Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
These geopolitical power imbalances sustain and reproduce a global class divide that has worsened since the end of colonialism. This injustice is conveniently elided by the one-hump graph, which offers a misleadingly rosy narrative about what has happened over the past half century.
Free trade is in real trouble today. But the promoters of free trade brought this on themselves. However, it is not because they have been tepid in their defense of free trade, as the description of this debate has it. They have been guilty of far greater sins.
Although Crashed primarily traces the financial crisis in the US and Europe during the period 2006-2018, Tooze brackets his tale of Euro-American financial implosions by sketching the “financial balance of terror” between China and the US and delineating how dangerous this ‘balance’ is.
This essay focuses on the murky financial realm known as offshore finance. It shows that offshore finance is not solely about capital moving beyond the reach of states, but involves the rampant unbundling and commercialisation of state sovereignty itself.
We citizens have a lot of work to do. We delegated too much, we have assumed experts can do it and have ended up in an exploitative relationship. We need to develop our own expertise.
We can end poverty right now simply by making the rules of our global economy fairer for the world’s majority (I describe how we can do this in The Divide, looking at everything from wages to debt to trade). But that is an approach that you and Gates seem desperate to avoid, in favour of a blustering defense of the status quo.
The solutions to this crisis will not be handed down from a mountain top to the grateful hordes: they will rely on us taking power for ourselves. Three decades after Reagan, the nine most laughable words in the English language are: “I’m from the elite and I’m here to help.”
For millions of Americans, however, the greatest threat to their day-to-day security isn’t terrorism or North Korea, Iran, Russia, or China. It’s internal — and economic.
The governments of the United States, Mexico, and Central American countries need to confront the root causes of migration and allow migrants the basic rights afforded to them by international laws.
After decades in which the only thing that’s changed has been the language, The World for the Many, Not the Few represents a change in the landscape. This new policy presents a radically different vision for how the UK should approach international development.
For peoples’ minds and imaginations to flower, they need two conditions. They need to be able to love and to care for others and they need to be cared about. I don’t think this is said enough.
Just as Thatcher asserted there was ‘no such thing as society’, it’s common to find economics commentators asserting that there is ‘no such thing as neoliberalism’ – that it’s simply a meaningless insult bandied about by the left, devoid of analytical content.
