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Economics

Nuevos modelos para un nuevo mundo

Jul 21, 2020 Bertrand Badré , Ronald Cohen, and Bruno Roche

PARÍS – El multilateralismo está en peligro y, con él, también lo está el capitalismo financiero. Los movimientos políticos populistas y la catástrofe económica global inducida por la pandemia han demostrado que ambos, en lugar de ser los pilares de la estabilidad, son palancas de poder político y económico.

En tanto el mundo lucha por reponerse de la crisis del COVID-19, reestructurar el multilateralismo y reformar el capitalismo se han convertido en tareas cruciales. Ambos necesitan transformarse en fuerzas multiplicadoras en un nuevo sistema de creación de valor dinámico. Pero antes habrá que redefinir el propósito fundamental y los principios subyacentes de cada uno.

El multilateralismo de hoy, concebido por los vencedores de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, estuvo dirigido a impedir conflictos globales (a través de las Naciones Unidas), organizar una defensa colectiva (a través de la OTAN, y el ahora difunto Pacto de Varsovia, por ejemplo) y respaldar la reconstrucción y el desarrollo económicos (a través del Plan Marshall, el Fondo Monetario Internacional y el Banco Mundial). A nivel global, estableció reglas de juego económicas comunes.

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Joe Ryan Sep 1, 2020

Maybe this essay criticizes received multilateral institutions too much and capitalism not enough.

On the multilaterals:

The perception that they "exhibit a systemic bias in favor of those with more power" doesn't seem justified, unless you think of NATO as multilateral, which it isn't (in the WTO sense that distinguishes multilateral, plurilateral, and regional).

The true multilaterals modestly diffuse power from member states with more individual power, compared to not having the multilaterals at all. Even regional organizations may well do so, within their regions if not globally.

How ISO, UNFCCC, the WTO, et al., or even BIS or the IMF, are based on "winner-take-all" relationships escapes me. If anything, the IMF has leaned against the natural currency integration around the USD.

On capitalism:

It's nothing new that capitalist firms try "to develop profitable solutions to shared problems," if you think of "shared problems" as widespread demand (willingness to pay).

But the principle by which capitalist firms distribute the income they get is the opposite of sharing: it's maximizing what is received by the very small part of the population who are capitalists, and minimizing the cost of employee compensation.

Government measures that raise average employee compensation, or raise the floor under it, or make it less variable, are uniformly resisted by capitalists. You can characterize such measures as either reforming or attacking capitalism, but in any case they're not an initiative of capitalists.

On the Chicago school:

The Chicago school gets both too much credit and too much blame in this essay. As regards multilateralism, the shift to taking advantage of global markets ("structural adjustment") has about the widest support among economists of any policy prescription ever. Little, Scitovsky, Scott, and their colleagues weren't Chicago boys.

The resurgence of Chicago-school "recessions can't happen" economics in the 1970s didn't so much "dominate the commanding heights of the global economy" as the commanding heights (capitalists) pushed it harder. It was just one part of their counterattack against the post-depression rise in the wage share (a counterattack conventionally dated as starting with "the Powell memorandum" of 1971).

Non-Chicago economists did their part by remaining wedded to Paul Samuelson's conclusion that "it really doesn't matter who hires whom." By obscuring the very existence of capitalism, non-Chicago economics hardly helped reform it.
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Meir Stieglitz Jul 24, 2020

In what way “must multilateral systems and institutions be redefined in order to promote peace and shared prosperity"?

By striving towards (relevant) Universalism ideas and pragmatic actions, thus acknowledging Global Tasks as the unifying concept of the hoped-for New World Order. In 1989, as part of constituting the historically-relevant principles of the Universalism as a system-of-thought, I defined Global Task so: a task is considered global when it fulfils four (and a half) necessary conditions:

1. Performing the task is necessary to confront and solve a situation which is posing a grave (potentially existential) danger and is recognized as common, and relatively equal, by the majority of the significant actors in world politics.

2. In the context of world order, the danger confronted must be recognized by all the relevant (necessary for the solution) actors as surpassing the Survival Predicament (as defined by the Realist World View).

3. The task cannot be performed and the problem can’t be solved by the actions of some actors against others.

4. The completion of the task will not result in a radically more privileged relative position for some of the main global actors.

5. Accommodating but not necessary: the completion of the task necessitates the (relative) participation of all the major actors. The chances of a stable and long-term solution are hindered if actions and contributions are limited to few of the major actors (“free-riders” problem).
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