136, 250 Standard Oil 98 state formation 196, 197, 202 state-corporate nexus 204 ‘space race’ (1960s and 1970s) 156 state-finance nexus 204, 205, 237, 256 blind belief in its corrective powers 55 ‘central nervous system’ for capital accumulation 54 characteristics of a feudal institution 55 and the current crisis 118 defined 48 failure of 56–7 forms of 55 fusion of state and financial powers 115 innovation in 85 international version of 51 overwhelmed by centralised credit power 52 pressure on 54 radical reconstruction of 131 role of 51 and state-corporate research nexus 97 suburbanisation 171 tilts to favour particular interests 56 statistical arbitrage strategies 262 steam engine, invention of 78, 89 Stiglitz, Joseph 45 stimulus packages 261 stock markets crash (1929) 211, 217 crashes (2001–02) 261 massive liquidity injections (1987) 236, 261 Stockton, California 2 ’structural adjustment’ programmes vii, 19, 261 subcontracting 131 subprime loans 1 subprime mortgage crisis 2 substance abuse 151 suburbanisation 73, 74, 76–7, 106–7, 169, 170, 171, 181 Summers, Larry 11, 44–5, 236 supermarket chains 50 supply-side theory 237 surveillance 92, 204 swaps credit 21 Credit Default 24, 262 currency 262 equity index 262 interest rate 24, 262 Sweden banking system crash (1992) 8, 45 Nordic crisis 8 Yugoslav immigrants 14 Sweezey, Paul 52, 113 ‘switching crises’ 93 systematic ‘moral hazard’ 10 systemic risks vii T Taipei: computer chips and household technologies in 195 Taiwan falling exports 6 follows Japanese model 92 takeovers 49 Taliban 226 tariffs 16 taxation 244 favouring the rich 45 inheritance 44 progressive 44 and the state 48, 145 strong tax base 149 tax rebates 107 tax revenues 40 weak tax base 150 ‘Teamsters for Turtles’ logo 55 technological dynamism 134 technologies change/innovation/new 33, 34, 63, 67, 70, 96–7, 98, 101, 103, 121, 127, 134, 188, 193, 221, 249 electronic 131–2 ‘green’ 188, 221 inappropriate 47 labour fights new technologies 60 labour-saving 14–15, 60, 116 ‘rule of experts’ 99, 100–101 technological comparative edge 95 transport 62 tectonic movements 75 territorial associations 193–4, 195, 196 territorial logic 204–5 Thailand Asian Currency Crisis 261 excessive urban development 8 Thatcher, Margaret, Baroness 15, 38, 64, 131, 197, 255 Thatcherites 224 ‘Third Italy’, Bologna 162, 195 time-space compression 158 time-space configurations 190 Toys ‘R’ Us 17 trade barriers to 16 collapses in foreign trade (2007–10) 261 fall in global international trade 6 increase in volume of trading 262 trade wars 211 trade unions 63 productivity agreements 60 and US auto industry 56 trafficking human 44 illegal 43 training 59 transport costs 164 innovations 42, 93 systems 16, 67 technology 62 Treasury Bill futures 262 Treasury bond futures 262 Treasury instruments 262 TRIPS agreement 245 Tronti, Mario 102 Trotskyists 253, 255 Tucuman uprising (1969) 243 Turin: communal ‘houses of the people’ 243 Turin Workers Councils 243 U UBS 20 Ukraine, Russian oil and natural gas flow to 68 ultraviolet radiation 187 UN Declaration of Human Rights 234 UN development report (1996) 110 Un-American Activities Committee hearings 169 underconsumptionist traditions 116 unemployment 131, 150 benefits 60 creation of 15 in the European Union 140 job losses 93 lay-offs 60 mass 6, 66, 261 rising 15, 37, 113 and technological change 14, 60, 93 in US 5, 6, 60, 168, 215, 261 unionisation 103, 107 United Fruit Company 189 United Kingdom economy in serious difficulty 5 forced to nationalise Northern Rock 2 property market crash 261 real average earnings 13 train network 28 United Nations 31, 208 United States agricultural subsidies 79 in alliance with Soviet Union against fascism 169 anti-trust legislation 52 auto industry 56 blockbusting neighbourhoods 248 booming but debt-filled consumer markets 141 and capital surplus absorption 31–2 competition in labour markets 61 constraints to excessive concentration of money power 44–5 consumerism 109 conumer debt service ratio 18 cross-border leasing with Germany 142–3 debt 158, 206 debt bubble 18 fiscal crises of federal, state and local governments 261 health care 28–9 heavy losses in derivatives 261 home ownership 3 housing foreclosure crises 1–2, 4, 38, 166 industries dependent on trade seriously hit 141 interventionism in Iraq and Afghanistan 210 investment bankers rescued 261 investment failures in real estate 261 lack of belief in theory of evolution 129 land speculation scheme 187–8 oil issue 76–7, 79, 80, 121, 170, 210, 261 population growth 146 proletarianisation 60 property-led crisis (2007–10) 261 pursuit of science and technology 129 radical anti-authoritarianism 199 Reagan Recession 261 rescue of financial institutions 261 research universities 95 the reversing origins of US corporate profits (1950–2004) 22 the right to the city movement 257 ‘right to work’ states 65 savings and loan crisis (1984–92) 8 secondary mortgage market 173 ‘space race’ (1960s and 1970s) 156 suburbs 106–7, 149–50, 170 train network 28 unemployment 5, 6, 60, 168, 215, 261 unrestricted capitalist development 113 value of US stocks and homes, as a percentage of GDP 22 and Vietnam War 171 wages 13, 62 welfare provision 141 ‘urban crisis’ (1960s) 170 urban ‘heat islands’ 77 urban imagineering 193 urban social movements 180 urbanisation 74, 85, 87, 119, 131, 137, 166, 167, 172–3, 174, 240, 243 US Congress 5, 169, 187–8 US Declaration of Independence 199 US National Intelligence Council 34–5 US Senate 79 US Supreme Court 179 US Treasury and Goldman Sachs 11 rescue of Continental Illinois Bank 261 V Vanderbilt family 98 Vatican 44 Veblen, Thorstein 181–2 Venezuela 256 oil production 6 Vietnam War 32, 171 Volcker, Paul 2, 236 Volcker interest rate shock 261 W wage goods 70, 107, 112, 162 wages and living standards 89 a living wage 63 national minimum wage 63 rates 13, 14, 59–64, 66, 109 real 107 repression 12, 16, 21, 107, 110, 118, 131, 172 stagnation 15 wage bargaining 63 Wal-Mart 17, 29, 64, 89 Wall Street, New York 35, 162, 200, 219, 220 banking institutions 11 bonuses 2 ‘Party of Wall Street’ 11, 20, 200 ‘War on Terror’ 34, 92 warfare 202, 204 Wasserstein, Bruce 98 waste disposal 143 Watt, James 89 wealth accumulation by capitalist class interests 12 centralisation of 10 declining 131 flow of 35 wealth transfer 109–10 weather systems 153–4 Weather Underground 254 Weill, Sandy 98 Welch, Jack 98 Westphalia, Treaty of (1648) 91 Whitehead, Alfred North 75 Wilson, Harold 56 wind turbines 188 women domestic slavery 15 mobilisation of 59, 60 prostitution 15 rights 176, 251, 258 wages 62 workers’ collectives 234 working hours 59 World Bank 36, 51, 69, 192, 200, 251 ‘Fifty Years is Enough’ campaign 55 predicts negative growth in the global economy 6 World Bank Development Report (2009) 26 World Trade Organisation (WTO) 200, 227 agreements 69 street protests against (Seattle, 1999) 55 TRIPS agreement 245 and US agricultural subsidies 79 WorldCom 8, 100, 261 worldwide web 42 Wriston, Walter 19 X X-rays 99 Y Yugoslavia dissolution of 208 ethnic cleansings 247 Z Zapatista revolutionary movement 207, 226, 252 Zola, Émile 53 The Belly of Paris 168 The Ladies’ Paradise 168


pages: 82 words: 24,150

The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism by Grace Blakeley

Anthropocene, asset-backed security, basic income, Big Tech, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, debt deflation, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, don't be evil, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, global value chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, income inequality, informal economy, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, price mechanism, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, reshoring, Rishi Sunak, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, social distancing, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, yield curve

The pivot came with the Third World debt crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, a result of oil-price shocks and rising interest rates in the West, which forced debtdistressed countries such as Ghana to implement promarket reforms in exchange for debt relief.12 The debt crisis was used as an opportunity to ‘open up’ poorer countries to international investment – a euphemism for preventing democratically elected governments from embarking upon state-led development programmes in favour of the external enforcement of ‘market friendly’ policies that would benefit international capital. Structural adjustment programmes often negatively impacted human and economic development – especially in sub-Saharan Africa.13 The much-touted effects on economic growth turned out to be negligible, while the poorest were hit hardest by cuts to infrastructure, education and public services.14 Over the long term, the debt crisis and structural adjustment programmes curtailed incomes and economic growth, as capital fled the Global South. As a result, the size of these nations’ debts only increased relative to their GDP.

Zambia, which has a long history of difficult relations with the international financial institutions, offers a good example of how modern imperialism has stunted the development of many states in the Global South. An economy highly reliant on the export of copper, Zambia was hit hard by the commodities price crash in the 1970s. Unable to borrow on international financial markets, Zambia was forced to go to the IMF for financial assistance, and was placed on a structural adjustment programme. It was accorded ‘middle income country’ status in 2011 but few of the population benefited from the GDP growth of this period. Debt levels and inequality have worsened. The country remains dependent upon copper exports and unable to generate the capital necessary to industrialise.20 Zambia has been forced to deal with even less scrupulous lenders.

But a payment pause will simply delay the pain until later in the year, when the global economy is likely to remain in a deep depression.38 Moreover, the initiative didn’t include all bilateral lenders. Certain states and financial institutions that own significant chunks of Global South debt have been asked to work constructively with debtors during the pandemic, but they have no obligation to do so. From the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s to modern-day Greece, the long arm of the imperial creditor has been used many times to subject peripheral states to the discipline of capital. The coronavirus pandemic will only deepen these relationships of imperial extraction. 4 Reconstruction It is often said that, in the midst of a crisis, everyone is a socialist.


Global Financial Crisis by Noah Berlatsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, social contagion, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, working poor

Even the most zealous market fundamentalists must have lost their illusions about the ability of markets to discipline themselves and correct their own mistakes. 2) Further discredit of the IMF and World Bank. The collapse of the neoliberal dogma is a major blow to the international financial institutions. What is even more devastating to them is the reversal of most of the policies they had advocated for decades in Africa and in other ‘poor’ countries under the now discredited SAPs (structural adjustment programmes). The IMF and the World Bank are supporting 188 Solutions to the Global Financial Crisis fiscal stimulus—expansionary fiscal policies—in the United States, Europe, and Asia. They are supporting rescue plans, including nationalization of private banks and other financial institutions. The priority of the day is no longer inflation but jobs and economic recovery.

., 63 Rosenberg, Daniel, 121–126 Roubini, Nouriel, 202, 219–224 Ruble (Russian currency), 118, 119 Russia, 22–26, 108–120 bad debt woes, 25 blames U.S. policies for crisis, 22–26 BRIC meetings, 146–147 migrant workers, 132 state of the nation opinions, 115, 119 unrest, 108–120 S Sacramento, California, 75, 76–77 Sanborn, Kathy, 74–79 SAPs. See Structural adjustment programs (SAPs) Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002), 30 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 108, 109, 111– 113, 183 Saudi Arabia, 164–165, 168, 169 Savings rates, 67, 69–70, 173–174 Scandinavia, 45, 95–96, 219–224, 225–230 Schepp, Matthias, 108–120 Seattle, Washington, 77 Securitization, illiquid assets, 54, 55–56, 67, 82, 87 Securum Bank, 228 Shareholders, banks, 43, 44, 45, 46, 228 Sharia law, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169 Shiller, Robert J., 32–41 Shirakawa, Masaaki, 207–218 Sigfússon, Steingrímur, 106–107 Simons, Stefan, 108–120 Singapore, 155 Size issues, banks, 42, 43, 46–47, 63, 223, 226 Slivinski, Stephen, 202–203, 205 Slovakia, 95 Slovenia, 95 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (1930), 182 Social contagion, 32, 35–36, 36–38 Social instability.

See Bubbles Standard of living rates, 101–102, 106 State, economic role, 189–191, 193, 194–195, 197 Steinbrück, Peer, 96 259 The Global Financial Crisis Stimulus packages Australia, 91 China, 116, 135, 140, 141–142, 144–145 France, 112 India, 135, 141–142 international efforts, 19, 186, 188–189 Japan, 215 United States, 19, 180, 181, 183 See also Protectionism Stock bonuses, 49 Stock market 1929 crash, 57, 61 bubble, 1990s, 41, 87, 215 drops, 18, 122 Iceland entrance, 104, 106 improvements, 19 Strikes. See Political instability/ unrest Structural adjustment programs (SAPs), 188, 189, 190, 196 Subprime mortgages Australia, 88 Canada, 81–82 U.S., 17, 32–33, 34, 82, 88 See also Mortgage crisis, U.S. Subsidies, U.S. policy, 201, 202– 206 Suharto, 115 Suicides, 118 Sukuk, 167–168, 169 Summit of the Americas, 2009, 159, 163 Swede, Hairy, 228 Sweden, 219–224, 225–230 bank nationalization example for U.S., 219–224, 225–226 bank nationalization myth, 225–230 recession, 95–96, 228 260 Switzerland Swiss National Bank, 97 World Economic Forum, Davos, 2009, 22–26, 113 Synovitz, Ron, 129–134 T Tatarinov, Andrei, 132 Tax evasion and revenues, 197, 199 Tax rates corporate income, 155 inequalities in paying, 203– 204, 206 penal, 44, 48 Tennessee, homelessness, 75, 77–78 Tent cities, U.S., 74–79 The Theory of Money and Credit (Mises), 61 Tourism, 131, 155, 160–161 “Toxic assets,” 45–46, 176, 177, 178, 179 remedies, 221, 222, 223 See also Derivatives Trade African challenges, 191, 192– 193 African-Chinese, 195, 198 Asian surpluses, 68–69, 70–71, 139, 144 China’s growing role, 144, 180, 184 Eastern-Western Europe, 98, 99 export slowdowns, 95, 96, 99, 140, 147–148, 154 free trade agreements, 180, 181, 182–185, 192–193 German recession cause, 96 South-South (developing countries), 195, 198 Index Millennium Development Goals, 136, 191 World Food Programme, 137 United Russia party, 118, 132 United States, 22–26, 65–71, 74– 79, 85–91, 201–206, 219–224 Australian economy ties, 85–91 U bailouts are corporate welfare will not solve crisis, 201–206 UK Financial Investments Ltd.


pages: 286 words: 87,168

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

But Western powers were not happy with this turn of events, as it meant they were losing access to the cheap labour, raw materials and captive markets that they had enjoyed under colonialism. So they intervened. During the debt crisis of the 1980s, they leveraged their power as creditors and used their control over the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to impose ‘structural adjustment programmes’ across Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia (with the exception of China and a few others). Structural adjustment forcibly liberalised the economies of the global South, tearing down protective tariffs and capital controls, cutting wages and environmental laws, slashing social spending and privatising public goods – all to break open profitable new investments for foreign capital and multinational companies.7 Neoliberal globalisation fundamentally reshaped the economies of the South.

For instance, if we develop better cancer treatments or other life-saving medicines, we may not want to charge people 1,000 times more to access them. Let’s not pretend either that capital’s need for constant expansion is going to only make better products. That would be naïve. When capital has bumped up against limits to profit-growth in the past, it has found fixes in things like colonisation, structural adjustment programmes, wars, restrictive patent laws, nefarious debt instruments, land grabs, privatisation, and enclosing commons like water and seeds. Why would it be any different this time? Indeed, a study by the ecological economist Beth Stratford finds that when capital faces resource constraints, this is exactly what happens: it turns to aggressive rent-seeking behaviour.

Do whatever it takes: get rid of environmental protections, slash labour laws, cut spending on healthcare and education, reduce taxes on the rich – it might seem regressive, and it may do a bit of harm in the short term, but ultimately it’s the only true way to improve people’s lives. * Those were heady days. During the 1980s and 1990s, the first two decades of the neoliberal era, this narrative reigned supreme. It served as the core justification for the structural adjustment programmes that were imposed so aggressively across the global South in the wake of the debt crisis. But research in the decades since has raised serious questions about the false equivalence between growth and human progress. The thing is, when McKeown and Preston published their claims, neither of them were looking at long-term data.


pages: 413 words: 119,379

The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth by Tom Burgis

Airbus A320, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Livingstone, I presume, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, purchasing power parity, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Ghana comes close to the top of the UN index that ranks countries by their success in turning GDP per head into improved living standards (scoring 22, compared with97 for Equatorial Guinea), but Ghanaians’ average income is a tenth of Lithuanians’ and one in three Ghanaians cannot read or write, the same level of illiteracy as in Congo. Inherent in the praise that is heaped on Ghana is a troubling undertone that mitigated penury is the best that Africans can aim for. Like the rest of Africa’s resource states, Ghana bowed to the orthodoxy that the World Bank and the IMF imposed from the early 1980s in the form of ‘structural adjustment programmes’. Based on a set of neoliberal economic policies known as the Washington Consensus, these programmes made loans to poor countries dependent on their adherence to strict conditions, including deep cuts to public spending, privatizing state-owned assets, and lifting controls on trade. Foreign investment was deemed essential to economic growth.

Emil Salim’s review of the World Bank’s record in the oil and mining industries reported that, in the cases it had studied, ‘the IMF’s approach to the extractive sectors was mainly one that promoted aggressive privatization of significant mining and hydrocarbon assets for short-term financing of the [government’s budget] deficit. This did nothing to ensure the creation of competition, efficiency gains, development of a domestic private sector, or environmentally and socially sound development strategies for the extractive sectors.’ The backlash to the stringent conditions it imposed under its structural adjustment programmes has chastened the IMF, but there were also reasons to be concerned about its increasing readiness to lend money to African governments with fewer stipulations. Using loans as leverage is easily caricatured as a neocolonial bludgeoning of sovereign African states, but it has its uses.

., 153–154 Gbadebo-Smith, Folarin, 232–233 GDP as measurement, 211–212 Gécamines, Democratic Republic of Congo, 35, 36, 50–51, 52 Geller, Uri, 49 George, Edward, 26–27 Gertler, Dan background/description, 47–48, 59 Democratic Republic of Congo/power and, 47–49, 53, 59, 96, 144, 171 diamonds/minerals and, 48, 50, 51–52, 53, 59, 106, 227 oil and, 59–60 Ghana description/peace, 150, 161 dogs poisoned (Skimpy/Don’t Forget), 151, 153, 156, 174 IFC and, 151–152, 153, 161, 162, 163–164, 169 independence, 162 Newmont/Ahafo gold mine, 151–153, 156, 162, 163, 164–165 oil, 161–162 poisons with gold mining, 151–153, 156, 164–165, 174 structural adjustment programmes, 162–163 UN Human Development Index, 162 GlaxoSmithKline, 82 Glencore, 2, 53, 106, 144, 168, 214, 233 Global CST, 117 Global Witness, 58, 124–125, 172, 174, 225–226, 235 Goldman Sachs, 13, 25 Gravelle, Jane G., 167–168 Grupo Aquattro Internacional, 16, 18–19 Guanxi described, 82 Guinea airline celebration, 120–121, 144 China Sonangol and, 120, 144 despots/corruption, 106, 107, 108, 109–118, 110, 119, 120, 122 Dutch Disease and, 130 foreign companies fighting over iron ore, 104, 107–109, 110, 112–114, 119–120, 123–130, 155 independence conditions, 106 massacre/aftermath, 115–119, 120 minerals overview, 107–108, 112 Peul ethnic group, 117, 118, 123 poverty/living conditions, 106–107, 109–110 Simandou/iron ore, 104, 108, 109, 110, 113–114, 124, 128–130 See also specific companies/organizations; specific individuals Gyakah, Kofi, 151, 152–153, 163, 174 Halliburton, 15, 191 Hamuli, Olivier, 41–42 H.


pages: 318 words: 85,824

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, debt deflation, declining real wages, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, labour market flexibility, land tenure, late capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Chicago School, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, union organizing, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Winter of Discontent

Since degree of neoliberalization was increasingly taken by the IMF and the World Bank as a measure of a good business climate, the pressure on all states to adopt neoliberal reforms ratcheted upwards.2 Thirdly, the Wall Street–IMF–Treasury complex that came to dominate economic policy in the Clinton years was able to persuade, cajole, and (thanks to structural adjustment programmes administered by the IMF) coerce many developing countries to take the neoliberal road.3 The US also used the carrot of preferential access to its huge consumer market to persuade many countries to reform their economies along neoliberal lines (in some instances through bilateral trade agreements).

One of the prime functions of state interventions and of international institutions is to control crises and devaluations in ways that permit accumulation by dispossession to occur without sparking a general collapse or popular revolt (as happened in both Indonesia and Argentina). The structural adjustment programme administered by the Wall Street–Treasury–IMF complex takes care of the first while it is the job of the comprador state apparatus (backed by military assistance from the imperial powers) in the country that has been raided to ensure that the second does not occur. But the signs of popular revolt are everywhere, as illustrated by the Zapatista uprising in Mexico, innumerable anti-IMF riots, and the so-called ‘anti-globalization’ movement that cut its teeth in the revolts at Seattle, Genoa, and elsewhere. 4.

In poorer countries with substantial forest resources, the pressure to increase exports and to allow foreign ownerships and concessions means that even minimal protections of forests break down. The over-exploitation of forestry resources after privatization in Chile is a good case in point. But structural adjustment programmes administered by the IMF have had even worse impacts. Imposed austerity means that poorer countries have less money to put into forest management. They are also pressurized to privatize the forests and to open up their exploitation to foreign lumber companies on short-term contracts. Under pressure to earn foreign exchange to pay off their debts, the temptation exists to concede a maximal rate of short-term exploitation.


Global Governance and Financial Crises by Meghnad Desai, Yahia Said

Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency peg, deglobalization, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, German hyperinflation, information asymmetry, Japanese asset price bubble, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent-seeking, short selling, special drawing rights, structural adjustment programs, Tobin tax, transaction costs, Washington Consensus

In the new era of globalisation, according to Desai, it is the US Federal Reserve which assumed the mantle of the lender of last resort and not the IMF. He views Introduction 3 the IMF as a lender of first resort charged with maintaining the exchange rate pegs with US support, conducting structural adjustment programmes and coordinating rescue packages. The problem with IMF intervention in crises is that it uses economic models that do not allow for cycles or crises. As such it views cycles as disequilibria, which can be remedied by drastic cuts. Desai concludes that crises are likely to recur with varying reach, timing and magnitude.

It played a role in organising rescue loans for countries caught in the systemic crises but at the same time came in for a lot of criticism in the way it managed the policy advice to the countries concerned. For what was a crisis of private bank lending with international liabilities, the IMF was still applying closed economy macro models and orthodox monetarist remedies. In all its structural adjustment programmes, the IMF has relied on a Chicago version of the macro model in which cycles do not occur. If an economy is in trouble this is seen to be a situation out of equilibrium and in a simple comparative static fashion the answer is to impose fiscal and monetary cutbacks. This is supposed to get the economy back to equilibrium.


pages: 193 words: 63,618

The Fair Trade Scandal: Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich by Ndongo Sylla

"there is no alternative" (TINA), British Empire, carbon footprint, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, degrowth, Doha Development Round, Food sovereignty, global value chain, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, labour mobility, land reform, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Some time ago, this situation could partly be explained by the export taxes as well as the price stabilisation mechanisms introduced by the governments of developing countries. This is less and less the case, following agricultural liberalisation policies implemented widely following structural adjustment programmes. Since then, developing countries significantly reduced the restrictions they impose on agricultural and manufactured products (World Bank and IMF, 2009). This is one of the merits of the global value chain analysis2 – to highlight recent developments on the commodity markets (agricultural and nonagricultural).

Under the stewardship of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, neoliberalism moved from the status of doctrine to that of economic policy programme: its keywords were market deregulation (the labour market and capital markets especially), privatisation of public enterprises and withdrawal of the ‘welfare state’. The same principles were applied in developing countries in the framework of the ‘conditionalities’ attached to structural adjustment programmes conducted under the auspices of the World Bank and the IMF. This is when Margaret Thatcher uttered her notorious TINA: ‘There Is No Alternative’ to neoliberalism. Neoliberalism had promised greater efficiency and more fairness. In reality, it mostly led to an increase of socioeconomic inequalities.


pages: 394 words: 85,734

The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis, Paul Mason

active measures, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Easter island, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, planetary scale, post-oil, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, systematic trading, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Yet, at the same time, we now know that, during the same period, an additional $100 of world growth translated into a measly extra 60 cents for the poorest 20 per cent. Furthermore, when one takes into account the disproportionate rise in prices for basic commodities, as well as the diminution in public services following the IMF’s structural adjustment programmes (in the wake of the Third World debt crisis of the 1980s), there appears to be very little cause for celebration on behalf of our poverty-challenged fellow humans. In Robert Greenwald’s shocking 2005 documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, a woman working in a Chinese toy factory asks ‘Do you know why the toys you buy are so cheap?’

A fuller picture emerges when we add the drive by US multinationals like Cargill and Monsanto to commodify seeds in India and elsewhere, the thousands of suicides of Indian farmers caught up in these multinationals’ poisonous webs, and the effects of the demise of social services at the behest of the IMF’s structural adjustment programmes, etc. In that picture, the Crash of 2008 seems to have made an already bad situation (for the vast majority of people) far worse.4 Tellingly, when the G20 met in London in April 2009 and decided to bolster the IMF’s fund by $1.1 trillion, the stated purpose was to assist economies worldwide to cope with the Crash.


pages: 443 words: 98,113

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In the 1970s, under Robert McNamara, fresh from masterminding the Vietnam War, the World Bank was made pivotal to the expansion of American interests. It and the IMF, whose head has traditionally been a European national, became the leading institutions fostering capitalism in developing countries in an increasingly ideological way. ‘Structural adjustment programmes’ forced on governments in Latin America, Africa and Asia by the IMF obliged them to pursue export-led industrialisation, cut welfare spending, rush privatisation measures, reduce government spending, lower salaries of civil servants and cut their numbers and, above all, enforce private property rights.

Companies buy back their own shares with the intention of forcing up the price, enabling top executives to take windfall gains by selling their shares or realising share options. Or executives take dividends from short-term profits based on borrowing. None of these practices boosts production; they are mechanisms for rent extraction. Privatisation via structural adjustment programmes has been a way of transferring public assets to private interests, giving selected individuals or firms considerable rental income. One of the most notorious instances was the Treuhand, the trust fund set up by the West German government after the collapse of East Germany, which sold East German state assets at giveaway prices, costing thousands of jobs and enriching a few West German firms.


pages: 334 words: 98,950

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

This was supposed to be done by financing projects in infrastructure development (e.g., roads, bridges, dams). Following the Third World debt crisis of 1982, the roles of both the IMF and the World Bank changed dramatically. They started to exert a much stronger policy influence on developing countries through their joint operation of so-called structural adjustment programmes (SAPs). These programmes covered a much wider range of policies than what the Bretton Woods Institutions had originally been mandated to do. The BWIs now got deeply involved in virtually all areas of economic policy in the developing world. They branched out into areas like government budgets, industrial regulation, agricultural pricing, labour market regulation, privatization and so on.

Another result is that, even when their policies may be appropriate, they have often failed because they are resisted by the locals as impositions from outside. In response to mounting criticisms, the World Bank and the IMF have recently reacted in a number of ways. On the one hand, there have been some window-dressing moves. Thus the IMF now calls the Structural Adjustment Programme the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility Programme, in order to show that it cares about poverty issues, though the contents of the programme have hardly changed from before. On the other hand, there have been some genuine efforts to open dialogues with a wider constituency, especially the World Bank’s engagement with NGOs (non-governmental organizations).


pages: 347 words: 99,317

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

This was supposed to be done by financing projects in infrastructure development (e.g., roads, bridges, dams). Following the Third World debt crisis of 1982, the roles of both the IMF and the World Bank changed dramatically. They started to exert a much stronger policy influence on developing countries through their joint operation of so-called structural adjustment programmes (SAPs). These programmes covered a much wider range of policies than what the Bretton Woods Institutions had originally been mandated to do. The BWIs now got deeply involved in virtually all areas of economic policy in the developing world. They branched out into areas like government budgets, industrial regulation, agricultural pricing, labour market regulation, privatization and so on.

Another result is that, even when their policies may be appropriate, they have often failed because they are resisted by the locals as impositions from outside. In response to mounting criticisms, the World Bank and the IMF have recently reacted in a number of ways. On the one hand, there have been some window-dressing moves. Thus the IMF now calls the Structural Adjustment Programme the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility Programme, in order to show that it cares about poverty issues, though the contents of the programme have hardly changed from before. On the other hand, there have been some genuine efforts to open dialogues with a wider constituency, especially the World Bank’s engagement with NGOs (non-governmental organizations).


pages: 414 words: 119,116

The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World by Michael Marmot

active measures, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, cakes and ale, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Doha Development Round, epigenetics, financial independence, future of work, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Kenneth Rogoff, Kibera, labour market flexibility, longitudinal study, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, New Urbanism, obamacare, paradox of thrift, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, structural adjustment programs, the built environment, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, twin studies, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working poor

The likelihood is that if all women in Ethiopia had secondary education, the fertility rate would be nearer to two births for each woman rather than more than five. FIGURE 5.2: KNOW WHEN TO SAY NO? It is precisely lack of education that has led to fertility rates actually rising between 1970 and 1990 in Sub-Saharan Africa, when they declined in every other region of the world. A great deal has been written about structural adjustment programmes.3 The International Monetary Fund (IMF), when asked for help by countries in dire economic straits, had a formula which required structural adjustment. That sounds neutral, but in practice it meant the state spending less on public services and putting things out to the market. In Africa in the 1980s large cuts in public expenditure may have satisfied those who equate government expenditure with waste and economic failure, but such cuts meant that real expenditure on education per person fell by nearly 50 per cent on average in Sub-Saharan Africa.4 In some countries there was an actual decline in school enrolment; in others the previous growth in the proportion of girls being educated slowed down.

In the 1980s the IMF made loans contingent on governments accepting IMF recommendations on how to manage the economy. It was mainstream Washington consensus: reduce public spending, markets as the default option for public services, economic deregulation, privatise public assets. We concluded: the effects of these programmes have been disastrous for public health . . . structural adjustment programmes undermined the health of poor people in sub-Saharan Africa through effects on employment, incomes, prices, public expenditure, taxation, and access to credit, which in turn translated into negative health outcomes through effects on food security, nutrition, living and working environments, access to health services, education.13 When discussing the battle between austerians and Keynesians I said that a key criterion should be impact on the lives people are able to lead.


pages: 403 words: 125,659

It's Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Easter island, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, foreign exchange controls, Kibera, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, out of africa, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, structural adjustment programs, upwardly mobile, young professional, zero-sum game, éminence grise

A 1970–71 parliamentary commission helpfully authorised government employees to run their own businesses while holding down civil service jobs (‘straddling’, as it was called), a ruling its chairman later justified on the grounds that there was no point banning an activity that would persist whatever the law decreed.13 A post in a state-run utility or corporation, which could hike prices ever upwards thanks to its monopoly position, offered untold profit-taking opportunities. Similarly, who was better placed to benefit from foreign exchange controls which created a yawning gap between black market and official rates than an insider with excellent banking and Treasury contacts? The structural adjustment programmes pushed on Africa by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the 1980s, which loosened the Kenyan government's stranglehold by making aid conditional on privatising bloated parastatals, dropping currency controls and opening markets to international trade, complicated things, but the ‘eaters’ quickly vaulted that hurdle.

(JG indicates John Githongo) a'Nzeki, Archbishop Ndingi Mwana 221 Achebe, Chinua 42, 132 Africa Commission 206, 212 Akunga, Conrad Marc 153, 154, 155, 158, 334 Al Qaeda 78, 258–9, 277 Ali, Major General Hussein 256 Anderson, David 107, 232, 308 Anglo Leasing and Finance Company Ltd 129, 162, 206; British investigation into 328; contracts with Kenyan government 85, 164, 165, 166, 169, 173, 180; cost of Kenyan government contracts with 165–6, 169, 174, 210, 216; elections, money from deals used to fund NARC campaigns (‘resource mobilisation’) 215–16, 219–20, 243; foreign donors' reaction to scandal 260–4, 266, 267; forensic laboratory contract 164, 173; ‘ghost firms’ sue Kenyan government for breach of contract 328; JG investigates 79, 80–97, 135, 163–6, 233–45, 248–54, 268–9; JG releases details of investigation into 248–54; KANU and 77–9; Kibaki and 219, 220, 222, 234, 235–6, 238, 244–5, 251, 265–6, 268, 273; Maore reveals scandal 77–9, 85, 86; media coverage of scandal 240, 245, 248–54, 255–6, 269–70; ministers involved with 84–97, 118, 165, 166, 171–2, 173, 177, 179, 215–16, 217–20, 222, 223, 245, 250–1, 268; Moi and 165, 171–2; NARC and 79, 84–97, 118, 165, 166, 171–2, 173, 177, 179, 215–16, 217–20, 222, 233–6, 241, 242–3, 245, 250–4, 261, 268, 269–74; navy frigate contract 165, 180; passport printing and lamination contract 78–9, 84–7; payments to 164–5, 170–1, 173, 219, 268, 328; police Mahindra jeep contract 78, 84; classic procurement scam 168–72; ‘Project Nexus’ 165; shadowy nature of 171–2 Annan, Kofi 314, 315 Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Act 66, 285 Artur brothers 256–60 Asians, Kenyan 139, 146, 168, 172, 173, 270, 281, 303, 316 Awori, Moody 84, 85, 87, 213, 245, 250, 251, 268, 301 BAE Systems 276–7, 334 Bellamy, William 193–4, 222–3, 224, 250, 259 Benn, Hilary 267, 276 Biwott, Nicholas 301 Blair, Tony 54, 194, 200, 206, 212, 276 Bland, Simon 267 Blixen, Karen 8–9, 121 Blundell, Michael 50, 112 Bomas of Kenya 73, 74, 241 Bono 205, 266 Bosire Commission 65, 268, 321 British High Commission, Nairobi 194, 195, 198, 202–3, 253, 268, 296 Brown, Stephen 188 Bruce, Colin 260, 263, 275, 278, 333 Bush, George W. 262, 263, 275, 277 Buwembo, Joachim 306 Cameron, James 109 Castle, Barbara 109 Central Bank, Kenya 62, 78, 93, 164–5, 259, 318, 319, 320, 322 Central Province, Kenya 52, 73, 99, 102, 108, 113, 114, 117, 127, 147–8, 243, 280, 282, 297, 298, 301, 304 Charterhouse Bank Ltd 259–60 China 209, 240 Christian Aid 160, 205 Churchill, Winston 105 CIA 82–3 Clay, Sir Edward 71, 171, 183, 194–204, 210–15, 224, 225, 254, 259, 267, 277, 333–4 Collier, Professor Paul 31, 51, 185–6, 232, 326 Collier, Val 326 Cornwell, David (John le Carré) 23 Daily Nation 63, 68, 91, 119, 131, 202, 222, 247–51, 253, 282–3, 291, 298, 319 De La Rue 78 Delamere family 8, 105 Democratic Party 69, 118, 135, 175–6, 242 Democratic Republic of Congo 15, 83, 115, 124, 196, 325 Department for International Development, UK (DfID) 194, 204, 205–12, 225, 261–2, 267, 275, 276, 337 Diop, Makhtar 190–2, 199, 223–4, 260 Dorobo tribe 103, 105 EastAfrican 12, 141 East African Community 140, 307 East African Standard 41, 56–60, 248, 255–7, 259 Easterly, William 207 Eigen, Peter 141, 142 Eldoret 112, 114, 290, 307 Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) 298, 301, 306, 307, 315n Eliot, Sir Charles 46 Embu 43, 72, 108, 216, 291, 307, 313 End of Poverty, The (Sachs) 192 Escrivá, Josemaría 33, 134 Ethiopia 9, 50, 115, 192, 277 European Union: Common Agricultural Policy 207; elections 2007, observers in Kenya for 298, 307; gives greater say to Kenyan Treasury on how aid is spent 286; JG's resignation, reaction to 223 Executive magazine 65, 138, 139, 141 Face Technologies 78 Facing Mount Kenya (Kenyatta) 103–4, 107 FBI 228, 326 Financial Times 11, 12, 23, 187, 189–90, 333 Fish, Dave 267 Ford Foundation 264 Foreign and Commonwealth Office, UK (FCO) 194, 196, 201, 203, 206, 225, 259, 334 G8 meeting, Gleneagles (2005) 206, 212, 262 Gado 63, 202 Geldof, Bob 205, 266 Gellhorn, Martha 8 General Service Unit (GSU) 3, 13, 34, 79, 187, 311, 337 Gethi, John 129 Getonga, Alfred 72, 85, 87, 91, 129, 177, 179, 215, 251 Gikonyo, Dr Dan 70–1, 175, 242 Gikuyu language 26, 74, 136, 222 Gikuyu, Embu, Meru Association (GEMA) 113, 126, 144, 176, 243, 337 Githongo, Ciru (JG's sister) 39, 125, 133 Githongo, Gitau (JG's brother)125, 131, 132, 138, 239–40 Githongo, Joe (JG's father): accountant 126–7; attempts to influence JG through 94–5, 118–19; Catholic faith 123, 142, 143; home 123; JG and 15–16, 94–5, 119, 130–1, 133, 137, 175, 238–9, 250, 265; Kenyatta regime, role in 118, 160; London, life in 125; loner 135–6; marriage 123; Mau Mau and 123–4, 125; Moi regime and 118, 160; railways, work on 126; social standing 135–6; Transparency International, role in birth of 14, 141; tribalism, loathing of 126–7, 142–3; UN, work for 124–5 Githongo, John (JG): African roots, disconnection from 143–4, 145, 229, 266–7, 286–7; Anglo Leasing, compiles dossier on 233–5, 240–1, 242, 243, 244–5, 248–54; Anglo Leasing, investigation into government contracts with 78–9, 80–97, 163–6, 233–5, 240–1, 242, 243, 244–5, 248–54; Anglo Leasing, releases details of investigation to media 248–54; author, relationship with 12–13, 14, 19, 20, 23–31, 74; author, stays with 19, 20, 23–31; birth 125, 160, 229; Britain, connection with 125, 160, 229, 266–7, 286–7; Catholic faith 27–8, 133–5, 142, 143, 159, 174, 175, 176, 237, 248; character 12, 13, 19, 27, 35–6, 37–40, 81, 132–3, 135, 161, 175–7, 216–17, 233, 235, 236, 264–5, 318, 323, 329–31; Chief of the Burning Spear 31–2, 218; childhood 127, 130–1; diaries 32, 135, 216, 234; elections 2002, role in 14; exile 227–60, 263–7, 271–8, 329; family home 121–3; family, effect of actions upon 175–6, 216, 238–40, 250, 265; father, relationship with 15–16, 17, 118–19, 130–1, 137, 145, 175, 238–9; foreign donors and 15, 38–9, 194, 222–3, 235, 236, 261–2, 263–4, 266, 267; girlfriend 28, 91, 216–17, 221, 250, 264–5, 335; high treason charge, possibility of 237, 251; informers 81–4, 86, 172, 180, 232, 244–5; journalist 12, 14, 138–41, 143; KACC, testifies before 254, 256, 268, 271, 272; Kibaki, relationship with 14, 15, 17–18, 34–5, 37, 66–8, 71, 86, 87, 90–1, 172–5, 179–82, 217, 219, 220, 222, 235–6, 238, 244–5, 265–6, 311–12; Kikuyu ethnicity 13, 97, 115, 117–19, 130, 142–4, 145, 159–62, 163–4, 243, 253, 287–8, 289; legacy of revelations 322–4, 327, 328; media, relationship with 14, 22, 92, 240, 245, 248–50, 251, 252, 253–4; Michael Holman, stays with 39, 31; Ministry of Justice, role in setting up of 66; Moi, investigates corruption under 14, 86; mother, relationship with 133–4, 175, 238–9; NARC and 14, 66–8, 79–87, 164–6, 171–82, 215–25, 229, 233–6, 241, 242–3, 244–5, 250–4, 268–74; Oxford University, stays at 31, 32, 228–33, 235, 242, 243, 264, 285, 290, 322, 329; PAC, testifies before 95, 237–8, 254, 257, 268; Permanent Secretary in Charge of Governance and Ethics, appointment as 12, 15–18, 17, 36–7, 118–19, 145; Permanent Secretary in Charge of Governance and Ethics, abortive attempt to demote from post as 18, 177–82, 215; Permanent Secretary in Charge of Governance and Ethics, office 34–6; Permanent Secretary in Charge of Governance and Ethics, resigns as 20, 21–3, 220–5; physique 12–13, 132; police, joins 137–8; public view of 165–6, 252–4, 286–90, 322; return to Kenya 329–30; revolt, reasons for ability to 158–62, 175–6; school 127–9, 133, 135, 136, 175; smear campaign against 91–2, 231, 254, 264; State House office 34–5, 164; studies in England 12; taping of ministers' conversations 21, 32, 88–90, 233–5, 251, 252, 253–4, 273–4, 289, 321–2; threats to 18, 26, 37, 87–8, 90–7, 176, 218–19, 222, 227–8, 229, 230–2, 250, 257–8, 274, 329–30; Transparency International and 14, 15, 141–2; travel within Africa 12; university in Wales 136, 143; World Bank Volcker panel, recruited by 263, 278 Githongo, Mary (JG's mother) 123–4, 125, 133–4, 238–9 Githongo, Mugo (JG's brother) 39, 126, 136, 138, 158, 178, 221, 239, 240, 274–5 Githongo & Company 126–7 Goldenberg scandal 62–3, 65, 86, 89, 139, 165–6, 168, 211, 216, 221, 228, 251, 268, 269, 284, 311, 319, 320, 321, 322, 324 Goldsmith, Lord 276 Grand Regency hotel 63, 322 Hall, Francis 104 Hannan, Lucy 312 Hemingway, Ernest 8 Hileman, Milena 162 HIV/AIDS 166, 171, 208, 302, 325 Holman, Michael 30, 31 Home Guard 108, 110, 123, 142, 288 Howells, Kim 259 Human Rights Watch 35 Infotalent Ltd 173 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 60–1, 170, 184, 186, 261 Iraq 262, 275 Islamic extremism 78, 188 Kaggia, Bildad 50 Kaiser, Father 26 Kamani, Deepak 84, 173, 327, 329 Kamani, Rashmi 327 Kamba people 43, 48, 58–9, 102, 116, 129, 157, 163, 313 Kantai, Parselelo 324 KANU party 77, 86, 262, 337; Anglo Leasing and 78, 171–2; elections 1997 188; elections 2002 2; elections 2007 215; independence and 109; Kikuyu and 113, 114; long grip on power 2 see also Moi, Daniel arap Karanja, Lisa 35–6, 38, 92, 95–6, 178, 217, 289, 324 Karen, Nairobi 121–2, 134, 135, 175, 242, 330 Kariuki, J.M. 26, 279 Karua, Martha 271, 311, 334 Karume, Njenga 175 Kaufmann, Daniel 207–8, 263, 327 Keane, Fergal 251 Kalenjin people 42; Asian Kenyans, relationship with 172; character of 43, 44; elections 2007 and 290, 297, 308, 312, 316; ethnic violence in the early 1990s, role in 114, 140, 141; history of 49, 112, 113, 114, 140, 141; invention of 49; Kenyatta and 112, 113; Moi and 51, 52, 56, 57, 142, 284, 300 KENYA AID AND DONORS, FOREIGN: Anglo Leasing, reaction to scandal of 192, 260–4, 266, 267; anti-corruption drive 262–4, 266–7, 275–8; Cold War 183, 185; Consultative Group meeting (April 2005) 223; corruption, general approach to 8, 9–10, 14, 38–9, 51, 53–5, 60–4, 184–225, 260–4, 266–7, 275–8, 324–5, 327–8; DfID see Department for International Development, UK; Gleneagles (2008) 206, 212, 262; High Commissioner Clay raises corruption as an issue 193–204; history of aid to Kenya 183–204, 205–22; intimacy of relationship between donors and government ministers 190–3, 224; IMF see IMF; JG, relationship with 15, 38–9, 194, 197, 198, 222–3, 235, 236, 261–2, 263–4, 266, 267; JG, reaction to resignation of 220–5; KACA and 186; under Kenyatta 184; under Kibaki 11, 38–9, 197–204; legislation passed to appease 185–6; under Moi 8, 9–10, 14, 170, 184, 185–7; multi-party politics, enforces 51, 62; NARC regime and 170, 183, 210–11; as percentage of government spending 184; structural adjustment funding 160, 184; UK aid 187, 193–204, 205–12, 225, 261–2, 267, 275, 276–7, 337; vastly boosted aid, recent culture of 205–13, 262; War on Terror and 275–6, 277; World Bank see World Bank COLONIAL RULE: Asian Kenyans under 172; clichés of 8–9; corruption under 60; economy under 11; education under 134; ethnic self-awareness, role in 45–50, 52; foreign aid and history of 184, 194, 202, 203; Karen under 122; Kikuyu under 104–10, 115; living standards under 11; modern Kenyan attitudes towards 286–8; pre-eminent role of Kenya in Africa as a result of 8–9 CORRUPTION: Anglo Leasing and see Anglo Leasing and Finance Company Ltd; anti-corruption legislation 65–6, 283–4, 285–6, 327; banks and 61, 259–60, 270; bribes 11, 55, 337; challenges to pan-African 326–7; donor communities' approach towards 8, 9–10, 14, 38–9, 51, 53–5, 60–4, 184–225, 260–4, 266–7, 275–8, 324–5, 327–8; economy and 11, 60–1, 160–1; effect upon stability of country 258–9; elections 2002, NARC campaign on 2; history of 41–2, 50–3, 56–9, 60–3; Islamic terrorism and 258–9; JG fights see Githongo, John; judiciary 65, 268–9; Kenyan ambivalence towards 55–6, 166–8, 169, 287–8; Kibaki and see Kibaki, Mwai; kitu kidogo (‘petty’ corruption) 55, 337; land grabbing 61–2, 65; layers of Kenyan 41–2; legal system used to fight action against 268–9; Moi and see Moi, Daniel arap; NARC and see National Rainbow Coalition; NSIS investigations into 80–1; ‘Our Turn to Eat’ culture (patronage) and 8, 11, 35, 42, 44, 5–3, 56–60, 72–4, 112–14, 116–19, 143, 144, 145, 157–62, 272, 282, 290–2, 297–300, 325–6; ‘pending bills’ 61, 65; Permanent Secretary in Charge of Governance and Ethics, post created 11–12; public procurement and 65, 77, 78–97, 168–72, 200 see also Anglo Leasing and Finance Company Ltd; state loans and 61; ‘straddling’ 60; UN Convention Against Corruption, ratifies 65; Transparency International see Transparency International CULTURE: character of Kenyan people 7, 67–8, 157; demography 150; education system 51, 127–9, 133, 135, 136, 175; history of 45–53; population, rise in 103, 147–8, 149, 195; recent shifts in 145–62; slums 2, 10, 11, 41–2, 149, 151, 157, 191, 203, 290, 303, 312, 330; tourism 9, 311, 317; urbanisation 148–9; youth 150–5 ECONOMY: 160–1; Cold War 9–10; colonial, effect of 9, 10–11; corruption, patronage (‘Our Turn to Eat’ culture) and 11, 60–1, 114, 160, 184–5; ethnicity, role in 282, 290, 299–300; under Kenyatta 184; under Kibaki 184, 220, 261, 279–82, 290, 292–3, 299–300; under Moi 2, 8, 9–10, 159, 171, 184, 261, 280, 290; most advanced in region 9; NARC and 184, 220, 261, 279–82, 290, 292–3, 299–300; post-election violence 2007, effect upon 311; rich and poor, wealth gap between 11, 279–80, 282, 290, 299–300; state sector shrivels 1980s 160 ELECTIONS: 1992 general election 140; 1997 general election 188; 2002 general election 1–2, 14–15, 73, 135, 154–5, 193, 215, 237, 241, 320; 2004 general election 214; 2005, referendum on new constitution 241–4; 2007 general election 290, 295–316; post-election settlement 2007 314–16 ETHNIC GROUPS: 11, 60–1; colonial rule, effect upon 44–50, 60, 104–10, 115; economy and 60–3, 282; elections 2007 and 290, 291–2, 295–316; ethno-favouritism/elitism 8, 11, 44, 50–3, 56–9, 72–4, 86, 112–14, 116–19, 143, 144, 145, 157–62, 272, 282, 290–2, 297–300, 325; ethno-nationalism as Africa's most toxic problem 325; history of 45, 46–7, 48, 49–53, 60–3, 104–14; JG and family break mould of 97, 118–19, 121–44, 158–62, 163–4; JG, Mount Kenya Mafia appeal to ethnicity of 97, 118–19; Rwanda, effect upon Kenyan awareness of 140–1; stereotypes 42–4, 49–50; under Kenyatta 50–1, 52, 110–13; under Kibaki 51–3, 56–60, 97, 118–19, 290, 291–2, 295–316; under Moi 51, 52, 113–14; violence between ethnic groups, early 1990s 114, 140, 141; youth outlook on 150–8 see also under individual ethnic group name MEDIA: 7, 12, 131–2; Anglo Leasing deals, coverage of 245, 248–54, 255–6, 269–70; cartoonists 7, 10, 34, 63; corruption, coverage of 198, 240, 245, 247–54, 255–7, 269–70; JG and 12, 14, 22, 92–3, 245, 248–54, 269–70; KTN, commandos storm 255–6; Moi and 131–2; newspapers, independence of 131–2, 247–8; newspapers, quality of 12; radio 155–8, 334; television 132, 251, 255–6 see also under individual newspaper title and radio and television station name POLICE: 3; Anglo Leasing supply jeeps for 78, 84; corruption within 6, 11, 77, 78, 84, 173; elections 2007, actions during 305, 312; digital communications contract 328; Infotalent Ltd security contract 173; shootings 192 see also General Service Unit (GSU) POLITICS: constitution 8, 13, 73, 86, 113, 185, 241–4, 283; State House 12, 21, 22, 27, 32, 33, 34, 35–6, 38, 39, 65–6, 69, 70, 71, 74, 80, 81, 84, 89, 92, 93, 129, 160, 164, 172, 173, 174, 177, 179, 181, 183, 184, 202, 218, 219, 220, 222, 224, 232, 235, 238, 244, 249, 260, 270, 271, 283, 300, 304, 306, 325; multi-party regime, advent of 7, 51, 62, 79, 88, 113–14, 139, 140, 158, 193; NARC see National Rainbow Coalition; parliament 153; prime minister, NARC expected to install 8, 283 Kenya Anti-Corruption Authority (KACA) 186, 337 Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission (KACC) 20, 66, 84, 86, 87, 92–3, 173, 217–18, 222, 245, 250, 254, 256, 261, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273n, 274, 327 Kenya Broadcasting Corporation 132, 251 Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) 36, 80, 220, 291, 297, 324, 337 Kenya Revenue Authority 280 Kenyan High Commission, London 23, 30, 238, 254, 257, 271 Kenyan Television Network (KTN) 255–6 Kenyatta, Jomo 34, 36, 50–1, 73, 87, 103–4, 106, 107, 109, 110, 112, 113, 117, 118, 122, 125, 126, 159, 160, 184, 279, 286, 296, 297, 300, 332 Kenyatta, Uhuru 2, 10, 129, 175, 237 Keriri, Matere 72, 175 Kettering, Merlyn 173 Khamala, Martin 138 Kiai, Maina 36, 291 Kiambu people 103, 105, 108, 116, 123, 136 Kibaki, David 129, 175 Kibaki, Lucy 190–1, 224 Kibaki, Mwai: Anglo Leasing dossier, reaction to release of 251, 268, 273; anti-corruption legislation 65–6, 283–4, 285; cabinet 7–8, 72–4, 80, 84–5, 241, 244, 245, 268, 273; car crash 2002 4, 34, 94, 181–2, 242; character 4–5, 8, 68–70, 71–3, 219; constitution and 8, 73, 86, 241–4, 283; corruption, attitudes towards 2, 5, 7, 12, 20, 65–6, 74–5, 77–8, 79–80, 81–97, 215, 219, 220, 222, 234, 235–6, 238, 244–5, 265–6, 282–4, 285; economy under 184, 220, 261, 279–82, 290, 292–3, 299–300; elections 2002 4, 73; elections 2007 284–5, 311–12, 314; ethnic favouritism under 7–8, 72–4, 85, 86; features of former era re-emerge under 282–4; foreign donors and 11, 38–9, 197–204; health 4, 34, 70–3, 80, 94, 181–2, 242; inauguration 2002 1–6, 8, 14, 65–6, 164, 283; inauguration 2007 306; JG, relationship with 14, 17–18, 22, 23, 34–5, 37, 67–8, 71, 86, 87, 90–1, 179–82, 219, 222, 234, 235–6, 238, 244–5, 265–6, 311–12; Moi and 5, 7, 68, 284–5; Mount Kenya Mafia and 72–4, 85, 172–3, 245; speeches 5, 72 Kibera slum, Nairobi 1, 149, 190 Kikuyu people: birth of tribe 101–3; burial of 147–8; Central Association 106; character of 43, 103–14, 115–19; colonial rule, under 105–10; country 98–103; culture 103–14; entitlement, sense of 117; foreign influences upon 131; history of 46, 47, 48, 101–14; JG and 13, 97, 115, 117–19, 130, 142–4, 145, 159–62, 172–5, 287–8, 289; jokes, enjoyment of 115–16; Kenyatta regime, benefit from 50–1, 52, 109–10, 111–13, 115, 159; Kibaki and 8, 7–8, 72–4, 85, 86; land ownership, importance of 104, 105, 112; Mau Mau and 107–12; under Moi 113–14, 159; multi-party politics, role in advent of 113–14; population 103; Reserve 106, 111; respect for elders 117–18; son and mother bond 159 Kikwete, Jakaya 314 Kimani, Martin 128, 159, 324 Kimathi, Dedan 111 Kimunya, Amos 242, 243, 250–1, 259, 285–6, 311 Kinyua, Joseph 219 Kiriamiti, John 316 Kisii tribe 307, 313 Kiss FM 155, 156, 334 Kisumu, Nyanza Province 282, 290, 298, 299, 300, 302–3, 306, 307, 325 Kiswahili language 26, 74, 79, 90, 150, 151, 203, 222, 332 Kivuitu, Samuel 298, 304, 307 Koinange, Jeff 129 Kotut, Eric 322 Kroll 12, 86, 221, 284 Land and Freedom Armies 107 see also Mau Mau land grabbing 61–2, 65 Langata Cemetery 145–8 Leakey, Philip 186 Leakey, Richard 18, 164, 186 Lone, Salim 284 Lonsdale, John 49, 111 Luhya people 43, 58–9, 116, 163, 307, 313 Luo people 43, 44, 49–50, 73, 116, 127, 129, 149, 216, 241, 289, 290, 291, 299, 302, 303, 304, 307, 308, 309, 310, 312, 313, 316 McCarthy, Leonard 326 MacKinnon, William 45, 46 Maasai 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 103, 104, 105, 106, 112, 114, 124, 281, 320 Maasai Mara 53, 317 Maathai, Wangari 49–50, 175 Macharia, Edith 253 Magari, Joseph 84–5, 87. 93, 165 Maina, Wachira 42, 324 majimboism 296 Make Poverty History 205, 206, 266 Makokha, Kwamchetsi 131–2, 284, 297–8, 326 Makotsi, Pamela 256 Malik, A.H. 94 Mangu, Central Province 125, 131 Maore, Maoka 77, 78–9, 85, 86, 328 Margaryan, Artur 256–60 Mars Group Kenya 166, 324, 328 Mathare slum 290, 308, 309, 310, 330 Mati, Mwalimu 36, 67, 69, 79, 175, 217, 315, 324 Matiba, Raymond 129 Mau Mau 50–1, 107–12, 123, 124, 125, 130, 140, 142, 159, 232, 287, 288 Mbeki, Moeletsi 325 Mboya, Tom 26, 299 Meinertzhagen, Captain Richard 104–5 Meru people 43, 72, 108, 216, 222, 291, 307, 313 Michuki, John 175, 256, 297, 311 Migiro, Dickson 254 Ministry of Justice, Kenya 40, 65, 179 Ministry of Finance, Kenya 218–19 Moi, Daniel arap 73, 178, 287, 301; anti-corruption bills 8; constitution and 13, 113, 185; corruption under 14, 39, 62, 66, 77, 80–1, 82, 86, 165, 171–2, 211, 214, 228, 270, 284–5, 286; East African Standard, involvement in 56–8, 256; economy under 2, 159, 160, 171, 184, 261, 290; elections 2007, role in 284–5, 313; foreign donors and 8, 9–10, 14, 170, 183, 185–6, 198–9; Goldenberg scandal, role in 62, 211; justice system under 65; Kalenjin ethnicity 51, 52, 56–8, 284, 300; Kibaki and 4, 5, 7, 68, 284–5; Kikuyu, treatment under rule of 113–14, 116–17, 164; legacy 5; liberalisation of the airwaves mid-1990s 156; ministers, treatment of 67; multi-party rule forced upon 113–14, 139, 140; opponents, treatment of 7; retirement 2, 4, 34, 69, 70, 183, 197; Transparency International and 14 Moi, Gideon 129 Mount Kenya 43, 46–7, 73, 99, 100, 101, 103, 108, 117, 145, 271, 272, 302 Mount Kenya Mafia: birth of 73, 74; donor community and 222; elections 2007, role in 297, 311, 325; Goldenberg scandal, shelves 269; JG and 89, 96, 119, 143, 144, 161, 179, 203, 215, 230, 242, 273; Kibaki, level of influence over 85, 172–3; media, attacks 256; referendum on constitution 2005, involvement in 244; technology, weakness with 89–90, 230 Moyo, Jonathan 162 Muga, Wycliffe 39, 119, 143, 252, 253 Mugabe, Robert 162, 256, 287, 287n Muhoho, George 15–16, 175, 297 Muite, Paul 148 Mukurwe Wa Nyagathanga 102 Mule, Harris 15–16, 31–2, 118 Muli, Koki 306–7 Mullei, Andrew 164–5 Mumbi 102, 115, 117, 144, 253 Munro, Bob 34 Munyakei, David 317–19, 320, 321–2, 323, 324 Murage, Stanley 179 Muranga 100, 101, 104, 108–9, 316 Murgor, Philip 177, 220 Murgor, Willie 112 Muriuki, Godfrey 105 Murungaru, Chris 72, 84, 85, 87, 88, 92, 177, 178, 179, 202, 212, 215, 220, 222, 223, 250, 268, 284, 301, 329 Murungi, Kiraitu 69, 72, 74, 86, 87, 88, 93, 94, 96–7, 173, 177, 178, 179, 180, 215, 216, 219–20, 222, 234, 250, 251, 268, 271, 273, 274, 284, 297, 311, 328 Museveni, Yoweri 196 Musyoka, Kalonzo 157 Muthaiga 68, 155, 156, 175, 190, 191, 195, 202–3, 260 Muthaura, Francis 87, 93, 177, 179, 200, 219, 222, 235, 268, 297 Muthumbi, Mary 28, 91, 221, 249–50, 264–5, 335 Mutoko, Caroline 155–8, 334 Mutua, Alfred 256 Mwai, Evan 169, 171, 219 Mwakwere, Chirau Ali 202 Mwaliko, Sylvester 93 Mwangi, Dave 84, 173 Mwangi, Wangethi 248, 249 Mwenje, David 86 Mwiraria, David 72, 85, 86, 93–4, 96, 165, 173, 179, 219, 222, 223, 250, 251, 260–1, 268, 273, 274, 284, 301 Nairobi 9, 70, 91, 103, 108, 111, 114, 117, 125, 134, 142, 145, 148, 149, 150, 154, 155–6, 167, 188; bookshops 281; cosmetic makeover of 280–1, 292–3; cosmopolitan nature of 9; economy 9; population 149; slums 2, 10, 11, 41–2, 149, 151, 157, 191, 203, 290, 303, 312, 330; State House see State House, Nairobi; unemployment in 55–6 Naivasha, Rift Valley 295 Nakumatt supermarket chain 292, 295, 312 Nandi language 47, 49 Nation Media Group 12, 141, 191, 248, 251, 269 National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) 261, 337; Anglo Leasing contracts, involvement in 79, 84–97, 118, 165, 166, 171–2, 173, 177, 179, 215–16, 217–20, 222, 223, 229, 245, 250–3, 255–8, 268–75; ‘Artur brothers’ and 256; cabinet 7–8, 72–4, 80, 84–5, 241, 244, 245, 268, 273; constitution and 8, 73, 86, 241, 243, 283; corruption within 20, 22, 79–97, 118, 165, 166, 170, 171–2, 173, 177, 179, 215–16, 217–20, 222, 223, 245, 250–1, 268; corruption, initial fight against 2, 5–6, 7, 8, 11–12, 36, 40, 67, 73, 80–1, 82, 183, 228, 268, 314; donor community, relationship with 170, 183, 210–11; economy under 184, 220, 261, 279–82, 290, 292–3, 299–300; elections 2002 2, 3, 4–8, 14, 71, 71, 82, 320; elections 2007 300; free primary education programme 210–11; High Commissioner Clay and 334; JG's relationship with 14, 66–8, 79–87, 164–6, 171–82, 215–25, 229, 233–6, 241, 242–3, 244–5, 250–4, 268–74; Mau Mau and 111; Nation and 247, 269; Nyayo House and 7; lavish spending of members 79–80 National Security Intelligence Service (NSIS) 80–1, 84, 90, 95, 235 Ndii, David 16, 67, 69, 117, 292, 330 Ndubi, Haroun 53 Ndung'u Commission 65 Ngumi, John 116 Ngunyi, Mutahi 162 Nigeria 11, 16, 102, 115, 326 Njonjo, Charles 178 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) 10, 79, 141, 143 Ntimama, William 114 Nyanza province 297, 298–9, 300 Nyerere, Julius 140 Nyeri, Central Province 108–9, 111–12, 118, 126, 255, 282, 289 Nyong'o, Peter Anyang' 238 Obama, Barack 8, 44 Obasanjo, Olusegun 192 Ochola, Robert 310 Odindo, Joseph 141, 222, 248, 249, 269 Odinga, Jaramogi Oginga 73, 300 Odinga, Raila 73, 241, 245, 257, 279, 282, 284, 296, 297, 298, 299–300, 301, 303, 305, 306, 307, 310, 311, 315 Odoi, Frank 7 Official Secrets Act 95, 236–7, 249, 319 Okolloh, Ory 153, 154, 158, 324 Okonjo-Iweala, Ngozi 326 Opus Dei 33, 134, 135, 174 Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) 284, 290, 297, 298, 301, 302–3, 306, 308, 309, 312, 313, 314, 338 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Convention on Combating Bribery 199, 276, 328 Otieno, Gladwell 224, 324 Otieno, Stephen 300 Ouko, Robert 26, 228, 299, 321 Oxfam 160, 189, 205 Pallister, David 327 Party of National Unity (PNU) 297, 301, 306, 307, 308, 312 Pattni, Kamlesh 62–3, 172, 268, 284, 295–6, 322 Perera, Anura 85, 94, 215, 268–9 Pinto, Pio 26 Power, Samantha 331 Prunier, Gerard 52 Public Accounts Committee (PAC) 95, 237–8, 253, 254, 257, 268 Public Officer Ethics Act 66, 283 Ribadu, Nuhu 326 Rice, Xan 250 Rift Valley 47, 49, 104, 112, 114, 140, 141, 282, 295, 297, 308 Ringera, Justice Aaron 20, 66, 217–18, 221–2, 228, 245, 250, 269–71, 272, 274, 322, 327 Rwanda 9, 115, 140–1, 196, 298, 299, 308 Rweria, Erastus 283 Ryan, Professor Terry 56 Sachs, Jeffrey 192, 205, 266 St Antony's College, Oxford 31, 32, 228–33, 235, 242, 243, 248, 326 St Mary's school, Nairobi 127–9, 133, 136, 142, 175 Saitoti, George 211, 251, 268, 273, 311 SAREAT (Series for Alternative Research in East Africa Trust) 162 Sargasyan, Artur 256–60 Satchu, Aly Khan 281 Save the Children 205 Serious Fraud Office, UK (SFO) 266, 276, 328 Sheng dialect 150–2, 310 Shihemi, Henry 128, 129 Short, Claire 71, 207, 287n Sitonik, Wilson 93 Somaia, Ketan 172 Somalia 9, 78, 277 South Africa 11, 326 Soyinka, Wole 132 Standard Media Group 255 State House, Nairobi 12, 21, 22, 27, 32, 33, 34, 35–6, 38, 39, 65–6, 69, 70, 71, 74, 80, 81, 84, 89, 92, 93, 129, 160, 164, 172, 173, 174, 177, 179, 181, 183, 184, 202, 218, 219, 220, 222, 224, 232, 235, 238, 244, 249, 260, 270, 271, 283, 300, 304, 306, 325 Strathmore University 134, 135 Sudan 9, 131, 314, 325 Tanzania 48, 102, 140, 141, 150, 283, 299, 314 Thiongo, Ngugi Wa 132 Trade Bank 270 Transparency International (TI) 11, 14, 15, 16, 17–18, 36, 55, 66, 79, 80, 81, 118, 141–2, 160, 162, 175, 176, 179, 197, 119–200, 224, 261, 283, 289, 320 Uganda 9, 45, 46, 48, 68, 140, 141, 150, 195–6, 283, 299, 302 United Kingdom: aid to Kenya 187, 193–204, 205–12, 225, 261–2, 267, 275, 276–7, 337; colonial rule of Kenya 8–9, 11, 45–50, 52, 60, 104–10, 115, 122, 134, 172, 184, 194, 202, 203, 286–8; High Commissioner to Kenya 71, 171, 183, 194–204, 210–15, 224, 225, 254, 259, 267, 277, 333–4; trains soldiers in Kenya 9 United Nations 314; Africa bureaux 9; awards Kenya Public Service Award 2007 285; Convention against Corruption 65; gives Kenyan Treasury more autonomy over use of aid 286; Habitat 149; Joe Githongo's work for 124; Millennium Development Goals 207, 287; oil-for-food programme 263 United States: aid to Kenya 189, 193–4, 222–3, 224, 250, 259; ambassador to Kenya 193–4, 222–3, 224, 250, 259; Federal Reserve 263; State Department 197; warships based off Kenya 9 USAID 189 Vogl, Frank 61 Volcker, Paul 263, 264, 278 von Szek, Samuel Teleki 104 Wa Kibiru, Mugo 45 Wainaina, Eric 129 Wainana, Binyavanga 1, 106, 152, 324 Wako, Amos 170, 268 Wanjigi, Jimmy 84, 87, 91, 93–4, 129, 175 Wanjui, Joe 15–16, 175, 265, 297 Wanyeki, Muthoni 324 Warah, Rasna 67, 131 Were, Hussein 58–60, 272, 273n, 327, 334 Wolf, Dr Tom 158 Wolfensohn, James 185, 262 Wolfowitz, Paul 262–3, 275–6, 277 World Bank 66, 305; Anglo Leasing scandal, reaction to 260–1; corruption, attitudes towards 141, 170, 184, 185, 199, 207–8, 223–4, 260–1, 262–3, 275–6, 277, 278, 333; Development Committee 276; DfID and 275, 276; Governance and Anti–Corruption (GAC) Framework 276; Institute 207–8; JG joins Volcker panel 263, 278; JG's resignation from Kibaki government, reaction to 223–4; Moi era, grows wary of funding during 170; ‘pushing money out the door’ 189; staff intimacy with African governmental staff 190–2; structural adjustment programmes 60–1; talks up Kenya's prospects 332 World Vision 189 Zaidi, Ali 138–40, 141, 236 Zenawi, Meles 192 Zhvania, Zhurab 227–8 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book is based on a score of interviews and conversations with John Githongo in London, Oxford and Guatemala City between February 2005 and December 2008.


Rethinking Islamism: The Ideology of the New Terror by Meghnad Desai

Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, global village, illegal immigration, income per capita, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, Yom Kippur War

By฀ the฀ early฀ s,฀ when฀ these฀ events฀ took฀ place,฀ the฀ world฀ economy฀ had฀ been฀ through฀ a฀ tough฀ two฀ decades฀ beginning฀ with฀ the฀oil฀shock฀of฀.฀Inflation฀and฀unemployment฀in฀the฀developed฀ countries฀and฀debt฀crises฀in฀the฀developing฀countries฀of฀Latin฀America฀and฀Africa฀had฀led฀to฀severe฀difficulties.฀The฀IMF฀had฀moved฀ in฀with฀its฀structural฀adjustment฀programmes,฀which฀countries฀in฀ economic฀difficulties฀had฀to฀sign฀up฀to.฀Public฀budgets฀were฀slashed฀ and฀any฀subsidies฀to฀the฀poor฀had฀to฀be฀cut.฀Life฀became฀hard฀for฀ many฀countries,฀and฀the฀alternative฀of฀rejecting฀capitalism฀was฀no฀ longer฀ available.฀ Many฀ states฀ failed฀ and฀ became฀ anarchic–฀ Sierra฀ Leone,฀ Somalia,฀ Liberia,฀ Zaire.฀ Yugoslavia฀ fell฀ apart฀ with฀ ethnic฀ cleansing฀in฀the฀backyard฀of฀Europe.


Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kondratiev cycle, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, law of one price, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, long and variable lags, low interest rates, market clearing, market friction, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, placebo effect, post-war consensus, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, value at risk, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-sum game

But the United States rejected the Keynes plan, and at the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 substituted an institution of its own devising – the International Monetary Fund – which upheld the orthodox policy of debtor adjustment, finance for deficits being confined to short-term help. The American motive was clear: they had no wish to place their hard-earned dollars automatically at the disposal of profligate debtors. The IMF thus provided no limit on persistent reserve accumulation. Bretton Woods laid the intellectual basis for the ‘structural adjustment’ programmes which the IMF would insist on as the condition of its loans to Latin America and East Asia in the 1980s and 1990s, and which the ‘troika’ of the IMF, European Central Bank and European Commission would demand as the condition of financing the foreign debt of Mediterranean countries following the crisis of 2008–9.

Pigou’s work on redistribution, 290–91 and protectionism, 380 and quantitative easing, 248, 271–3, 272, 279, 284, 305 sharp rise in since 1970s, 288–9, 289, 298–302, 300, 302 and slow down in Western growth rate, 369–70, 369 and under-consumption theory, 293–6, 297–8, 303–6, 370 inflation Bodin’s description of, 33 ‘cost-push’ school, 146–8, 304 and creditors, 32, 37, 42, 47 economic deterioration (1969–73), 164–6 ‘excess demand’ school, 144–6 Friedman’s view of, 179–83 global lowering of from 1990s, 190 during gold-standard years, 43 during Great Moderation, 106, 215, 216, 252–3, 253, 348, 359, 360 hyperinflation of early 1920s, 100, 275 increases in late 1960s, 152, 153, 154, 163, 164 inflation targeting, 2, 101, 188–9, 189, 196, 215, 249–53, 347, 358 ‘inflation tax’, 28, 64–5 and interest rates, 101–2, 359 Keynes–Cannan debates on, 100 and Keynesian policy, 131, 141, 144–8, 161, 162, 169–70, 171, 180, 304, 348 during Napoleonic wars, 45–6, 47–8 new-classical approach to, 2 nineteenth century debates on, 44–9 oil price shock (1973–4), 166–7, 189, 190 oil price spike (1980–82), 189, 190 onset of stagflation (1965–9), 164 Phillips Curve, 144–5, 147, 162, 163, 180, 194, 205, 205–12 post-war period until 1960s, 32, 148 and quantitative easing (QE), 254, 258, 261, 262–3, 270–71, 271, 272, 277 Quantity Theory of Money, 9, 32–5 Ricardo on, 28 ‘stagflation’ in 1970s, 2–3, 9, 16, 152, 154, 162–70, 163, 183, 184, 189, 189–90, 304 and suspension of convertibility (1919), 101–2 wage explosion in Britain (1968), 152 Innes, Alfred, 24, 25 innovation, state subsidy of, 353–4 interest rates during 2008 crisis, 217, 218, 253–6, 254, 274 anti-usury laws, 31 central bank reaction function, 212–13 classical view of, 31, 47 cost of government borrowing (2000–2016), 234 and Cunliffe Report (1918), 54–5, 102, 145 during economic deterioration (1969–73), 165, 168 in Eurozone, 376 and ‘expansionary fiscal contraction’, 192 and Fed’s ‘Reserve Position Doctrine’ (1920s), 103 financial crowding out theory, 234–5 and gold standard debtor countries, 127 and inflation, 101–2, 359 investment’s sensitivity to changes in, 116, 125, 137, 145, 173, 204 IS/LM model, 173, 199, 203, 203–4, 204 476 i n de x and Keynes’ MEC (marginal efficiency of capital), 119 Keynes’s recipe of low rates, 107, 116, 117, 124–5, 137, 138, 145, 297 liquidity preference theory, 106, 121, 124–5, 146, 173, 259, 261, 265, 283–4 as main control-mechanism from 1990s, 185, 249–53, 256 and monetarism, 180, 184–5, 186, 187, 188, 206 moral considerations, 31 ‘natural’ rate of, 68–9, 70, 102, 201, 213, 251, 255, 278, 311 in neo-classical multiplier, 134–6 in new fiscal constitution, 352 as not optimally self-adjusting, 172, 311, 339 and Phillips Curve, 206 as price of liquidity, not saving, 121, 297 and quantity theory, 61, 64, 65, 66–7, 68–70, 71 and Thornton, 47, 278 Victorian fiscal constitution, 86 and Wicksell, 61, 201, 251, 255, 278 see also Bank Rate International Monetary Fund (IMF), 139, 140, 198 and Eurozone crisis, 139, 242–3 and fiscal multipliers, 230–31, 233 ‘neo-liberal’ agenda of, 139, 181, 318–19 ‘scarce currency’ clause, 380–81 ‘structural adjustment’ programmes, 139, 181 Ireland potato famine (1840s), 15 sovereign debt crisis, 328, 341, 365 Italy, 33–4, 91, 102, 156, 157, 242, 299, 356 James, Harold, 383 James I, King, 79 Japan, 166, 332, 333, 369, 378 and 2008 crash, 218, 271 post-war modernization/catch-up, 156, 157, 159 Jenkins, Roy, 152 Johnson, Lyndon B., 153, 161 Jones, Stedman, 197 Jordà, Ò., 243–4 Juncker investment programme, 274 Kaldor, Nicholas, 34, 150–51, 160, 190, 378 Kaldor–Hicks criterion, 291 Kennedy, John F., 152, 153 Keynes, John Maynard, xviii, xix ‘animal spirits’ of, 120, 127, 133, 282, 286 Clearing Union plan (1941), 127–8, 139, 159, 380–81 and control of credit, 100–101, 102–3, 105, 115–16 demolition of Say’s Law, 119 doctrine of ‘creditor adjustment’, 127–8, 139, 159 ethics of, 123–4, 126–7, 297, 369 and fallacy of composition, 389 and fiscal multiplier, 111, 125–6, 133–4, 138, 235, 244–5 on gold standard, 58, 101 on Hayek, 175–6, 195 and heuristics, 196 on ‘inflation tax’, 28 on international capital movements, 382 letter to T.


Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System by Alexander Betts, Paul Collier

Alvin Roth, anti-communist, centre right, charter city, corporate social responsibility, Donald Trump, failed state, Filter Bubble, global supply chain, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Kibera, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, open borders, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rising living standards, risk/return, school choice, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, trade route, urban planning, zero-sum game

Vast areas in often remote, arid, and dangerous border locations were annexed as spaces for emergency protection that became enduring residences for the long-term displaced. Dehumanizing camps became the default response for a combination of reasons. First, with democratization, debt crises, and the ‘Structural Adjustment’ programmes of the 1980s and 1990s through which the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank imposed economic liberalization and cuts in government spending across much of the developing world, host governments became increasingly constrained in their ability to allocate scare resources to non-citizens.6 Camps offered a means to place refugees ‘out of sight and out of mind’ while abdicating financial responsibility to the international community.


Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky

Able Archer 83, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, one-state solution, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, uranium enrichment, wage slave, WikiLeaks, working-age population

If we listen to voices from the global South today we can learn that “the conversion of public goods into private property through the privatization of our otherwise commonly held natural environment is one way neoliberal institutions remove the fragile threads that hold African nations together. Politics today has been reduced to a lucrative venture where one looks out mainly for returns on investment rather than on what one can contribute to rebuild highly degraded environments, communities, and a nation. This is one of the benefits that structural adjustment programmes inflicted on the continent—the enthronement of corruption.” I’m quoting Nigerian poet and activist Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International, in his searing exposé of the ravaging of Africa’s wealth, To Cook a Continent, which examines the latest phase of the Western torture of Africa.36 A torture that has always been planned at the highest level, and should be recognized as such.


pages: 273 words: 34,920

Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values by Sharon Beder

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, junk bonds, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Powell Memorandum, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, spread of share-ownership, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Torches of Freedom, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, young professional

Pinochet reinstated a minimum wage and union rights, instituted a government programme that created 500,000 public service jobs, and regulated the flow of foreign capital.6 Nevertheless, the same failed free market policy prescription was actively promoted by the World Bank and IMF, not only in Latin America, but in all parts of the world from the mid-1980s.7 It was the driving force behind the structural adjustment programmes being imposed on all indebted developing nations. World Bank and IMF loans became conditional upon the adoption of policies such as privatization, outsourcing, downsizing of public service workforces, reducing barriers to foreign investors and redirecting government spending away from public services and publicly-owned enterprises into debt servicing.


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

The means by which it did so are clear and well documented.44 Unequal trade relationships forced much of Latin America, all of Africa and most of Asia to adopt development models that led to super-profits for Western companies and poverty at home. Countries that tried to reject these models, such as Chile or Guyana, had their governments overthrown by CIA coups or, as with Grenada, by invasion. Many found their economies destroyed by debt and by the ‘structural adjustment programmes’ the IMF dictated in return for debt write-offs. With little domestic industry, their growth models relied on the export of raw materials, and the incomes of the poor stagnated. Globalization changed all that. Between 1988 and 2008 – as the chart shows – the real incomes of two-thirds of the world’s people grew significantly.


pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

This is known as the Third World Debt Crisis, thus known because the developing world was then called the Third World, after the First World (the advanced capitalist world) and the Second World (the socialist world). Facing economic crises, developing countries had to resort to the Bretton Woods Institutions (the IMF and the World Bank, just to remind you). The BWIs made it a condition that borrowing countries implement the structural adjustment programme (SAP), which required shrinking the role of the government in the economy by cutting its budget, privatizing SOEs and reducing regulations, especially on international trade. The results of the SAP were extremely disappointing, to say the least. Despite making all the necessary ‘structural’ reforms, most countries experienced dramatic growth slowdown in the 1980s and the 1990s.


pages: 471 words: 124,585

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

Yet the days had gone when investors could confidently expect their governments to send a gunboat when a foreign government misbehaved. Now the role of financial policing had to be played by two unarmed bankers, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Their new watch-word became ‘conditionality’: no reforms, no money. Their preferred mechanism was the structural adjustment programme. And the policies the debtor countries had to adopt became known as the Washington Consensus, a wish-list of ten economic policies that would have gladdened the heart of a British imperial administrator a hundred years before.bc Number one was to impose fiscal discipline to reduce or eliminate deficits.


pages: 277 words: 80,703

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle by Silvia Federici

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Community Supported Agriculture, declining real wages, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, financial independence, fixed income, gentrification, global village, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, labor-force participation, land tenure, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Occupy movement, planetary scale, Scramble for Africa, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, the market place, tontine, trade liberalization, UNCLOS, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

In contrast to those who saw the movement’s task as reforming, humanizing, and “genderizing” the World Bank and IMF, these essays look at these institutions as the instruments of a new process of recolonization, and worldwide capitalist attack on workers’ power. In particular, they examine the relation between the large migratory movements triggered by structural adjustment programs in the early ‘90s, and what Arlie Hochschild has termed the “globalization of care.” They also investigate the connection between warfare and the destruction of subsistence farming and, most importantly, the motivations behind the new global economy’s war against women. A running theme throughout the essays of Part Two is also the critique of the institutionalization of feminism and the reduction of feminist politics to instruments of the neoliberal agenda of the United Nations.

These policies have so undermined the reproduction of the populations of the “Third World” that even the World Bank has had to concede to having made mistakes.18 They have led to a level of poverty unprecedented in the postcolonial period, and have erased the most important achievement of the anticolonial struggle: the commitment by the new independent nation states to invest in the reproduction of the national proletariat. Massive cuts in government spending for social services, repeated currency devaluations, wage freezes, these are the core of the “structural adjustment programs” and the neoliberal agenda. We must also mention the ongoing land expropriations that are being carried out for the sake of the commercialization of agriculture, and the institution of a state of constant warfare.19 Endless wars, massacres, entire populations in flight from their lands and turned into refugees, famines: these are not only the consequences of a dramatic impoverishment that intensifies ethnic, political, and religious conflicts, as the media want us to believe.

Moreover, it is in the nature of the present capitalist crisis that no mediation is possible and development planning in the so-called “Third World” gives way to war.3 That the connection between integration in the global economy and warfare is not usually recognized is due to the fact that globalization today, while in essence continuing the nineteenth century imperial project, presents itself primarily as an economic program. Its first and most visible weapons are structural adjustment programs, trade liberalization, privatizations, intellectual property rights. All these policies are responsible for an immense transfer of wealth from the “colonies” to the metropoles, but they do not require territorial conquest, and thus are assumed to work by purely peaceful means.4 Military intervention too is taking new forms, often appearing under the guise of benevolent initiatives, such as “food aid” and “humanitarian relief,” or, in Latin America, the “war against drugs.”


pages: 497 words: 123,718

A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, airline deregulation, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bob Geldof, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate personhood, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, full employment, global village, high net worth, land bank, land reform, large denomination, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, Tax Reform Act of 1986, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Another result of the crisis of the 1970s was to discredit the reigning economic orthodoxy—Keynesian government-led or -guided economic development—in favor of a corporate-inspired movement restoring a measure of laissez-faire (a program usually called neoliberalism outside North America). Its standard-bearers were Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Britain, and international enforcement of the neoliberal model was put into the hands of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. Dozens of countries currently operate under IMF “structural adjustment” programs (SAPs), and despite—or because of—such tutelage few ever complete the IMF/World Bank treatment to regain financial health and independence. The Web of Control Payments on Third World debt require more than $375 billion a year, twenty times the amount of foreign aid that Third World countries receive.

The Web of Control EXTORTING TRIBUTE FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH Foreign aid, investment, and development loans to Third World countries are dwarfed by the flow of money for loan service, earmarked goods and services, stolen funds, and flight capital. At least $5 trillion has flowed out of poorer countries to the First World since the mid-1970s, much of it to offshore accounts. Meanwhile, IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs throttle economic and social development in many countries. GLOBAL NORTH G8 NATIONS • MULTINATIONALS • WORLD BANK • IMF FUNDS FLOWING TO UNDERDEVELOPED COUNTRIES • Loans for inflated projects • Structural adjustment loans • Development loans • Arms “aid” • Export credit agency financing • Offshore production CONDITIONS FOR AID, LOANS, AND INVESTMENT • Resource development concessions • One-sided production sharing agreements • “Partnerships” with local elites • Privatization of public services • Nonreciprocal elimination of tariffs • Unnecessary buildup of defense, security forces • Public investment to enable private corporate projects ENFORCEMENT • Rigged elections • Bribes • Penetration of military, security forces • Manipulation of local currency, interest rates • Manipulation of local ethnic conflicts • Assassination of uncooperative leaders • Use of local militias, security forces • Military intervention FLOW OF MONEY BACK TO THE FIRST WORLD • Contracts, loan payments • Rigged bids • Flight capital • Kickbacks deposited in offshore accounts • Manipulated commodities markets • Embezzled funds to offshore accounts • Arms contracts • Earmarked services and suppliers • Tax evasion/money laundering • Transfer mispricing GLOBAL SOUTH THE UNDERDEVELOPED WORLD The Market: Subsidies for the Rich, Free Trade for the Poor If the global empire had a slogan, it would surely be Free Trade.

GLOBAL NORTH G8 NATIONS • MULTINATIONALS • WORLD BANK • IMF FUNDS FLOWING TO UNDERDEVELOPED COUNTRIES • Loans for inflated projects • Structural adjustment loans • Development loans • Arms “aid” • Export credit agency financing • Offshore production CONDITIONS FOR AID, LOANS, AND INVESTMENT • Resource development concessions • One-sided production sharing agreements • “Partnerships” with local elites • Privatization of public services • Nonreciprocal elimination of tariffs • Unnecessary buildup of defense, security forces • Public investment to enable private corporate projects ENFORCEMENT • Rigged elections • Bribes • Penetration of military, security forces • Manipulation of local currency, interest rates • Manipulation of local ethnic conflicts • Assassination of uncooperative leaders • Use of local militias, security forces • Military intervention FLOW OF MONEY BACK TO THE FIRST WORLD • Contracts, loan payments • Rigged bids • Flight capital • Kickbacks deposited in offshore accounts • Manipulated commodities markets • Embezzled funds to offshore accounts • Arms contracts • Earmarked services and suppliers • Tax evasion/money laundering • Transfer mispricing GLOBAL SOUTH THE UNDERDEVELOPED WORLD The Market: Subsidies for the Rich, Free Trade for the Poor If the global empire had a slogan, it would surely be Free Trade. As their price for assistance, the IMF and World Bank insist in their structural adjustment programs that indebted developing countries abandon state-led development policies, including tariffs, export subsidies, currency controls, and import-substitution programs. Their approved model of development instead focuses on export-led economic growth, using loans to develop new export industries—for example, to attract light industry to export-processing zones (firms like Nike have been major beneficiaries of these policies).


pages: 823 words: 206,070

The Making of Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, book value, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, continuous integration, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, dark matter, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, guest worker program, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, oil shock, precariat, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, vertical integration, very high income, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Rather, it was a key mechanism, in Alan Milward’s apt formulation, for the “European rescue of the nation-state.”1 But this was strongly encouraged by American policymakers, and what was in fact taking place was the American rescue of the European capitalist state. The Marshall Plan’s achievements in this respect would later be called “history’s most successful structural adjustment program”—one which permitted Europe’s welfare states to be “built on top of and . . . not supplant or bypass the market allocation of goods and factors of production.”2 US policymakers repeatedly spoke, as Allen Dulles did in 1947, of their “desire to help restore a Europe which can and will compete with us in the world markets.”3 The economic rationale for this was that it would enable Europe to buy “substantial amounts of our products,” and it was hoped that this would eventually entail not only exports from the US but also production by US corporations within Europe.

This was done with the strong encouragement of the US Treasury, whose own crucial loans to New York City at the end of 1975 were provided on terms that were explicitly intended, as Treasury Secretary Simon told a Senate hearing, to be “so punitive, the overall experience so painful, that no city, no political subdivision would ever be tempted to go down the same road.”10 While municipal unions were conscripted to invest their pension funds in New York City’s bonds, committees dominated by bankers framed the loan conditions on the basis of the policies that later became widely identified with neoliberalism—a concept of fiscal rectitude that rejected higher taxes and instead cut social programs, froze wages, and privatized public services and assets.11 Many of New York’s Democratic Party elite were complicit in imposing this early structural adjustment program, and this appeared to reinforce what Alan Greenspan saw at the time as a remarkable emerging consensus among Republican and Democratic leaders on economic policy—“a convergence of attitudes between the liberal left and the conservative right . . . looking to restrain inflation, cut deficit spending, reduce regulation, and encourage investment.”12 But it was by no means clear that the new Carter administration would sustain this elite consensus.

Nothing symbolized labor’s defeat more vividly in the following years than Volcker using his “Humphrey-Hawkins testimony” to make the monetarist case that low inflation was the Fed’s overriding target, even at the expense of unemployment, and that this was the principal means of ultimately reaching high employment.45 But it was a Democratic Congress’s imposition on labor of what was effectively a “structural adjustment program”—in the conditions attached to the loan guarantees Congress gave Chrysler in 1979 to prevent its bankruptcy—that signaled the most important factor in sustaining the Volcker shock. Whereas there had been an explosion of labor militancy in the strike wave that erupted in the wake of the Fed’s 1969–70 “policy of extreme restraint,” a decade later the acquiescence of the UAW in the “reopening” of its collective agreement, to make wage concessions and allow for the outsourcing of production to non-union plants, now became the template for the spread of similar concessions throughout US industry.


pages: 221 words: 55,901

The Globalization of Inequality by François Bourguignon

Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, minimum wage unemployment, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Gordon, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, very high income, Washington Consensus

In other countries the distribution has remained relatively stable (Cameroon, Uganda) or even seems to have narrowed (Senegal). In Latin America, inequality levels have followed a clear inverted U-­shaped curve over the last thirty years. They rose significantly in the 1980s as the economies were experiencing a severe balance-­of-­payments crisis and were submitted to draconian reforms under the “structural adjustment program” imposed by the IMF and the World Bank. This was followed by a noteworthy drop throughout the 2000s. In total, inequality has not yet returned to its earlier Are Countries Becoming More Unequal?55 levels in half of all Latin American countries. In others, it has dropped below its earlier levels.

These structural adjustment policies have often been criticized for their social costs, partly because they slowed growth and thus the reduction of poverty dramatically, and partly because they placed more of the brunt of the costs of these programs on the lower and middle classes, rather than on the high end of the income scale.23 The debt crisis began in Latin America, specifically in Mexico in 1982, and for a decade and a half it would have harsh consequences for the developing world, in particular in sub-­Saharan Africa and Latin America. The structural adjustment programs that the international financial institutions demanded in exchange for aid were grounded on a package of free market principles that were later baptized the “Washington consensus.” They resulted in deep institutional changes: commercial and financial liberalization, deregulation of goods, capital and labor markets, privatization, the elimination of consumer and producer subsidies, 23 See IMF-­IEO, Fiscal Adjustment in IMF-­Supported Programs, IMF, June 2002. 110 Chapter 3 cuts in social spending, and so forth.

As we have seen, many of these reforms almost certainly had inegalitarian effects, and, in fact, between the 1980s and 1990s we can see a substantial rise in inequalities in the countries affected most directly by these programs: Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and even Brazil. But it would be an error to attribute this entirely to the structural adjustment programs. Latin America was in a difficult economic situation, one in need of radical reform. It is likely that inequality would have worsened no matter what these reforms were. In several cases, inequality had already begun to increase at the first signs of the crisis, when the rich began transferring their assets overseas to avoid the fallout.


pages: 233 words: 75,712

In Defense of Global Capitalism by Johan Norberg

anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, capital controls, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Glaeser, export processing zone, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, open economy, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, rising living standards, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, zero-sum game

When a corrupt government has to take account of perhaps a hundred different stipulations and guidelines at once, things get difficult, especially as it must simultaneously keep track of any number of other aid programs from individual countries. Because these structural adjustment programs are often quite vaguely written, it is easy for governments to delay and undermine them. Breaches of the programs have led to a cancellation of payments, but, bizarrely, the funding tap has been turned full on again as soon as the politicians have verbally promised renewed compliance. That, it seems, can be repeated indefinitely. One analyst maintained that 15 years of structural adjustment programs in Africa had meant only ‘‘minimally more openness to the global economy.’’17 The unwillingness of the recipient countries to follow the advice given makes it wrong to point to the IMF’s liberalizing recommendations as the cause of those countries’ profound crises, as many left-wing movements do.

Like all credit providers, they would prefer to be paid back, and so they insist on reforms that would allow the country to emerge from its crisis and eventually be capable of repaying what it has borrowed. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this attitude, and the recommendations (termed structural adjustment programs) have often been healthy: a balanced budget, a lower rate of inflation, greater competition, open markets, less corruption and more rule of law, and a reduction of military spending in favor of things like education and health care. Much work has also been devoted to establishing greater transparency and to cleaning up shady dealings and nepotism between rulers and economic players.

It is very dangerous to suppose that reforms can be brought about from outside by means of economic inducements. In the majority of cases, resource transfers of this kind have had the effect of propping up a failed system. Assistance, if it is to have any positive effects, must come after reforms begin. When, in 1994, the WB reviewed 26 different structural adjustment programs, it found that only 6 of them had led to a serious change of policy. Above all, those in power could not, or would not, reduce and streamline bureaucracy and their own control of the economy. Countries have sometimes tried to meet certain important stipulations, such as budgetary balance, by destructive policies such as increasing taxes and tariffs, printing more money, or slashing the most important public spending—on education and health—instead of subsidies, bureaucracy, and the military.


Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Almost three thousand new garment factories were built between 1980 and 2000.9 Under the military rule of Hussain Muhammad Ershad, Bangladesh was also one of the first countries subjected to a World Bank and IMF structural adjustment program. The IMF is a predatory loan shark forcing conditions of market liberalization and state austerity as preconditions to receiving a loan, and using debt as a disciplinary mechanism to reorganize economies into bordered sites of resource extraction and labor exploitation. The neoliberal and neocolonial imposition of these structural adjustment programs became known as “debt dictatorship,” with developing economies forced to accept severe austerity packages that stripped away social safety measures while increasing capitalist investment and trade tariffs.

Maquiladoras (border assembly plants) produced everything from televisions to vehicle parts in bordered zones of transnational capital investment and union-free labor. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Mexican economy was further subordinated to the US, World Bank, and IMF through loans and structural adjustment programs, resulting in massive deregulation of state enterprises and 70 percent of capital goods production income going to mainly US corporations.47 This capitalist economy accelerated with NAFTA prying open domestic industries in Mexico to a global regime of production. In addition to the US annexation of northern Mexico and US efforts to thwart the Mexican Revolution, described in chapter 1, NAFTA was yet another act by the US ruling class, in alliance with the Mexican oligarchy, to dominate Mexico’s politics and economy.

While many media stories about migration feature the fate of millions of refugees fleeing political upheaval, mass displacement produced by the terror of imposed neoliberalism and the catastrophes of climate change are less visible. Like the neoliberal projects and flooding disasters unfolding in Bangladesh, a pattern has emerged from thousands of other structural adjustment programs. World Bank–funded development projects displaced at least 3.4 million people between 2004 and 2013 through land grabs, fueling a vortex of dispossession and displacement.48 Land grabs epitomize the bordering regime of land enclosures, a violent form of accumulation conjoining the triad of capitalist extraction, colonial dispossession, and ecological degradation.


pages: 239 words: 62,311

The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa by Irene Yuan Sun

"World Economic Forum" Davos, asset light, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business logic, capital controls, clean water, Computer Numeric Control, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, means of production, mobile money, Multi Fibre Arrangement, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, tacit knowledge, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population

Nigeria, whose economy had become dangerously dependent on oil exports, faced galloping inflation, increasing unemployment, and a balance-of-payments crisis. Government debt ballooned from less than 10 percent of GDP in 1980 to more than 100 percent of GDP a mere six years later. In 1986, with no other options left, Nigeria accepted the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Program, a package of emergency loans that gave it a much-needed fiscal lifeline in exchange for acceptance of Washington Consensus policies of privatization and liberalization of the economy. A main thrust was the adoption of a floating exchange rate program with no predefined rates of change.

Onyeiwu, “The Modern Textile Industry in Nigeria.” 14. L. N. Chete, J. O. Adeoti, F. M. Adeyinka, and O. Ogundele, “Industrial Development and Growth in Nigeria: Lessons and Challenges,” Brookings Africa Growth Initiative Working Paper No. 8., The Brookings Institution, 2016. 15. BigBen Chukwuma Ogbonna, “Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) in Nigeria: An Empirical Assessment,” Journal of Banking 6, no. 1 (June 2012): 19–40. 16. World Bank Study cited in Onyeiwu, “The Modern Textile Industry in Nigeria.” 17. Onyeiwu, “The Modern Textile Industry in Nigeria.” 18. Maiwada and Renne, “The Kaduna Textile Industry,” 183. 19.

See also capital-intensive production labor protection laws, 79–81, 83–84 labor supplies, 92–94, 99 Lawrence, Robert, 44, 57 Leakey, Richard, 175–177 leapfrogging, 22 Lebanon, 120 Lee Group, 42, 46–47, 63 Lesotho, 7, 11, 23–24, 49–66 clothing manufacturing, 49–50, 71–72, 114–115, 184n5 comparative advantages of, 73 exchange rates in, 56 failure rates in, 114–115 foreign investment in, 73 GDP, 62, 184n13 government loans in, 65 industrialization in, 8 infrastructure, 62–63, 67–69 local ownership of factories in, 113–119 textile manufacturing, 57–61 unions in, 102–105 US trade policy and, 66, 184n3 Lesotho National Development Corporation, 72–73 Levi’s, 56 Lin, Alan, 71–72, 136 Lin, Justin Yifu, 25–26, 93 living standards, 6, 29, 89–91, 94–95 Lomé Convention, 54, 63–64 macroeconomics, 32–33, 35–41, 44–45 management experience in, 65 local elites in, 115–116 local ownership and, 113–119 manufacturing African ownership of, 109–127 attractions of Africa for, 44–47 benefits of jobs in, 94–96 Chinese investment in African, 42–44 complaints about workers in, 91, 96–100 difficulty of learning to work in, 91, 100–101 dishonesty in, 74–81 diversity and resiliency in, 51–54 education and jobs in, 95 employment share from, 43–44 failure rates in new, 114 flying geese theory of, 9, 23–30, 93, 112–113 global competition in, 70 global output, 179n1 growth of Chinese, 29–30 human chain in the spread of, 17–30 individuals’ influence in, 32–33, 45–47 input management in, 113 learning by doing, 17–19, 23–26, 89–91 life, death, and rebirth of, 31–47 negative effects of, 7–8 Nigeria, 31–47 obsolete technology in, 37 owners in, 64–65, 109–127 product/location drivers of, 61–66 rebirth of African, 41–42 risks in, 67–85 societal transformations from, 91, 97–98, 101–107 uneven growth in, 51 wealth creation from, 7 markets, 7 in-country vs. exports, 52–57, 62–63 McKinsey & Company, 42, 92 migrants and migration, 123–127 Millennium Development Goals, 22, 153 Millennium Villages, 136 mindset, 136 Modern Times, 100–101 Mohapi, Chris, 114–115, 119 Mothabeng, Thabiso, 116–117 Mountain Textile Screening Company, 116–117 M-Pesa, 142–146, 190n14 Multi Fibre Arrangement (MFA), 63–64 Nairobi National Park, 175–177 Namibia, 3–4, 151–153 National Youth Service, Kenya, 133 Ndemo, Bitange, 144–145 Ndung’u, Njuguna, 145, 146 New Development Bank, 12, 174 Nien Hsing Textile Company Limited, 58–61, 184n7 Nigeria, 10, 31–47 cardboard box factory, 89–91 ceramics factory, 17–19, 21, 22–23, 74–75 corruption in, 39, 40–41, 63, 75–78 customs corruption in, 136–140 demographics of, 93–94 foreign investment in, 33–34, 73 Four Great Families in, 34–35 GDP, 36, 62 global competition and, 37–39, 40–41 good enough governance in, 136–140 industrialization in, 8 Lee Group in, 42, 46–47 market growth in, 7 oil in, 34 pharmaceutical industry, 157 protectionism in, 53 smuggling in, 40–41 special economic zones, 137–140, 141–142, 169 steel production in, 61–66, 75 Structural Adjustment Program in, 21, 37 textile manufacturing, 33–41, 61–66 unemployment rate, 94 Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission, 73 non-traded sectors, 94–95 Obama, Barack, 43, 154 Ogun Guangdong Free Trade Zone, 137–140, 141–142, 169 oil production, Nigeria, 34, 35–37, 39 Omidyar Network, 82 optimism in Africa, 6 Chinese commitment and, 167–169 good enough governance and, 131–132, 136, 142, 149–150 Hiding Hand and, 165–166 about local ownership, 118–119 Oqubay, Arkebe, 166 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 29 ownership, local, 109–127 African-Chinese collaboration for, 120–123 in Lesotho clothing factories, 113–119 natural progression toward, 119–120 optimism about, 118–119 relationships in, 123, 126–127 trust and, 123–124, 126 partnerships, 115–117 patent laws, 162 pharmaceutical industry development of in China and India, 161–163 Ethiopia, 121–123, 156–157, 163–169 international aid and, 154–158 pivoting, 146–148 plastic wrap, 28–29 poverty Africa, 6 China, 2–3, 180n10 President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), 154, 159 productivity, 20, 71–72, 94, 96–101, 115 profit margins, 23, 56 property rights, 135 protectionism, 174 export-oriented manufacturing and, 63–64 Nigeria, 37–39, 40–41, 53 US, 72 Protestant work ethic, 135 Qi Lin, 132–134 racism, 92, 97–101 Reagan, Ronald, 20 realism, 136 Reebok, 50, 56 regulation, 70, 74–75 development of with industrialization, 83–84 innovation and, 143–148 working conditions and, 79–81 See also government relationships, 123, 126–127 rentier states, 38–39 research and development, 158 resiliency, 51–54 resource curse, 35–36, 38–39 risk, 65–66, 67–85 Chinese willing to accept, 70–71 good enough governance and, 131–132, 140–142 in labor- vs. capital-intensive production, 54 local ownership and managing, 113 partnerships and, 115–117 robotics, 9, 172–173 Rodrik, Dani, 20, 21 Royal Dutch Shell, 35–36, 137 rule of law, 135 Rushdie, Salman, 123–124, 126 Sabel, Charles, 134 Sachs, Jeffrey, 136 Safaricom, 144, 145 safety issues, 79–81 Saich, Tony, 147 Seiso, Mabereng, 115–116 Setipa, Joshua, 67–68 Shen, Mrs., 49–50, 54–57, 64, 172 Siemens, 137 Sigei, Stephen, 109–112, 126 Silk Road, 173–174 Singapore, 29 Sino-Africa Centre of Excellence (SACE) Foundation, 129–132 Sino-Africa Industrial Skill Upgrading Center, 149–150 Sino-Ethiop Associate Africa PLC, 121–123 Skyrun, 93 Smith, Adam, 165 smuggling, 40–41, 136–140 social media, 124–127 societal transformations, 91, 97–98, 101–107 sourcing raw materials, 75 South Africa, 62–63, 73, 103–104, 163 South Korea, 29, 39 special economic zones (SEZs), 137–140, 141–142, 169 standardization, 46–47 state-owned enterprises (SOEs), 43 structural justice/injustice, 159–163 Sun, Mr., 17–19, 21, 22–23, 73–74 supply chains, 55–57, 113 Taiwan, manufacturing in, 19, 26, 29, 184n6 Taiyuan clothing factory, 71–72 Tanzania, 41, 157 Teachers Service Commission (TSC), 131 technology automation and, 9, 55, 58–61, 172–173 downtime from malfunctioning, 114, 115 obsolete, 37 test and learn approach, 145–146 textile manufacturing, 61–66 Asian, 39 automation in, 58–61 clothing manufacturing vs., 52 Nigeria, 33–41 Thatcher, Margaret, 20 Thompson, E.


State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century by Francis Fukuyama

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, centre right, corporate governance, demand response, Doha Development Round, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, Hernando de Soto, information asymmetry, liberal world order, Live Aid, Nick Leeson, Pareto efficiency, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system

As van de Walle (2001) points out, the neopatrimonial regime, usually embodied in the office of the president, exists side-by-side with a Weberian rational bureaucracy, often created in colonial times, that seeks to perform routine public administration tasks. The neopatrimonial network is often threatened by the existence of the modern state sector and is its competitor for resources. The dual nature of such an African state meant that donorimposed stabilization and structural adjustment programs during the 1980s and 1990s had an unintended and counterpro- the missing dimensions of stateness 17 ductive effect. The international lending community called for cutbacks in state scope through implementation of orthodox adjustment and liberalization programs, but given their ultimate political dominance, neopatrimonial regimes used external conditionality as an excuse for cutting back on the modern state sectors while protecting and often expanding the scope of the neopatrimonial state.

Such demand when it emerges is usually the product of crisis or extraordinary circumstances that create no more than a brief window for reform. In the absence of strong domestic demand, demand for institutions must be generated externally. This can come from one of two sources. The first consists of the various conditions attached to structural adjustment, program, and project lending by external aid agencies, donors, or lenders. The second is the direct exercise of political power by outside authorities 36 state-building that have claimed the mantle of sovereignty in failed, collapsed, or occupied states.5 What we know about the techniques and prospects for generating demand for institutions from the outside is both extensive and discouraging.


pages: 365 words: 88,125

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, borderless world, business logic, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent control, Robert Solow, shareholder value, short selling, Skype, structural adjustment programs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

The sudden collapse in growth must be explained by something that happened around 1980. The prime suspect is the dramatic change in policy direction around the time. Since the late 1970s (starting with Senegal in 1979), Sub-Saharan African countries were forced to adopt free-market, free-trade policies through the conditions imposed by the so-called Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the World Bank and the IMF (and the rich countries that ultimately control them). Contrary to conventional wisdom, these policies are not good for economic development (see Thing 7). By suddenly exposing immature producers to international competition, these policies led to the collapse of what little industrial sectors these countries had managed to build up during the 1960s and 70s.

Index active economic citizenship xvi, xvii Administrative Behaviour (Simon) 173–4 Africa see Sub-Saharan Africa AIG 172–3 Air France 131 AOL 132–3 apartheid 214–16 Argentina education and growth 181 growth 73 hyperinflation 53–4 Austria geography 121 government direction 132 protectionism 70 balance of payments 97–100, 101 Baldursson, Fridrik 235 Bangladesh entrepreneurship 159–60 and microfinance 161–2, 163, 164 Bank of England 252 (second) Bank of the USA 68 Bank for International Settlements (BIS) 262 bankruptcy law 227–8 Barad, Jill 154 Bard College 172 Bateman, Milford 162 Baugur 233 Baumol, William 250 Bebchuk, Lucian 154 behaviouralist school 173–4 Belgium ethnic division 122 income inequality 144, 146 manufacturing 70, 91 R&D funding 206 standard of living 109 Benin, entrepreneurship 159 Bennett, Alan 214 Besley, Tim 246 big government 221–2, 260–61 and growth 228–30 see also government direction; industrial policy BIS (Bank for International Settlements) 262 Black, Eugene 126 Blair, Tony 82, 143, 179 borderless world 39–40 bounded rationality theory 168, 170, 173–7, 250, 254 Brazilian inflation 55 Britain industrial dominance/decline 89–91 protectionism 69–70 British Academy 246–7 British Airways 131 brownfield investment 84 Brunei 258 Buffet, Warren 30, 239 Bukharin, Nikolai 139 Bunning, Senator Jim 8 Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) 121, 200 Bush, George W. 8, 158, 159, 174 Bush Sr, George 207 business sector see corporate sector Cameroon 116 capital mobility 59–60 nationality 74–5, 76–7 capitalism Golden Age of 142, 147, 243 models 253–4 capitalists, vs. workers 140–42 captains of industry 16 Carnegie, Andrew 15 Case, Steve 132–3 Cassano, Joe 172–3 CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) 238 CDSs (credit default swaps) 238 CEO compensation see executive pay, in US Cerberus 77–8 Chavez, Hugo 68 chess, complexity of 175–6 child-labour regulation 2–3, 197 China business regulation 196 communes 216 economic officials 244 industrial predominance 89, 91, 93, 96 as planned economy 203–4 PPP income 107 protectionism and growth 63–4, 65 Chocolate mobile phone 129 Chrysler 77–8, 191 Chung, Ju-Yung 129 Churchill, Winston 253 climate factors 120–21 Clinton, Bill 143 cognitive psychology 173–4 collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) 238 collective entrepreneurship 165 communist system 200–204 Concorde project 130–31 conditions of trade 5 Confucianism 212–13 Congo (Democratic Republic) 116, 121 consumption smoothing 163 cooperatives 166 corporate sector importance 190–91 planning in 207–9 regulation effect 196–8 suspicion of 192–3 see also regulation; transnational corporations Cotton Factories Regulation Act 1819 2 credit default swaps (CDSs) 238 Crotty, Jim 236–8 culture issues 123, 212–13 Daimler-Benz 77–8 Darling, Alistair 172 de-industrialization 91 balance of payments 97–100, 101 causes 91–6 concerns 96–9 deflation, Japan 54 deliberation councils 134 Denmark cooperatives 166 protectionism 69 standard of living 104, 106, 232–3 deregulation see under regulation derivatives 239 Detroit car-makers 191–2 developing countries entrepreneurship and poverty 158–60 and free market policies 62–3, 71–3, 118–19, 261–2 policy space 262–3 digital divide 39 dishwashers 34 distribution of income see downward redistribution of income; income irregularity; upward redistribution of income domestic service 32–3 double-dip recession xiii downward redistribution of income 142–3, 146–7 Dubai 235 Duménil, Gérard 236 East Asia economic officials 249–50 educational achievements 180–81 ethnic divisions 122–3 government direction 131–2 growth 42, 56, 243–4 industrial policy 125–36, 205 École Nationale d’Administration (ENA) 133 economic crises 247 Economic Policy Institute (EPI) 144, 150 economists alternative schools 248–51 as bureaucrats 242–3 collective imagination 247 and economic growth 243–5 role in economic crises 247–8 Ecuador 73 Edgerton, David 37 Edison, Thomas 15, 165, 166 education and enterprise 188–9 higher education effect 185–8 importance 178–9 knowledge economy 183–5 mechanization effect 184–5 outcome equality 217–18 and productivity 179–81 relevance 182–3 Elizabeth II, Queen 245–7 ENA (École Nationale d’Administration) 133 enlightened self-interest 255–6 entrepreneurship, and poverty 157–8 and collective institutions 165–7 as developing country feature 158–60 finance see microfinance environmental regulations 3 EPI (Economic Policy Institute) 144, 150 equality of opportunity 210–11, 256–7 and equality of outcome 217–20, 257 and markets 213–15 socio-economic environment 215–17 equality of outcome 217–20 ethnic divisions 122–3 executive pay and non-market forces 153–6 international comparisons 152–3 relative to workers’ pay 149–53, 257 US 148–9 fair trade, vs. free trade 6–7 Fannie Mae 8 Far Eastern Economic Review 196 Federal Reserve Board (US) 171, 172, 246 female occupational structure 35–6 Fiat 78 financial crisis (2008) xiii, 155–6, 171–2, 233–4, 254 financial derivatives 239, 254–5 financial markets deregulation 234–8, 259–60 effects 239–41 efficiency 231–2, 240–41 sector growth 237–9 Finland government direction 133 income inequality 144 industrial production 100 protectionism 69, 70 R&D funding 206 welfare state and growth 229 Fischer, Stanley 54 Ford cars 191, 237 Ford, Henry 15, 200 foreign direct investment (FDI) 83–5 France and entrepreneurship 158 financial deregulation 236 government direction 132, 133–4, 135 indicative planning 204–5 protectionism 70 Frank, Robert H 151 Franklin, Benjamin 65–6, 67 Freddie Mac 8 free market boundaries 8–10 and developing countries 62–3, 71–3, 118–19, 261–2 labour see under labour nineteenth-century rhetoric 140–43 as political definition 1–2 rationale xiii–xiv, 169–70 results xiv–xv, xvi–xvii system redesign 252, 263 see also markets; neo-liberalism free trade, vs. fair trade 6–7 Fried, Jesse 154 Friedman, Milton 1, 169, 214 Galbraith, John Kenneth 16, 245 Garicano, Luis 245 Gates, Bill 165, 166, 200 General Electric (GE) 17, 45, 86, 237 General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC) 194, 237 General Motors (GM) 20, 22, 45, 80, 86, 154, 190–98 decline 193–6 financialization 237 pre-eminence 191–2 geographical factors 121 Germany blitzkrieg mobility 191 CEO remuneration 152–3 cooperatives 166 emigration 69 hyperinflation 52–4 industrial policy 205 manufacturing 90 R&D funding 206 welfare state and growth 228–9 Ghana, entrepreneurship 159 Ghosn, Carlos 75–6, 78 globalization of management 75–6 and technological change 40 GM see General Motors GMAC (General Motors Acceptance Corporation) 194, 237 Golden Age of Capitalism 142, 147, 243 Goldilocks economy 246 Goodwin, Sir Fred 156 Gosplan 145 government direction balance of results 134–6 and business information 132–4 failure examples 130–31 and market discipline 44–5, 129–30, 134 share ownership 21 success examples 125–6, 131–4 see also big government; industrial policy Grameen Bank 161–4 Grant, Ulysses 67 Great Depression 1929 24, 192, 236, 249, 252 greenfield investment 84 Greenspan, Alan 172, 246 Hamilton, Alexander 66–7, 69 Hayami, Masaru 54 Hennessy, Peter 246–7 higher education 185–8 Hirschman, Albert 249 History Boys (Bennett) 214 Hitler, Adolf 54 home country bias 78–82, 83, 86–7 Honda 135 Hong Kong 71 household appliances 34–6, 37 HSBC 172 Human relations school 47 Hungary, hyperinflation 53–4 hyperinflation 52–4 see also inflation Hyundai Group 129, 244 Iceland financial crisis 232–4, 235 foreign debt 234 standard of living 104–5 ICT (Information and Communication Technology) 39 ILO (International Labour Organization) 32, 143–4 IMF see International Monetary Fund immigration control 5, 23, 26–8, 30 income per capita income 104–11 see also downward redistribution of income; income inequality; upward redistribution of income income inequality 18, 72–3, 102, 104–5, 108, 110, 143–5, 147, 247–8, 253, 262 India 99, 121 indicative planning 205 indicative planning 204–6 Indonesia 234 industrial policy 84, 125–36, 199, 205, 242, 259, 261 see also government direction Industrial Revolution 70, 90, 243 infant industry argument 66–8, 69–70, 71–2 inflation control 51–2 and growth 54–6, 60–61 hyperinflation 52–4 and stability 56–61 Information and Communication Technology (ICT) 39 institutional quality 29–30, 112–13, 115, 117, 123–4, 165–7 interest rate control 5–6 international dollar 106–7 International Labour Organization (ILO) 32, 143–4 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 54–5, 57, 66, 72, 244, 262 SAPs 118 International Year of Microcredit 162 internet revolution 31–2 impact 36–7, 38, 39 and rationality 174 investment brownfield/greenfield 84 foreign direct investment 83–5 share 18–19 invisible reward/sanction mechanisms 48–50 Ireland financial crisis 234–5 Italy cooperatives 166 emigrants to US 103 Jackson, Andrew 68 Japan business regulation 196 CEO remuneration 152–3 deflation 54 deliberation councils 134 government direction 133–4, 135, 259 indicative planning 205 industrial policy 131, 135, 242–5 industrial production 100 production system 47, 167 protectionism 62, 70 R&D funding 206 Jefferson, Thomas 67–8, 239 job security/insecurity 20, 58–61, 108–9, 111, 225–8, 247, 253, 259 Journal of Political Economy 34 Kaldor, Nicolas 249 Keynes, John Maynard 249 Kindleberger, Charles 249 knowledge economy 183–5 Kobe Steel 42–3, 46 Kong Tze (Confucius) 212 Korea traditional 211–13 see also North Korea; South Korea Koufax, Sandy 172 Kuwait 258 labour free market rewards 23–30 job security 58–60 in manufacturing 91–2 market flexibility 52 regulation 2–3 relative price 33, 34 Latin America 32–3, 55, 73, 112, 122, 140, 196–7, 211, 245, 262 Latvia 235 Lazonick, William 20 Lenin, Vladimir 138 Levin, Jerry 133 Lévy, Dominique 236 LG Group 129, 134 liberals neo-liberalism xv, 60, 73 nineteenth-century 140–42 limited liability 12–15, 21, 228, 239, 257 Lincoln, Abraham 37, 67 List, Friedrich 249 London School of Economics 245–6 LTCM (Long-Term Capital Management) 170–71 Luxemburg, standard of living 102, 104–5, 107, 109, 232–3, 258 macro-economic stability 51–61, 240, 259, 261 Madoff, Bernie 172 Malthus, Thomas 141 managerial capitalism 14–17 Mandelson, Lord (Peter) 82–3, 87 manufacturing industry comparative dynamism 96 employment changes 91–2 importance 88–101, 257–9 productivity rise 91–6, 184–5 relative prices 94–5 statistical changes 92–3 Mao Zedong 215–16 Marchionne, Sergio 78 markets and bounded rationality theory 168, 173–6, 177, 254 conditions of trade 5 and equality of opportunity 213–15 failure theories 250 financial see financial markets government direction 44–5, 125–36 government regulation 4–6, 168–9, 176–7 participation restrictions 4 price regulations 5–6 and self-interest 44–5 see also free market Marx, Karl 14, 198, 201, 208, 249 Marxism 80, 185, 201–3 mathematics 180, 182–3 MBSs (mortgage-backed securities) 238 medicine’s popularity 222–4 Merriwether, John 171 Merton, Robert 170–71 Michelin 75–6 microfinance critique 162 and development 160–62 Microsoft 135 Minsky, Hyman 249 Monaco 258 morality, as optical illusion 48–50 Morduch, Jonathan 162 mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) 238 motivation complexity 46–7 Mugabe, Robert 54 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) 67 National Health Service (UK) 261 nationality of capital 74–87 natural resources 69, 115–16, 119–20, 121–2 neo-liberalism xv, 60, 73, 145 neo-classical school 250 see also free market Nestlé 76–7, 79 Netherlands CEO remuneration 152–3 cooperatives 166 intellectual property rights 71 protectionism 71 welfare state and growth 228–9 New Public Management School 45 New York Times 37, 151 New York University 172 Nissan 75–6, 84, 135, 214 Nobel Peace Prize 162 Prize in economics 170, 171–2, 173, 208, 246 Nobel, Alfred 170 Nokia 135, 259–60 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 67 North Korea 211 Norway government direction 132, 133, 205 standard of living 104 welfare state and growth 222, 229 Obama, Barack 149 OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) 57, 159, 229 Oh, Won-Chul 244 Ohmae, Kenichi 39 Opel 191 Opium War 9 opportunities see equality of opportunity Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 57, 159, 229 organizational economy 208–9 outcomes equality 217–20 Palin, Sarah 113 Palma, Gabriel 237 Park, Chung-Hee 129 Park, Tae-Joon 127–8 participation restrictions 4 Perot, Ross 67 Peru 219 PGAM (Platinum Grove Asset Management) 171 Philippines, education and growth 180, 181 Phoenix Venture Holdings 86 Pigou, Arthur 250 Pinochet, Augusto 245 PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) 180 Plain English Campaign 175 planned economies communist system 200–204 indicative systems 204–6 survival 199–200, 208–9 Platinum Grove Asset Management (PGAM) 171 Pohang Iron and Steel Company (POSCO) 127–8 pollution 3, 9, 169 poor individuals 28–30, 140–42, 216–18 Portes, Richard 235 Portman, Natalie 162 POSCO (Pohang Iron and Steel Company) 127–8 post-industrial society 39, 88–9, 91–2, 96, 98, 101, 257–8 Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) 118 see also SAPs PPP (purchasing power parity) 106–9 Preobrazhensky, Yevgeni 138–40, 141 price regulations 5–6 stability 51–61 Pritchett, Lant 181 private equity funds 85–6, 87 professional managers 14–22, 44–5, 166, 200 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 180 protectionism and growth 62–3, 72–3 infant industry argument 66–8, 69–70, 71–2 positive examples 63–5, 69 PRSPs see Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers purchasing power parity (PPP) 106–9 R&D see research and development (R&D) Rai, Aishwarya 162 Rania, Queen 162 rationality see bounded rationality theory RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland) 156 real demand effect 94 regulation business/corporate 196–8 child labour 2–3, 197 deregulation 234–8, 259–60 legitimacy 4–6 markets 4–6, 168–9, 176–7 price 5–6 Reinhart, Carmen 57, 59 Renault 21, 75–6 Report on the Subject of Manufactures (Hamilton) 66 The Rescuers (Disney animation) 113–14 research and development (R&D) 78–9, 87, 132, 166 funding 206 reward/sanction mechanisms 48–50 Ricardo, David 141 rich individuals 28–30, 140–42 river transport 121 Rogoff, Kenneth 57, 59 Roodman, David 162 Roosevelt, Franklin 191 Rover 86 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) 156 Rubinow, I.M. 34 Ruhr occupation 52 Rumsfeld, Donald 174–5 Rwanda 123 Santander 172 SAPs (Structural Adjustment Programs) 118, 124 Sarkozy, Nicolas 90 Scholes, Myron 170–71 Schumpeter, Joseph 16, 165–7, 249 Second World War planning 204 (second) Bank of the USA 68 self-interest 41–2, 45 critique 42–3 enlightened 255–6 invisible reward/sanction mechanisms 48–50 and market discipline 44–5 and motivation complexity 46–7 Sen, Amartya 250 Senegal 118 service industries 92–3 balance of payments 97–100, 101 comparative dynamism 94–5, 96–7 knowledge-based 98, 99 Seychelles 100 share buybacks 19–20 shareholder value maximisation 17–22 shareholders government 21 ownership of companies 11 short-term interests 11–12, 19–20 shipbuilders 219 Simon, Herbert 173–6, 208–9, 250 Singapore government direction 133 industrial production 100 PPP income 107 protectionism 70 SOEs 205 Sloan Jr, Alfred 191–2 Smith, Adam 13, 14, 15, 41, 43, 169, 239 social dumping 67 social mobility 103–4, 220 socio-economic environment 215–17 SOEs (state-owned enterprises) 127, 132, 133, 205–6 South Africa 55, 121 and apartheid 213–16 South Korea bank loans 81 economic officials 244 education and growth 181 ethnic divisions 123 financial drive 235 foreign debt 234 government direction 126–9, 133–4, 135, 136 indicative planning 205 industrial policy 125–36, 205, 242–5 inflation 55, 56 job insecurity effect 222–4, 226, 227 post-war 212–14 protectionism 62, 69, 70 R&D funding 206 regulation 196–7 Soviet Union 200–204 Spain 122 Spielberg, Steven 172 Sri Lanka 121 Stalin, Josef 139–40, 145 standard of living comparisons 105–7 US 102–11 Stanford, Alan 172 state owned enterprises (SOEs) 127, 132, 133, 205–6 steel mill subsidies 126–8 workers 219 Stiglitz, Joseph 250 Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) 118, 124 Sub-Saharan Africa 73, 112–24 culture issues 123 education and growth 181 ethnic divisions 122–3 free market policies 118–19, 262 geographical factors 121 growth rates 73, 112, 116–19 institutional quality 123 natural resources 119–20, 121–2 structural conditions 114–16, 119–24 underdevelopment 112–13, 124 Sutton, Willie 52 Sweden 15, 21–2 CEO remuneration 152 income inequality 144 industrial policy 205 industrial production 100 per capita income 104 R&D funding 206 welfare state and growth 229 Switzerland CEO remuneration 152–3 ethnic divisions 122 geography 121 higher education 185–6, 188 intellectual property rights 71 manufacturing 100, 258 protectionism 69, 71 standard of living 104–6, 232–3 Taiwan business regulation 196 economic officials 244 education and growth 180 government direction 136 indicative planning 205 protectionism 69, 70 Tanzania 116 TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) 8 tax havens 258 technological revolution 31–2, 38–40 telegraph 37–8 Telenor 164 Thatcher, Margaret 50, 225–6, 261 Time-Warner group 132–3 TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) 180, 183 Toledo, Alejandro 219 Toyota and apartheid 214 production system 47 public money bail-out 80 trade restrictions 4 transnational corporations historical debts 80 home country bias 78–82, 83, 86–7 nationality of capital 74–5, 76–7 production movement 79, 81–2 see also corporate sector Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 180, 183 trickle-down economics 137–8 and upward distribution of income 144–7 Trotsky, Leon 138 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) 8 2008 financial crisis xiii, 144, 155–6, 171–2, 197–8, 233–4, 236, , 238–9, 245–7, 249, 254 Uganda 115–16 uncertainty 174–5 unemployment 218–19 United Kingdom CEO remuneration 153, 155–6 financial deregulation 235–6, 237 NHS 261 shipbuilders 219 see also Britain United Nations 162 United States economic model 104 Federal Reserve Board 171, 172, 246 financial deregulation 235–8 immigrant expectations 103–4 income inequality 144 inequalities 107–11 protectionism and growth 64–8, 69 R&D funding 206 standard of living 102–11 steel workers 219 welfare state and growth 228–30 United States Agency for International Development (USAID) 136 university education effect 185–8 Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) 200 upward redistribution of income 143–4 and trickle-down economics 144–7 Uruguay growth 73 income inequality 144 USAID (United States Agency for International Development) 136 vacuum cleaners 34 Venezuela 144 Versailles Treaty 52 Vietnam 203–4 Volkswagen government share ownership 21 public money bail-out 80 wage gaps political determination 23–8 and protectionism 23–6, 67 wage legislation 5 Wagoner, Rick 45 Wall Street Journal 68, 83 Walpole, Robert 69–70 washing machines 31–2, 34–6 Washington, George 65, 66–7 Welch, Jack 17, 22, 45 welfare economics 250 welfare states 59, 110–43, 146–7, 215, 220, 221–30 and growth 228–30 Wilson, Charlie 192, 193 Windows Vista system 135 woollen manufacturing industry 70 work to rule 46–7 working hours 2, 7, 109–10 World Bank and free market 262 and free trade 72 and POSCO 126–8 government intervention 42, 44, 66 macro-economic stability 56 SAPs 118 WTO (World Trade Organization) 66, 262 Yes, Minister/Prime Minister (comedy series) 44 Yunus, Muhammad 161–2 Zimbabwe, hyperinflation 53–4

Index active economic citizenship xvi, xvii Administrative Behaviour (Simon) 173–4 Africa see Sub-Saharan Africa AIG 172–3 Air France 131 AOL 132–3 apartheid 214–16 Argentina education and growth 181 growth 73 hyperinflation 53–4 Austria geography 121 government direction 132 protectionism 70 balance of payments 97–100, 101 Baldursson, Fridrik 235 Bangladesh entrepreneurship 159–60 and microfinance 161–2, 163, 164 Bank of England 252 (second) Bank of the USA 68 Bank for International Settlements (BIS) 262 bankruptcy law 227–8 Barad, Jill 154 Bard College 172 Bateman, Milford 162 Baugur 233 Baumol, William 250 Bebchuk, Lucian 154 behaviouralist school 173–4 Belgium ethnic division 122 income inequality 144, 146 manufacturing 70, 91 R&D funding 206 standard of living 109 Benin, entrepreneurship 159 Bennett, Alan 214 Besley, Tim 246 big government 221–2, 260–61 and growth 228–30 see also government direction; industrial policy BIS (Bank for International Settlements) 262 Black, Eugene 126 Blair, Tony 82, 143, 179 borderless world 39–40 bounded rationality theory 168, 170, 173–7, 250, 254 Brazilian inflation 55 Britain industrial dominance/decline 89–91 protectionism 69–70 British Academy 246–7 British Airways 131 brownfield investment 84 Brunei 258 Buffet, Warren 30, 239 Bukharin, Nikolai 139 Bunning, Senator Jim 8 Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) 121, 200 Bush, George W. 8, 158, 159, 174 Bush Sr, George 207 business sector see corporate sector Cameroon 116 capital mobility 59–60 nationality 74–5, 76–7 capitalism Golden Age of 142, 147, 243 models 253–4 capitalists, vs. workers 140–42 captains of industry 16 Carnegie, Andrew 15 Case, Steve 132–3 Cassano, Joe 172–3 CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) 238 CDSs (credit default swaps) 238 CEO compensation see executive pay, in US Cerberus 77–8 Chavez, Hugo 68 chess, complexity of 175–6 child-labour regulation 2–3, 197 China business regulation 196 communes 216 economic officials 244 industrial predominance 89, 91, 93, 96 as planned economy 203–4 PPP income 107 protectionism and growth 63–4, 65 Chocolate mobile phone 129 Chrysler 77–8, 191 Chung, Ju-Yung 129 Churchill, Winston 253 climate factors 120–21 Clinton, Bill 143 cognitive psychology 173–4 collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) 238 collective entrepreneurship 165 communist system 200–204 Concorde project 130–31 conditions of trade 5 Confucianism 212–13 Congo (Democratic Republic) 116, 121 consumption smoothing 163 cooperatives 166 corporate sector importance 190–91 planning in 207–9 regulation effect 196–8 suspicion of 192–3 see also regulation; transnational corporations Cotton Factories Regulation Act 1819 2 credit default swaps (CDSs) 238 Crotty, Jim 236–8 culture issues 123, 212–13 Daimler-Benz 77–8 Darling, Alistair 172 de-industrialization 91 balance of payments 97–100, 101 causes 91–6 concerns 96–9 deflation, Japan 54 deliberation councils 134 Denmark cooperatives 166 protectionism 69 standard of living 104, 106, 232–3 deregulation see under regulation derivatives 239 Detroit car-makers 191–2 developing countries entrepreneurship and poverty 158–60 and free market policies 62–3, 71–3, 118–19, 261–2 policy space 262–3 digital divide 39 dishwashers 34 distribution of income see downward redistribution of income; income irregularity; upward redistribution of income domestic service 32–3 double-dip recession xiii downward redistribution of income 142–3, 146–7 Dubai 235 Duménil, Gérard 236 East Asia economic officials 249–50 educational achievements 180–81 ethnic divisions 122–3 government direction 131–2 growth 42, 56, 243–4 industrial policy 125–36, 205 École Nationale d’Administration (ENA) 133 economic crises 247 Economic Policy Institute (EPI) 144, 150 economists alternative schools 248–51 as bureaucrats 242–3 collective imagination 247 and economic growth 243–5 role in economic crises 247–8 Ecuador 73 Edgerton, David 37 Edison, Thomas 15, 165, 166 education and enterprise 188–9 higher education effect 185–8 importance 178–9 knowledge economy 183–5 mechanization effect 184–5 outcome equality 217–18 and productivity 179–81 relevance 182–3 Elizabeth II, Queen 245–7 ENA (École Nationale d’Administration) 133 enlightened self-interest 255–6 entrepreneurship, and poverty 157–8 and collective institutions 165–7 as developing country feature 158–60 finance see microfinance environmental regulations 3 EPI (Economic Policy Institute) 144, 150 equality of opportunity 210–11, 256–7 and equality of outcome 217–20, 257 and markets 213–15 socio-economic environment 215–17 equality of outcome 217–20 ethnic divisions 122–3 executive pay and non-market forces 153–6 international comparisons 152–3 relative to workers’ pay 149–53, 257 US 148–9 fair trade, vs. free trade 6–7 Fannie Mae 8 Far Eastern Economic Review 196 Federal Reserve Board (US) 171, 172, 246 female occupational structure 35–6 Fiat 78 financial crisis (2008) xiii, 155–6, 171–2, 233–4, 254 financial derivatives 239, 254–5 financial markets deregulation 234–8, 259–60 effects 239–41 efficiency 231–2, 240–41 sector growth 237–9 Finland government direction 133 income inequality 144 industrial production 100 protectionism 69, 70 R&D funding 206 welfare state and growth 229 Fischer, Stanley 54 Ford cars 191, 237 Ford, Henry 15, 200 foreign direct investment (FDI) 83–5 France and entrepreneurship 158 financial deregulation 236 government direction 132, 133–4, 135 indicative planning 204–5 protectionism 70 Frank, Robert H 151 Franklin, Benjamin 65–6, 67 Freddie Mac 8 free market boundaries 8–10 and developing countries 62–3, 71–3, 118–19, 261–2 labour see under labour nineteenth-century rhetoric 140–43 as political definition 1–2 rationale xiii–xiv, 169–70 results xiv–xv, xvi–xvii system redesign 252, 263 see also markets; neo-liberalism free trade, vs. fair trade 6–7 Fried, Jesse 154 Friedman, Milton 1, 169, 214 Galbraith, John Kenneth 16, 245 Garicano, Luis 245 Gates, Bill 165, 166, 200 General Electric (GE) 17, 45, 86, 237 General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC) 194, 237 General Motors (GM) 20, 22, 45, 80, 86, 154, 190–98 decline 193–6 financialization 237 pre-eminence 191–2 geographical factors 121 Germany blitzkrieg mobility 191 CEO remuneration 152–3 cooperatives 166 emigration 69 hyperinflation 52–4 industrial policy 205 manufacturing 90 R&D funding 206 welfare state and growth 228–9 Ghana, entrepreneurship 159 Ghosn, Carlos 75–6, 78 globalization of management 75–6 and technological change 40 GM see General Motors GMAC (General Motors Acceptance Corporation) 194, 237 Golden Age of Capitalism 142, 147, 243 Goldilocks economy 246 Goodwin, Sir Fred 156 Gosplan 145 government direction balance of results 134–6 and business information 132–4 failure examples 130–31 and market discipline 44–5, 129–30, 134 share ownership 21 success examples 125–6, 131–4 see also big government; industrial policy Grameen Bank 161–4 Grant, Ulysses 67 Great Depression 1929 24, 192, 236, 249, 252 greenfield investment 84 Greenspan, Alan 172, 246 Hamilton, Alexander 66–7, 69 Hayami, Masaru 54 Hennessy, Peter 246–7 higher education 185–8 Hirschman, Albert 249 History Boys (Bennett) 214 Hitler, Adolf 54 home country bias 78–82, 83, 86–7 Honda 135 Hong Kong 71 household appliances 34–6, 37 HSBC 172 Human relations school 47 Hungary, hyperinflation 53–4 hyperinflation 52–4 see also inflation Hyundai Group 129, 244 Iceland financial crisis 232–4, 235 foreign debt 234 standard of living 104–5 ICT (Information and Communication Technology) 39 ILO (International Labour Organization) 32, 143–4 IMF see International Monetary Fund immigration control 5, 23, 26–8, 30 income per capita income 104–11 see also downward redistribution of income; income inequality; upward redistribution of income income inequality 18, 72–3, 102, 104–5, 108, 110, 143–5, 147, 247–8, 253, 262 India 99, 121 indicative planning 205 indicative planning 204–6 Indonesia 234 industrial policy 84, 125–36, 199, 205, 242, 259, 261 see also government direction Industrial Revolution 70, 90, 243 infant industry argument 66–8, 69–70, 71–2 inflation control 51–2 and growth 54–6, 60–61 hyperinflation 52–4 and stability 56–61 Information and Communication Technology (ICT) 39 institutional quality 29–30, 112–13, 115, 117, 123–4, 165–7 interest rate control 5–6 international dollar 106–7 International Labour Organization (ILO) 32, 143–4 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 54–5, 57, 66, 72, 244, 262 SAPs 118 International Year of Microcredit 162 internet revolution 31–2 impact 36–7, 38, 39 and rationality 174 investment brownfield/greenfield 84 foreign direct investment 83–5 share 18–19 invisible reward/sanction mechanisms 48–50 Ireland financial crisis 234–5 Italy cooperatives 166 emigrants to US 103 Jackson, Andrew 68 Japan business regulation 196 CEO remuneration 152–3 deflation 54 deliberation councils 134 government direction 133–4, 135, 259 indicative planning 205 industrial policy 131, 135, 242–5 industrial production 100 production system 47, 167 protectionism 62, 70 R&D funding 206 Jefferson, Thomas 67–8, 239 job security/insecurity 20, 58–61, 108–9, 111, 225–8, 247, 253, 259 Journal of Political Economy 34 Kaldor, Nicolas 249 Keynes, John Maynard 249 Kindleberger, Charles 249 knowledge economy 183–5 Kobe Steel 42–3, 46 Kong Tze (Confucius) 212 Korea traditional 211–13 see also North Korea; South Korea Koufax, Sandy 172 Kuwait 258 labour free market rewards 23–30 job security 58–60 in manufacturing 91–2 market flexibility 52 regulation 2–3 relative price 33, 34 Latin America 32–3, 55, 73, 112, 122, 140, 196–7, 211, 245, 262 Latvia 235 Lazonick, William 20 Lenin, Vladimir 138 Levin, Jerry 133 Lévy, Dominique 236 LG Group 129, 134 liberals neo-liberalism xv, 60, 73 nineteenth-century 140–42 limited liability 12–15, 21, 228, 239, 257 Lincoln, Abraham 37, 67 List, Friedrich 249 London School of Economics 245–6 LTCM (Long-Term Capital Management) 170–71 Luxemburg, standard of living 102, 104–5, 107, 109, 232–3, 258 macro-economic stability 51–61, 240, 259, 261 Madoff, Bernie 172 Malthus, Thomas 141 managerial capitalism 14–17 Mandelson, Lord (Peter) 82–3, 87 manufacturing industry comparative dynamism 96 employment changes 91–2 importance 88–101, 257–9 productivity rise 91–6, 184–5 relative prices 94–5 statistical changes 92–3 Mao Zedong 215–16 Marchionne, Sergio 78 markets and bounded rationality theory 168, 173–6, 177, 254 conditions of trade 5 and equality of opportunity 213–15 failure theories 250 financial see financial markets government direction 44–5, 125–36 government regulation 4–6, 168–9, 176–7 participation restrictions 4 price regulations 5–6 and self-interest 44–5 see also free market Marx, Karl 14, 198, 201, 208, 249 Marxism 80, 185, 201–3 mathematics 180, 182–3 MBSs (mortgage-backed securities) 238 medicine’s popularity 222–4 Merriwether, John 171 Merton, Robert 170–71 Michelin 75–6 microfinance critique 162 and development 160–62 Microsoft 135 Minsky, Hyman 249 Monaco 258 morality, as optical illusion 48–50 Morduch, Jonathan 162 mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) 238 motivation complexity 46–7 Mugabe, Robert 54 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) 67 National Health Service (UK) 261 nationality of capital 74–87 natural resources 69, 115–16, 119–20, 121–2 neo-liberalism xv, 60, 73, 145 neo-classical school 250 see also free market Nestlé 76–7, 79 Netherlands CEO remuneration 152–3 cooperatives 166 intellectual property rights 71 protectionism 71 welfare state and growth 228–9 New Public Management School 45 New York Times 37, 151 New York University 172 Nissan 75–6, 84, 135, 214 Nobel Peace Prize 162 Prize in economics 170, 171–2, 173, 208, 246 Nobel, Alfred 170 Nokia 135, 259–60 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 67 North Korea 211 Norway government direction 132, 133, 205 standard of living 104 welfare state and growth 222, 229 Obama, Barack 149 OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) 57, 159, 229 Oh, Won-Chul 244 Ohmae, Kenichi 39 Opel 191 Opium War 9 opportunities see equality of opportunity Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 57, 159, 229 organizational economy 208–9 outcomes equality 217–20 Palin, Sarah 113 Palma, Gabriel 237 Park, Chung-Hee 129 Park, Tae-Joon 127–8 participation restrictions 4 Perot, Ross 67 Peru 219 PGAM (Platinum Grove Asset Management) 171 Philippines, education and growth 180, 181 Phoenix Venture Holdings 86 Pigou, Arthur 250 Pinochet, Augusto 245 PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) 180 Plain English Campaign 175 planned economies communist system 200–204 indicative systems 204–6 survival 199–200, 208–9 Platinum Grove Asset Management (PGAM) 171 Pohang Iron and Steel Company (POSCO) 127–8 pollution 3, 9, 169 poor individuals 28–30, 140–42, 216–18 Portes, Richard 235 Portman, Natalie 162 POSCO (Pohang Iron and Steel Company) 127–8 post-industrial society 39, 88–9, 91–2, 96, 98, 101, 257–8 Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) 118 see also SAPs PPP (purchasing power parity) 106–9 Preobrazhensky, Yevgeni 138–40, 141 price regulations 5–6 stability 51–61 Pritchett, Lant 181 private equity funds 85–6, 87 professional managers 14–22, 44–5, 166, 200 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 180 protectionism and growth 62–3, 72–3 infant industry argument 66–8, 69–70, 71–2 positive examples 63–5, 69 PRSPs see Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers purchasing power parity (PPP) 106–9 R&D see research and development (R&D) Rai, Aishwarya 162 Rania, Queen 162 rationality see bounded rationality theory RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland) 156 real demand effect 94 regulation business/corporate 196–8 child labour 2–3, 197 deregulation 234–8, 259–60 legitimacy 4–6 markets 4–6, 168–9, 176–7 price 5–6 Reinhart, Carmen 57, 59 Renault 21, 75–6 Report on the Subject of Manufactures (Hamilton) 66 The Rescuers (Disney animation) 113–14 research and development (R&D) 78–9, 87, 132, 166 funding 206 reward/sanction mechanisms 48–50 Ricardo, David 141 rich individuals 28–30, 140–42 river transport 121 Rogoff, Kenneth 57, 59 Roodman, David 162 Roosevelt, Franklin 191 Rover 86 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) 156 Rubinow, I.M. 34 Ruhr occupation 52 Rumsfeld, Donald 174–5 Rwanda 123 Santander 172 SAPs (Structural Adjustment Programs) 118, 124 Sarkozy, Nicolas 90 Scholes, Myron 170–71 Schumpeter, Joseph 16, 165–7, 249 Second World War planning 204 (second) Bank of the USA 68 self-interest 41–2, 45 critique 42–3 enlightened 255–6 invisible reward/sanction mechanisms 48–50 and market discipline 44–5 and motivation complexity 46–7 Sen, Amartya 250 Senegal 118 service industries 92–3 balance of payments 97–100, 101 comparative dynamism 94–5, 96–7 knowledge-based 98, 99 Seychelles 100 share buybacks 19–20 shareholder value maximisation 17–22 shareholders government 21 ownership of companies 11 short-term interests 11–12, 19–20 shipbuilders 219 Simon, Herbert 173–6, 208–9, 250 Singapore government direction 133 industrial production 100 PPP income 107 protectionism 70 SOEs 205 Sloan Jr, Alfred 191–2 Smith, Adam 13, 14, 15, 41, 43, 169, 239 social dumping 67 social mobility 103–4, 220 socio-economic environment 215–17 SOEs (state-owned enterprises) 127, 132, 133, 205–6 South Africa 55, 121 and apartheid 213–16 South Korea bank loans 81 economic officials 244 education and growth 181 ethnic divisions 123 financial drive 235 foreign debt 234 government direction 126–9, 133–4, 135, 136 indicative planning 205 industrial policy 125–36, 205, 242–5 inflation 55, 56 job insecurity effect 222–4, 226, 227 post-war 212–14 protectionism 62, 69, 70 R&D funding 206 regulation 196–7 Soviet Union 200–204 Spain 122 Spielberg, Steven 172 Sri Lanka 121 Stalin, Josef 139–40, 145 standard of living comparisons 105–7 US 102–11 Stanford, Alan 172 state owned enterprises (SOEs) 127, 132, 133, 205–6 steel mill subsidies 126–8 workers 219 Stiglitz, Joseph 250 Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) 118, 124 Sub-Saharan Africa 73, 112–24 culture issues 123 education and growth 181 ethnic divisions 122–3 free market policies 118–19, 262 geographical factors 121 growth rates 73, 112, 116–19 institutional quality 123 natural resources 119–20, 121–2 structural conditions 114–16, 119–24 underdevelopment 112–13, 124 Sutton, Willie 52 Sweden 15, 21–2 CEO remuneration 152 income inequality 144 industrial policy 205 industrial production 100 per capita income 104 R&D funding 206 welfare state and growth 229 Switzerland CEO remuneration 152–3 ethnic divisions 122 geography 121 higher education 185–6, 188 intellectual property rights 71 manufacturing 100, 258 protectionism 69, 71 standard of living 104–6, 232–3 Taiwan business regulation 196 economic officials 244 education and growth 180 government direction 136 indicative planning 205 protectionism 69, 70 Tanzania 116 TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) 8 tax havens 258 technological revolution 31–2, 38–40 telegraph 37–8 Telenor 164 Thatcher, Margaret 50, 225–6, 261 Time-Warner group 132–3 TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) 180, 183 Toledo, Alejandro 219 Toyota and apartheid 214 production system 47 public money bail-out 80 trade restrictions 4 transnational corporations historical debts 80 home country bias 78–82, 83, 86–7 nationality of capital 74–5, 76–7 production movement 79, 81–2 see also corporate sector Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 180, 183 trickle-down economics 137–8 and upward distribution of income 144–7 Trotsky, Leon 138 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) 8 2008 financial crisis xiii, 144, 155–6, 171–2, 197–8, 233–4, 236, , 238–9, 245–7, 249, 254 Uganda 115–16 uncertainty 174–5 unemployment 218–19 United Kingdom CEO remuneration 153, 155–6 financial deregulation 235–6, 237 NHS 261 shipbuilders 219 see also Britain United Nations 162 United States economic model 104 Federal Reserve Board 171, 172, 246 financial deregulation 235–8 immigrant expectations 103–4 income inequality 144 inequalities 107–11 protectionism and growth 64–8, 69 R&D funding 206 standard of living 102–11 steel workers 219 welfare state and growth 228–30 United States Agency for International Development (USAID) 136 university education effect 185–8 Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) 200 upward redistribution of income 143–4 and trickle-down economics 144–7 Uruguay growth 73 income inequality 144 USAID (United States Agency for International Development) 136 vacuum cleaners 34 Venezuela 144 Versailles Treaty 52 Vietnam 203–4 Volkswagen government share ownership 21 public money bail-out 80 wage gaps political determination 23–8 and protectionism 23–6, 67 wage legislation 5 Wagoner, Rick 45 Wall Street Journal 68, 83 Walpole, Robert 69–70 washing machines 31–2, 34–6 Washington, George 65, 66–7 Welch, Jack 17, 22, 45 welfare economics 250 welfare states 59, 110–43, 146–7, 215, 220, 221–30 and growth 228–30 Wilson, Charlie 192, 193 Windows Vista system 135 woollen manufacturing industry 70 work to rule 46–7 working hours 2, 7, 109–10 World Bank and free market 262 and free trade 72 and POSCO 126–8 government intervention 42, 44, 66 macro-economic stability 56 SAPs 118 WTO (World Trade Organization) 66, 262 Yes, Minister/Prime Minister (comedy series) 44 Yunus, Muhammad 161–2 Zimbabwe, hyperinflation 53–4


pages: 605 words: 169,366

The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations by Sebastian Mallaby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, capital controls, clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, export processing zone, failed state, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentleman farmer, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, microcredit, oil shock, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, the new new thing, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Yom Kippur War

The more it lent money to bad debtors, the more indebted they became—and the greater the calamity would be if one of these bad debtors defaulted. Besides, the more the Bank was forced to keep dud countries from defaulting by plying them with defensive loans, the less it could direct money to fresh openings in the battle against poverty. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Bank’s so-called structural-adjustment programs were failing to promote adjustment because that was often not their real purpose; they were really about getting fresh loans to Africa so that Africans could repay old ones. Time and again, the Bank would give these defensive loans a structural-adjustment coating by projecting that they would kick-start growth; time and again, these projections proved wrong, discrediting structural adjustment still further.

Another part of the Bank’s post-structural-adjustment formula was the shift toward participatory planning of the sort pioneered in Uganda. This innovation turned out less well than the shift away from conditions. From the time of his first trip to Africa, Wolfensohn grasped how the development dialogue needed to be broadened. Part of the reason why structural-adjustment programs were seldom implemented was that they lacked popular legitimacy. Uganda-style participatory planning is one way of building legitimacy for a national development strategy, just as consulting farmers on rural projects boosts the chances of the projects’ working. But participation is no magic elixir.

A later version of the same report, “Resettlement and Development,” can be viewed at http://www.wds.world bank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/1996/03/01/000009265_3980728143956/Rendered/PDF/multi_page.pdf. 44. For an example of the critical take, see Caufield, Masters of Illusion, p. 262. For an example of a balanced one, see “Moving People,” The Economist, April 23, 1994, p. 48. 45. Meanwhile, Christian Aid declared that the Bank’s structural-adjustment programs “are damaging the poorest people in debt burdened developing countries.” 46. Mark Malloch Brown interview, December 5, 2002. 47. Ibid. CHAPTER THREE: THE RENAISSANCE PRESIDENT 1. “The Salsa at the Summit: Kennedy Center Stages a Show in Miami,” by Eric Brace, The Washington Post, December 10, 1994, p.


Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Caribbean Basin Initiative, classic study, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, land reform, land tenure, long peace, mass incarceration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, price stability, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

There is, however, one bright spot, Ron Suskind reports in a front-page Wall Street Journal article headlined “Made Safe by Marines, Grenada Now is Haven for Offshore Banks.” The economy may be “in terrible economic shape,” as the head of a local investment firm and member of Parliament observes—thanks to USAID-run structural adjustment programs, the Journal fails to add. But the capital “has become the Casablanca of the Caribbean, a fast-growing haven for money laundering, tax evasion and assorted financial fraud,” with 118 offshore banks, one for every 64 residents. Lawyers, accountants, and some businessmen are doing well; as, doubtless, are the foreign bankers, money launderers, and drug lords, safe from the clutches of the carefully crafted “drug war.”25 The US liberation of Panama recorded a similar triumph.

President Callejas concedes that these policies have had “a negative effect on the vast majority of the population”; but, CAR observes, he “is willing to pay this price, however, to satisfy international lenders and continue promoting a free market economy.” Callejas and his associates, needless to add, are not those who “pay the price.” In El Salvador, 90 percent of the population live in poverty and only 40 percent have steady employment. The 1990 structural adjustment program put 25,000 more out of work and substantially reduced exports, and despite increase in minimum salaries, “the price of the basic family basket far outstrips workers’ income.” Almost 80 percent of private bank loans go to large businesses; of agricultural loans, 60 percent went to coffee growers, 3 percent to small-scale basic grain producers.

These enterprises furnished about 40 percent of Haitian exports (100 percent having been primary commodities in 1960), though limited employment or other benefits for Haitians, apart from new opportunities for enrichment for the traditional elite. In the 1980s, IMF Fundamentalism began to take its customary toll as the economy deteriorated under the impact of the structural adjustment programs, which caused agricultural production to decline along with investment, trade and consumption. Poverty became still more terrible. By the time “Baby Doc” Duvalier was driven out in 1986, 60 percent of the population had an annual per capita income of $60 or less according to the World Bank, child malnutrition had soared, the rate of infant mortality was shockingly high, and the country had become an ecological and human disaster, perhaps beyond hope of recovery.


pages: 537 words: 99,778

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement by Amy Lang, Daniel Lang/levitsky

activist lawyer, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bonus culture, British Empire, capitalist realism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, different worldview, facts on the ground, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, housing justice, Kibera, late capitalism, lolcat, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, plutocrats, Port of Oakland, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Slavoj Žižek, social contagion, structural adjustment programs, the medium is the message, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor

These models share Occupy’s approach of building towards an unknown other world through continuous practice, perhaps best summarized in the words of Antonio Machado adopted as a motto by many Zapatista-inspired groups: se hace el camino al andar – ‘we make the road by walking’. Just as the interweaving of recent local and international influences on Occupy/Decolonize reflects resistance to neoliberal economics, to Structural Adjustment Programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund, and to ‘austerity’ budgets both within the US and elsewhere, so too were the local post-World War Two movements which make up the movement’s earlier prehistory intertwined with those abroad – the US face of anti-colonial struggles from Vietnam to Algeria to South Africa, student uprisings from Paris to Tokyo to Mexico City, and so on.

What they needed were the resources and the low-cost labor they were used to from their colonies, and just enough of the world wealthy enough to buy things. The mercenary lending practices of these banks is infamous; eye-watering rates of interest and conditions which have established the so-called first, second and third worlds. The IMF imposes Structural Adjustment Programs on its debtors, effectively overriding any attempt at democracy. Yes, you can have this loan – but you will need to sell off all of your public services, slash public spending, let foreign investors buy up your land… oh and don’t open this one up to a vote. What then happens? The obvious: more people in the country fall into poverty as they lose their jobs, they can’t afford to send their children to private school and the state can no longer afford to run an education system, health is privatized so people start dying of treatable illnesses – and you have a call for foreign aid to help educate the children, heal the sick and feed the starving.

175, 188-91 IMF see International Monetary Fund Immigrant Workers’ Rights Solidarity group 141, 162, 163 immigrants 22, 64, 144, 147, 296 rights 56 inclusivity in Occupy/Decolonize 21, 22, 289-90 LGBTQ 125, 129-32 people of color 95-6, 105, 118, 147-9 India 296 indigenous peoples 86, 109, 141, 147, 148, 150-3, 164-5, 195, 291 indignadxs 204, 277, 295, 298 information 26-46, 92 see also libraries and online resources infrastructure at Occupy/Decolonize sites 253-76 international links 204, 241, 274, 277, 278-9 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 21, 44, 202, 285 Irache (on 15-M March) 298, 299 Iran 295 Iraq 16, 48, 67-9, 243, 296, 297 Ireland 43, 233, 296 Islamic Labor Caucus 147 Israel 248, 295 Italy 21, 43, 64, 229 Jackson, Jesse 263 Jaffe, Sarah 12, 197, 213, 253, 254 Japan 21, 237 Jeannie (at Occupy LA) 218, 220 Jen-Mei Wu 196 Johnson, Joyce Hobson 57 Johnson, Nelson 57 Johnson, Thomas 151 Johnson City, US 72, 73-4 Johnston, Angus 72, 75 Jones, Van 97 jóvenes en resistencia alternativa 63, 65 JP Morgan Chase 148 Just Cause/Causa Justa 148 justice system 50, 95 Kali (at Occupy Oakland) 94, 96 Katehi, Linda PB 225, 246-7 Kathleen (at Occupy LA) 220 Kelly, Ray 254 Kelsey-Fry, Jamie 13 Kendrick, Chris 188, 190 Kennedy, Mark 294 Kibera, Kenya 72, 88, 89 Kim, Richard 26, 27 Kim, Tammy 141, 161 King, Martin Luther, Jr 17, 194, 203, 272 Kingsolver, Barbara 72, 73 kitchens see food and kitchens Klein, Naomi 26, 43, 261 Koch brothers 224 Konczal, Mike 10, 250 Konvergencia Gráfica 65 Korematsu, Fred 195 Kucinich, Dennis 98 labor rights 18, 49, 50, 56, 58, 73, 89, 241 Lacan, Jacques 41 Lang, Amy Schrager 13, 15 Lang, Emily 13 Lang/Levitsky, Daniel 13, 15 language 39-42 languages 148 see also deaf sign language law making 238-9 Lawson, James, Jnr 57 Lawson, Phillip 57 Lee, Barbara 98 Lee, Ed 203 Lee, Jenny 84, 85 legal support 75, 115 Lewis, John 147 LGBTQ 56, 125, 129-30 and Occupy/Decolonize 125, 129-32 rights 19, 54 violence against 131, 168 Liberty Plaza 154 see also Occupy Wall Street and Zuccotti Park, New York libraries 22, 28, 48, 61-2, 155, 191, 215, 217, 224, 238, 239, 240, 257 Lincoln, Abraham 230 listening, power of 127 Liu, Kenji 175, 194 living practices change in 19, 24-5, 45, 108-9, 156 Livingston, Ira 26, 31 local protests 201 themes 197, 206-12 London, UK 279, 291, 294 Longview, US 225, 249 Lorde, Audre 36, 123, 196 Los Angeles, US 57, 99, 104-7, 148, 201, 216-20, 225 low end theory (blogger) 141, 171 Ludd, Ned 292 Luxemburg, Rosa 235-6, 244 Lydon, Jason 271 Lynchburg, US 57 Lynd, Staughton 9, 226 Maathai, Wangari 89 Machado, Antonio 21 Macharia, Keguro 72, 88 Maclean, Steven 277, 289 Madrid, Spain 298-300 Maharawal, Manissa McCleave 10, 141, 154, 162 Malcolm X 195 Mandela, Nelson 232 Mann, Larisa 99, 108, 197, 221 Marcus, Sara 10, 12, 253, 263 Marcuse, Peter 167 Marea Creciente México 65 marginalization see exclusion from Occupy/Decolonize Mason, JW 251 McCain, John 76, 148 McChesney, Robert W. 110 McDonald’s 120, 155 McEllrath, Robert 248 media 28, 47-71, 145, 155, 224, 246, 285 coverage of Occupy/Decolonize 93, 110, 126, 133-7, 162, 172, 213, 255 medical care and supplies 30, 60, 110, 217, 220, 240, 256, 259, 263 Mehserle, Johannes 65, 95, 171, 172, 210, 239 Meister, Bob 242 M11 protests 102, 296 Mendoza, Kerry-anne 277, 283 mental illness 119, 127, 130, 208, 271, 273, 275, 284 Mexico 21, 63-5, 89, 224, 229, 230 Miami, US 64 microphone, people’s see people’s microphone Mike (Wordpress.com blogger) 110 military occupations 16 Miller, Jennifer 42 M’Intosh, William 151 Mitchell, David 8 Mohammad, Yannar 69 Mohawk, John 150 money 199, 255 Moore, Michael 261 Mortville Declaration of Independence 47, 54 mountaintop removal 73 Move On 97, 98 Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST) 20 Mubarak, Hosni 48, 297 Mullen, Bill V. 13 music 90, 111, 131 Myles, Eileen 14 myth-making 291-4 Nairobi, Kenya 72, 88, 89 naming Occupy/Decolonize 16-17, 201, 202 narcotics 64 New Bottom Line 148, 250 New York, US 76, 147, 201, 223, 241 see also Occupy Wall Street New Zealand 296 Nietzsche, Friedrich 242 Nigeria 277, 305-8 9/11 attacks 44, 229 No Borders 19, 296 No M11 102 No One Leaves 250, 251 noise statutes 115 nonviolence 8, 44, 47, 56, 202, 230, 232, 290, 299 civil disobedience 168 peaceable assembly 49, 50, 207, 245 Oakland, US see Occupy Oakland Obama, Barack 39, 76, 88, 152, 204, 272 Occupation of New York City, Declaration of 18, 47, 49-51, 309 revisions 141, 157-60, 162 Occupy Albuquerque 147, 195 Occupy Atlanta 147 Occupy Baltimore 47, 54 Occupy Boston 108-10, 125, 128, 148, 165, 271, 272-3, 275 Occupy Dallas 257-8 Occupy DC 72, 88-90 Occupy Denver 72, 85, 141, 150-3, 165 Occupy Detroit 82, 83, 85-7, 118, 201 Occupy Fort Worth 257 Occupy Halloween 29 Occupy Harlem 147 Occupy the Hood 147, 303 Occupy Johnson City 72, 73-4 Occupy London 277, 279, 291, 293-4 Occupy Los Angeles 99, 104-7, 148, 201 disability access 216-20 Occupy Oakland 29, 60, 83, 92-8, 126-7, 148, 162, 175, 240, 267-9 eviction 188-91, 269 General Strike 47, 58, 63, 225, 234-44 local protest theme 197, 206-12 media coverage 133-7 and police 59, 63, 65, 134, 137, 171-3, 188, 191, 204, 206-7, 211, 238 solidarity with 47, 58-60, 63-5 Occupy Paris 201 Occupy Philly 194 Occupy for Prisoners 276 Occupy San Francisco 83 Occupy Seattle 201 Occupy Sesame Street 175, 176 Occupy Student Debt 47, 52-3 Occupy Syracuse 201 Occupy Together 86, 150, 164, 166, 167 Occupy Vancouver 141, 164, 167 Occupy Wall Street (OWS) 8, 27-30, 79-82, 100-3, 108, 154-60, 165, 240 arts and culture 14, 27-9, 37, 177, 181-2 declarations and statements 18, 47, 49-51, 141, 157-60, 162, 309 donations to 30, 114, 156, 241, 256, 257 duration 44, 202 Egypt delegation 70-1 evictions 15, 162 General Assembly 15, 50, 75, 99, 112-116, 119, 156, 254, 266 infrastructure 254-9 organizers’ meetings 116-9 People of Color Caucus 118, 121, 130, 162 people’s microphone 14, 30, 40, 43, 81, 101, 113, 158, 260-2, 266 and police 15, 29, 44, 48, 58, 115, 118, 123, 138-9, 154, 155, 162, 214, 215, 254, 263, 265 principles and grievances 47, 49-51 solidarity with 47, 56-7, 61-2 Spokes Council 99, 116, 118, 121 working groups 15, 22, 28, 30, 75, 113, 114-15, 120, 124, 138, 156, 169 Occupy Youngstown 227 Octopi meme 177 Ogawa, Frank H 195 oil dependency 50 Okubo, Mine 195 older people 18, 155, 286 see also Council of Elders Olin, Lenny 13 Olsen, Scott 65, 173, 238 online resources 12, 16, 302 blogs 72, 79-84, 110, 162, 171, 305 Facebook 141, 195, 216, 300, 305 Twitter 31, 76, 77, 216, 222, 263, 293, 300 video feeds 28, 263 Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq 69 organizers’ meetings 116-19 Orwell, George 280, 282 Oscar (at Occupy Oakland) 93 Oscar Grant Plaza, Oakland 59 see also Occupy Oakland and Frank Ogawa Plaza overseas aid 284-5 OWS see Occupy Wall Street Oxleas Wood 295 Palestine 16 Paretsky, Sara 198, 223 Paris, France 9, 19, 21, 201 Parks, Rosa 8 participatory democracy 8, 19, 21, 49, 50, 105, 300-2 see also consensus; hand signals and people’s microphone Paul, Ron 202 Paulina, Lily 13 Payne, Charles 233 peace movement 56, 295 Peace Zones for Life 86 Peltier, Leonard 152 people of color (POC) 22, 23, 88-90, 97, 110, 210, 228, 268, 274, 303 class divisions 142, 171-4 and justice system 95 and Occupy/Decolonize 95-6, 105, 118, 121, 130, 141, 143-9, 154-63 and violence 121-4 people’s microphone 14, 30, 40, 43, 73, 81, 101, 113, 158, 191, 260-2, 266 Pepper Spray Cop 10, 178-9, 225, 245 percentages 176 1% 22, 27, 43, 54, 58, 59, 67-9, 70, 102, 105, 144, 149, 184, 191, 200, 203, 224, 232, 248, 250, 273 10% (top) 274, 276; (bottom) 275 20% (bottom) 274, 276 20% (disabled persons) 216 37% (immigrants) 22 52/53% (women) 22, 91, 128 67% (people of color) 22 99% 22, 27, 43, 67, 69, 71, 72, 74, 91, 105, 128, 130, 144, 145, 148, 149, 161, 166, 184, 191, 194, 200, 203, 208, 213, 224, 232, 248, 250, 253, 255, 273, 275, 281, 297 performance art 28 Petrus, James 66 pharmaceutical industry 50 Philadelphia, US 57, 194 Philippines Airlines Employees’ Association 241 Phillips, Morrigan 11, 253, 270 Picture the Homeless 20 Pike, John 10, 225, 245 pink tide 204 POC see people of color poetry 14, 28 police 50, 129, 168, 195, 221, 232, 237, 275, 281, 296 alternatives to 65, 86, 168 art images of 178-9 death of Oscar Grant 65, 95, 171, 172, 210, 239 at 15-M 300 at Oaxaca Commune, Mexico 65 at Occupy London 293-4 at Occupy Los Angeles 105-6, 220 at Occupy Oakland 59, 63, 65, 134, 137, 171-3, 188, 191, 204, 206-7, 211, 238 at Occupy Wall Street 15, 44, 48, 115, 118, 123, 138-9, 154, 155, 162, 214, 215, 254, 263, 265 at University of California Davis 10, 178, 225, 245, 246 political empowerment 31-42 politics change in 203-5, 241 corporate influence 15, 18, 43, 49-51, 59, 76, 144, 271 election monitoring 70-1 port blockades 63, 225, 243, 248-9 Port Huron Statement, 1962 17 posters 28, 148, 181-3, 194-6, 204, 311 poverty 18, 253, 270-6 Prague, Czech Republic 9, 64 Prashad, Vijay 167, 197, 203 prisoners 50, 56, 95, 96, 152, 195, 232, 272, 275-6 privacy, personal 50 privatization 18 of daily living 99, 108 of education 43, 242, 246-7 of public space 15 of social security 43 projections 192-3 public documents from Occupy/Decolonize 47-71 public health see sanitation public spaces privatization of 15 reclamation of 16, 19-20, 255 renaming 175, 194-6 state prohibition of public use 237-8 see also under named public spaces Pulse Working Group 115 puppetry 27, 28-9, 192-3, 263, 265, 266 Quan, Jean 203, 207 Quattrochi, Gina 132 Quebec, Canada 229 queer camp Mortville 47, 54 Queller, Jane 13 Quinn, Daniel 101 Rabasa, José 66 racial diversity see indigenous peoples; people of color and white people Radical Activist Homeless Kicking Ass (RAHKA) 119 Raphael, Molly 61 rats 133-5 Reagon, Bernice Johnson 57 Rebuild the Dream 97 Red (medic, at Occupy Wall Street) 256, 259 Reed, Ishmael 171, 172 Regeneración Radio 65 representation see inclusivity in Occupy/Decolonize Reyes Arias, Alejandro 66 Rhassan, Malik 147 Richmond, Michael 277, 291 Ridgley, Jen 13 Rising Tide 65 roads protests 295-6 Robbins, Jamieson 257 Robin Hood 292 Romero, Oscar 230 Romney, Mitt 251, 272 Rosenthal, Emma 10, 197, 216 Ruiz Ortiz, Ulises 65 Rukeyser, Muriel 21 Russia/Soviet Union 9, 232, 235 Ryan (at Occupy LA) 220 Safer Spaces Working Group 124, 138, 156 Said, Edward 305 San Diego, US 147 San Francisco, US 57, 58, 83, 204, 210 sanitation 22, 30, 133-7, 254 Santorum, Rick 224 Sarah (at Occupy Wall Street) 118 School of the Americas 21 Schragis, Rachel 309 Scott, Dread 37, 42 Scott, Joan 36 SDS see Students for a Democratic Society Seattle, US 44, 64, 82, 88, 201, 229 security 30, 106 self-organization of Occupy/Decolonize 80, 108 Sen, Rinku 141, 147, 163, 167 Sennett, Richard 167 sexual assaults 125, 130, 138-40 sexual orientation see LGBTQ Shakur, Yusef 85 Sharpe, Christina 89 Sheehan, Cindy 297 shifts of consciousness 308 signs of Occupy/Decolonize 9, 25, 42, 46, 51, 53, 57, 60, 66, 69, 78, 84, 87, 91, 103, 107, 111, 124, 132, 137, 140, 146, 149, 153, 160, 163, 170, 174, 191, 200, 204, 212, 215, 222, 233, 249, 262, 276, 288, 294, 304, 306 Simmons, Gwendolyn Zoharah 57 Simmons, Russell 261 Simon, John 13 Singh, Sonny 11, 99, 121, 157, 159 slavery 230 slogans of Occupy/Decolonize, see signs Smith, Jenny 13 SNCC see Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Snicket, Lemony 197, 199 Snitow, Ann 297 solidarity, meaning of 270, 274 Sorel, Georges 234 South Africa 21, 232, 248 South Asians for Justice 141, 157, 162 Spain 21, 70, 204, 295, 298-304 speech, freedom of see conversations, political and people’s microphone Spicuzza, Annette 245 Spiotta, Dana 197, 201 spokes councils 99, 116, 118, 121 Star Wars characters 31, 175, 185 Stein, Gertrude 237 Stiglitz, Joseph 215, 251 Stoller, Matt 214 Stonewall Rebellion 129 storage of donated goods 30, 114-15 strikes 20, 281 at Occupy Oakland 47, 58, 63, 225, 234-44 Strong Women 129 Structural Adjustment Programs 21 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) 8, 144, 228, 233 students debt 47, 50, 52-3, 242, 247, 271 and police at University of California 10, 178, 225, 245, 246 see also education Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) 8, 19, 228, 229, 233 Sublevarte Collective 65 subprime lending 148, 242 substance use 23, 119, 271, 273, 275 suicide prevention 125, 127 Sumner, Charles 102 sustainability 22, 30, 197-224, 240 Sweden 296 Swing Riots 293 Switzerland 296 symbolism of Occupy/Decolonize 24 Syria 68 Tagonist, Anne 11, 99, 100 Tahrir Square, Cairo 9, 241, 295, 297 Take Back the Land 20, 272 Tamara (at Occupy LA) 220 tax avoidance 98 Tea Party 36, 80 tensions within Occupy/Decolonize 22, 118 tents 60, 180 Thematic Social Forum on Capitalist Crisis, Social & Economic Justice 277 Therrien, Joe 26, 27 timeline (dates in brackets) February 2011: 20; (25) 68 May 2011: (15) 298, 299; (20) 300; (22) 299 September 2011: (17) 15, 29, 58, 113; (23) 131; (25) 154; (29) 49, 75 October 2011: (3) 213; (4) 106; (5) 54; (6) 43; (8) 29; (9) 79, 150, 216; (10) 108, 147, 238; (11) 83, 262; (13) 154, 254, 260; (14) 92, 162, 164; (15) 97, 298; (16) 88; (17) 199, 263; (18) 85, 267; (19) 250; (20) 133, 238; (21) 263; (24) 126, 223; (25) 59, 63; (26) 63, 243; (27) 171, 201; (28) 116; (29) 138; (30) 112, 113, 295; (31) 58, 234; November 2011: (1) 147, 190, 194; (2) 27, 47, 59, 63, 143, 248, 249; (3) 67; (4) 138; (8) 161; (10) 70, 171; (13) 31, 63, 70; (15) 15; (16) 100, 104; (17) 188; (18) 73, 128, 129; (20) 56, 63, 245; (21) 52, 247; (23) 190, 203; (26) 221; (27) 248; (30) 281 December 2011: (1) 61; (5) 206; (12) 248, 249; (14) 116; (20) 280 January 2012: (5) 283; (9) 305; (17) 307; (24-29) 278; (31) 291 February 2012: 298; (1) 121; (11) 278; (12) 270; (13) 289; (28) 227 May 2012: (1) 311 Tinker, George 57 toilet facilities 92, 216, 218-19, 254 Tokyo, Japan 21 Toronto, Canada 166 Town Planning Working Group 22 transgender see LGBTQ traveller communities 297 Trotsky, Leon 232 Troy Davis Park, Atlanta 147 Truth (at Occupy Oakland) 94 Tucson, US 57 Tunisia 58, 68 twinkling see hand signals Twyford Down 295 Ty, Michelle 234 UC David Bicycle Barricade 225, 245 Uhuru, Ife Johari 147 Ukraine 296 unemployment 18, 20, 58, 67, 91, 93, 214, 239, 271, 272, 274, 280-1, 282, 299 see also employment unions 20, 30, 47, 58, 92, 94, 110, 243, 248-9, 256, 303 universality of Occupy/Decolonize 177, 187, 201-2 Universidad de la Tierra en Oaxaca 65 University of California 10, 47, 58, 60, 178, 225, 245-7 (Un)Occupy Albuquerque 147, 195 urban communities change in 209 US Uncut 98 Vancouver, Canada 141, 164, 167 Vietnam 8, 17, 21, 228 ‘violent’, meaning of 121 Volkswagen 31 volunteers 30, 110, 126, 253, 256, 259, 268 Wachovia 64 Wald, Gayle 90 Wales 296 Walia, Harsha 13, 142, 164 Walker, Scott 20 Wall Street see Occupy Wall Street Walsh, Joan 208 war see anti-war campaigns Washington, DC, US 57, 72, 88-90 Waskow, Arthur 57 water supplies at Occupy/Decolonize sites 60, 257, 258 Waters, John 47 wealth 18, 45 weather 161, 162, 215, 257, 281 Wells Fargo 64, 148 West, Cornel 115, 261 Westendarp, Patricia 66 wheelchair users 216-20 White, Mel 57 white people 65, 80, 105, 144, 159, 161, 167, 171, 173, 238 Whitman, Walt 24 Williams, Raymond 36 Wisconsin, US 20, 58, 89 Wolf, Naomi 161 Wolff, Megan 13 women 22, 91, 105, 129, 159, 161, 224, 268 protests 9, 232, 295 rights 17, 19, 56, 67-9, 90, 125, 128, 223 Women Occupying Nations 129 Woodruff Park, Atlanta see Troy Davis Park working groups 15, 22, 28, 30, 75, 113, 114-15, 120, 124, 138, 156, 169 World Trade Organization (WTO) 44, 202, 285 writing 39-42, 277, 305 WTO see World Trade Organization Yakupitiyage, Thanu 162 Yassin, Jaime Omar 10, 72, 92, 125, 126, 136, 175, 188, 253, 267 Yemen 68 yoga classes 28, 240 young people 27, 86, 155, 173 see also children and students Youngstown 227 Zapatistas 21, 48, 64, 230, 233 Zena (at Occupy Boston) 128 Ziolkowski, Thad 42 Žižek, Slavoj 162, 169, 261 Zuccotti Park, New York 15, 34 see also Liberty Plaza Zunguzungu (blogger) 110 About New Internationalist We are an independent not-for-profit publishing co-operative.


pages: 409 words: 118,448

An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy by Marc Levinson

affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, deindustrialization, endogenous growth, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, intermodal, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, linear programming, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Multi Fibre Arrangement, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working-age population, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Under the rubric “structural adjustment,” unprofitable manufacturers harvested billions of dollars in direct state aid and tens of billions more from the higher prices made possible by government policies that reduced competition, such as restricting imports and legalizing cartels. But the true cost went far beyond the higher prices and subsidies the favored firms were able to extract. At a time when the entire world was struggling with slower productivity growth, most countries’ structural adjustment programs systematically assisted sluggish industries with scant growth potential rather than dynamic, innovative ones. The net result may have been to deepen the productivity slump rather than ending it. This was evident when it came to steel. Almost every country had a steel industry for reasons of national prestige, if not economics.

While it may turn out that a particular government action or private innovation raised living standards dramatically for a generation, the connection may not be clear until well after the fact—and a similar policy or innovation, unleashed at a different moment or under different circumstances, might have no far-reaching consequences at all. Indeed, policies advanced for their purported power to increase long-run economic growth may have precisely the opposite effect. This was the case with the structural adjustment programs of the 1970s, which channeled public and private resources into troubled industries unlikely ever to regain their previous heights, such as shipbuilding and steelmaking, rather than helping workers and communities prepare for the economy to come. Cuts in taxes on capital, measures to weaken labor unions, stricter limits on corporate mergers, regulations to encourage or discourage the formation of large banks—all may enhance economic performance at one point in time but weaken it at another.

See also political parties Solomon, Anthony, 221–222 South Korea, 124, 131, 224, 257–258; debt crisis in, 254–255 Southeast Asia, 240, 241 Southeastern Nigeria, 44 Soviet bloc, 19; ungovernability in, 160–162 Soviet communism, 179 Soviet Union, 163; Cold War and, 41; communist economies of 1970s and, 161–162; economy at close of World War II in, 17, 19; Great Depression of 1930s in, 7; income per person in, 160; oil crisis of 1973 in, 162; trade and, 162; ungovernability in, 160–162 Spain, 11, 56, 213–214; anti-inflation policy in, 53; economic policy under Franco in, 211–213; economy at close of World War II in, 20; in European Community, 214; income distribution in, 140; labor/trade unions in, 211, 213; market-oriented economic policies of, 217; nationalism in, 211; per capita income in, 265; privatization in, 213, 214, 215, 216–217; Socialist Workers Party in, 211–213, 214, 215; unemployment in, 217 Speer, Albert, 102, 108 Springsteen, Bruce, 11 stabilization of commodity prices, 42–43 state-owned companies: labor/trade unions and Thatcher and, 186–191; privatization, labor/trade unions, Thatcher and, 190, 191–194, 214 stationary-state economy, 63 steel industry, 127, 130 Stigler, George, 107 stock market: impending collapse in 1973 and, 66–67 Stockman, David, 236 Strauss, Franz Josef, 33 Streeck, Wolfgang, 267–268 Strindberg, August, 164 structural adjustment programs, 129–130, 250, 269–270 student movement: in West Germany, 34 subsidies: wage, training, and job seeking, in Japan, 121 Sudan, 244 supply-side economics, 225–229, 236–237 Sweden, 11; banks/banking system in, 94 (see also banks/banking systems); economic crisis of 1970s in, 164–167; income distribution in, 140; income tax in, 149, 164–167; labor productivity in, 257; manufacturing in, 167; oil crisis of 1973 in, 166; political parties in, 166–167; welfare state in, 143 Switzerland, 1–2, 62, 78; banks/banking system in, 86–87, 89, 181 (see also banks/banking systems); income distribution in, 136, 140 Syria, 1, 11, 69, 73 Taft, Robert A., 24 Taiwan, 124, 255, 265 Tanaka, Kakuei, 156–157, 163 tax and spending policies, 8, 30, 49, 234 taxes/tax rate/tax policy, 234, 270; in France, 208–209; government revenue and, 227–228; income distribution and, 137; Laffer Curve and, 227–228; Reagan and, 226–231, 235, 237; redistribution of income and, 226; Thatcher and, 176, 183, 185, 196; during World War II, 146–147.


Hopes and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, colonial rule, corporate personhood, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, invisible hand, liberation theology, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuremberg principles, one-state solution, open borders, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus

Stephen Zunes, one of the leading scholarly analysts of these matters, points out that “at a critical point in the nation’s effort to become more self-sufficient [in the early 1950s], the U.S. government forced Bolivia to use its scarce capital not for its own development, but to compensate the former mine owners and repay its foreign debts.”1 The economic policies forced on Bolivia in those years were a precursor of the structural adjustment programs imposed on the continent thirty years later, under the terms of the neoliberal “Washington consensus,” which has generally had harmful effects wherever its strictures have been observed. By now, the victims of neoliberal market fundamentalism are coming to include the rich countries, where financial liberalization is bringing about the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s and leading to massive state intervention in a desperate effort to rescue collapsing financial institutions.

Such government intervention “has been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries,” they conclude from a detailed analysis. That is apart from the crucial state role, particularly in the post–World War II period, in socializing the costs and risks of R&D while privatizing profit.2 We might also take note of the striking similarity between the structural adjustment programs imposed on the weak by the IMF and the huge financial bailout that is on the front pages today in the North. The U.S. executive director of the IMF, adopting an image from the Mafia, described the institution as “the credit community’s enforcer.”3 Under the rules of the Western-run international economy, investors make loans to third world tyrannies, and since the loans carry considerable risk, make high profits.

The instructions for the rich are virtually the opposite: lower interest rates, stimulate the economy, forget about debts, consume, have the government take over (but don’t “nationalize”—the takeover is a temporary measure to hand it back to the owners in better shape). And the public has almost no voice in determining these outcomes, any more than poor peasants have a voice in being subjected to cruel structural adjustment programs. Others do have a voice, and well-established practice is a good guide as to where to look and listen. The best guide I know of is political economist Thomas Ferguson’s “investment theory of politics,” mentioned above, the thesis that to a good first approximation, we can understand elections to be occasions in which groups of investors coalesce to control the state, a very good predictor of policy over a long period, as he shows.


pages: 222 words: 75,561

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier

air freight, Asian financial crisis, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, British Empire, business cycle, Doha Development Round, export processing zone, failed state, falling living standards, Global Witness, income inequality, mass immigration, out of africa, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, structural adjustment programs, trade liberalization, zero-sum game

Ordinary people were going to notice this catastrophic decline whether or not they understood why it was happening. At this point the government launched some limited economic reforms, with the much-trumpeted support of international financial institutions. The reforms were dressed up into a high-profile political package and called a structural adjustment program. Although the reforms were modest, they were remarkably successful: output grew more rapidly than at any time during the oil boom. But these few percentage points of growth in non-oil output were completely swamped by the fall in the value of oil and the switch from borrowing to repayment, with the consequent contraction in expenditure.

See Revolutionary United Front Rules of origin (ROOs), 169 Rwanda, 125 Sachs, Jeffrey, 5, 41, 54, 105, 191 Sahel, 180 Sankoh, Foday, 25, 28 Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 30 Sassou-Nguesso, Denis, 21 Savimbi, Jonas, 28, 87 School of Oriental and African Studies, 158 Secondary education, 70–72 Security, 177–78 Seko, Mobutu Sese, 155 Selection by intrinsic motivation, 111 Sembet, Lemma, 94 Shagari, Shehu, 48 Short, Clare, 159, 184 Sierra Leone, 25, 29, 127–29 Skills, 111–15 Society change in, xi conflicts of, 17 crime in postconflict, 33–34 failure informing, 66 fragility of, 33 rescued from within, 96 resource-rich, 42 struggle within bottom billion, 192 Socioeconomic data, 18 Söderbom, Måns, 152 Soludo, Charles, 151, 180 Somalia, 25, 94, 125–26 South Africa, 152 Specialization, x Speight, George, 24–25 Stiglitz, Joe, ix, xi Stockholm Peace Research Institute, 103 Structural adjustment program, 41 Supervision, 118 Svensson, Jakob, 150 Switzerland, 55, 56–57 Tamil Tigers, 22 Tariff escalation, 160 Tariffs escalation of, 160 OECD imposing, 168 Technical assistance, 112 delivery of, 181 in economic reform, 114 as emergency relief, 115 in failing states, 113–14 money relating to, 116 Thatcher, Margaret, 67 Third world, 3 Togo, 130 Trade advocacy, 157–58 barriers, 160–63, 171 fair, 163 free, 164 liberalization, 161, 163 relating to bottom billion, 81–87 restrictions, 82 technology of, 60–61 Trade policy, 59, 159–60 changing, 122, 187 Christian Aid campaign for, 157–59 mobilizing changes in, 187 rich-country, 159–60 Transparency International, 65 Transport infrastructure, 59 Traps within bottom billion, 37 defining, 5–8 development, 5–8, 13 emerging from, 80, 95 future, 95–96 instruments for escaping, 176 probability of, 79 return on capital influenced by, 92 war as, 17–18, 32 Troops British, 127–28 danger for, 125, 127 peacekeeping, 126 Tumusiime-Mutebile, Emmanuel, 150, 161 Turnarounds aborting, 90 in failing states, 69 incipient, 71–72 population influencing, 70–72 in postconflict countries, 72–73 preconditions for, 70–71 risk ratings reflecting, 89 statistics of, 69–70 value of successful, 75 World Bank supporting, 117 Uganda, 55, 57, 59, 150, 166 link to coast, 108 risk ratings of, 89 sustained growth rates in, 63 UN peacekeepers, 127 Underinvesting, 44 UNITA.


The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Edward Glaeser, end world poverty, European colonialism, failed state, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Live Aid, microcredit, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, publication bias, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, TSMC, War on Poverty, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

health care colonial dysfunctional systems for foreign aid successes in modest fees for See also disease heavily indebted poor countries (HIPCs) high-technology exports Hindustan Lever Limited HIV.SeeAIDS HIVSA “hold-up” problem homegrown development aid agencies liberated by examples of as only way to end poverty the poor as helping themselves success and self-reliance Honduras Hong Kong economic growth in formula for success of high-technology exports markets in success of takeoff in ten best per capita growth rates triads in Horton, Lynn humanitarian aid Hungary hunger hungry season in Africa malnutrition in Millennium Development Goals number of people without enough to eat Hun Sen Husain, Ishrat Hussain, Altaf Hussein (king of Jordan) Hussein, Saddam Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashimi Hutus Ickes, Barry Igbo Iliffe, John immunization imperialism as beneficent but incompetent benefits of not being colonized as coming back into fashion decolonization in Middle East native autocrats sponsored by in Pakistan partition of India ratio of Europe’s income to colonies’ in Sudan India advanced degrees in AIDS prevention among prostitutes in British attitude toward caste system colonial rule in economic growth in education projects in ethnic conflict over land in formula for success of GlobalGiving.com project in and hatred of Pakistan legal education in markets in growth of partition of per capita income in police in private firms helping the poor in ten best per capita growth rates Indians (Asian) Indonesia indoor smoke inequality infant mortality inflation Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) International Christian Support Fund (ICS) International Labour Organization (ILO) International Monetary Fund (IMF) accountability lacking for and Argentine default and bad government as bailing itself out in Bolivian free-market reforms creation of debt monitored by and democracy differences among aid bureaucracies ending conditions on loans from evaluation of on financial equilibrium financial programming model of and Haiti as having fewer goals than other agencies and heavily indebted poor countries Independent Evaluation Office in international aid bureaucracy and Mexican banking crisis in Millennium Project Nicaragua aid from as not enforcing its conditions Pakistan aid from on participation postmodern imperialism and Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility loans Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper research department of resources of riots sparked by and selection effect “standby arrangements,” and state collapse “structural adjustment” programs of successful programs of success stories without aid from Sudan aid from in Western interventions in world poverty World Economic Outlook as world’s most powerful creditor Internet Iran (Persia) Iraq American occupation of Saddam Hussein nation-building in in partition of Ottoman Empire Islam, Roumeen Israel Jamaica Jana, Smarajit Japan and benefits of not being colonized intervention in poor countries by per capita income in takeoff in ten best per capita growth rates U.S. nation-building in World War II propaganda in Jereissati, Tasso Jesuits Jews Jinnah, Ali Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development Johnson, Simon Jordan Kabila, Joseph Kabila, Laurent Kagame, Paul Kasavubu, Joseph Kashmir Kasper, Sara Kaufmann, Daniel Kazakhstan Keefer, Phil Kennedy, John F.

“shock therapy,” SIBD (something is being done) syndrome Sierra Leone colonial rule in Fourah Bay College measles in mineral wealth of state failure in ten worst per capita growth rates warlords in Singapore economic growth in formula for success of high-technology exports markets in success of takeoff in ten best per capita growth rates slavery small and medium enterprises (SMEs) smallpox Smith, Adam smoke, indoor social action programs social change, philosophies of social engineering, utopian social norms in democracy against predation Sokoloff, Kenneth Somalia “something is being done” (SIBD) syndrome Sonangol Soto, Hernando de South Africa AIDS in in Angolan civil war European minority settlement in South Korea economic growth in formula for success of high-technology exports IMF aid to markets in success of takeoff in ten best per capita growth rates specialization by aid agencies ethnic Sri Lanka state collapse statistical analysis Stern, Ernest Stiglitz, Joseph Stockwell, John Strachey, John structural adjustment programs bad government justifying for Bolivia British empire compared with IMF not enforcing conditions of Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility loans and repetition of for Russia for Rwanda as social engineering Subramanian, Arvind Sucre Alcalá, Antonio José de Sudan summits sustainable development Swaziland Sykes, Sir Mark Syria Taiwan benefits of not being colonized economic growth in formula for success of high-technology exports markets in success of takeoff in ten best per capita growth rates takeoff Tanganyika Groundnuts Scheme Tanzania aid for roads in bed nets for colonial rule in Tanganyika dysfunctional health system in government nurses in National Poverty Eradication Strategy self-protection groups in social engineering in successful aid programs in Tendler, Judith terrorism Thadani, Vijay Thailand AIDS prevention in bad government in benefits of not being colonized high-technology exports IMF aid to takeoff in ten best per capita growth rates Thompson, Tommy Tibet tied aid titles to property Togo trachoma tragedy of the commons traps “poverty trap,” Trebbi, Francesco Trevelyan, Charles triads triple-drug cocktail Truman, Harry S.

., Wolfensohn, James women education for girls hunger in in Igbo revolt malnutrition in pregnancy maternal mortality in Millennium Development Goals and polygamy World Bank AIDS programs aid volume emphasized by author as employee of and bad government Big Push thinking influencing in Bolivian free-market reforms China aid from Congolese strategy of creation of and democracy Development Impact Evaluation Task Force differences among aid bureaucracies evaluation of formal rules preferred by Haiti program of and heavily indebted poor countries India aid from in international aid bureaucracy Lesotho agricultural project of on maintenance and Mexican banking crisis in Millennium Project Nicaragua aid from observable efforts shown by Operations Evaluation Department “Our Dream Is a World Free of Poverty,” Pakistan aid from on participation on peacekeeping postmodern imperialism and Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper progress reports on Africa research department of scholarship program of and selection effect SMEs supported by social action program in Pakistan “structural adjustment” programs of successful programs of Sudan aid from in Western interventions in world poverty World Development Report World Economic Forum World Economic Outlook World Health Organization (WHO) and AIDS Chinese tuberculosis project creation of on health spending in poor countries in international aid bureaucracy vaccination campaigns of Xiaogang (China) Yamagata Aritomo Yeltsin, Boris Yugoslavia Yukos Yunus, Mohammad Zaire/Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) AIDS in Belgian Congo cellular phone network in government corruption and violence in Luba dominating trade in mineral wealth in Mobuto negative growth in “post-conflict reconstruction” aid to state collapse in ten worst per capita growth rates U.S. military intervention in Zakaria, Fareed Zambia Zimbabwe AIDS in bad government in as failed state white-minority regime in whites and Asians in business in Zinga, Silvia Neyala Page numbers are in Sachs’s book The End of Poverty: Economic ossibilities for Our Time (New York: Penguin Press, 2005).


Propaganda and the Public Mind by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, deindustrialization, digital divide, European colonialism, experimental subject, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, interchangeable parts, language acquisition, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, one-state solution, precautionary principle, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, Washington Consensus

GDP continues to go up, social indicators start to go down, not just stagnate. And they’ve been going down since the mid-1970s, with a slight upturn in the late 1990s. They’re now at a level of about 1959, when the study started. What happened in the mid-1970s? The U.S. started undergoing reforms, not unlike the structural adjustment programs designed for the poor countries. And with the usual consequences. Here’s the leading democracy of the South and the leading democracy of the North showing very much the same pattern. The Fordham investigators called this a “social recession” in the United States. It’s one part of the story which is not shown in the applause for the wonderful new era we’re in.

In the midst of this bout of seasickness on this tilting ship, I came to the realization that maybe the hobby was really the right way to proceed and the other one was a dead end. I managed to convince myself of that and from then on worked on the hobby. Talk about the power of language to shape and control political discussion. For example, the IMF’s much-criticized “structural adjustment program” bas now been renamed ‘’poverty reduction and growtb facility.” The School of Americas, the notorious training facility for the Latin American military at Fort Benning, Georgia, is now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Let me just make clear, this has absolutely nothing to do with linguistics.


Rogue States by Noam Chomsky

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edward Snowden, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, land reform, liberation theology, Mahbub ul Haq, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, oil shock, precautionary principle, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Tobin tax, union organizing, Washington Consensus

But according to prevailing ideology, they are to bear the burdens of repayment, while risks are transferred to taxpayers in the West by IMF bailouts (of lenders and investors, not the countries) and other devices; recent “IMF bailout loans” keep to the norm as “private-sector creditors walked away with the IMF money, while debtor countries effectively nationalized the private-sector debts.”1 The operative principles protect the banks that made bad loans and the economic and military elites who enriched themselves while transferring wealth abroad and taking over the resources of their own countries. The debt may be a “crisis” for the poor, who are subjected to harsh structural adjustment programs to facilitate debt repayment, at enormous human cost, and a lesser crisis for Northern taxpayers to whom high-yield and hence risky loans are shifted if they go unpaid. But to wealth and privilege, the arrangements are quite congenial. The Latin American debt that reached crisis levels from 1982 would have been sharply reduced—in some cases, overcome—by return of flight capital, though all figures are dubious for these secret and often illegal operations.

Lissakers, Banks, Borrowers; Payer, Lent and Lost. For government spending growth under Reagan, see Fred Block, Vampire State (New Press, 1996). Current programs of cancellation of debt (recognized to be unpayable) for the “Highly Indebted Poor Countries” (HIPC) are conditioned on their acceptance of IMF structural adjustment programs, renamed “Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility” (PRGF). 5. Peter Cowhey and Jonathan Aronson, Managing the World Economy (Council on Foreign Relations, Columbia Univ., 1993). 6. Eric Helleiner, States and the Reemergence of Global Finance (Cornell Univ. Press, 1994). 7. Patricia Adams, Odious Debts (Earthscan, 1991); Lissakers, Banks, Borrowers.


pages: 593 words: 183,240

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

Paul Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1942, 361. 7. Charles Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 153. 8. J. Bradford DeLong and Barry Eichengreen, “The Marshall Plan: History’s Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program,” in Postwar Economic Reconstruction and Its Lessons for the East Today, ed. Rüdiger Dornbusch, Willem Nolling, and Richard Layard, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003, 189–230. 9. Richard Strout, TRB (column), New Republic, May 5, 1947. 10. As reported by Clark Clifford. Forrest C. Pogue, George C.

Lewis, Guerrillas and Generals: The “Dirty War” in Argentina, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. Lewis’s fundamental view is that “what lay at the bottom of Argentina’s… decline was the refusal of its entrenched elites… to accept the age of mass politics” (p. 4). 14. J. Bradford DeLong and Barry Eichengreen, “The Marshall Plan: History’s Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program,” in Postwar Economic Reconstruction and Its Lessons for the East Today, ed. Rüdiger Dornbusch, Willem Nolling, and Richard Layard, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 15. Said Amir Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. 16.

Thomas Piketty and Emmanual Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 1 (February 2003): 1–39, https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/pikettyqje.pdf. 14. Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor, New York: Basic Books, 1995. 15. J. Bradford DeLong and Barry Eichengreen, “The Marshall Plan: History’s Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program,” in Postwar Economic Reconstruction and Its Lessons for the East Today, ed. Rüdiger Dornbusch, Willem Nolling, and Richard Layard, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 16. Charles Kindleberger, Europe’s Postwar Growth: The Role of Labor Supply, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Center for International Affairs, 1967; Barry Eichengreen, The European Economy Since 1945: Coordinated Capitalism and Beyond, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947. 17.


pages: 128 words: 38,187

The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, basic income, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, crony capitalism, do what you love, feminist movement, follow your passion, food desert, Food sovereignty, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, Khan Academy, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, microapartment, performance metric, post-Fordism, post-work, profit motive, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, structural adjustment programs, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

As rural sociologist Phil McMichael argues, in the 1980s the “development project”—in which poor countries implemented national development strategies geared toward economic self-sufficiency and political sovereignty—was replaced by the “globalization project”—an ideological turn that encouraged states to lower their trade barriers, privatize resources and services, and embed themselves in global value chains.10 In this climate, national states lost legitimacy and, during the debt crisis, structural adjustment programs forced developing countries to dramatically curtail spending on health, education, and food subsidies. To ameliorate the human crisis that resulted, international governing bodies (UN, IMF, World Bank) encouraged poor states to outsource welfare provision to Western INGOs, which were considered more efficient and knowledgeable than local institutions.


Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination by Adom Getachew

agricultural Revolution, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, failed state, financial independence, Gunnar Myrdal, land reform, land tenure, liberal world order, market fundamentalism, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, Peace of Westphalia, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

But for all its limits, the NIEO, situated between the crisis of the developmental-­welfare state and anticipating the era of globalization, represented a compelling vision of what a just and egalitarian global economy [ 146 ] Ch a pter Fi v e required. The innovations, as well as the political and normative significance of this vision, are revealed in contrasting the NIEO with the development model that preceded it and the structural adjustment programs as well as the philosophical debates on global justice that would come to displace it. The following section reconstructs the central coordinates of the development model as articulated in the work of the St. Lucian economist Sir W. Arthur Lewis, who served as Nkrumah’s first economic advisor and contributed to Eric Williams’s plan for a centralized West Indian Federation.

In response to both the breakdown of the Bretton Woods the w elfa r e wor ld of the new economic or der [ 173 ] system and the exclusion of developing nations from the IMF and World Bank, the Arusha initiative called for a new democratic and universal monetary system that would be attentive to economic development in the global south and that established an international currency unit independent of the US dollar.137 For Nyerere and Manley, the economic crisis at home and internationally was an opportunity to advance the “struggle for the New International Order.”138 But far from initiating a new phase of debates about the NIEO and revealing the limits of the NIEO’s initial preoccupation with trade, the Arusha initiative would be one of the last attempts to revive the postcolonial demand for a welfare world. As more developing nations fell prey to the debt crisis and began to default on loans, structural adjustment programs were a ubiquitous feature of postcolonial politics in the 1980s. In this context, structural adjustment, which UNCTAD understood as a coordinated project of economic reforms in both developing and developed nations, was now limited to the reform and disciplining of indebted nations, largely in the global south.


Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, classic study, declining real wages, deindustrialization, full employment, invisible hand, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, land reform, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, Washington Consensus

THE WASHINGTON CONSENSUS The neoliberal Washington consensus is an array of market oriented principles designed by the government of the United States and the international financial institutions that it largely dominates, and implemented by them in various ways—for the more vulnerable societies, often as stringent structural adjustment programs. The basic rules, in brief, are: liberalize trade and finance, let markets set price (“get prices right”), and inflation (“macroeconomic stability”), privatize. The government should “get out of the way”—hence the population too, insofar as the government is democratic, though the conclusion remains implicit.


pages: 258 words: 63,367

Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Frank Gehry, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Howard Zinn, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, liberation theology, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, precariat, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, working poor

As international affairs scholar Stephen Zunes points out, in the early 1950s, “at a critical point in the nation’s effort to become more self-sufficient, the U.S. government forced Bolivia to use its scarce capital not for its own development, but to compensate the former mine owners and repay its foreign debts.” The economic policies forced on Bolivia at that time were a precursor of the structural-adjustment programs imposed on the continent thirty years later, under the terms of the neoliberal “Washington consensus,” which has generally had disastrous effects wherever its strictures have been observed. By now, the victims of neoliberal market fundamentalism are coming to include the rich countries, where the curse of financial liberalization has helped to bring about the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.


pages: 219 words: 62,816

"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths About Immigration by Aviva Chomsky

affirmative action, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, call centre, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, European colonialism, export processing zone, full employment, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, invisible hand, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, mass incarceration, new economy, open immigration, out of africa, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Although those programs are associated (rightly) with the Democratic Party, the Democrats of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have retreated from the social welfare orientation of their predecessors, at least at the national level. Internationally, the new consensus is sometimes (not very accurately) called globalization. The philosophy behind it can be seen in the Chicago School of Economics–inspired program implemented in Chile in the 1970s, in the Structural Adjustment Programs (or SAPs) mandated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for the Third World in the 1980s, and in the so-called Washington Consensus prescribed for Latin American and other Third World economies in the 1990s. Though they have different names, these policy approaches all encompass similar basic principles, sometimes also called “neoliberal” because they draw on some aspects of nineteenth-century liberal economic thought (which is very different from what Americans generally think of as “liberal” in the twentieth century).


pages: 272 words: 71,487

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More by Charles Kenny

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, inventory management, Kickstarter, Milgram experiment, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Robert Solow, seminal paper, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, very high income, Washington Consensus, X Prize

Thus globalization’s proponents claim China and Taiwan’s growth in recent decades as the result of liberalization of their economies, while globalization’s critics claim that these same countries have been able to capitalize on the opportunities afforded by globalization because of extensive government intervention both in the past and present.”9 After the East Asian crisis, of course, and with remarkably little irony on either side, the statists argued that too much openness in the crisis countries was to blame, while the free marketeers decried excessive intervention as the cause. As Aisbett notes, further support for an explanation that downplays the effects of government policies on long-term growth is the weak reaction of African countries to a range of different policy environments.10 From state-led dirigisme in the 1960s to structural adjustment programs in the 1990s, average African economic performance was pretty grim. If the right kind of government was really the key to fast growth in Africa, one would expect that Ghana—interventionist in the 1960s and 1970s, liberal-reform-oriented in the 1980s and 1990s—would have seen significant growth in at least one of the two periods.


pages: 258 words: 69,706

Undoing Border Imperialism by Harsha Walia

Corrections Corporation of America, critical race theory, degrowth, emotional labour, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, informal economy, Internet Archive, mass incarceration, means of production, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, telemarketer, women in the workforce

A central feature of neoliberalism is the increased mobility of capital across borders. The mobility of capital is aided by the multinational nature of corporations, which defy and evade labor and tax regulations through subcontracting, outsourcing, and transnational banking systems. Global economic regimes such as multilateral trade agreements and structural adjustment programs also facilitate the mobility of capital by imposing measures such as privatization, austerity cutbacks, and user-pay social services. While guaranteeing capital flows, neoliberalism concurrently guarantees labor flexibility. Waged labor is ever-more synonymous with labor flexibility, which necessitates creating a pool of precarious workers.


pages: 708 words: 176,708

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire by Wikileaks

affirmative action, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, energy transition, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, F. W. de Klerk, facts on the ground, failed state, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, high net worth, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Northern Rock, nuclear ambiguity, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Thus, when Aristide won office in 1990 with 67 percent of the vote, compared to just 14 percent for the World Bank economist and US favorite Marc Bazin, CIA-trained death squads descended on the country and initiated three years of terror that only ended when the US government persuaded Aristide to accept the political agenda of his opponent and govern along the lines prescribed by the IMF and World Bank. He was compelled to accept a structural adjustment program that included further cuts to the wages of Haiti’s already extremely poor workers. As UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi told Haitian radio in 1996, the US would accept that political change was necessary, but when it came to economic power, the elites should know “they have the sympathy of Big Brother, capitalism.”84 But Aristide’s reluctant acquiescence was not sufficient, and the attempt to implement structural adjustment created divisions in the Lavalas movement between a “moderate” wing close to Washington and those aligned with Aristide, who tried to dilute the program.

Through the 2000s, over a quarter of a century after US defeat to the Viet Minh, WikiLeaks’ disclosures show the US embassy in Hanoi charting with some satisfaction the Vietnamese government’s incorporation into US-led globalization. This included laying the foundations for accession to the WTO, engaging in market-led reforms and privatization programs, and willing submission to IMF orthodoxy and compliance with all necessary prerequisites for participation in IMF structural adjustment programs.18 Such programs are notorious for the effects they have on national economies and for the ignominious nature of dependency they generate between debtors and creditors: in short, debt bondage. On the other hand, they are extremely useful tools for the United States, in that the loans can be selectively deployed to help countries more indebted to American corporations, or those that are politically close to the US government.19 Why did the Vietnamese government, nominally a socialist one that had defeated the American empire in a horrifying war, accede to this?


pages: 583 words: 182,990

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cakes and ale, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cryptocurrency, dark matter, decarbonisation, degrowth, distributed ledger, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, fiat currency, Food sovereignty, full employment, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, High speed trading, high-speed rail, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, land reform, liberation theology, liquidity trap, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, megastructure, Modern Monetary Theory, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rewilding, RFID, Robert Solow, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, synthetic biology, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, wage slave, Washington Consensus

They would look at each other and see the mutual lack of enthusiasm in their peers, and hide behind that. If the world cooked and civilization fell apart, it wouldn’t be their fault, even though they were funding the disaster every step of the way. Something was going to have to make them do it. The “structural adjustment programs” enforced by the World Bank on the developing countries caught in the debt crises at the end of the twentieth century set the conditions for what became the world order in the twenty-first century. These SAPs were instruments of the postwar American economic empire, which was unlike the older empires in that it did not insist on ownership of its economic colonies; it only owned their debts and their profits, no more than that.

Its SAP requirements, made of any country that wanted a bail-out in the form of further loans, came only by adhering to the following conditions: a reduction in public spending; tax reforms, especially reducing taxes on corporations; privatization of state-owned enterprises; market-based interest and currency exchange rates, with no government controls on these; a set of strong investor rights, so investors could no longer be given haircuts (the long hair provisions, so-called); and the massive deregulation of everything: market activities, business practices, labor and environmental protections. Even though these structural adjustment programs were widely criticized, and judged a failure by some analysts at the end of the twentieth century, they were the template for dealing with the EU crises in the small southern countries, and were inflicted on Greece in full to scare Portugal, Ireland, Spain, and Italy, not to mention the new EU countries from eastern Europe, at the prospect of what the EU (meaning in this case France and Germany) would do to them if they tried to create and hew to a line of their own.


pages: 306 words: 78,893

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

At the time Korten's book was published, those middle-income countries had, on average, Hfe expectancies nine years shorter than the high-income (77 vs. 68); a female iUiteracy rate of 30%, compared with less than 5%; an infant mortaUty rate of 39 per 1,000 live births, vs. 7.They include the victims of the structural adjustment programs that antidevelopmental-ists rightly criticize; it's strange to see them as models. It's especially strange that a Malthusian should, since the population growth rate of the sustain-ers is three times that of the rich countries. Korten, who even mentioned Malthus by name, gingerly endorses the goal of bringing the world's population down to 1—2 bilHon from the present 6 biUion, though without saying how.


pages: 264 words: 74,313

Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places by Paul Collier

business cycle, carbon tax, dark matter, deskilling, failed state, information security, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, price stability, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, zero-sum game

Not only had socialism been at its apogee, but to their great credit Europe’s socialists were the first politicians to support decolonization struggles. And beyond European socialism, imitating the Soviet model carried the sweetener of a ready access to armaments to address their security problems. One aspect of the so-called Structural Adjustment Programs of the 1980s was that African governments were encouraged or coerced into shifting activities from the public sector to the private sector. Though heavily criticized both for being coercive and for being ideologically driven, the direction of the shift was appropriate given the diverse composition of Africa’s societies.


pages: 278 words: 82,069

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

He said that what he thought was being witnessed with the Asian financial crisis was “a very dramatic event towards a consensus of the type of market system which we have in this country,” this country being America. In other words, Greenspan thought that the crisis was a lesson being taught to the Asian tigers for daring to protect their national industry. And, of course, the I.M.F. imposed structural adjustment programs that forced them to lower those barriers, which allowed the very Wall Street firms at the center of this crisis to go in and engage in what the New York Times Magazine at the time called “the world’s biggest going out of business sale.” Michel Camdessus, the head of the I.M.F. at the time, agreed.


pages: 913 words: 219,078

The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War by Benn Steil

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, imperial preference, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, kremlinology, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, open economy, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, structural adjustment programs, the market place, trade liberalization, Transnistria, Winter of Discontent, Works Progress Administration, éminence grise

This formulation would, in spite of the mind-numbing details that would come to define the Marshall program, be the deal in a nutshell—that the United States would underwrite a basic standard of living in the participating countries to afford them the space to liberalize and integrate their economies. In essence, the State Department was tendering the largest foreign aid program in history as a social shock absorber for the largest structural adjustment program in history. Clayton told the committee that the $29.2 billion request it was contemplating was far too large. It had no prospect of finding political backing in Washington. Given that the aim of the Marshall program was a self-supporting western Europe, the fact that the conference anticipated a continued need for assistance at the end of the period that was as great as its present need reflected, Clayton said, “the unsatisfactory nature of the methods by which [the gap] was calculated and the assumptions on which it was based.”

“Weak States, Poor Countries.” Project Syndicate. September 2013 [republished October 12, 2015]. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economic-development-requires-effective-governments-by-angus-deaton. DeLong, J. Bradford, and Barry Eichengreen. “The Marshall Plan: History’s Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program.” NBER Working Paper Series. No. 3899 (November 1991). Dobbs, Michael. “Clinton’s NATO Effort Risky; President’s Vision Rests on Historic Rationale.” Washington Post. July 8, 1997. Drozdiak, William. “The Brussels Wall: Tearing Down the EU-NATO Barrier.” Foreign Affairs. May/June 2010.


pages: 352 words: 90,622

Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security by Sarah Chayes

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Celtic Tiger, colonial rule, crony capitalism, drone strike, failed state, high-speed rail, income inequality, microcredit, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, structural adjustment programs, trade route, ultimatum game, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional

Lack of development overseas is the inevitable result of a collectivist approach, including planned economies and state-run enterprises. Privatization and deregulation, in the view of this group, are key elements of the cure. For if left alone, freedom and the market will function to the greater good of all. The overwhelming evidence that the market liberalization, privatization, and structural adjustment programs the West imposed on developing countries in the 1990s have often helped catalyze kleptocratic networks—and may have actually exacerbated corruption, not reduced it—conflicts with this group’s orthodoxy, and so is hard to process. For most Westerners, in other words, seriously examining the nature and implications of acute corruption would imply a profound overhaul of their own founding mythologies.


pages: 288 words: 90,349

The Challenge for Africa by Wangari Maathai

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, deliberate practice, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, sustainable-tourism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

An additional, crucial element in the difficulties Africa has had in accessing the benefits of the global economy has been the policies of the World Bank, the IMF, and developed-country governments. In the 1980s, the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union restricted access to Africa's agricultural products, while the World Bank and IMF's structural adjustment policies emphasized commodity development over diversification. One of the conditionalities imposed through structural adjustment programs and, more recently, debt relief initiatives is that poor countries further open their markets to goods from the developed world, as a way to bring in foreign currency and stimulate foreign investment. But this call for open markets has not been reciprocated. The European Union, the United States, and some East Asian countries still protect their own producers of cotton, wheat, sugar, and other products either by subsidizing their industries or by placing tariffs on such products and others from outside.


pages: 252 words: 13,581

Cape Town After Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City by Tony Roshan Samara

conceptual framework, deglobalization, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, illegal immigration, late capitalism, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, structural adjustment programs, unemployed young men, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, working poor

Scholars across a range of disciplines have documented the rise and dominance of an approach to governance, across a variety of scales, informed by key principles of contemporary neoliberalism, including, most notably, the preeminence of the “free market” in allocating goods and services, the retreat or reconfiguration of the state to accommodate the requirements of transnational market forces, and an emphasis on policies promoting and protecting free trade, foreign direct investment, and private property rights.21 The following section discusses why the urban scale is of particular importance for understanding this project, the politics of urban security governance that are integral to defining it, and the specific role that policing, crime, and the criminal play in its execution; doing so will provide the necessary theoretical and conceptual framework for the subsequent discussion of Cape Town. Neoliberal principles of economic reform originally came to prominence through their application at the national level in the global South. Although change was already afoot in the nations and cities of the global North as well, it was the structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the 1980s and 1990s, and the intimately related prescriptions of the Washington Consensus, that first drew attention and notoriety to the ascent of neoliberalism as a global governance force.22 The requirements for installing this new governance regime were substantial, and their implementation often Introduction╇ ·â•‡ 11 necessitated significant restructuring of the state and the strict management of often intense political resistance to all or part of the project.


The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa by Calestous Juma

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, business climate, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, double helix, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, export processing zone, global value chain, high-speed rail, impact investing, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, land tenure, M-Pesa, microcredit, mobile money, non-tariff barriers, off grid, out of africa, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, Recombinant DNA, rolling blackouts, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, total factor productivity, undersea cable

By and large, countries with the lowest enrollment ratios from primary to higher education levels have the lowest enrollment ratios for their female populations. African countries have shown considerable vitality in enrollment in higher education since the mid-1990s, following the lean years of the destructive structural adjustment programs. Nevertheless, African countries still have the lowest higher education enrollment in the world. Although there are a few exceptions in southern Africa (Lesotho is a unique case, where nearly three-fourths of the higher education students are females), in most African countries female enrollment is lower than that of males.


pages: 268 words: 112,708

Culture works: the political economy of culture by Richard Maxwell

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, business process, commoditize, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, intermodal, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, structural adjustment programs, talking drums, telemarketer, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Thorstein Veblen, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture

Neoliberal policies—the North American Free Trade Agreement is the best known of these in the United States—have lowered trade barriers, and weakened labor rights and environmental standards around the world, creating unprecedented mobility of capital. Jobs and manufacturing processes have been exported out of the United States to economically desperate and Western-dominated countries such as Mexico, Haiti, El Salvador, China, Korea, Poland, Thailand, and Turkey, many of which have been forced by U.S.-led “structural adjustment” programs to become, more than ever before, the cheap labor pool for the wealthy world. Trade agreements privileging U.S., European, and Japanese capital, and the coordination of a rapid, 175 Susan G. D av i s international “intermodal” transport system of ports, shipping, long-distance trucking, and railroads, have accelerated the importation of very cheap goods into the United States.42 These changes in policy and the international division of labor have made mass-market discounters possible.


pages: 576 words: 105,655

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth

"there is no alternative" (TINA), accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, debt deflation, deindustrialization, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Irish property bubble, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, short selling, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

As the March of Dimes shows us so well, they invent new missions.81 In the case of the IMF, they became the provider of “firm-surveillance” of member states’ policies to increase global transparency, at least for the developed world. In the case of the developing world, however, the IMF became the financial police force behind the implementation of what were termed “structural adjustment programs”: also known as the Washington Consensus checklist applied in practice.82 As Dani Rodrik notes, IMF policy in this period, aided and abetted by the World Bank, devolved to a mantra of “stabilize, privative, and liberalize” as “codified in John Williamson’s well-known Washington Consensus.”83 The result was a series of one-size-fits-all policies that were applied from Azerbaijan to Zambia whose objective was to “minimize fiscal deficits, minimize inflation, minimize tariffs, maximize privatization, maximize liberalization of finance.”84 It was, in other words, “expansionary fiscal austerity” in a developmental form, and the results were, by and large, terrible.


pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

And though most people would agree that liberal capitalism was an immensely superior alternative to the centrally-planned, command economies of the Soviet bloc, cracks in the system’s armor were by now all too apparent: the increasing volatility of globally-interconnected capital markets, the failure of “shock therapy” and structural adjustment programs in the developing world, and rising inequality and corporate power in the West itself gave the sense that despite a growing economic pie, millions of people were still being served a smaller slice than they deserved. The beginning of the twenty-first century seemingly confirmed the pessimists’ worst fears.


pages: 379 words: 114,807

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth by Fred Pearce

activist lawyer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Cape to Cairo, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, corporate raider, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, Garrett Hardin, Global Witness, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, out of africa, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, smart cities, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

An important reason why smallholder farming has stagnated, in many parts of Africa in particular, is because even the most basic state help has been stripped away. The collapse of support for peasant farmers in Africa has been a continent-wide tragedy and a global disgrace, because it has often been carried out in the name of free markets, and demanded by structural adjustment programs. For decades, African governments have turned their backs on the countryside, putting their money into airlines, industrial enterprises, and urban infrastructure, and starving smallholders of seeds, fertilizer, and rural roads. The state marketing agencies that once underpinned local economies by buying crops at stable prices have been abolished.


pages: 374 words: 114,660

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality by Angus Deaton

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, colonial exploitation, Columbian Exchange, compensation consultant, creative destruction, declining real wages, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Jenner, end world poverty, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, very high income, War on Poverty, zoonotic diseases

Of course, we understand that many people, most of them children, are still dying of conditions—respiratory infections, diarrhea, inadequate nutrition—from which they would not die had they not been born in the “wrong” places. But this is presumably an argument for more aid. And perhaps health is the story of aid as a whole? Saving a life is a clearer target, and one more easily counted than the murkier benefits of roads, dams, or bridges, let alone of structural adjustment programs to “get prices right” or repair government finances. Yet perhaps aid for those things helps just as aid for health helps, only less transparently. And perhaps the problem discussed in the previous section—that aid corrupts politics—is either overstated or at least a reasonable price to pay for the benefits.


pages: 393 words: 115,178

The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins

Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capitalist realism, centre right, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, land reform, market fundamentalism, megacity, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, union organizing

Second, Indonesia had begun to rewrite the regulations governing its oil industry after expelling the Dutch, greatly concerning US officials. The New York Times published an editorial warning that Sukarno was “inexorably addicted to nationalistic excess” and adding: “How he deals with the oil companies will be a major test of his intentions.”12 The IMF demanded what amounted to a structural adjustment program in Indonesia, which dictated spending cuts, an increase in the production of raw materials for export, currency devaluation, monetary tightening, and an end to government subsidies.13 Sukarno’s ministers went along with the IMF’s demands, and they had a swift, severe, and widespread impact on the population, which saw prices double, triple, or even quintuple overnight.


pages: 651 words: 135,818

China into Africa: trade, aid, and influence by Robert I. Rotberg

barriers to entry, BRICs, colonial rule, corporate governance, Deng Xiaoping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, low interest rates, megacity, megaproject, microcredit, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Scramble for Africa, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, trade route, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

The colonial state had suppressed autonomous African capitalism; the predatory politics of independent African states ensured that African entrepreneurs remained paralyzed.33 With economies in decline, bloated governments demanding soaring com-pensation, ineffectual development projects stagnating, and foreign debts spiraling, many African states were in utter disrepair and hostage to incompetent leadership by the late 1980s. Developmental assistance tied to “structural adjustment programs” was intended to replace the most pernicious of Africa’s governance structures with reformed, neoliberal institutions, but ultimately failed to improve economic conditions on the continent.34 Political and social upheaval, in the midst of economic ruin, characterized many regions of Africa in the 1990s.


pages: 459 words: 138,689

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

Failure to rein in the behavior of the most socially naive of economists—and some economists, it has to be said, can be very naive—and those who instituted policies based on their work would lead, just a few decades later, to accelerating population growth. Girls who couldn’t attend school in the late 1980s and early 1990s due to structural adjustment became women who on average had children earlier and more children overall. Poverty, despair, and ignorance increase fertility. The damage wreaked on the continent by those structural adjustment programs was devastating. The total personal and government income across most countries in Africa fell between the early 1980s and late 1990s.19 Africa has a long history of harmful international intervention. Between 1500 and 1600, the entire population of the continent rose from 47 million people to 56 million.


The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community by David C. Korten

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, banks create money, big-box store, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, death of newspapers, declining real wages, different worldview, digital divide, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, peak oil, planetary scale, plutocrats, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, shared worldview, social intelligence, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, trade route, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, World Values Survey

Europe, Canada, and Japan were pressured to similarly “modernize” their economies. The third-world debt crisis of 1982 created the necessary pretext for the IMF and World Bank — operating under the direction of the U.S. Treasury Department — to impose the neoliberal agenda on indebted low-income countries. Through their structural-adjustment programs, the IMF and World Bank stripped governments, some democratically elected, of their ability to set and enforce social, environmental, and workplace standards or even to give preference to firms that hired locally or employed union workers. After the Republican Ronald Reagan, the presidency passed to the Republican George H.


The Cigarette: A Political History by Sarah Milov

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, American Legislative Exchange Council, barriers to entry, British Empire, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, deindustrialization, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, global supply chain, Herbert Marcuse, imperial preference, Indoor air pollution, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, land tenure, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Journalism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, scientific management, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, Torches of Freedom, trade route, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

“Farmers Cast Votes in Leaf Referendum Today,” Dispatch (Lexington, NC), July 23, 1949, 1. 31. See, for instance, “Leaf Growers Will Vote on Assessment,” Loris Sentinel (Conway, SC), December 10, 1958, 1. 32. 94 Cong., 2nd sess., part 4, 5341 (1976). 33. J. Bradford De Long and Barry Eichengreen, “The Marshall Plan: History’s Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program,” Discussion Paper 634 (May 1992), 3. 34. Daniel Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 17. For the U.S. role in establishing the postwar order, see Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 35.


Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, gentrification, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, Howard Zinn, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Samuelson, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, wage slave, women in the workforce

In my view, what we’re seeing now is a profound revival of pure old-fashioned racist imperialism, with regard to the entire Third World. You see it in articles by British journalists in the New York Times Magazine about how the best thing we can do for Africa is to recolonize it; it shows up at the economic level in structural adjustment programs, which are a big part of how we siphon off the wealth of the Third World to the rich countries; the anti-immigrant campaigns in the U.S. and Europe are a part of it; this program for the Palestinians is another part of it—and one could go on and on. 115 The idea is, “We smashed up the world and stole everything from it—now we’re not going to let anyone come and take any piece of it back.”


pages: 829 words: 229,566

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Indeed postcolonial independence movements—which so often had the redistribution of unjustly concentrated resources, whether of land or minerals, as their core missions—were consistently undermined through political assassinations, foreign interference, and, more recently, the chains of debt-driven structural adjustment programs (not to mention the corruption of local elites). Even the stunningly successful battle against apartheid in South Africa suffered its most significant losses on the economic equality front. The country’s freedom fighters were not, it is worth remembering, only demanding the right to vote and move freely.


pages: 492 words: 70,082

Immigration worldwide: policies, practices, and trends by Uma Anand Segal, Doreen Elliott, Nazneen S. Mayadas

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, centre right, conceptual framework, credit crunch, demographic transition, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

The importance of this was that the government implemented drastic policy issues on relations with other member states of ECOWAS, one of which was the expulsion of over 2 million illegal immigrants (Afolayan, 1988; Brown, 1989). However, not every illegal immigrant left, as some went into hiding, especially those who were in locations that were far removed from the full glare of the government. Even a few of the expelled made a roundabout turn when suitable occasions made it possible. Furthermore, the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) that was introduced by June 1986 was based on the premise of a dwindling economy. It failed, however, to achieve the expected turnaround condition for the country, as revealed by the socioeconomic indicators for Nigeria. These included a declining GNP, a negative growth in consumption both at the government and private levels, and a very high inflation rate.


pages: 918 words: 257,605

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers’ League, Women’s Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Ferge, “The Changed Welfare Paradigm”; Jacoby, Modern Manors; Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country; J. Bradford De Long and Barry Eichengreen, “The Marshall Plan: History’s Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program,” in Post–World War II Economic Reconstruction and Its Lessons for Eastern Europe Today, ed. Rudiger Dornbusch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity; Amenta, “Redefining the New Deal”; Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W.


pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

Chapter 17 DOOM LOOP On September 1, 2011, Pedro Passos Coelho, Portugal’s new prime minister, made his first visit to Berlin. His host, Chancellor Merkel, began the joint press conference by announcing how pleased she was to hear that the troika had just submitted its first report on Portugal’s structural adjustment program and had declared itself satisfied with the progress being made. She was delighted also to hear that Coelho saw no obstacle to incorporating a German-style debt brake into Portugal’s constitution. Then, in the question-and-answer session that followed, it seemed that Chancellor Merkel let the cat out of the bag.