الطريق إلى الـفاشـيّـة

Dec 12, 2022 Joseph E. Stiglitz

نيويورك ــ أُطـلِـقَ على الاقتصاد وصف "الـعِـلم الكئيب"، وسوف يبرر العام 2023 هذا اللقب. نحن الآن تحت رحمة كارثتين خارجتين عن سيطرتنا ببساطة. الأولى هي جائحة مرض فيروس كورونا 2019 (كوفيد-19)، التي لا تزال تهددنا بـمتحورات جديدة أكثر فتكا، أو أشد عدوى، أو أكبر قدرة على مقاومة اللقاحات. الواقع أن الجائحة أديرت بقدر كبير من الرداءة من قِـبَـل الصين، ويرجع هذا في الأساس إلى فشلها في تلقيح مواطنيها بلقاحات الحمض النووي الريبوزي المرسال mRNA الأكثر فعالية (المصنوعة في الغرب).

تتمثل الكارثة الثانية في حرب العدوان التي تشنها روسيا في أوكرانيا. لا يُـظـهِـر هذا الصراع أي نهاية في الأفق، وقد يتصاعد أو يُـنـتِـج تأثيرات غير مباشرة أكبر. في أي من الحالتين، سيكون حدوث المزيد من الاضطرابات في أسعار الطاقة والغذاء أمرا شبه مؤكد. وكما لو أن هذه المشكلات ليست مزعجة بالقدر الكافي، فهناك أسباب وفيرة تدعو إلى القلق من أن تُـفـضي استجابة صناع السياسات إلى زيادة الأوضاع سوءا على سوء.

الأمر الأكثر أهمية أن بنك الاحتياطي الفيدرالي الأميركي قد يرفع أسعار الفائدة بدرجة أكبر مما ينبغي وبسرعة أكبر مما ينبغي. يعود السبب الرئيسي وراء التضخم اليوم إلى نقص المعروض، وبعض هذا النقص في طور التسوية بالفعل. وعلى هذا فإن رفع أسعار الفائدة قد يأتي بنتائج عكسية. فهو لن يُــنتِـج المزيد من الغذاء أو النفط، لكنه سيزيد من صعوبة حشد الاستثمارات التي من شأنها أن تساعد في التخفيف من نقص المعروض.

To continue reading, register now.

Subscribe now for unlimited access to everything PS has to offer.

As a registered user, you can enjoy more PS content every month – for free.

Already have an account? Log in

Subscribe to PS Digital

Access every new PS commentary, our entire On Point suite of subscriber-exclusive content – including Longer Reads, Insider Interviews, Big Picture/Big Question, and Say More – and the full PS archive.

Subscribe Now

Joseph E. Stiglitz

Writing for PS since 2001
326 Commentaries

Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and University Professor at Columbia University, is a former chief economist of the World Bank (1997-2000), chair of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and co-chair of the High-Level Commission on Carbon Prices. He is Co-Chair of the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation and was lead author of the 1995 IPCC Climate Assessment.

Wars Aren’t Won with Peacetime Economies
Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Economics 5

Wars Aren’t Won with Peacetime Economies

Joseph E. Stiglitz urges governments to intervene to overcome market failures and other problems caused by the Ukraine crisis.
Will Corporate Greed Prolong the Pandemic?
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
Free to read

Longer Reads 34

Will Corporate Greed Prolong the Pandemic?

Joseph E. Stiglitz & Lori Wallach dismantle Big Pharma's arguments against waiving intellectual property rights to boost global vaccine production.

new comment has been posted. new comments have been posted.

0 Comments on this paragraph, 2 Comments on this article

Patrice Horner Jan 30, 2023

That makes it 7/8ths empty. Not to forget Middle Class Americans who drove much of the economic engine for a century. We enabled the extraction of capital to the upper 1% in the name of globalization and cheaper stuff, leaving much of Middle American in serdom or worse. We need to support the middle to become whole again or extremism will spring from within.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
YL Chang Jan 17, 2023

"The pandemic has been managed especially poorly by China." This seems to have become the standard self-comforting rhetoric in the West while turning a blind eye to the numbers of lives lost in the US and Europe to Covid. But my bet is that when all the Covid pandemic dust has settled, credible statistics will show that China had managed to produce by far the lowest per-million-population mortality rate from this pandemic than any of the industrialized nations in the West, including Japan and South Korea, and in the absence of a comparable medical infrastructure. They will have managed this by stopping the pandemic in its tracks during the high-mortality phases where the Alpha and Delta versions of virus predominated and opening up only when the more contagious but less deadly Omicron version has became the dominant strand. Of course, saving lives may not rank high in Stiglitz' criteria for how well a country has "managed" the pandemic, which, however, has been the highest priority for China. It is true that China fumbled during both the initial phases of the Wuhan outbreak and the recent opening up, but I alway expected some hiccups in China's transitioning from zero tolerance to opening up to the rest of the world that had simply let the pandemic rip during the past three years. As to the long-term economic consequences of how different countries handled the pandemic, only time will tell, but here, too, I don't think China will come out badly in comparison, because it has used the pandemic period to restructure its economy for the long haul, even if this restructuring remains unfinished as of January 2023.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.

https://prosyn.org/vwVfzKDar

الطريق إلى الـفاشـيّـة

Subscribe to PS Digital

Wars Aren’t Won with Peacetime Economies

Will Corporate Greed Prolong the Pandemic?

New Comment

Contact us

War and Populism

The Road to Fascism

The Fog of Waronomics

The Ukraine War and Asian Security

Log in/Register

الطريق إلى الـفاشـيّـة

Subscribe to PS Digital

Edit Newsletter Preferences

Set up Notification