Free Trade Reimagined: The World Division of Labor and the Method of Economics
by Roberto Mangabeiram Unger, Princeton University Press (2007), 240 pp.
Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
by Ha-Joon Chang, Bloomsbury (2008), 276 pp.
How Rich Countries Got Rich... and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor
By Erik S. ReinertPublicAffairs (2007), 365 pp.With their outrageous proportions, the global food crisis and the implosion of the world’s financial system are the latest indictments of twenty-first century capitalism. In November 2007, the head of the World Food Program said that the hungry were being “priced out of the food market.” Almost a year later, you could say the same for some of the world’s biggest banks. The financial crisis, too, has had morbid overtones. In the UK, the Daily Mail reports the pileup of hundreds of corpses, as families can’t come up with the cash to bury their loved ones.
But if today’s headlines have displaced slower-moving ecological catastrophes, like shrinking freshwater supplies and runaway climate change, we need to remember how tightly our environmental, economic, and social crises are connected. Our global eco-nomic system, which balances market fundamentalism for most with corporate welfare for the few, is threatening human life on a massive scale.
Among a number of the US’s foremost economists, the recent situation has prompted a change of heart. “Mainstream economists’ disenchantment with the old near-certainties has continued to build, and at a gathering rate,” bemoaned The Atlantic, among them the latest Nobel laureate in economics and author of the infamous essay “In Praise of Cheap Labour,” Paul Krugman; former World Bank chief economist Lawrence Summers; and this October in the Wall Street Journal, calling for coordinated government intervention to save the financial markets, Paul Volcker himself, the former Federal Reserve chairman who in the 1970s and 1980s was free market funda-mentalism’s first great champion.
Yet for all these ironic twists, when you listen carefully to talk of the economy during this Canadian and US election season, whether it’s Stéphane Dion, Jack Layton, or Stephen Harper, Barack Obama or John McCain, the scope of reforms being proposed is incredibly narrow. Partial nationalization, credit injections, an orgy of tax credits: though dazzling in their variety and technical complexity, their goal is to save, not transform, the fundamental economic structures we already have — the very system that continues to exacerbate climate change, water wars, and hunger, while stymying our capacity to adapt when we need it most.
Beyond North America, progressive thinkers are reinterpreting how economies work in greater depth while moving toward a vision that neither surrenders to markets nor pretends to avoid them. These thinkers insist that we can imagine organizing our economy in ways that are fair for everyone. Just as important, in the face of a web of global crises, they show how dramatically different public policies can foster a climate of innovation. Still, while they’re grounded in a solid reassessment of history, the authors’ prescriptions remain largely speculative.
In What Should the Left Propose? Roberto Mangabeira Unger, one of the most imaginative and real-world powerful of the group, writes: “The world suffers under a dictatorship of no alternatives. Although ideas all by themselves are powerless to overthrow this dictatorship, we cannot overthrow it without ideas.”
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