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Though Polish voters in October ousted their right-wing populist government, recent elections in Slovakia and the Netherlands show that populism remains as malign and potent a political force as ever in Europe. But these outcomes also hold important lessons for the United States, where the specter of Donald Trump’s return to the White House haunts the runup to the 2024 presidential election.
Card-carrying neo-liberals like me, who pushed for opening capital flows wide in the early 1990's, had a particular vision in mind. But the future that we hoped for did not come to pass.
We looked at how extraordinarily strongly the world's system of relative prices was tilted against the poor: how cheap were the products they exported, and how expensive were the capital goods that they needed to import in order to industrialize and develop.
"Why not free up capital flows and so encourage large-scale lending from the rich to the poor?" we asked. Such large-scale lending might cut a generation off the time it would take economies where people were poor to converge with the industrial structures and living standards of rich countries.
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