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"The bottom line here is simple. Both capitalists and workers have cause for complaint. Capitalists have lost pricing power - the degree of monopoly has fallen - which has tended to depress the profit share. But this has not benefited workers because instead the "wedges" of other incomes and higher imports have depressed their share. "
"That is an interesting question because it assumes that neoliberalism produces despair. I wish it did but I am not convinced that it does. I think that the process that some of us have called neoliberalization actually seizes on something that is just a little to one side of despair that I might call something like a quotidian nihilism. By quotidian, I mean it is a nihilism that is not lived as despair; it is a nihilism that is not lived as an occasion for deep anxiety or misery about the vanishing of meaning from the human world. Instead, what neoliberalism is able to seize upon is the extent to which human beings experience a kind of directionlessness and pointlessness to life that neoliberalism in an odd way provides. It tells you what you should do: you should understand yourself as a spec of human capital, which needs to appreciate its own value by making proper choices and investing in proper things. Those things can range from choice of a mate, to choice of an educational institution, to choice of a job, to choice of actual monetary investments – but neoliberalism without providing meaning provides direction."
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I’ve been thinking a lot about anxiety lately and it is partly because I am so aware of how much anxiety is a feature of everyday discourse in the US when people are just describing their personal state. One of the things I’ve been trying to think about – it is not quite related to the walls question but we will go back to that – is whether the sheer level of anxiety in human beings has been increasing in ways that are commensurate with the loss of certain kinds of boundaries, the denigration of defining features of communities, all that we associate with globalization. I think the answer is probably yes, and I hope somebody will do a study on this: historicizing anxiety and thinking about the history of the human subject in terms of a more anxious subject today than ever before. There are lots of reasons that students, for example, are anxious in ways that I don’t remember being anxious as a college student. There are concerns about performance and job markets, but I am really talking about a world of anxiety that is quite disseminated and quite general and does not simply pertain to the high ambition end of the American middle class.
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Obviously, a strong conception of a global citizen, a cosmopolitan ideal, could have that global citizen actually living and connecting to a particular place, but most theories of the global citizen and of the global village insignificantly honor the need for a human-scale sense of place. A nation-state is too big for that sense of place but human communities provide it, and so do slightly larger or even non-human ways of bounding what and who we are. I do think that is really important and I don’t think that political theory will get us very far if it can’t acknowledge and attend to that particular dimension of being human.
"The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy, Dani Rodrik, W.W. Norton & Co, 346 pages
Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System, Barry Eichengreen, Oxford University Press, 215 pages"
"In short, what ails the U.S. economy is primarily a structural problem, not a cyclical one that can be effectively dealt with through the magic of short-term Keynesian stimulus. Unless we find a way to dramatically increase the size and scope of the tradable sector, Spence says, we're in for an extended period of slow job growth and rising inequality. And make no mistake: at the heart of this problem is globalization."
"The would-be foreign policy prodigy Parag Khanna made a splash with his first book, “The Second World,” in 2008, by announcing with great fanfare — including a lengthy adaptation in The New York Times Magazine — what everyone already knew: that the international order was changing. The book was Khanna’s version of the fall of the West and the rise of the rest. Having described this grave new world, Khanna now wants to tell us how to run it. The result is another easy, breezy book that dispenses platitudes as though they were original insights and in the process fails to examine their actual significance. "
"It is perhaps telling that Blankfein is the son of a Brooklyn postal worker and that Hayward—despite his U.S. caricature as an upper-class English twit—got his start at BP as a rig geologist in the North Sea. They are both, in other words, working-class boys made good. And while you might imagine that such backgrounds would make plutocrats especially sympathetic to those who are struggling, the opposite is often true. For the super-elite, a sense of meritocratic achievement can inspire high self-regard, and that self-regard—especially when compounded by their isolation among like-minded peers—can lead to obliviousness and indifference to the suffering of others. "
Note by contrast that the period of gung-ho globalization, which we may date from the early 1990s on, presented no improvement over the preceding post-war arrangements.
Washington-led neo-liberalism and unilateralism has failed the world. It is urgent that we find a way beyond its legacy. This calls for a new model of globalisation, that works for humans everywhere.
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The alternative to the Washington consensus is not a simple endorsement of state–centric development nor is state intervention always progressive and beneficial just because it runs counter to it. Rather, the Washington consensus has eroded the ability to formulate and implement sound public policy and has damaged essential political capacity. Public objectives, for example, can be delivered by a diversity of actors, public and private, with partnerships between them – and not just by the state. The wider development of civil society (trade unions, citizen groups, NGOs and independent institutions) is indispensable to a robust programme of national development. Of course, there will be conflicts between economic development and the strengthening of civil society. But societies need significant measures of autonomy to work out their own ways of managing these conflicts.
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Development thinking has to shift from a dogged focus on “market access” to a much wiser and complex mindset. Developing nations need policy space to exercise institutional innovations that depart from orthodoxies of the World Bank, IMF and WTO. In parallel, organisations like the WTO must move their agendas away from a focus on market creation and supervision towards a broader range of policies which encourage different national economic systems to flourish within a fair and equitable rule–based global market order.
report on Social Science Research Council project on area-studies programs at US universities
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