Podcast appearances and mentions of Washington Consensus

Sat, 31 May 2025 04:00:00 +0000 https://feed.neuezwanziger.de/link/21941/17042008/wehrpflicht-im-feuilleton-us-geooekonomie-esc-ostmullen-katholische-ki-totes-internet 12ae7bef6ef8e118df2a5a98f9bf3a68 Wolfgang und Stefan besprechen den Mai 2025 In Amerika ist vieles durcheinander, hört man aber den Chefberatern des Sicherheitsapparats damals nochmal zu, klingen sie wie die Sicherheitsarchitekten von heute. Wir hören Jake Sullivan unter Biden und ordnen die Sachlagen mithilfe einer aktuellen Rede von Adam Tooze ein. Es gibt doch große Linien über die Präsidenten hinweg, sogar heute. Dann stellen wir uns grundsätzliche Fragen: Ein neuer Papst, viele alte Ideen und KI, die nicht nur mit Menschen redet, sondern auch Selbstgespräche führt. Sollten wir die alten Lehren nochmal neu schätzen lernen, auch unter Atheisten? Einladend sind die ersten Äußerungen von Leo XIV. allemal. Gegen Ende befassen wir uns mit Ostmullen und dem Ende des Internets. Wenn ihr Hinweise auf hübsche Büroräume in Frankfurt habt: mail@stefanschulz.com, thx. 00:00:53 ESC ungesehen Thema: Eurovision Song Contest (ESC). Sänger J.J. (Johannes Pietsch) und dessen Gesangslehrerin Linda Watson (im Transkript als Linda Wurzen bezeichnet). Stimmlicher Vergleich: ESC-Darbietungen und klassische Musik, insbesondere Barockopern. Referenz: Paul Potts und dessen Bekanntheit durch Castingshows. 00:03:21 Wehrpflichtdebatte im Feuilleton Thema: Debatte über die Wiedereinführung der Wehrpflicht in Deutschland. Auslöser: Interview von Verteidigungsminister Boris Pistorius in der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung. Diskutanten im Feuilleton: Nele Pollatschek und Myrna Funk. Kontroverse Punkte: Wehrpflicht für Frauen, Emanzipation, Rolle der Frau für den Staat (Reproduktion), Kollektivgedanke. Begriff: "Aufwuchsfähigkeit" im militärischen Kontext laut Carlo Masala. Perspektive: Friedrich Merz zur Beendigung von Kriegen durch militärische Erschöpfung. 00:32:32 Gaza Thema: Situation in Gaza und Äußerungen von Friedrich Merz auf der re:publica zum Vorgehen Israels. Medienberichterstattung: Tagesschau und Darstellung durch das Bundeskanzleramt auf Instagram. Podcast-Analyse: Paul Ronzheimer diskutiert mit Daniel Gerlach über den israelischen Diskurs und PR-Aspekte. Kritik an Berichterstattung: Robin Alexander lobt SPD und Grüne für zurückhaltende Israel-Kritik. 00:59:42 Salon-Anmerkungen Ankündigungen: Live-Podcast-Event am 23. August in Frankfurt. Weitere Termine von Wolfgang M. Schmitt: Zürich (6.6., Filmvorführung "Die Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Thomas Mann"), Kilchberg (7.6., Thomas Mann Tag), Berlin (11.6., Gespräch mit Franz Friedrich über "Die Toten Seelen"). Stefan Schulz: Auftritt im WDR3 Forum zum Thema Spotify. Bürosuche in Frankfurt für Bürogemeinschaft 1789. Podcast-Unterstützung: Aufruf zur Mitgliedschaft im "Salon". Nächstes Buch im "Salon": "Geoökonomie, Anatomie der neuen Weltordnung" von Milan Babic. Abonnement-Möglichkeiten: neue20er.de, Steady, Apple Podcasts, Patreon. 01:05:35 Präsidentenberater erklären US Geoökonomie Thema: US-Geoökonomie und -Geopolitik. Analyse eines Vortrags von Joe Bidens Sicherheitsberater Jake Sullivan. Kritik an den Folgen der Globalisierung für die USA. Verkündigung eines "New Consensus", der den "Washington Consensus" ablöst. Fokus auf heimische Industriepolitik und "Außenpolitik für die Mittelklasse" als Anti-China-Strategie. Bedeutung kritischer Mineralien und das Risiko ihrer "Weaponization" durch China. Aufforderung an Partner, sich der US-Strategie anzuschließen. Lob für Ursula von der Leyens "De-Risking"-Ansatz. Vergleich mit der Politik Donald Trumps, insbesondere dessen Zollpolitik. Analyse von Adam Tooze: Chinas wirtschaftlicher Aufstieg als historischer Entwicklungserfolg und Destabilisierungsfaktor für die USA ("ontologische Sicherheit", "China Shock"). Nachhaltigkeitspolitik als geopolitisches Instrument und potenzielle Herausforderung für die US-Hegemonie. Das "China/Houthi-Problem": Entwicklung und kostengünstige Technologien (z.B. Drohnen) als Herausforderung für globale Machtstrukturen. Kritische Betrachtung des Pariser Klimaabkommens und der US-amerikanischen Haltung dazu. Feststellung, dass China bei der Reduktion von CO2-Emissionen und dem Ausbau erneuerbarer Energien führend ist. 02:12:20 Katholische KI Thema: Fehlende politische Fundamente und moralische Orientierung. Kritik an der Rhetorik Friedrich Merz'. David Brooks (im Gespräch mit Scott Galloway) über den Unterschied zwischen Konservatismus und "Anti-Links"-Haltungen sowie die Auswirkungen von Donald Trumps Präsidentschaft auf traditionelle Werte. Konzepte moralischer Verankerung: John Bowlby ("Secure Base") und Walter Lippmann (Gefahr privatisierter Moral). Vorschlag von Stefan Schulz: Rückbesinnung auf Ordensregeln (Benediktiner, Dominikaner, Franziskaner, Augustiner) als moralische Orientierungspunkte. Neuer Papst Leo XIV. (fiktive Figur im Podcast für das Jahr 2025): Positionierung zu Risiken durch Künstliche Intelligenz (KI) für Menschenwürde, Gerechtigkeit und Arbeit. Bezugnahme auf Papst Leo XIII. und dessen Sozialenzyklika "Rerum Novarum" im Kontext industrieller Revolutionen. Verbindung zu Augustinus' Werk "Gottesstaat" ("City of God"). Paolo Benanti (Franziskanermönch und KI-Berater des Vatikans und der italienischen Regierung): Betrachtet KI als potenzielle neue "Götzen", die antike Orakel ersetzen könnten. Thomas Luckmanns Konzept der "unsichtbaren Religion" und dessen Anwendung durch Befreiungstheologen wie Gustavo Gutiérrez auf Kapitalismus und Nationalismus. KI-Entwicklungen: "Spirituelle" Selbstgespräche von Anthropics KI Claude 4 über Bewusstsein und Liebe. Mark Zuckerbergs Vision von KI als persönlichem Gesprächspartner (Meta AI). Scott Galloways Bedenken zu KI-Companions und deren Auswirkungen auf menschliche Beziehungen. 03:42:59 Ostmulle Thema: Das Internetphänomen "Ostmullen" – junge ostdeutsche Frauen, die sich online in einer rechten Ästhetik inszenieren. Diskussion und Analyse des Phänomens in rechten Kreisen: Martin Sellner: Sieht darin einen metapolitischen Erfolg. Ellen Kositza: Beschreibt die Frauen als oft perspektivlos und aus schwierigen Verhältnissen stammend, sieht sie aber auch als "Nemesis der BRD". Joachim Paul (AfD-Politiker): Beglückwünscht die Bewegung und hofft auf eine Ausweitung auf den Westen ("Westmullen"). Lukas Kubicki (YouTuber, im Transkript als Lukas Kurtial): Thematisiert eine vermeintliche Gottlosigkeit und die Verantwortung, diesen Frauen zu helfen, da sie "Nachwuchs gebären" werden. 04:12:39 Das Internet stirbt Thema: Die "Dead Internet Theory" und Veränderungen der Internetnutzung. Daten von SimilarWeb: Anstieg der Nutzung von ChatGPT, das Wikipedia in den Zugriffszahlen überholt hat. Rückläufiger Traffic bei etablierten Webseiten wie Google, YouTube, Facebook und Instagram. Verändertes Suchverhalten: Google beantwortet einen Großteil der Anfragen direkt, ohne auf Quellseiten zu verlinken. Verhältnis von KI-Crawlern zu menschlichen Besuchern (Beispiele: Google 15:1, OpenAI 250:1, Anthropic 6000:1). Implikationen: Schwindende ökonomische Anreize zur Erstellung neuer Inhalte für das offene Web. 04:20:39 Salon-Hinweise Abschließender Hinweis auf das nächste Buch im "Salon": "Geoökonomie, Anatomie der neuen Weltordnung" von Milan Babic. Weitere Lese- und Hörempfehlungen der Moderatoren: Stefan Schulz ("Apple in China"), Wolfgang M. Schmitt (Jazz-Musik). KÄS-Termine 2025 Fr. 20.06. / Fr. 19.09. / Fr. 19.12. Kontakt per Mail: neuezwanziger@diekaes.de SOMMERSALON am 23. August! Tickets gibts hier Alles hören Komm' in den Salon. Es gibt ihn via Webplayer & RSS-Feed (zum Hören im Podcatcher deiner Wahl, auch bei Apple Podcasts und Spotify). Wenn du Salon-Stürmer bist, lade weitere Hörer von der Gästeliste ein. full Wolfgang und Stefan besprechen den Mai 2025 no Stefan Schulz & Wolfgang M. Schmitt 15906

01:00 American Primeval exemplifies my worldview, https://yourmoralleader.blogspot.com/2025/05/american-primeval.html 12:00 Political scientist John J. Mearsheimer on war and international politics, https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article/49/4/7/130810/War-and-International-Politics 27:40 Which prominent Americans called for regime change in Russia?, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=161403 32:00 Subversive un-pc jokes on SNL 34:20 Mark Halperin: Opportunity Missed: The Media Continues Failing As "Original Sin" Biden Book Becomes Dominant Topic, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkxy1dPTSg 45:00 Dan Senor's State of World Jewry Address (@92NY), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFkIPZxTQng 55:00 Michael joins to talk about Destiny's appearance on CSPAN 58:00 Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020), https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=159114 1:03:00 Batya Ungar-Sargon and Alan Dershowitz lost all their friends when they didn't hate Trump 1:20:00 Learning to love LA, https://www.palladiummag.com/2025/05/02/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-l-a/ 1:34:00 The Washington Consensus, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=161401 1:50:00 The World Turned Upside Down: America, China, and the Struggle for Global Leadership, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=161339 2:01:00 RCP: Media Won't Give Trump a Win on the Economy, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A9smlJbQEU 2:08:00 Econonmists Herbert Stein and his son Ben Stein, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein 2:22:00 Clyde Prestowitz: Global Competition and Comparative Advantage: New Thinking in International Trade, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-wFEx6KdWQ 2:48:00 Dan Senor on college anti-semitism, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzbF57US280 3:00:00 Jews after Oct. 7, https://www.commentary.org/articles/dan-senor/american-jewry-after-october-7/ 3:30:00 Michael Beckley: Has the United States Gone Rogue?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1v9Y3g_mdE 3:43:20 Trump is bold, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW8Wav0OydI 3:46:00 Axios: Biden officials "awed" by Trump's rule-breaking Middle East moves, https://www.axios.com/2025/05/15/trump-israel-syria-policy-reverse-biden 3:49:40 Mark Halperin talks to Rich Lowry, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEBcvGBNGWI 4:00:00 NYT: Strong Dollar vs. Weak Dollar: President Trump is of two minds when it comes to America's currency. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzbF57US280

The world is changing rapidly, driven by the necessity of creating alternative institutions to counter US domination and aggression. As the multipolar world rises, it is a critical time for the United States to re-evaluate and change its policies and practices in order to remain an active member of the global community. Clearing the FOG speaks with Ben Norton of Geopolitical Economy about the ways that US policy, the Washington Consensus, have backfired and what the growing US deficit means. Norton outlines what can be done to counter the current path the US is taking. For more information, visit PopularResistance.org.

This special episode of The Korea Pro Podcast features a live recording from our latest Seoul Circuit event, held on Jan. 16, 2025. Unlike our usual 15-minute studio podcasts, this 45-minute discussion was moderated by Jeongmin, Korea Pro's editorial director, over dinner and drinks.   The event's speakers included Chad O'Carroll, CEO of Korea Risk Group, and Mason Richey, professor of international politics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, president of the Korea International Studies Association and editor-in-chief of The Journal of East Asian Affairs.   Together, they explored the limitations of conventional Washington-centric perspectives — often referred to as “the Washington blob” — in analyzing Korean Peninsula issues. They discussed how geographical distance, institutional biases and regional complexities influence and sometimes distort global perceptions of South and North Korea.   Tune in to this special episode for an engaging and nuanced conversation that challenges conventional wisdom about the Korean Peninsula. While this episode features the moderated discussion, the Q&A session that followed was conducted under the Chatham House Rule and is not included here. For exclusive insights and the chance to engage directly with stakeholders in Seoul, consider joining our next Seoul Circuit event. About the podcast: The Korea Pro Podcast is a weekly 15-minute conversation hosted by Editorial Director Jeongmin Kim (@jeongminnkim) and Editor John Lee (@koreanforeigner), diving deep into the most pressing stories shaping South Korea — and dissecting the most complicated ones for professionals monitoring ROK politics, diplomacy, culture, society and technology. Uploaded every Friday. This episode was recorded on Thursday, Jan. 16, 2025. Audio edited by Gaby Magnuson

The Washington Consensus of the past few decades that called for open markets, free trade and reduced regulation will officially die on Monday as Trump re-takes the presidency with a radically different economic program. Free trade is out and tariffs are in; globalization is dead and national sovereignty is the rule of the day. Such a change has massive implications for companies all around the world, many of whom have designed their corporate strategies for a global world. Who is affected, particularly when it comes to U.S.-China relations in the years ahead? That's where Isaac Stone Fish comes in. He's the CEO and founder of Strategy Risks, a data and research company that helps companies and regulators understand and reduce alternative forms of risk. He's particularly noted for his China expertise, and his firm publishes the SR250 ranking, which highlights the largest American companies with the deepest ties with China, encompassing everything from financing and supply-chain interlinkages to public communications. Fish joins host Danny Crichton and Riskgaming director of programming Laurence Pevsner to talk about Trump's imminent arrival, why Ford is the most China-entwined company in the U.S., how China overtook the U.S. in electric vehicles, why American defense contractors are surprisingly engaged in China trade, why we might already be at war with China, how CEOs are managing these new strategic risks and finally, what the biotech and social media industries must do going forward in a more fractured world. Produced by ⁠Chris Gates⁠ Music by ⁠George Ko

Neoliberalism: Thank you for supporting us at The Neoliberal Corporation. In this season of giving, we preview the book and sit down with Author, Prof. Renaldo McKenzie to talk about his book, mainly what Neoliberalism is? What Bureaucratic Phenomenon it describes, what the Washington Consensus is, and what does it have to do with Structural Adjustment and Neoliberal Globalization? The episode has background music and interludes, and Harry Belafonte is in the background singing Day-o to accentuate your listening and watching experience. Renaldo shares a preview of the reading of Michael Scott's book, available via Audible. The recording included clips of the audiobook sample on Twitter Spaces, with comments and discussions by Renaldo McKenzie with Donte T Nelson of The NeoLiberal Round Podcast and YouTube Channel. The Neoliberal Corporation is always in the season of giving. Visit our store page at https://store.theneoliberal.com to see our services and solutions. Neoliberalism is available in paperback, hardcover, ebook, and audible. Learn more at https://store.theneoliberal.com The Neoliberal Corporation is at htttps://theneoliberal.com or https://renaldocmckenzie.com Subscribe to our channel https://youtube.com/@renaldomckenzie Subscribe to our Audio Podcast feeds. audiobook. Learn more at https://store.theneoliberal.com. The Neoliberal Corporation is at https://theneoliberal.com or https://renaldocmckenzie.com. Support us: https://anchor.fm/theneoliberal/support Email us at info@theneoliberal.com or renaldocmckenzie @gmail.com  Call us at 1-445-260-9198 Neoliberalism is ON SALE: https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084?params=uh8uom2I6hhG9IbED45ePUL1PRYEejjqoslbXFlozekCheck out this video: https://youtu.be/7jmPoglegVU?si=3zmYKqZLSz9FcQgH Learn More at https://store.theneoliberal.com Visit us at theneoliberal.com or renaldocmckenzie.com Neoliberalism via the Audio: https://www.audible.com/pd/Neoliberalism-Globalization-Income-Inequality-Poverty-and-Resistance-Audiobook/B099LFCD79?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-267926&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_267926_rh_us+ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theneoliberal/support

We may think that the worst of inflation is over, but a changing world order means that inflation will be sticking with us. Globalization of international trade since the collapse of the Soviet Union has kept prices low for decades, but at a cost. But now that globalization is receding Americans must be ready to pay more. In this podcast the Edifice of Trust host, Victor Bolles, looks at why prices will go up and also how we should spend our money to protect our future.

Why is the United States waging economic war on China? Ben Norton discusses how China became the world's industrial superpower and a leader in important technologies, why the US is unable to compete, and the clash between Western neoliberal capitalism and Chinese socialism. VIDEO: https://youtube.com/watch?v=c3ngd__0ok0 China is now the 'world's sole manufacturing superpower': https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2024/01/31/china-world-manufacturing-superpower-production/ Topics 0:00 Bipartisan US economic war 2:19 China is world's #1 manufacturer 4:28 Clash of systems 6:29 Elon Musk laughed at Chinese competitors. Now they're beating him. 9:27 TikTok: Why US wants to ban it 10:56 EU threatens tariffs on China 11:20 West's hypocrisy on climate change 12:25 Solar panels: China installs more than rest of world combined 13:46 Clean energy is top driver of China's growth 14:56 China leads world in green transition 16:57 Neoliberal West can't outcompete China's state-led industrial development 18:27 The death of "free market" dogma 20:31 The myth of "free trade" 23:23 US opposes industrial policy when China does it 29:10 "Washington Consensus" failed, Washington admits 38:01 Ronald Reagan's trade war on Japan 43:25 Outro

John Stoltzfus, Oppenheimer Chief Investment Strategist, says the consumer and the jobs market will play an important role in 2024. Elliot Ackerman, US Marine Corps Veteran & Former White House Fellow, overviews the latest in the Middle East and Indo-Pacific as global geopolitical tensions continue to rise. Sarah Hunt, Alpine Saxon Woods Chief Market Strategist, says six rate cuts could indicate a weaker economic scenario. Thierry Wizman, Macquarie Global Interest Rates and Currencies Strategist, advises holding a long position on oil. Doug Kass, Seabreeze Partners President, details the catalysts that could drag down stocks in his '10 surprises of 2024.' Get the Bloomberg Surveillance newsletter, delivered every weekday. Sign up now: https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/surveillance  Full Transcript: This is the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. I'm Tom Keane, along with Jonathan Farrow and Lisa Abramowitz. Join us each day for insight from the best and economics, geopolitics, finance and investment. Subscribe to Bloomberg Surveillance on demand on Apple, Spotify and anywhere you get your podcasts, and always on Bloomberg dot Com, the Bloomberg Terminal, and the Bloomberg Business App. John Stolfus joints chief investment Strategist at op co Op and I'm our asset management and we speak to him about the bullmarket he nailed last year and continues to nail this year. John, I'm going to take it back to the analog of the middle seventies, a horrific recession, the leap in nineteen seventy five, and then a follow on in nineteen seventy seven. It's twenty twenty four, a follow on bullmarket. I think in many ways it is, Tom. I think the question here really is, or rather the difference is, it's a substantially different background in terms of a digitalized global society for business as a consumer and what was back then, which was essentially an analog world. And I think things get digested much quicker. I think that the data is a better quality. And because we've been in crisis in an out of crisis since two thousand and eight, all the players as well as you know, the traders as well as the investors are more experienced with dealing with volatility. John, I think what's so important here is only Stolphus is talking about last year was a prelude. I just think that's so important. Fifty two hundred price target year rent this year, John, let's build on that. You and I have talked about this a few times in the last few months, and I've appreciate it. Can we just address it right now? How dependent that call is on interest rate cuts from the feder Reserve? Not much really. You know, we're not of the camp it's looking for six cuts this year in twenty twenty four. We're looking for perhaps one or two. And we're not looking for the first half for cuts. We think it'll happen in the second half of the year, and lightly later rather than earlier. In the second half. To us, the Fed has been remarkably sensitive in practicing its mandate. You know, where as able to comy and full employment is described by unemployment between three and four percent, and we think it wants to keep it that way, and so that's what we're looking at A little bit different. We like the Fed. Ironically, very few people do we think the Fed has done. It shows the Ben Bernank legacy carried on through Jerome Powell in the sense of communication and clarity. So it might not necessarily the rally my not be dependent on j. Powell. But how much is it dependent on the Central Bank of Tim Cook? I would have to say, perhaps I'll keep it away from a company specific here, but I would say certainly a business, the consumer and the jobs market will play an important role this year. Keyword to watch for is resilience when we look at economic data, what we're looking at is for things to show resilience, and naturally is a challenging environment when you're making transitions and you have the levels of trouble around the world. The geopolitical risks seems to keep ramping up by the day. But consider where business plays out in this where the opportunities are both this cyclical point where we are on the calendar, as well as the secular trends that are driving potential growth for all eleven sectors. Okay, So in other words, his text still lead me. I guess if that's the question at a time, or that accounted for fifteen percent of the twenty four percent game of the SMP last year at least, I think tech certainly remains a major participant in this, But I think what we need to watch well, of course communications services, which is about fifty percent tech related, you also have when you look at the other sectors, just think about industrials and all the technology in that. And it's a good customer of technology, whether it's it's sensors of robotics or what have you, and the cloud, big data and all that aon. So when we look at this, it's you know, whether it's it's a utility company, whether it's a materials company, whether it's a pharmaceutical or a biotech. Technology is where it's at. So we can but think. The other reason is last year Tech was was fabulous it's performance because it had been so brutalized in twenty twenty two when the Bears sold all of Tech, the long duration they sold because they were worried about red dancings, but they sold the good stuff that was highly profitable positive cash low, create products, and deeply embedded in the lives of business and the consumer. John the cliche is the boat has left the duck. I would guess a very large percent of the surveillance audience feels like they missed twenty twenty three. How do you get back in the game if the boat's left the duck. Yeah, Tom, I would say for the people who missed this, I would say it's a question of layering in. That's not back up the truck. At these levels, consider opportunities that show up when you get some weakness in names that may have gotten away from you. Look for babies that get grown out with the bathwater in downdrafts to add to positions that you're building, and in essence, what you want to avoid is just blindly buying deps. You want to be selective, even within what appears to be a nicely broadening rally. After as Lisa pointed out earlier, I mean we're still back to the future in terms of the prices of stocks. In many cases outside of the magnificent seventy eight there you know they've got it would look like they've got plenty of headroom available to move higher in so many ways. We had a decade in a year. As Lisha and I discussed a little bit earlier on the program, John want to put to catch up with you, sir, Happy new year. John stelfiestet of Oppenheim arrasted management. Right now, we need perspective, and we get it from someone gifted. He's served the nation in the Marine Corps, also a White House fellow, and critically he is a king of speculative fiction with James Travitis, Elliott Ackerman's must read two thou thirty four, boy is out of mustard right now, given the Philippines, given the South China Sea, and we eagerly anticipate two thousand and fifty four that you'll see in March. Elliott Eckerman joins us this morning. Elliott, if this is not speculative fiction, it is reality in the Red Sea. What is lost in the press coverage? I think the one thing that is often lost is we have a tendency to focus kind of specifically on military events while losing perspective that all military events happen in a political overlay. You know, ultimately these are political questions. What's going on in Taiwan? What's going on in Ukraine, what's going on in Israel. And the longer these wars play out, the more and more central the politics of the war it self become. And what the outcome is going to be the heart of your fiction with the Admiral st Vetus is things happen suddenly and then in sequence, do we have the ships in place against these terrorists whatever you want to call them. Do we have the process in place where unexpected bad things can happen in sequence? I think when it comes to the Middle East and the challenges that we're seeing there, yes we do. And that is a situation where we the United States vis the Iranians. We are not facing a peer level adversary necessarily in Iran. And I agree with Terry's comments that the underappreciated conflict here is Taiwan. And when it comes to Taiwan, you know, the United States does not have the forces in place, at least peer level forces in place that could meet Chinese aggression across the Taiwan Straits, and that's one of the huge challenges that we face it. But the Chinese would be fighting that conflict in their backyard and we would be fighting it from across the Pacific Ocean. I want you to elaborate a little bit on the point that you just made that all of these international conflicts have real domestic political implications. What are some of the ramifications that we've seen over the past year, how the conflicts have developed, and how public opinion has shaped the inaction that we're currently seeing in Congress to continue providing aid. I think when we go around the go around the world, if we look at Ukraine right now, I would argue that that's probably a war that's not going to be decided on the battlefield as those conditions stagnate. Is a war that's going to be decided at the ballot box. And I think in Ukraine, in Israel, as we see this war is now extending in two months, I think domestic political considerizations in Israel are going to determine the outcome of their war with Hamas. And I think when we look at the United States, you know, the elephant in the room is we have an election. It's going to occur this fall, and how that election unfolds will be determinatives of those conflicts. And lastly, when we look at Taiwan, I mean, in two weeks the Taiwanese people are having a presidential election, and the outcome of that election will certainly affect China's perceptions on what they should do in Taiwan. How different is the foreign policy of Donald Trump versus President Biden. I think the foreign policy of Donald Trump is much more unpredictable, and I think the foreign policy of Joe Biden, as we've seen it, as much more. It has it much more incremental. So I don't think anyone can necessarily say what Donald Trump's policies would be on any three of these conflicts Taiwan, Ukraine, or Israel, Whereas I think we've seen sort of a more consistent approach that Joe Biden has applied. I mean, I look, Elliott where we are, and it's about public service. There's a lot of people watching this across this nation that have loved ones. That's the loved ones on long tours of duty. I know that the Ford is coming back from the Mediterranean. Are we fit now in our defense budget for multiple wars you mentioned Taiwan. Let's say our war Ukraine, our war Iran, maybe our war China. Do we have a budget near capable of meeting those three threats? I think we're I think we have to take a very very hard look not only at the budget and the financial resources that we're applying, but you know, also the intellectual resources. And that's actually where I have the most concerns. You know, is a what a war against China look like a repeat of the Second World War, in which the coin of the realm and naval battle or aircraft carriers eighty years after the aircraft carrier became the corner of the realm. And I don't know that that is necessarily the case. You know, we've seen in places like Ukraine that the Ukrainians have been very effective in sinking Russian ships of the line with shore based missiles. And so I know, I'm a marine veter in my own service right now is in the midst of doing some real strategic a real strategic reset about what it would look like to fight a revisited island hopping campaign in the South China Sea, and they're restructuring the entire Marine Corps to do that. So I think there's a budgetary question, but there's also an intellectual question of you know, what will the wars of the future look like, and that work needs to be done now, and it's going to force some American military institutions to transform in ways that are going to be very uncomfortable with the war of the future. Elliott, what's a more effective strategy one that's predictable or one that's unpredictable. Well, I think in terms of your battle plans, you always want to be unpredictable. The word I would use is one that is adaptive. Because it's very difficult to predict what the war the future is going to be. It's most essential not to get the prediction right, but to get the prosture right so that your forces can adapt to whatever the next conflict looks like. And to use an analogy from the Second World War, at the outset of the Second World War, in terms of naval warfare, again, the coin of the realm was the battleship, and it had been the corner of the realm and was the central platform for centuries. But as we all know, you know, Pearl Harvard, the entire US battleship fleet was sunk, and we had this new platform, which is the aircraft carrier, and that platform was able to adapt and become the central force around which naval battles were fought, and I think whatever the next war is, we're going to see a similar process of adaptation need to occur. It's going to have to occur very fast, and the side that gets their right will probably be the side that wins oty. Just to finish that, what do you suspect it is. I think it's going to probably be a network of platforms. I think it's going to be unmanned, unmanned ships, unmanned aerial vehicles, our ability to fight both a high tech war and also a hybrid low tech war where many of those high tech systems are taken offline and our forces ability to kind of toggle between the two. So it's gonna be very, very complex, but more of the network centric version of warfare as opposed to a platform center version of warfare built around you know, very big ships and aircraft and things of that. Interesting. Interesting Elliott, thank you, I appreciate your time this morning. Always do Happy New Year, Sir Akman, US Marine Corps veteran whether surround the table. Sarah Hunt, chief market strategist at Alpine Saxon Words, Sarah, good morning and happy New Year. Let's revisit that quote from Berkley's This Morning. We believe the continued period of week results coupled with multiple expands is not sustainable. You on the same page. I think you almost have to be. I mean, you know, the theme for twenty twenty three was all about the FED and what was going to happen, and as soon as the cycle peak, you could be okay. So if we pulled forward a lot of multiple expansion on the back of the idea that rates are going to come down, they're probably not going to come down to that great Financial crisis level. If they come down a couple hundred basis points. Is the multiple expansion already too much? And I think that that's going to be the big tension in a lot of them. And you know, for Apple, which we were talking about, you've got to look at all that consistency and all that cash onlo and that's what people are paying for that and the exclusivity of its Apple, and people will keep replacing those products. It's that assessment true. If the whole market of just a select group of stocks that dominate the market, I think it's more select group. I mean, you have to I think valuations and we keep saying and it's one of like, this is Europe's year, this is valuation's year. It's going to matter this year, right, I don't know when it's going to matter, but at some point it will. I think having money have a cost makes valuations matter in a way that we had fifteen years where you know, people talked about it, but it didn't really matter. And maybe that starts to happen now and maybe people really start looking at those metrics. But I think you've got a lot of money on the table, and you've got a lot of places that you know, I got a lot of money that needs to be invested. Frame out total return. You could go to the Bloomberg folks. The terminal tr is the function, and you can model in and your return quickly one year back, two years back, three years, et cetera. And the answer is we're now addicted to oh, I made fifteen percent. I failed Blooney, it's a single digit return. At the most, you're going to make eleven percent. But the answer is do we need to get use again to equity return of eight or nine percent? I think that you do. And I think that you also have to look at history. I mean, yes, you had a huge move last year, and a handful of names, and yes, some of the other stocks started to catch up at the end of the year. I'm just looking at a chart of L three Harris before I come on here, and I was like, Wow, that back end of the performance was really really quick. I don't know where you end up with multiples here, but I don't think that you can have the kind of growth that we've had given the kind of economic backdrop that we're looking at. You. If the Fed's really going to cut six times like the market is pricing in, then we probably have a much weaker economic scenario than earnings are pricing in. So I don't know. There's a tension here. In twenty twenty four has got a lot of questions that need to be answer. You're the person I've been wanting to ask this question too. One of the big surprises last year was that the great underperformance came from oil. Tom and John were talking about why that was so surprising considering some of the conflicts that really were escalating in the Middle East. At this point, we are seeing oil perkop just a touch with relative in relation to what's going on in the Red Sea. Could this increase if it continues, change the disinflation narrative absolutely, I mean just the changing the trade routes alone could change some of that because you're going to things get more expensive. But you've had a huge supply response to oil demand and you've got you were talking about earlier, the US is a huge producer now right commodities are priced on the margin. If I've got excess supply, I can't get prices to really move that high, which is why the Saudias had to keep taking oil off the market. But if you start to see a crimping of some of those roots and you can't move things the way you thought you could before, then you're going to see then you could see some problems. And that's been a huge help for the inflation picture. And if that changes and you start to see data that is a little bit more inflationary, that narrative on how much the Fed's going to cut has to change, and then that's going to be a question. Then where to equity multiples go given that scenario. I know that you're bullish on energy stocks through the beginning of last year, then you've got a little more tapid as you saw as some of the moves at this point, how much are you leaning in to some of those names because of just how offsides people would be if the disinflation narrative fades an oil prices surge. Well, we think of energy as an area where you need to have some position, but you trade around that position, and you get heavier when you think that you've got an opportunity, and you get lighter when you think that the market is not going your way. When the supply came up a lot, that's where you sort of lighten up on your energy positions. I don't think you want to be out of it entirely. You've got a lot of very good dividen yields in those and you've got a lot of stocks that act better in a bad market than some of the other things do. So I think that's something you want to trade around. And we still think that energy has a longer tail. You've got a Barbell portfolio, You've got short term stuff for your day trading. We know you're famous for that, Sarah, and then you got the buy and hold. I want you to talk to the audience that their heads are spinning off of COVID. They're stating, Okay, COVID's over. Can I maintain some form of three year or four year or five year ownership of whatever equity uncomfortable? Can you still do that act? I think you absolutely can, and I think that this is the time to really be thinking about that thematic trade of what's going to happen in the next few years. Right, so we look at something like Tetratech that does all sorts of engineering construction but basically on a lot of water and some of the infrastructure stuff. I think that you can definitely look at companies that have a longer term theme that are playing into some of the things that are going on, but the volatility within that you have to be able to say, okay, this is where I will allow some volatility to occur, because some of those stocks that we like a lot still have had some challenges in a year where someone makes an acquisition or somebody does something. But I think you can look at the matic investing now because you really got a longer term view and you've got a market. It's fairly expensive, so you better really like where you're positioned. Let's finish on the banks, the regional banks specifically, not a big players, the regionals Kori closely followed Regional Bank ETF you know them well, up almost fourteen percent in November of sixteen percent in December. Is that just a leftige trade on what's happening in the bond market in treasuries as yields fall aggressively or is there something to get your hands around for twenty four I think that's a lot to do with what's going on with interest rates, and I think it's also a lot to do with people looking for okay, where has completely still been on the floor and maybe we can pick something up here, because the valuations on that group were very, very not challenging relative to the rest of the market. I think you still have issues with the yield curve. I think it's still difficult to make some money in some of those and I think we still have some commercial real estate issues that we haven't flown through yet. So it's a little bit challenging to say that that's a definite thing about the environment as more as like it was being picked up off the floor. Speaking of the yeld curve, Lisa two year versus ten year still negative thirty six basis points. They're not going to really make up some of the difference through lending long and borrowing short. To also Sarah's point one hundred and seventeen billion dollars of commercial mortgage debt coming to just this year alone, that's really going to raise some questions on that front. With some of these reached out. I had the same article. I believe it is in the fteam. My brain's frozen on that right now. But the answer John is I saw a bar chart. I'm going to say ten cities in America, there's basically New York in some of all the others, and maybe every other city combined is the same as New York. I mean, it's amazing. Now this is a local issue for us. E Sarah, It's going to see you. Happy New year, Sarah. About pont Snackson Woods. Let's quickly get the ry isman of acquiry here on global FX and all the other things that get us back to a great bull market in the United States. Wonderful to have your after Wiseman to get us started for the year. Let me go to the larger view, which is everything hinges on China. Do you agree not for twenty twenty four? No, Although I do think that China is a very important part of the macro story. Globally. We have this central banks in the US to worry about, we have the central banks in Europe to worry about, and we have supply shocks, especially in the natural resource markets and the oil markets to worry about too. So China is important, but it's not all or nothing as it comes to China. I will say this though, I think the market is somewhat wrong in focusing too much on the property sector in China an agurate demand in China. I think what the market has lost sight of to some extent is President's willingness to go after the tech sector in China and more generally, you know, against the whole concept of private property in China. I think this is what is souring sentiment for China, and I think to the extent that that is find some relief in twenty twenty four, it could be a bigger deal for China on the upside than you know, some resolutions to the problems on the balance sheet of the property sector. There's been a multi decade failure of international stocks and some correlated over to an ever stronger dollar. Is a dollar finally broken where there's an unspoken opportunity in international equities. Well, if you're asking, is the dollar is a lot dollars a reserve currency as the standard for international trade, international finance is over No, I know, I don't think so. If what you're asking for, is there going to be a structural break with regard to the status of the dollar, international capital markets, and international trade, I think the answer is no. Remember that we had a period before we had globalization, before nineteen ninety five for that matter, when China and Russia and the other emerging markets were not that fully integrated into the global economy or the Washington Consensus for that matter, and yet we still talked about the dollar is the reserve currency of the world. Why, because you know, a good part of the of the world still depends on the dollar for its trade and for its commerce and for its it's financing. So no, I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. At least, one of the trades that we do at the beginning of every year is to come up with potential tail risks, which inevitably will probably be wrong. But there is a question here. Tail risk the dollar being somehow profoundly debased, seems to be off the table. From what you just said, what about a sort of the tail risk of some sort of significant supply shock. You sort of alluded to that initially in the commodity space, so that I think is a bigger tail risk, and I think it behooves every investor out there to at least have some oil in one's portfolio, be long oil, because when you think about US recessions in the postwar period, you'll find it an amazingly large number of them had been preceded by a rapid rise in oil prices. You'll see that, and it behooves investors to have some oil in the portfolio because we just don't know to the extent that we do have a supply shock. Oil prices will go up, and you'll offset the losses you would otherwise experience from seeing stocks go seeing bonds go down. In that context, this raises a question to me of how off size the market would be should there be some sort of oil supply shock. Given the fact that people have kind of gotten accustomed to the idea that the US is a producing record amounts, and then even in the phase of conflict, oil prices went down, how wrongly positioned are people for this kind of this kind of event. I don't know how wrongly positioned they are. There is a case to be made, however, for the logic of oil prices having come down in the last few months, and the logic is very straightforward. The elasticity of supply in oil is actually quite high, potentially higher than the market surmised before six months ago. What we have seen with the increase in oil prices that preceded this decline is a huge increase in oil production in the US, and that is the basis for why oil prices are down. But if we were to get a shock, a shock out of the Middle East, for example, a shock out of Russia, it's not conceivable that production can go up quickly enough to offset that in a very short period of and that's the risk that we face right now from these shocks. Over the long term, there'll be an adjustment in US supply that's positive and beneficial, but not in the short term. Is the US donar a commodity currency now? No, I don't think so. Certainly the market doesn't see it that way, right. It's interesting there are some emerging markets that we don't necessarily associate that much from the perspective of their current account balance and their trade with oil, because they're not huge net exporters Brazil, for example, but they are large producers. And yet the market tends to associate the Brazilian real with oil more than it does associate the US dollar with oil. Do you expect that to change anytime soon? No? I don't think so. And that's because no one's going to really associate the US with a very large net export balance in oil. It really has to get to a point where US trade is dominated by oil, and that is not the case. Yet it's still dominated by services. Knowledge very true, TK The number is just absolutely staggering when it comes to production, thirteen million barrows a day in this country. Yeah, well, it's interesting here is we don't have an oil policy. I mean, we take great pride that Washington has never come up with the plan. We've got this plan, that plan, whatever plan. I guess it's a technological success. Not sure. We needn't want no plan. Well to that point, do we need one? It's Washington is the White House of renovant with regards to this conversation, only to respect that oil is such a geopolitical issue, and of course geopolitics and politics generally have to manage you through diplomacy or through some management of market forces that are relevant to geopolitics. That's ok. There's a case be made for the energy market to be managed from that perspective. But if it wasn't for the importance of oil from a geopolitical perspective, I don't think so. Terry. It's good to see you. Happy new year. Thank you, sir, Terry Wiseman of Macquarie. We're beginning strong this year, and part of that is with Doug Cass, who is many of you know out on social media. Seabree's Partners is a great pinata and Doug, before we get to your always interesting, thought provoking ten ideas, if I'm cautious on the market, or if I'm short on the market and the market runs away from me the other direction, what do you do? What do you do? In December? Given this bull market leg up? How did you respond? We were short in two time frames. One was timely mated after July after the majorly I run, but we didn't lose money in the majorly run, and we were net short in November and December. We didn't lose money either. And now how do you do that? I think a lot of people want to know, Doug, how do you not lose money? It's tough, you know, to begin with, Why did I get it wrong in the last two months? I think I underestimated the animal spirits and the price momentum that had been accumulated. I underestimated the power of the herd as the pressure on the upside intensified, and so did Fomo. I understand. I estimated the contribution from market structure, which had basically intensified the upside to equities, and same applies to interest rates. The momentum and the yields to the downside accelerated. And you know, we live in a market which is has a structure. It's far different than I started when I was a housing analyst kit or Peabody. Buyers live higher and sellers of lower, so you have to adapt. Warm Buffett said the first two lessons on investing don't lose money, and the second lesson is don't forget the first lesson. So we trade opportunistically around short positions and risk averse. Because my short book is pretty diversified, and when I'm wrong, I take a lot of small office that's the answer. But as we entered the new year, I am not short. So how do you think about here this twenty twenty four? Again, I think the you know, late October through the year end twenty three caught a lot of people by surprise, the vigor of that rally here. So what do we do here on January second? Well, I always find it amusing that there is now a universal view almost after the quantum rise, especially the NASDAC, the markets are headed higher. However, I think it's important Paul, to observe how wrong the confident consensus has been in each of the last two years. If you remember, in the end of twenty twenty one, the herd was optimistic. In twenty twenty two was a disaster. We had such a bad experience in twenty twenty two that the consensus ended that year wildly confident, and that especially but this time barish, especially on tech stocks, and that couldn't be for their off sides. Today, the consensus found the momentum is very bullish and an area bear can be found. In fact, many of the bears that I watch when I'm on the desk stars the NBC have now become bulls. So I see a vast of a ray of unexpected political, geopolitical, economic, and market surprises that could be untapped for next year. And my biggest concern is the equity risk premium. And despite the enormity of the drop in yields, the equity risk premium is still paper thin, and historically this is a reasonable predictor of weak markets. Paul Apple, Yeah, exactly, Doug surprises for twenty twenty four. What should Maybe we're not thinking about it. I mean we should, sure. I think one of the things we're not thinking about is in part due to fear that the Democrats will continue to hold on to the presidency. Foreign powers step up military confrontations and my surprise, my second surprise, is that the West continues to lose patients with how the war is going with Ukraine, as a US backs off and support and negotiations of a territorial split began and Ukraine is forced to give up east side of the country. North Korea, with support from Russia, undertakes skirmishes in the DMZ and makes threats to invade South Korea. Iran completes its nuclear build up, which provides a direct attack from Israel. Though China doesn't invade Taiwan, it continues with aggressive war game tactics in the Kia Sea. So my feeling is that the global economy, Tom and pol are more susceptible to supply shocks than has generally believed. And with Russia and Saudi conspiring on production cuts, I wouldn't be surprised as a surprise that the price of oil exceeds one hundred and ten dollars a barrel, and the price of a gallon gasoline US approaches six dollars, and shares of Exxon oxy chevron each rise by a third in the year. Doug, I want to get to send it's so important within all of this, you really go after the Blackstones, the Apollos of the world. You say, private equity quote to get torn to shreds. Discuss that that's important for global wall Street. Sure, Surprise number seven is Wall Street's most vicious vultures. Private equity are about to get torn to shreds. And remember we still Tom have elevated interest rates, and we have a slowing global economy. We have the loan rate reset cliff beginning at the last half of this year, and I think it's going to contribute to a leader in private credit failing. Blackstone shares could drop by a third after the BREI, which is the private real estate fund run by the company, and the public fund bx MT come under new redemption pressures. And finally, I wouldn't be surprising. I was involved as a director of a business development company in New York Stock Exchange and I personally saw vividly the phony marks in our books. So my surprise is that shares a private equity stocks like KKR, Apollo and Blackstone plunge as the SEC opens and investigation into the failure of the private equity industry to realistically marked to market their portfolios in the timely manner. Wow, interesting because that's been an issue for a long time, particularly now that these companies are public. How about private credit, Doug, This is a new business for you, Tom and me. Over the last decade or something. It's just exploded in terms of size. We were all comfortable with, or we think we understand private equity, but private credit has become a huge business and it just doesn't feel like it gets the regulatory scrutiny that they get the regulatory scrutiny at all. Paul it's hurting the banking industry. It's one of the reasons why I'm so negative on banks, besides the credit cycle, the emerging credit cycle. So this is something to watch, you know, whenever there is such quantum increase in balance sheets as are currently in private equity, we have to be on the alert. Well, speaking of alert, Doug, I got time for one question. I read my Padres in Red Sox the athletic coverage this week. I'm sorry Juan Soto for the dreaded New York Yankees. He's basically Weighe bogs with power that changes the Yankees lineup, doesn't. It's a massive move for the Yankees. Our team has lacked left hand sluggers in recent years, and we never had the necessary lineup support for Aaron Judge. Remember, he bats left handed right and he's fully capable of taking advantage of the short porch in right fielded Yankee Stadium. I think we're one Jordan Montgomery type away through the World Series. But the problem is Montgomery, Montras, Manea Lugo, they're all going, they're all signing. But this is a powerful lineup from may U Sodo, Judge, Zo, Stanton Torres, twenty seconds. Dougcast, could you do something about the food at Yankee Stadium? People that live in glasshouses in Fenway Park? Doug, Thank you so much. Doug Cass the series partners. Subscribe to the Bloomberg Surveillance podcast on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Listen live every weekday starting at seven am Eastern on Bloomberg dot Com, the iHeartRadio app tune In, and the Bloomberg Business app. You can watch us live on Bloomberg Television and always. I'm the Bloomberg Terminal. Thanks for listening. I'm Tom Keane and this is Bloomberg.See 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Dimes and Judas hash out recent online drama concerning a transgender influencer in the DR, intercept a story on ancient alien disclosure occurring in Mexican congress, and review the film Corner Office. This leads to a discussion on the essentiality of merging economics and geopolitics as a form of short-term forecasting, citing the book “Geopolitical Alpha” by Marko Papic. Here they explore the shift from the Washington Consensus to the Buenos Aries Consensus, coupled with the eternal importance of constraints over idealism. Lastly on this episode of The Copepranos Society, Dimes speaks with the enigmatic Charles Haywood, Owner of The Worthy House, and Founder of Foundationalism. They discuss his pathway to financial independence, how dissident minded men can prepare for collapse, and the nasty rumors of him being a cool warlord. Timestamps: 1:59 – The Hunt for 5G Black Goo 10:41 – The Evelyn Question 31:28 – Conservation Through Distinct Lines 44:21 – Movie Korner: Corner Office 59:24 – Mummified Alien Disclosure to Mexican Congress 1:07:44 – RFK Jr. Murdering a Woman During an Election Debate on Aliens 1:11:30 – No Bodies Found in Alleged Mass Grave for Aboriginal Children 1:21:51 – Avenging Burned Churches 1:27:43 – Geopolitical Alpha Discussion Begins 1:30:47 – The Shift from the Washington Consensus 1:34:42 – Newtonian Investors and Overreliance on Math 1:44:54 – The System for Financial Geopolitical Forecasting 1:48:22 – Media Voter Theory and Finding the Election's Hook 1:56:54 – Examples of Poor Predictions 2:02:25 – Where to Dig Deep for the Right Information Flows 2:04:23 – Predictions for the Next Decade

Economic policy prescriptions for crisis-hit developing countries known as the “Washington Consensus” have boosted prosperity in Asia and beyond but also have been criticized for negatively affecting manufacturing jobs and the labor force in developed countries. In this podcast, Jenny Gordon, Honorary Professor at the Centre for Social Research and Methods at the Australian National University, explains the principles and limitations of the Washington Consensus and how countries can approach them effectively moving forward. Transcript: adbi.me/3Ow6AxQ

On this week's Education Gadfly Show podcast, former Massachusetts Secretary of Education Jim Peyser joins Mike to discuss education reform's tendency to overpromise, and how we can avoid that in the fight against learning loss. Then, on the Research Minute, Adam discusses a study on how the pandemic affected the academic growth of high- and low-achieving students.Recommended content:“Settle for better”— James Peyser“Education reform is alive and well, even if the Washington Consensus is dead for now”—Michael Petrilli“Let's forge a new K–12 political coalition—without political extremists” —Bruno MannoThe study that Adam reviewed on the Research Minute: Scott J. Peters et al., “Unequal Learning Loss: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Influenced the Academic Growth of Learners at the Tails of the Achievement Distribution,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (June 2023) Feedback Welcome:Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to Jeanette Luna at jluna@fordhaminstitute.org.

On this episode, we begin with South Korea's President Yoon Suk Yeol's 6-day state visit to the United States. South Koreans have become increasingly concerned about the nuclear threat from North Korea. We discuss if South Korea got the security guarantees they desired. We also look at other key issues in the US-South Korea relationship.Fierce fighting in Sudan has been capturing headlines. But what are they fighting about? We go over the key actors, what is at stake, and why Americans should care about this conflict.Finally, we introduce a new segment: Changing Tides, where we read a book, set of articles, or in today's case, speeches that are either changing the world or reflecting on how the world is changing. Today, we discuss two recent foreign policy speeches by the Biden administration that were given in recent days. That of Janet Yellen on economic policy towards China and Jake Sullivan on Biden's foreign policy for the middle class.Topics Discussed in this Episode04:50 - U.S.-South Korea Summit30:45 - Crisis in Sudan49:30 Changing Tides: Discussion of the Biden Administration's "new" Washington Consensus and foreign policy for the middle class Articles and Resources Mentioned in EpisodeU.S.-South Korea SummitSouth Korea has America in its face and China breathing down its neck (The Economist)America's Ironclad Alliance With South Korea Is a Touch Rusty (Foreign Policy)After Warmth From Biden, South Korea's Leader Faces a Different Tune at Home (NY Times)Crisis in SudanIn Sudan, a power struggle between rival armed forces turns violent (Vox)What's behind the fighting in Sudan, and what is at stake? (WaPo)United States Says Wagner Has Quietly Picked Sides in Sudan (NY Times)Changing Tides: Discussing the ‘new' Washington Consensus and "foreign policy for the middle class"Jake Sullivan's Talk at the Brookings InstitutionJanet Yellon's Talk at Johns Hopkins SAISFollow Us Show Website: www.kelloggsglobalpolitics.com Show Twitter: @GlobalKellogg Anita's Twitter: @arkellogg Show YouTube

This week on Rational Security, a Quinta-less Alan and Scott were joined by Lawfare legal fellow Saraphin Dhanani to talk through the week's big national security news, including:“Seoul Authority.” South Korea and the United States recommitted themselves to their close security relationship this past week, including through a state dinner and a new Washington Declaration that confirms that the United States will respond to any nuclear attack on South Korea with overwhelming force. What drove this public showing? And what impact will it have on the nuclear threat posed by North Korea?“The Uncanny X-Date.” The debate over raising the debt ceiling took on new urgency this week, when Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced that the United States might meet the ‘X-Date' at which it defaults on its obligations as soon as June 1. Yet there are few signs of a compromise, as House Republicans have dug in on a proposal that demands deep spending cuts while the Biden administration continues to push for a clean raise. Where will this debate lead?“Washington Contentious.” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan gave remarks at our own Brookings Institution this past week, laying out a new approach to international economic policy. What should we make of this new ‘Washington Consensus'?Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Derek releases the fire hose of news upon the trash fire of Danny. This week: the death of an Islamic State leader (0:39), clashes in the Gaza Strip (5:52), a Sudan update (8:27), the Kremlin drone strike and a Ukraine update (12:04), a damning human rights report on Peru (16:21), a New Cold War update (17:48) featuring the Paraguayan election and its relationship with Taiwan (17:52), a new US embassy in Tonga (19:40), a new NATO office in Japan (20:36), and Jake Sullivan's Washington Consensus speech (24:08).Recorded Thursday, May 4, 2023 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.americanprestigepod.com/subscribe

This week, a Quinta-less Alan and Scott were joined by Lawfare legal fellow Saraphin Dhanani to talk through the week's big national security news, including:“Seoul Authority.” South Korea and the United States recommitted themselves to their close security relationship this past week, including through a state dinner and a new Washington Declaration that confirms that the United States will respond to any nuclear attack on South Korea with overwhelming force. What drove this public showing? And what impact will it have on the nuclear threat posed by North Korea?“The Uncanny X-Date.” The debate over raising the debt ceiling took on new urgency this week, when Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced that the United States might meet the ‘X-Date' at which it defaults on its obligations as soon as June 1. Yet there are few signs of a compromise, as House Republicans have dug in on a proposal that demands deep spending cuts while the Biden administration continues to push for a clean raise. Where will this debate lead?“Washington Contentious.” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan gave remarks at our own Brookings Institution this past week, laying out a new approach to international economic policy. What should we make of this new ‘Washington Consensus'?For object lessons, Alan recommended Matthew Continetti's (audio)book on American conservatism, "The Right." Scott decided to shil for his favorite (washable!) shoe brand (for men!), Rothy's. And Saraphin overcame her natural aversion to musicals to endorse the current Broadway run of Stephen Sondheim's classic, "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We continue with the Lectures in Caribbean Thought. We introduced the concepts of Power, position, privilege, and the foundations of Knowledge and Hegemony of faith within the development of western civilization that affects Caribbean thinking and reality. This is compendium of perspectives on power that examine how the status quo uses strategy to extend, establish or maintain power which then imposes on Caribbean Thought and poses problems for human (Caribbean) progress. This involves looking at the Development of Power, Privilege, Position & Status Within the Foundations of Historical literature and Divine Intervention. The presentation will be interdisciplinary but benefits from the discipline of Liberal Studies and liberal arts, lifting up issues of human values and ethics. We will consider and make conclusions about the foundations of knowledge and the hegemony of faith as we present our analysis. It uses anthropological methods and other primary and secondary sources to ascertain data as well as explore the historical archives. Further the Lecture presentation, due to the dynamism of the Lecturer/presenter, writing within a post-colonial milieu will consider social media as one of the Greatest Victory for Masses and Social Movements and Caribbean peoples, that will upend Strategies of Power by The Status Quo and the culture of violence in society? Moreover, the answer may lie in an exploration of The Development of Power, Privilege, Position and Status Within the Foundations of Historical literature and Divine Intervention. I am here talking about the foundations of knowledge and the hegemony of faith and the cultures containing this hegemony. So, we will begin by asking, "Do the Poems of Homer and Hesiod's Theogony and the Biblical Stories provide a Basis to Begin to Understand the Problem and Consequences of Human Dynamics in the Development of Human Society? Further, language, thought and history become part of any examination and reflection of culture involving philosophical inquiry. "The negro is not. Any more than the Whiteman," Frantz Fanon, in "Black Skin White Masks," psychoanalyses of the "colonized" (systematically-controlled) man/woman, he removes the dominant view within comparisons, striving for the empowered self. According to Homi Bhabha, here the familiar alignment of colonial [controlled] subjects is disturbed by a break, a pause from the usual to reveal a truly authentic self. In fact, when we hear of Jamaica or the Caribbean, we think of beautiful islands of paradise with sun, sea and sand, reggae music, cannabis and "irie" people like Usain Bolt- people who are living out their best dreams, desires, and lives. But this book analyzes this motif, given the historical and current economic and political situation in Jamaica and the Caribbean / the "Global South." In an attempt to escape the adverse realities of poverty, inequality, and injustice, the people of the Global South find themselves in north metropolises with very little agency and minimal change to their lives. In fact, except for the use of cleaning neoliberal waste, the immigrant is usually portrayed as an alien with three heads and big sharp teeth seeking to steal and destroy the profit and disrupt society. As such we will discuss Black, brown, and Pan-African struggles for economic prosperity, justice, and freedom and consider efforts, abilities, or inabilities to chart their own futures since decolonization and realize real political independence and economic prosperity. Perhaps, they are charting their own course by the few corrupt of the status quo who are benefiting from partnerships with the neoliberal regime of the "Washington Consensus," advocates of the "bureaucratic phenomenon," while the masses are left behind…” We explore history and thinking from a sub-altern view as we think about Privilege, Power, Position and Status within the development of society. https://theneoliberal.com --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theneoliberal/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theneoliberal/support

Brian Winter, vice president of policy at Americas Society and Council of the Americas and editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly, leads the conversation on U.S. relations with South America. CASA: Welcome to today's session of the Winter/Spring 2023 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I'm Maria Casa, director of the National Program and Outreach at CFR. Thank you all for joining us. Today's discussion is on the record and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/Academic, if you would like to share it with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Brian Winter with us to discuss U.S. relations with South America. Mr. Winter is the vice president of policy for the America Society and Council of the Americas and editor in chief of Americas Quarterly. An influential political analyst, he has followed South America for more than twenty years and has served as a correspondent for Reuters in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico. Mr. Winter is the author of several books including Why Soccer Matters, a New York Times bestseller he wrote with the Brazilian soccer legend Pelé. He is a regular contributor to television and radio and host of the Americas Quarterly podcast. Welcome, Brian. Thank you very much for being with us. WINTER: Thank you, Maria. Thanks for the invitation. CASA: Can you begin with a general overview of current U.S. relations with South American countries? WINTER: I can try and actually, as a matter of fact, today is an extremely fortuitous day to be doing this and let me tell you why. A couple of weeks ago on February 10, Brazil's new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, made a one-day trip to Washington. He met with President Biden while he was here. He brought his foreign minister with him as well as his chief foreign policy adviser, his finance minister, a couple other members of his Cabinet. One of the biggest sort of concrete results of this trip that Lula made up here was a U.S. donation to the Amazon Fund of $50 million. That is million with an M. Well, today, Lula leaves for China with about half of his Cabinet and a delegation of approximately two hundred and thirty leaders from Brazil's private sector in what Brazilian media are calling the biggest foreign delegation ever to leave Brazil for another country. They will be in China for six days and there is a whole roster of deals on the table ranging from financing to infrastructure to education, environmental, and so on. So the point I'm trying to get across here is one of clear asymmetry and it really reflects kind of the new moment for U.S. relations with South America overall. As Maria mentioned, I started my career in the region as a reporter a little more than twenty years ago. I was in Argentina for four years. I was in Mexico for one year and Brazil for five, and in the course of that relatively short period of time we've seen kind of the power balance in how we think about Latin America but specifically South America. We've seen a significant change in how we think about that region. Back the early 2000s, certainly, during the 1990s, these were the final years of the so-called Washington Consensus, a period characterized by kind of the unipolar moment that came with the end of the Cold War, a certain consensus not only around democracy but around a certain set of liberalizing economic policies as well, and that ran its course. But really, it was around 2003 when everything started to change for a variety of reasons. The biggest one is the one that I've already referenced, which is the growth of China as a trading partner for the region. China had always had a presence in Latin America. In fact, for the magazine that I run, Americas Quarterly, we ran a piece two years ago about the Chinese presence in Mexico going all the way back to the 1600s when they operated barber shops and other sort of forms of commerce. But what's happened over the last twenty years is really remarkable. In numbers, Chinese trade with Latin America and the Caribbean overall went from 18 billion (dollars) in 2002 to a stunning 450 billion (dollars) in 2021. China is now the largest trading partner for Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay, and for South America as a whole if you take all those countries in the aggregate China now outranks the United States. When you look at Latin America, by the way, that includes Mexico. If you take that grouping then the U.S. is still the number-one trading partner but, again, that's almost entirely because of that relationship—that trading relationship as a result of the former NAFTA and now USMCA. Along with that big growth in Chinese trade have come other changes. We've had a lot of talk in the U.S. media in recent days about the twentieth anniversary of the Iraq war. That was something—and I was living in Argentina at the time and you could really feel how that even then carried a cost for the U.S. reputation in some of these countries. I think that with the failure of the—the failures of the war over time I think that that only accentuated the view that—not only a long-standing view that the U.S. was an unwelcome, meddling, and in many cases imperialist presence but it also accelerated this narrative that the United States was in relative decline. More recent years we've seen kind of other things contribute to this diminished reputation of the United States and throughout many countries in the region—everything ranging from not just the election of Donald Trump, who, of course, was not popular in most of the region; but also specific decisions that were made by his government, such as the withdrawal from the TPP—the Trans-Pacific Partnership—that, of course, is the trade deal that was negotiated under the Obama administration that included several Latin American countries, including Chile and Peru—but also the weaponization of tariffs; and, you know, Trump's repeated threats to even cut off Mexican imports. They did—those threats did have the effect of kind of forcing, first, President Peña Nieto in Mexico and then his successor, Andrés Manuel Lόpez Obrador, to cooperate with initiatives like management of migration policy. So in the short term, they, quote/unquote, “worked” but in the longer term it showed Mexico as well as other countries in the region that the U.S. was not a particularly reliable partner. Some of you may be listening to all this and thinking, well, this sounds like the viewpoints espoused by governments in the region that are leftist and have never really cared for the United States in the first place. But another interesting thing about this latest trend and the way that things have changed over the last ten years is that this desire to forge a middle path between China and the United States as their strategic competition escalates is shared by leaders across the ideological spectrum. South American countries in particular are not unlike the United States when it seems like virtually everything is polarized, and yet in this area and specifically the need—the perceived need to have closer relations with—I'm sorry, closer relations with China while maintaining a civil relationship but not siding too much with United States, some of the most enthusiastic proponents of that view in recent years have actually been governments on the center right and right such as Sebastián Piñera, the former president of Chile, Iván Duque, the former president of Colombia, Guillermo Lasso, the current president of Ecuador, who has worked extensively with China, and even Jair Bolsonaro, who was until recently the right-wing president of Brazil, ended up essentially going along with Beijing and allowing Huawei to participate in the recent auction of 5G mobile communications technology there. And so what we end up with as a result is a policy in many countries across the region that some are calling active nonalignment, the idea that governments in the region, regardless of their ideological stripe, need to seek an equidistant or middle path between Washington and Beijing, essentially taking advantage of their relative distance from not only potential conflicts between the U.S. and China but also looking at what's happening in Ukraine right now and saying, look, we need to maintain our independence, not side too strongly with either of these emerging blocs, and see if we can benefit from this by selling our commodities to everybody, keeping in mind that these are economies, especially in South America, that rely extremely heavily on the sale of commodities exports to drive their economic growth. So, you know, in conclusion for these initial remarks that is a huge change in the course of a generation. We've gone in a little more than twenty years from this assumption that most Latin American countries are in the U.S. sphere of influence, to use a very outdated term, which I detest, that they were part of our, quote/unquote, “backyard” to an increasing realization in DC, and I think people are still getting their heads around that, that automatic support, automatic alignment, can no longer be expected whether it is in Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, and then on down into South America, which I know is our focus today, governments like Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, another country where we've seen a lot of change on this front even in the last couple years and, again, not just because there's a leftist president in Colombia now because his predecessor, who I've already mentioned, Iván Duque, was one of the main people pushing this change. So that's a lot to digest. I'm happy to take any questions and hear from you. So thank you. CASA: Thanks, Brian, for that comprehensive introduction. Now let's open it up to questions. (Gives queuing instructions.) Our first question is a written question and it comes from Andrea Cuervo Prados, who is an adjunct instructor at Dickinson State University, and asks, what is your perspective regarding the new leftist president of Colombia and U.S. relations? What is the risk that Colombia could turn into another Venezuela? WINTER: Right. It's a good question. I think that we are still figuring out exactly what Gustavo—not only who Gustavo Petro is but what his ambitions are for both Colombia and for his relationships with the rest of the region and the rest of the world. There is some distance between what he has said he wants to do and what he may be able to do. This is a president who, you know, talks in these grand sweeping terms but ultimately has to get things through congress, and to just cite a result or an example of this that doesn't directly have to do with Colombia's foreign relationships, he said—he gave a very dramatic speech at the UN General Assembly last September in which he talked about the need to legalize narcotics across the board, including cocaine. But then—it was a speech that generated a lot of attention in capitals all over the world and all over the region. But then in ensuing weeks when he was pressed on this he didn't really have a lot of detail and admitted that it was not something that Colombia could do unilaterally, which is all to say that, again, there's this gap where I think it's important to pay careful attention to the gap between the rhetoric and what's actually possible with Petro. I don't personally—you know, the question of could X country become another Venezuela it's a question that people have been asking all over Latin America for the last ten years. I think—I understand why people ask it because what happened in Venezuela was so awful and dramatic, not only with the country becoming a full-fledged dictatorship that represses political opposition but also the humanitarian crisis that has forced some 7 million people or about a quarter of the country's population to leave the country. But, look, Petro is Colombia's first president on the left and I don't think it necessarily follows that—in fact, I'm certain that it doesn't follow that every person on the left wants to go down the path of Venezuela. So I suppose I'm a little more optimistic not only that Petro is a pragmatist in areas like the economy—for example, his finance minister is a quite pragmatic figure, a Columbia University professor who is well respected by markets—and I'm also somewhat optimistic about Colombian institutions and their ability to stand in the way of any truly radical change. CASA: Thank you. Our next question comes from Morton Holbrook, who is an adjunct professor at Kentucky Wesleyan College. Morton? Q: Hello. Yes, I'm here. Morton Holbrook, Kentucky Wesleyan College. University of Louisville also. Thanks for your really interesting comments, especially about China's relationship with Latin and South America. Can I turn north a little bit to Russia? Considering particularly the Brazilian president's upcoming visit to China do you think he might want to go to Russia, too? Bearing in mind that the International Criminal Court just issued an arrest warrant for President Putin, how might that affect Latin American relations with Russia? Do you think some of them might now have second thoughts about Russia or inviting Putin to visit their countries? Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela have all signed the ICC statute promising to cooperate in the carrying out of arrest warrants. Thank you. WINTER: That's a great question and one that is—I can tell you is very front of mind for Brazilian officials and I think others around the region right now. I was just in Brazil two weeks ago working on our—our next issue of Americas Quarterly will be on Brazil's foreign policy and what it means for the rest of Latin America. This is a question that's very front and center. Brazil's foreign minister did say in the last couple of days—he did explicitly almost word for word repeat what you just said, which is that Brazil is a signatory to that treaty. That would seem to eliminate any possibility of Vladimir Putin visiting Brazil. I'm not sure that that was really on his list of things to do anyway. But it was not only a practical signal but a diplomatic one as well. Lula's position on Russia and the Ukraine war has been inconsistent. He said during his campaign last year that Zelensky and Putin bear equal responsibility for the conflict. My understanding is that after that statement, you know, nobody wants to contradict the boss openly and sometimes not even in private. My sense personally based on conversations with others in Brasilia is that at the very least his foreign policy team regretted that he made that statement. Brazil has, in other form, condemned the Russian invasion. Other governments including Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and others have done the same. However, these are countries that, like most of the Global South, are firmly opposed to any sanctions and so their position, again, ends up being I suppose you could call it nuanced. They believe it's important in part because of their own experience as nations to condemn invasions of one country by another. I, personally, think that it's fair to think of what Putin is doing is a kind of imperialist aggression, which these are countries that have certainly objected to that when it's the U.S. over the last, you know, 200-plus years and so you would think that it would be in their DNA to do so in the Ukrainian case as well, and in fairness most of them have. I would just add that, you know, the Brazilian position, I think, though, gets influenced also by two other things. One is, again, this notion of nonalignment. Most people talk about nonalignment in Brazil and Argentina, in Chile and Colombia, and they think about the U.S.-China relationship, as I noted during my introductory remarks. But they also think of it as a helpful guide to thinking about the conflict, the war in Ukraine, as well for reasons that are not firmly rooted in morals or values, let's say, but in interests as, you know, foreign policy often is. To say it in a different way, I had a conversation a couple of years ago with former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who I helped him write his memoir in English back in 2006. He was president during the 1990s, and in talking with him about the China question he said, we have to take advantage of our greatest strategic asset, which is that Brazil is far. (Laughs.) And to just unpack that a little bit, I think the meaning of that is clear to all of you. But these are countries that really see an opportunity right now just by virtue of their geographic distance from these conflict zones to avoid being dragged in and also to potentially, at some level, benefit from it through strategic superpower competition for their support as well as through higher prices for some of the commodities that they produce. There's one added element in the case of Brazil, which is that Lula, I'm told by people close to him, sees himself as almost a Nelson Mandela-type figure. He's back now for his third term in the presidency twenty years after he was president the first time. Of course, I'm sure people on this call know that he went through some real struggles in the intervening years including nearly two years in prison over—on corruption charges that were later thrown out and, you know, he may see his presidency as an opportunity to kind of write the last chapter or two in his biography, and there's talk that he wants a Nobel Peace Prize and that he sees potentially helping negotiate a peace deal for the Ukraine war as the best opportunity to do that. I actually think that that idea, which is—tends to be dismissed in Washington as well as in European capitals, I personally think that idea is not as crazy as some people here in Washington think. But maybe I can go into that a little bit later if anybody wants. CASA: Thank you. Next, we have two written questions from the same university that we can take together. They're from Marisa Perez and Trevor Collier, who are undergraduate students at Lewis University. They would like to know what world leaders such as the United States can do to prevent deforestation of the Amazon rainforest and how they can do so without compromising Brazil's sovereignty. WINTER: Well, it's a really great question, in part because it mentions an issue that Americans don't often think about, which is precisely the sensitivity on the sovereignty issue. Brazil, and specifically not only Brazil's military but Brazil's foreign policy establishment, have a long-standing concern that is part of their doctrine, I suppose you could say, that is concerned always about the possibility of territorial loss and about foreigners gaining influence or, in some cases, even control over the Amazon. And I have to say, you know, this is another one of those ideas that I think—I wish we were all together in a room. This Zoom is kind of the next best thing. I could see your faces that way. But sometimes when I talk about this I see people kind of roll their eyes as if it was some sort of imagined conspiracy. But the truth is that as recently as 2019 when the—the first year of Jair Bolsonaro's government when the fires in the Amazon really became a huge controversy, driven in large part by social media and tweets from people like Justin Bieber and Cher, who, to be clear, were, I think, justifiably and quite heroically shining light on what was happening there. In the midst of all that Emmanuel Macron actually proposed that perhaps some sort of international force in the Amazon was necessary, that that deployment of that would be a good idea if Brazil was not capable of taking care of the Amazon itself. That proposal was disastrous because it just reinforced this long-standing fear that so much of the establishment in Brazil has always had, and it's true that Bolsonaro was on the right but you, certainly, in conversations, I think, with people across the ideological spectrum this is something that people think about. So OK. So back to the original question, how can the U.S. help. Well, the U.S. could help by providing both logistical and financial resources beyond the $50 million, which is, you know, the equivalent of about seven seconds of what we're spending in terms of supporting Ukraine right now. I don't know—Norway is the biggest sponsor of the Amazon Fund. I don't have that number in front of me but I think that their contribution is upwards of at least a billion dollars, probably more. Ultimately, though, I do believe that the Amazon is a local challenge and I know that can be unsatisfying to hear in forums like this where we're sort of designed—you know, this is a CFR event. We're supposed to be thinking of ways that the international community can get involved. But it's going to be a big challenge. The good news is that Brazil has shown that it is capable of getting its hands around this problem before. During Lula's first terms in office from 2003 to 2010 his government was able to reduce the level of deforestation by upwards of 75 percent. It was a very dramatic difference in a very short period of time. This was done through a variety of means, both things like satellite monitoring and new technology that let the authorities follow this in real time. They were also able to step up environmental enforcement agencies like IBAMA, whose inspectors are necessary. It's necessary to have them on the ground in order to, you know, stop—actually stop illegal loggers from setting the fires that are the main driver of deforestation. They were also able to build political consensus around the need to reduce deforestation during those years. I don't think it's going to be—in fact, I'm certain it will not be as “easy,” quote/unquote, this time around. A lot has changed. The upwards of 60 percent increase that we saw in deforestation during the Bolsonaro years had the support, unfortunately, in my view, of local populations who believe essentially that slashing and burning will lead their day-to-day economic lives to improve. In the election that happened in October where Lula won and Bolsonaro lost but by a very small margin—the closest margin in Brazil's modern democratic history—the strongest support nationally for Bolsonaro was in areas that have seen the most illegal deforestation over the last four years and what that tells you is that, again, these are local populations that believe that this will lead to greater wealth and greater well-being for all of them, this being deforestation. So that's a big challenge for Lula with a—you know, at a time when resources are fairly scarce. It's not like it was during his first presidency when all of this increase in Chinese trade was really boosting the amount of money in Brazil's coffers. So he's going to have to figure out a way to dedicate financial resources as well as convince local populations that this is in their interest to do it. It's not going to be an easy road. CASA: Our next question comes from Mike Nelson, an affiliate adjunct professor at Georgetown University. Mike? Q: Thank you very much for an outstanding overview of what's going on in U.S. relations to South America. I study international technology policy and data governance but my question is about corruption. You mentioned corruption in Brazil but it's a problem throughout South America, and my three-part question, is it getting worse or better; are there any countries who have really done the right thing and have taken serious measures to address it; and how can the internet and some of the technologies for citizen journalism help expose corruption and make leaders less likely to dip into the public fund? WINTER: OK. Yeah. No, great questions, and reflective of if you look at opinion polling and remember that these are countries that many of them have been dealing with rising crime, rising homicide levels, economic stagnation, the pandemic, which hit Latin America by many measures harder than in any other region in the world at one point—I haven't seen updated numbers on this but it was fairly consistently throughout the pandemic Latin America, which is about 8 percent of the world's population, was accounting for about 30 percent of the world's confirmed COVID deaths. Anyway, amid all of that, and the economic stagnation that has been such a problem over the last ten years, in a lot of countries and in public opinion surveys, the thing that people identified as the number-one problem in their country is corruption. That was not always true. If you look back at public polling twenty years ago, people tended to identify kind of more, what's the word, basic needs—think, like, unemployment, hunger, misery, which often is kind of asked as a separate—that's one of the boxes you can check. Twenty years ago, those were the issues. And as the region became more middle class, especially in the 2000s because of this China-driven economic growth that described during my introduction, a lot of people were able to move beyond their basic needs and focus on essentially what was happening to the money that they paid in taxes, keeping in mind that many people were paying taxes for the first time. Some of it surely was also driven by these things, as you mentioned, mobile phones that not only things like videos of people carrying suitcases of cash, but also the attention that was given to big corruption scandals. Previously in a lot of countries, governments were able to make pacts with newspapers and TV channels, and kind of tamp things down a little bit, and lower the temperature. In an era of Facebook and Twitter, that was no longer as easy for them to do. All of this culminated in several corruption scandals at once in the mid-2010s, the most emblematic of which was the so-called Lava Jato, or car wash, scandal, which originated in Brazil, but eventually had franchises, if you will, in almost a dozen countries throughout Latin America and the world. That story is complicated. Politicians all over the region went to jail. Business leaders did too. Lula was one of them. That was the case that put him in jail. In intervening years, we've discovered that there were abuses and procedural violations, both things on behalf of the prosecutors and the judge involved, who the Brazilian Supreme Court decided, I think in 2021, they ruled—maybe it was earlier than that—that the judge overseeing Lula's conviction had not been—or, rather, it's easier to say—had been partial in his rulings. And so that's left us in a place today where populations are still angry about corruption, as I mentioned, but it is no longer driving conversation in most countries, like it did before. I still believe—and you can probably tell, this is something I've thought about a lot over the years and continue to watch. The first question you asked, in some ways, is the most important one. Is corruption getting worse or better? It's impossible to know for sure. My hypothesis is actually corruption is about the same, and may in fact be getting better, which flies in the face of all of these headlines that we've seen. But to me, the operative question over these last ten years or so has been, you know, not why—I've heard people say, well, why are these—why are these countries so corrupt? And to me, the real question is, why are we suddenly seeing these cases of corruption? Because I think it speaks to not only the technological changes that I referenced, but also the improvement—(audio break)—these are countries many of which transitioned from dictatorship to democracy in the 1980s and early 1990s. And therefore, it really took a generation for independent prosecutors to show up, to have the training and political support that they needed to go after some very powerful people. So, in sum, I am a believer in the story of rule of law improving in many countries in Latin America. I would recognize, again, that it's a very complex story, in part because of some of the problems around not just Lava Jato but in other countries, such as Peru and Guatemala. But progress is rarely linear. (Laughs.) And I still think that this is something that is likely to get better with time. CASA: Our next question is a written one from Mary Beth Altier at New York University. She asks: What role do you think misinformation and disinformation play in citizens' perceptions of the U.S. versus China and Russia in Latin America? What could the U.S. do better from a strategic communications perspective, if anything? And then—I can repeat this other question later, which is kind of a follow up. So you think— WINTER: Yeah, maybe. Well, that first one—that first one is worthy of a book. All of these are—these are great questions. They're difficult to answer in pithy fashion in three minutes. I am continually impressed by the quality of Russian propaganda in Latin America. Those guys are really good. You look at RT en Español—(changes pronunciation)—RT en Español—it has one of the biggest social media followings of any “media company,” quote/unquote, in the region. Even people who I know are—who I know to not be pro-Russia, let's put it that way, I see sharing content and videos from RT, which, of course, is just as pure a propaganda arm as you can get of the Russian government. But also, you know, have a whole network of sites that are more subtle and that push very sophisticated and sometimes, you know, not particularly obvious narratives that are designed to undermine the United States or promote the views of China and Russia. I would recognize at the same time that—I referenced this during my introduction remarks, sometimes the United States does not need any help with it comes to undermining its reputation in the region. I mentioned some of the, quote/unquote “own goals” that we've seen over the last five to ten, even twenty years, going all the way back to the Iraq War. As far as actively pushing back, all I can say is this: You know, I think that they're—on the one hand, I think there are concrete steps that are being used. We're still trying to get our heads around this problem to fight misinformation. But I was just in a different forum this morning where I was asked, what—how can the U.S. help the cause of democracy in Latin America. And my answer to that is that the best thing the United States can do to help democracy in Latin America is to get its own house in order, to move past the polarization, the misinformation, and the scorched earth politics that have put our own democracy at risk over the last several years, and try to, you know, recapture some of the consensus, at least around basic democratic rules of the game and how we hold elections that characterized most of the previous two-hundred-plus years of our history. Because I do think that while—you know, look, I lived ten years in Latin America. I know that people roll their eyes at the notion of the United States as being kind of the shining city on the hill. And I understand why. And that was always true, in part because of the long history of U.S. intervention in Latin America often showing, you know, some of our worst behaviors. On the other hand, as a Brazil specialist, I've seen how some of the tactics and even some of the same people that were behind our own democratic decay of the last five years, some of those same tactics were repackaged and exported to open arms in Brazil. So I do think that it makes a difference on the ground in places like Brazil, potentially, and other countries as well, when a strong democratic example is being set in the United States. And I think that's the most powerful thing we can do. Some of the other stuff, like what's happening on RT and Telesur and some of these other outlets is relatively outside our control. CASA: We have a complementary question from— WINTER: There was a second part of that question. CASA: Oh, no, you did end up answering, I think, what could the U.S. do better from a strategic communications perspective. I think you kind of covered that. We have another question from Gursimran Padda, a student at Stony Brook University, who asks: Does China's strategy of gaining influence in Latin America differ from its tactics in Africa? And if so, why? WINTER: Gosh, all these great questions. China—I have to start from the beginning. I am not an African specialist. But I can tell you kind of the narrative of what happened in Africa through Latin American eyes, if that makes any sense, because this is a conversation I've had a lot over the years. The perception is that China went into some of these countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and engaged in infrastructure projects and other things that had abusive terms. In many cases, China imported its own labor to do some of these projects. They also engaged in some predatory lending practices. And that was all—essentially the takeaway from actions like that in places like Buenos Aires, Bogota, certainly Brasilia, was that the Chinese would not be allowed to come and engage in those same behaviors in Latin America. And I think, in practice, it seems that the Chinese have realized that. There have been examples, such as the construction of a dam in Ecuador, where the terms ended up being perceived as something of a debt trap. But my sense—again, and this is not so much my sense; it's repeating what I've heard in numerous conversations about this subject with leaders across the ideological spectrum and throughout the region—is that they understand the risks involved in working with China, in part because of the experience throughout parts of sub-Saharan Africa. And they're determined to not let those things happen in their home countries. You know, I know that that's a view that, in places like where I am today—I'm on in the road in Washington, participated in this other conference this morning. That's why my Zoom background is not quite as put together as it sometimes is, by the way. I know people roll their eyes at that notion here, and are constantly warning—you know, kind of wagging their finger a little bit at governments throughout South America, and saying that they need to be eyes wide open about the risks of engagement with the Chinese. The problem is that here in the U.S., I think they're underestimating, in some cases, the sophistication of foreign ministries and trade ministries in places like Peru and Chile when they make those comments. Which is to say, I think that there's something both visually and in terms of the context a bit paternalistic about it, that everybody picks up on and tends to make people in the region justifiably crazy. (Laughs.) And then, the other part is that the U.S. is not really offering much in the way of alternatives. We're at a pretty unique moment in the history of the United States right now where we have both parties—the Republican and Democratic Parties—are pretty much closed to the idea of new free trade deals. That, in my lifetime, has never happened before. I mentioned the fact that Trump dropped out of TPP. Well, Joe Biden has not picked that back up. I think there are domestic political reasons that explain that, but what it means in practice for our relationships with governments in Latin America is that Washington doesn't have a whole lot to offer. Because, unlike the Chinese, we can't just order our companies to go invest someplace. That's not how our economy works. It is very much how the Chinese economy works, where they can decide to make these decisions. They are not necessarily for a short-term economic payoff, but for medium-term reasons, or even decisions that have very little to do with dollars and cents or ROI, return on investment, and everything to do with geopolitics. So wanting to have beachheads in terms of, say, ports in places like El Salvador. So, you know, again, without that—without trade and without that ability to kind of dictate investment, there's not a lot that's left in Washington's toolkit for counteracting this kind of influence. CASA: Our next question comes from Daniel Izquierdo, an undergraduate student at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Daniel. Q: Good afternoon, sir, ma'am. Thank you for taking the time. I just had a quick question on the increasing tensions between China and the U.S., and how that will kind of develop itself in Latin and South America. So given the strategic interests of Latin and South America, and the persistent political unrest, along with increasing tensions between China and the U.S., what do you believe the likelihood to be of proxy conflicts or foreign meddling, similar to what occurred during the Cold War, occurring in the region? And if not, how do you foresee the U.S. and China competing for influence in the region? WINTER: So another very good question. Thank you for that. Look, I think some of this ground we've covered already, but I would say that, you know, you're the first to mention—I had not previously mentioned this idea of a new cold war. And this—you know, this is another reason why so many countries across the ideological spectrum are opting for this policy of nonalignment. Essentially because they believe that the first Cold War went badly, very badly, for Latin America. It resulted in all kinds of traumas, from the wars in Central America during the 1980s to U.S. support for coups in places like Chile, to, you know, Cuban meddling in places like Bolivia and elsewhere around the region during those years, which led to the rise of guerrilla movements like the FARC, that ended up killing very high numbers of people. And so essentially, you know, not to be glib about it, but the reaction that today's generation has is: We want no part of this. Because it didn't go well for us the first time. I think there are obvious differences between a conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union back in the 1950s and 1960s, and this strategic competition between Washington and Beijing, that thankfully has not quite reached those heights, at least not yet, here in the twenty-first century. But I have to tell you, and again this is based on conversations I'm having all the time, the fear is real. The perception is that the world may be headed back to that kind of conflict, being driven not only by what's happening in the Ukraine but the increasing speculation of potential war over Taiwan. So this, again, as far as—as far as how it could play out in practice, I think it's still early. I think it remains to be seen. Right now there is—you know, there are clear cases where I think the Chinese are, as I alluded to in my previous answer, making investments not for economic reasons but for strategic ones, with a long-term horizon I mind. Things like the, quote/unquote, “space base” that they've established in Argentina, which really is deserving of the full air quotes when we say the phrase “space base.” I think everyone senses that—you know, that that conflict—or, that competition, if you will, is likely to define the next twenty to thirty years. And I think there's a determination in most countries, it makes a lot of sense to me personally, that they don't want their countries used again as a chessboard amid that larger conflict. CASA: Our next question comes from Damien Odunze. He's assistant professor at Delta State University who writes: Ideas in the long run change the world. Do you think a closer educational collaboration between U.S. universities and those in Latin and South America could help shape and strengthen liberal democratic values in those countries? WINTER: What an interesting question. Look, let me talk first about kind of the—that equation today. There's already quite a lot of connectivity, especially at the—at, you know, not a word I love to use, but at the elite level, the elites in government and business and U.S. education systems. Which is an unnecessarily wordy way of saying that a large percentage of people in South America come from the elite classes and get educated at universities and sometimes even at high schools in the United States. That is one reason why, again, many of these governments are likely to at least forge a middle path between China and the United States, rather than going full-fledged in the direction of China. I think there's a cultural affinity, family ties, cultural ties, educational ties, and other things that are probably kind of the strongest connection that the U.S. has with a lot of these countries right now. As to whether a strengthening of those educational ties would improve dedication and the strength of democracy, whew. It could, but I watched with dismay as poll after poll suggests that younger generations, not just in the United States but across the Western world, are less committed in theory to both democracy and democratic institutions than their predecessors. And so I wonder just—I don't have an answer to this—but I wonder if even, quote/unquote, “even” within the United States, if we're properly instilling an appreciation for democracy in today's generations, which then raises the question of whether we'd be able to do so amongst the youth of other countries as well. I'm not sure. I think this is another area where, you know, in the U.S. we have some work to do at home before we start thinking about what's possible in other countries. CASA: Our next question comes from Mary Meyer McAleese, who is a professor of political science at Eckerd College in Florida. Mary. Q: Yes. Good afternoon and thank you for this opportunity. I have, well, two questions. I hope they're quick. The first one is, what do you think the effect will be on Latin America or South America with regard to the failure of the Silicon Valley Bank? I read that a lot of Latin American businesses have had investments in that bank, so I wonder if you could say a bit more about the banking situation and the longer-term effects there. And also, gender violence, of course, is a horrible problem all around the world, but especially in Latin and South America. What do you think the United States and the Americas Society could do to support groups in the region that are fighting against gender violence? Thank you. WINTER: Well, thank you for both questions. Both very good questions. There's been a lot of talk about SVB and possible effects in Latin America. What I've heard from people who are far more knowledgeable about the financial—excuse me—the financial system than I am, is that as long as it does not spread and become a more systemic risk, it should not pose much of an issue for Latin America. In part because—and this is another area where just like—where we were talking about the courts having, I think, been engaged in a thirty-year long process of improvement—I think the same can be said of banking and financial systems around most of Latin America. My first job was covering the financial crisis that Argentina went through back in 2001 and 2002. Which, for the uninitiated, that saw five presidents in two weeks, a freeze of bank deposits, and a 70 percent devaluation of the currency. It was quite a traumatic thing to be a part of. And during those years, we saw similar—well, not quite as bad—but at least thematically similar crises in Brazil, Colombia, and elsewhere, following other crises in the 1990s. Which is all to say, Latin America has been curiously quiet this time around in terms of financial contagion. The economies aren't doing well, for the most part, but at least we're not talking about a financial meltdown. And that is because of lessons learned. These are banking systems that now have stricter capital requirements than they did in the past. And the macroeconomic fundamentals, generally speaking, are better than they were twenty years ago. Argentina, of course, is kind of in trouble again with an inflation rate that just passed 100 percent. And that's terrible. But again, the depth—(laughs)—everything's relative. And the depth of just financial devastation is, thankfully, nothing compared to what it was when I was there twenty-plus years ago. So, you know, we'll see. If the bank run spreads and we start seeing other banks come in trouble here in the U.S., then my sense is that, with the whole Credit Suisse thing, and we're not out of the woods yet. But if it stays more or less contained, then the consensus, at least so far, is that Latin America should be fine. Your question about femicide is an excellent one. It has driven the political discussion in Brazil in recent years. It's something that President Lula has spoken movingly about. It has also been, on the other end in Mexico, the feminist movement that has had femicides as one of the main areas of concern, has been one of the most effective opposition groups to President López Obrador, who has often been, sadly in my view, dismissive of the seriousness of that problem. As far as what the United States can do to help, or even what my own organization can do, I think that in a lot of cases these are—you know, like a lot of problems—there are things that the international community can do to help. And certainly, I see things from a journalist's perspective, even though I'm more analyst than journalist these days. I think that shining light on these problems, using vehicles like—platforms like Americas Quarterly, which is the small publication about Latin American politics that I run, that's, you know, my own insufficient contribution to looking at his problem. But it's certainly one—I mean, we look at the numbers in places like Brazil. I don't have those numbers on my fingertips, but it is just an incredibly serious problem, and one that deserves more attention. CASA: Thank you, Brian. We have so many other questions. I'm really sorry, though, we have to cut off now. We're at the hour. But this has been a very interesting discussion. And you've covered an enormous amount of ground. Thank you to all of you participating for your great questions. I hope you will follow Brian on Twitter at @BrazilBrian. The next Academic Webinar will take place on Wednesday, March 29, at 1:00 Eastern Time. Renee Hobbs, professor of communication studies at the University of Rhode Island, will lead a conversation on media literacy and propaganda. In the meantime, I encourage you to learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/Careers. Follow at @CFR_Academic on Twitter and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. Thank you, again, for joining us today, and we look forward to you tuning in again for our webinar on March 29. Bye. WINTER: Bye. Thank you. (END)

It is not just the history of slavery and colonization, culture of racial discrimination, structural Adjustment, debt and size and history that have affected Caribbean development and growth, but also the culture of corruption, inherited either from neo-capitalism or human nature or the result of those who are always in lack and dependency. Today's lecture at the Jamaica Theological Seminary in Caribbean Thought week 9, focuses on the Cost of Corruption. The topic is important as since recently there has been a recent rise in financial and white-collar crimes not just in Jamaica but int he world. What is corruption? "We define corruption as the abuse of entrusted power for private gain. To end corruption, we must first understand it. That's why we look at what causes corruption and what works against it. To end corruption, we advocate for power to be held accountable. Everywhere," (Transparency International Website, https://www.transparency.org/en/). The 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) shows that most countries are failing to stop corruption. The CPI ranks 180 countries and territories around the world by their perceived levels of public sector corruption, scoring on a scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean), (Ibid). What is Jamaica's CPI compared to other Caribbean Countries? JAMAICA Score 44/100 Rank 69/180 Score change 0 since 2021. Caribbean nations with the Best CPI/Rank: 65 - Barbados 29 and 64 -Bahamas 30. Caribbean Nations with the worse CPI/Rank: 171 - Hait 17, 166 - Dominica Rep. 20, 85 - Suriname 40, and 85 - Guyana 40, 77 - Trinidad and Tobago 42, and Jamaica. Recently, Janie McEwan submitted a Letter to the Gleaner, which was "Letter of the Day on January 18, 2023, defining White-Collar Crimes, from a sociological perspective, as a product of the societal and cultural norms that shape the behavior of individuals and organizations. Jamaica, like many developing countries, has a culture of corruption that is deeply ingrained in its society. This culture of corruption can be seen in the widespread acceptance of bribes, embezzlement, and other forms of white-collar crime as a normal part of doing business,” See Janel McEwan in Letter of the Day | The impact of white-collar crime on Jamaica | Letters | Jamaica Gleaner (jamaica-gleaner.com) January 18, 2023. Three students, Tyrese Harrison, Sanshia Hayles and Sasha-Gaye Robinson in a group submitted a brief essay on Corruption in Jamaica by reviewing the film "Cost of Corruption'' a 2011 documentary film by the National Integrity Agency (NIA) Hosted by Executive Producer, Prof. Trevor Monroe. We may blame Jamaica's stagnation on the Neoliberal Regime of the Washington Consensus, but Trevor Monroe agrees but also places blame on the Corrupt Politicians and leaders. In fact, The Jamaica Gleaner reported a story on "Crooked Politicians on UK Radar," reporting that the former UK Ambassador to Jamaica had found widespread levels of corruption within Jamaica within the Government. “The politicians are more interested in getting in and or staying in power, than they are in delivering on the promises that Jamaicans need”, (The cost of corruption, 2012). The documentary Cost of Corruption is one that highlights corruption at its highest in society. We then discussed our advocacy for Haiti initiative and the Petition/sign on letter for Haiti for Caribbean Nationals. You can get involved by visiting https://theneoliberal.com, https://ijdh.org, https://jts.edu.jm or https://renaldocmckenzie.com. Credits: Rev. Renaldo C. McKenzie is the Creator/Host of the Show, Adjunct Lecturer at the Seminary and Author of Neoliberalism. The Neoliberal Corporation, Serving the world today to solve tomorrow's challenges by making popular what was the monopoly. Email us: Info@theneoliberal.com Subscribe for free! Visit/Support us: https://anchor.fm/theneoliberal. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theneoliberal/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theneoliberal/support

One D&D to rule them all, One D&D to find them! One D&D to bring them all and in the darkness BIND THEM! That's right, D&D is no longer an edition, it's just... D&D. What's coming down the line from Wizards? And what does all this talk of the future of D&D mean? What sinister plans do this neoliberal cabal of sorcerers craft in the shadows? Only one way to find out... So you could find out by reading the news... This was recorded before news of the OGL debacle over the past couple of weeks, but if anything, past Matt and Joe had no idea just how bad it would be. Most of the same analysis of neoliberal tendencies applies, so take a listen! Keep in touch on Twitter and support us on Patreon for extended episodes! Sources: D&D One Unearthed Arcana Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. 1992 Wizards of the Coast. Spelljammer: Adventures in Space. 2022. Strange Assembly. Review: SpellJammer. 2022. The Washington Consensus

Welcome to another episode of Ideas Untrapped. My guest today is Charlie Robertson, who is the chief economist of Renaissance Capital - a global investment bank - and in this episode we talked about the subject of Charlie's new book, "The Time-Travelling Economist''. The book explores the connection between education, electricity, and fertility to economic development. The thrust of the book's argument is that no poor country can escape poverty without education, and that electricity is an important factor for investors looking to build businesses. It also explains that a low fertility rate helps to increase household savings. Charlie argues, with a lot of data and historical parallels, that countries need at least a 70-80% adult literacy rate (defined as being able to read and write four sentences in any language) and cheap electricity (an average of 300 - 500 kWh per capita) in order to industrialize and grow their economies rapidly. Small(er) families (3 children per woman) mean households are able to save more money, which can improve domestic investments by lowering interest rates - otherwise countries may repeatedly stumble into debt crises. We also discussed how increasing education can lead to higher domestic wages, but that this is usually offset by a large increase in the working-age population - and other interesting implications of Charlie's argument.TRANSCRIPTTobi;The usual place I would start with is what inspired you to write it. You mentioned in the book that it was an IMF paper that sort of started your curiosity about the relationship between education, electricity, fertility, and economic development. Generally. So, what was the Eureka moment?Charlie;Yeah, the eureka moment actually came in Kenya, um, because I'd already done a lot of work showing how important education was. It's the most important, no country escapes poverty without education. So I'd already made that clear and there wasn't much debate about that. Perhaps there was a debate about why some countries have gone faster than others, but there wasn't much debate about that. The second thing I was very clear on was electricity, which kept on coming up in meetings across Sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan, [at] a number of countries, people kept on talking about the importance of electricity. But the eureka moment came when somebody pointed out to me that Kenya, where I was at the time, couldn't afford to build huge excess capacity of electricity, which I was arguing you need to have. You need to have too much electricity, so that it's cheap and it's reliable.And then investors come in and say, "great! I've got cheap educated labour, and I've got cheap reliable electricity. I've got the human capital and the power I need, that then enables me to invest and build a business here." And the question then was, well, why was it so expensive in Kenya but so cheap in China? Why was the cost of borrowing so high in Nigeria but so cheap in Morocco or Mauritius? And when I was trying to work out where did the savings come from in China, uh, well I was looking globally, but China's the best example of economic success and development success we've seen in the last 50 years. Over half the answer came from this IMF paper saying, actually it came from their low fertility rate. That's over half of the rise in household savings, which are massive in China, came about because the fertility rate had fallen so dramatically.And I then thought, could this possibly be true for other countries as well? Could this help explain why interest rates are so high in Nigeria or Kenya and so low elsewhere? And the answer is yes. So this book, The Time Travelling Economist is bringing all of these three things together - the fertility rate, the education rate, and electricity - to say not just how countries develop, cause I think I've answered that, but when they develop. Because once we know those three factors are key, we can then work out the when. Not just in the past [of] countries, but also in the future. Um, so that's where this came from.Tobi;I mean, we're going to be talking about each of those factors over the course of this conversation, but another question...some would say boring question, but I know how development economists and economists generally always try to defend their turf, you know, around issues like these. So, has anybody like taking you to task on the causal link between these three factors and development? And how would you defend yourself against that were it to be asked?Charlie;I haven't found anyone yet who's argued successfully against these points. Um, the closest criticism I get, and just to say, you know, this book came about off the back of three key reports I did in 2017 on education, 2018 on electricity, and 2019 on fertility and savings. So I've now been talking about these ideas for three to five years. The book only came out in July, 2022, bringing them all together. But in five years I haven't had pushback other than people ask, "is it not correlated?" You know, "is it not perhaps economic growth leads fertility declines or boosts savings?" And I think I show really clearly in the data that "no." Um, the fertility declines give us the growth. You don't get growth without adult literacy of at least 40%, you certainly don't get industrialization until literacy is at 70 to 80.So, you know, I'm looking at the data and I think it's pretty crystal clear that you've gotta get these other things right first before your economy can take off. And I can't find any counter-examples. Except, I mean there's the inevitable few, those countries like Qatar or Kuwait with huge amounts of energy exports per capita or diamonds in Botswana's case. And there you don't have to get everything right before you get wealthier because you just happen to be lucky to have huge amounts of energy exports per person and a very small population. But they are a bit of an exception. I think you could probably argue that they do grow first before they get everything else right. But for the vast majority of the planet and all countries in history, it's the other way around. You gotta get education, power, fertility rates in the right place to take off.Tobi;So I mean, getting into the weeds, let's look at education first. Before your book, personally for me, and I should say what I really like about your book is, it's well written, it's an interesting read. It comes across as a bit less analytical, which is what you get from the standard development literature, you know, and I think that's partly because you are writing about a lot of the countries that you have also worked in and interacted with a lot of these factors. So it really gives it a first-hand experience kind of narrative. So I like that very much. So prior to your book, if someone were to ask me about the relationship between education and economic development or catch-up growth, generally, the reference usually goes to Studwell's big claim, Joe Studwell, that: Yeah. You don't really need a super high level of education metrics for a country to industrialize because the standard explanation is that how a relatively poor country starts industrializing is from the low-skill, uh, labour-intensive, low-skill manufacturing jobs, that you don't need a high level of education and skill for you to be able to do that.So what I wanna work out here is what is the transmission mechanism between adult literacy and industrialization the way you've, like, clearly analyzed in your book?Charlie;Well, thank you very much for saying it was nicely written, I appreciate that. I wanted to try and make it as accessible as possible. Yeah, I think Joe Studwell's books are really good and I think he's right that you don't need a high level of education to do that first step out of rural poverty, subsistence farming into a textile mill. I think what's interesting is how many people writing about development forget how important just adult literacy actually is, because we've taken [it] so much for granted. So Adam Smith, who wrote The Wealth of Nations, the father of economics back in the 18th century in Scotland, he didn't make a big deal about adult literacy driving growth. And more recently, you know, people like Dani Rodrik have echoed exactly that saying you don't need any great education to work in a textile mill. You just need to be dextrous with your fingers. Which is almost exactly actually what Adam Smith said 250 years ago. And I was sympathetic to that, but I then kept on seeing in the data, well, first of all, I found this theory written in the sixties that said that no country has industrialized even to that first basic level of textiles without adult literacy being about 70 to 80% of the population. Which means basically all adults, all men, plus well over half the female population as well. And this was the theory written in the sixties and when I looked at the data, it was proven right and I couldn't quite understand why - if you just need dextrous fingers to work in a textile mill, why would there be that link? And I ended up talking to a guy who ran Levi's factories in Asia in the 1980s and he said, “Charlie, just think about it.”You've got this box of Levi's jeans coming down the conveyor belt. Do you put that box onto the truck labelled United States or that truck labelled Europe for export? And if you can't read and write, you won't even get that right. So the adult literacy thing I think is overlooked. People are focusing on secondary school, high school education, how much [many] university graduates a country needs and they do need graduates too. But until you get to that 70 to 80% adult literacy, textile mills don't go to a country. And we can see that they did go to China in the nineties when they got to adult literacy of 70%. They are in Southeast Asia. They're in Bangladesh since education hit about 70 to 80% in the last 10 to 15 years. But they're not big in sub-Saharan Africa, or at least in parts of Nigeria or the Sahel or West Africa because the education levels still aren't there yet. So, you know, I looked as far back as I could go to the 19th century and even the first non-European country to take off, Japan, had an adult literacy rate of about 70% by 1900 and 20 years later, they had a thriving textile industry. The education always comes first. And Korea copied that Japan model in the 1950s and sixties, Taiwan, Hong Kong, all the rest [of] Southeast Asia's followed. Now, South Asia's doing it and luckily it's spreading across Africa too. But the adult literacy is the first essential step.Tobi;One possible objection. And I haven't seen this anywhere, but I couldn't really get it out of my mind while I was reading that part of the book is that some will argue that increasing education also increases domestic wages and that is really a problem for industrializing. And, if I recall, one particular point that the anonymous economic historian on Twitter, Pseudoerasmus, made particularly about Asia, is they were able to combine a very high adult literacy rate - a measure which you use is completion of secondary education…Charlie;Yeah.Tobi;With very unusually low domestic wages. What role do wages play in your analysis?Charlie;I think that's the norm actually. It connects to the fertility thing. And I'm not sure if you want to jump there just yet, but what tends to happen when you've educated your population is that the fertility rate drops a lot. And when that happens, the number of people who have to stay at home looking after 5, 6, 7 children goes down a lot too. Women can go into the workforce and of course cause you've got the education, right? Those women are educated so they can join the industrial workforce as well. So very roughly, if we say there's a hundred people in Nigeria, 50 kids and 50 adults, let's say 25 of the adults have to be staying at home to look after 50 kids, you're talking 25% of the population can go out and work of the overall population. You go to Asia today and it's more like 70% adults, say 30% of kids.So you need maybe 15% of adults to stay at home. And you end up with something like 85% of the whole population can go out to work instead of 25%. Now, the consequence of that is a massive rise in the working-age population. And I think that that keeps industrial wages low for a few generations, in fact. Or at least three decades. Probably 40 years, where the education's come through, the fertility rates come down, you've got this huge excess supply of labour, which is then joining the industrial workforce and getting jobs. But because there keeps on being more people joining that workforce, it keeps wages relatively low. Now, what eventually happens then after a few decades is that that big increase in the workforce stops increasing as fast. We've seen this in China in the last 20 years. So, 20 years ago China's per capita GDP was about fifteen hundred dollars, $1,500.Whereas now, now the population has stopped growing. Working age population's shrinking. It's gone up to over $11,500. It's gone up tenfold. So the big reward for industrialization comes later. And we had this in Europe of course in the 19th century, you know, wages were pretty awful and industrial working was pretty awful experience in the 19th century. I mean it paid slightly better than rural subsistence farming, which is why people came to the cities. But London was a horrible place for the vast majority of people. And the industrial workhouses were terrible places as well. And that lasted for generations. It's only when that big population, kind of, boom stories started to shift that labour eventually got any bargaining power. Cause when there was too much labour coming into the market, they had no bargaining power with the factory owners. It wasn't until the 1870s that the trade unions became legal in, say, the United States. Because up till then, you know, "you join a union, I fire you," you know, could be what the factory owner would say in the United States, cause there's always gonna be another person I can employ. But once the workforce starts to gain a bit of bargaining power, cause it's not expanding quite so fast, then finally wages start to pick up. So I think what's happened in Asia is pretty normal and will probably be the experience that we've seen across Africa as well.Tobi;Inevitably this will take us into what it means to be educated, really. Because a lot of countries, I mean it's pretty much standard - they say, Oh yeah, we want invest in education. Um, we know it is important for human capital. We know how important it is to have an educated population and all that. You talked about some data challenges also for some countries in your book. So what I wanna ask here is what exactly does it mean to be educated in the sense that you are talking about in the book?Charlie;Yeah, this is a really fair question. Why am I talking about adult literacy? The definition is can you read and write four sentences in any language? Sentences like "farming is hard work." So it's not a very high threshold and I wouldn't argue, I don't think you would, that it's highly educated. It's just educated enough to put that box of jeans onto the right truck when it's going to America or Europe. But all that's doing then is taking your country's per capita GDP from your per person kind of wealth from say $500 a year, a thousand dollars a year to the kind of two, $3,000 a year level. It doesn't mean you've got the education levels you need to get to the $10,000 per capita GDP level growth or 20 or 50 or even a hundred. Um, to get to the 10,000 level, I think you probably need very good secondary school education as well.And to get to the $20,000 per capital GDP level, you're talking a lot of graduates coming out of university and you need to have that education then spreading throughout the population, both broadening and deeper education as well. And that is a process that takes decades. I mean I focused quite a bit on Korea because it was one of the most successful models and then China came along and did it even faster. But what Korea prioritized in the 1950s was getting that adult literacy rate from 35% or so, too low even to grow sustainably, to about 90% they said by 1960. So in about 10 or 15 years they got it from 35 to 90 and that was enough then to have textile mills do really well in the 1960s and they became a manufacturing country, an industrialized country by the early 1970s.But already then the government said, right, we need more engineers, we need graduates coming out of university to do heavy industry, to do cars, shipbuilding. But Korea had no cars or shipbuilding at the time, nothing significant. So they were changing the university focus from, kind of, the arts or law towards engineering and the sciences before they had the economic sectors that they were trying to promote. And then about 10 to 20 years later, all these graduates were then in the economy and ready to start up companies like Deawoo, Hyundai, Kia, Samsung. And they started small obviously in the 1980s and early nineties. But this kind of sequential thinking about it meant that Korea kept on having the right human capital at every stage of development. So my book's trying to focus on, you know, why hasn't Pakistan got all the textile factories?Why does Bangladesh have them? Why doesn't Nigeria have them? Why does Vietnam have them? And this is saying first you've gotta get that sequencing right of everybody ideally being literate, everybody having had school up to 11 years old and come out with a good standard of education. On the quality issue you just raised, the problem here is a couple of things. So I mean firstly people sometimes just make up the data and say, yes, my population is literate when it's not. But secondly, when you try and kind of shoehorn a hundred kids into one class to say, you know, they're all going to school now, but you've only got one teacher, you are not coming out with a good education at all. You might not even be coming out literate at all. So that, you know, I'm also trying to warn that governments can't do this on the cheap. Or not completely. They have to take it seriously and say, look, we actually need to make sure everyone really is coming out able to read and write. It's not just trying to tick a box to say everyone's at school.Tobi;Hopefully, we'll circle back to policy questions around this later. Let's talk briefly about electricity, which as you say, once you start investigating these factors, then you start teasing out what's what for each country. And the way you introduce that is [that] there are some countries with very high adult literacy rates but still weren't getting the benefits - like [the] Philippines, which was your example in the book. And it turns out what was missing in that particular case was electricity generation. But first I want you to make one distinction for me quite quickly. Cause it's funny, I was reading David Pilling's brief coverage of your book in the FT and he talked about the fertility part being controversial and I wonder that people miss the obvious controversy in electricity, but we'll get to that. So, now, is it really about investment in electricity that is often missing in countries that can't quite manage to get it right or the way their electricity market is structured? I know you are quite familiar with Nigeria and it's really a big, big, big debate that we've been having for, I don't know, like 20 years. So, some people will say you need very large upfront investment, possibly by the government, in generating capacity transmission, machinery and co. We argue, oh no, you really need to restructure the electricity market first. People have to pay for what they use. You need to restructure the tariff system, blah blah blah, blah, blah. What are your thoughts?Charlie;Um, big issues. And there is a debate. There're so many debates about this actually. There's the debate about whether you need a big national grid, big national generation and distribution companies or whether you can have localized electricity. Um, you are getting a couple of points though that I think it's easier to say some answers to. And one of them was to do with getting people to actually pay their bills. Certainly a problem in Nigeria, apparently, you know, discos will say that because there hasn't been good metering and despite privatization that those meters have not been rolled out. I know the government's promising to roll it out to all 10 million account holders now, but because there hasn't been metering, you can't charge necessarily the fair price for the amount of electricity people have used. So then people don't wanna pay. So then the discos are losing money, then they can't pay the generators and this then becomes a problem.And I think there is a case to say that if the generators can sell some power directly to some big companies, that could be one way around part of the problem. So in a place like Lagos, very similar to the Philippines in the 20th century, good educated population just held back by a lack of cheap reliable power. You know, I think if Lagos could have its own electricity story, it would be a phenomenally successful economy. It should be over the next three or four decades. So there is a case about how you structure this. But I found two or three things interesting when I was looking into this issue in 2018. And the first was just clarifying that it really is electricity that people need more than say transport infrastructure. You know, this is a survey the world bank had done and the only countries where they've said transport infrastructure was the bigger problem was countries where there wasn't an electricity problem because there's so much of it.So countries, where there's a load of electricity, say yes we need more transport infrastructure, but everybody else says we have to have the electricity first. So then it's a question of how do you roll that out in a way that makes money and supports development? And there is a... I think, a problem at the moment with well-meaning policies from people like the United Nations or the African Development Bank saying everybody should have access to electricity. But my point in the book is, and Adam Smith said the same thing in the 18th century, you want your infrastructure to be making money not losing money. You need to make sure that if you're going to supply people with a road or a bridge or electricity, that they can pay for it. And if you start building stuff that loses you money because people can't pay their bills, then you'll end up with an uneconomic electricity system which can't function properly and can't give industry what it needs.And what I try to emphasize in this is that every country from America and France in the 1920s to Turkey in the 1960s or seventies to Korea in the 1970s, every country has said, okay, let's make sure we've got electricity for industry first. Profitable, makes money, and then households over time? Yeah, okay, we'll connect them over time, but only when they can start affording to pay for electricity. It's not another subsidy that governments can't afford, we just can't do that. [This] is what every other country's done. But at the moment I do see this pressure for electricity systems to try and roll out universal access and so, in places like Kenya that's putting the whole electricity system under financial pressure because it's hurting their profits. And if you're trying to roll out cheap electricity to households, well how do you pay for that?Well, government subsidies partly, but the other way to pay for it is to make industry pay a high price. But if you're making industry pay a high price industry won't come. They'll go to Asia; where they get a low price for electricity. They're not going to go to somewhere that's got a high price. Cause no company's gonna say, I just wanna subsidize households getting electricity. Companies are coming to build stuff in countries because they'll make a good profit from doing so. So I think you've raised a number of issues there, you know, is localized electricity good, and so on? You know, what should you be prioritizing first - industry or households? And there's a whole host of issues. But I hope I've answered that.Tobi;Actually, that's the controversy I was referring to at the beginning of that question because the background that is, it'll be a very, very tough sell in the current political climate, for example in Nigeria, for any person aspiring to public office to make this argument that you have to power industry first. What it's going to sound like is: you are just trying to prioritize the rich and trying to exclude some people from what, like you said, has come to be framed as a universal basic right. You talk to a lot of small businesses, even individuals, like you mentioned with the World Bank Survey, the importance of electricity is so paramount on everybody's mind that if there's stable electricity, I can start X and Y businesses. I could make money and, I mean, no one needs the government for anything else. Just give us electricity.Charlie;Yeah.Tobi;So my point is practically… thinking about this practically, how do you think a sensible government that is not trying to bankrupt itself prematurely can manage this situation?Charlie;Well, I think it's hard work. Um, how did the Koreans do it in the sixties or the seventies or the eighties? They gave you no right to protest - military government. How did the communists do so well at getting this industry first, households later? How did they get it right in China or Russia? Same thing. You've got no rights to protest. "Your interests don't matter, we're thinking 10 to 20 years ahead how to make our country better off and how to make everyone better off. So you suffer now because we are gonna prioritize business." So that is one model. I'm not recommending it, I'm just saying it is a model that can be done. The other way is to allow it to be done by the private sector. And if you let the private sector roll out electricity, they will not supply electricity to people who won't pay their bills.And that is the story that you saw in western Europe, it's the story you saw in the States, and to some extent you're seeing actually in Kenya. There's quite an interesting company there called M-KOPA. And M-KOPA will sell you, well, they'll lend you, they'll lease you, a solar panel, a little one that you can put on your - actually, a friend of mine was showing it to me the other day in Uganda...they put it on the straw roof of the mud hut and that solar panel, you pay a monthly fee and after about 18 months you've paid for the panel, you've also got energy during that time enough to supply a mobile phone and so on, lights a little bit, and then it's yours and that's effectively privatizing that rural distribution story. But I think the difficulty is that politicians find it really hard to do this.And part of what I'm writing about in the book is how really hard it is for governments in a country with no savings, big population growth, to constantly meet all of the different demands. With huge population growth you're having to build new schools all the time, you have to hire even more teachers all the time. You've got population pressure, maybe, causing clashes over agricultural land like the Fulani herdsman in Central Nigeria, Northern Nigeria as well. And all of these pressures are on you all of the time. And there's constant demand to spend more on bridges, on hospitals, on education, on security. And what you can't afford to be doing is making a loss. And so I think what politicians need to do is say, we've gotta sequence this right. The same thing as with education. It's no good having a million university graduates if a country isn't literate enough to have an industrial base, you've gotta have the literacy first.And equally, it's no good having electricity rolled out to every household when there are no factories for people to go and get the jobs they need to be able to pay the electricity bill. And it's not easy. I, I totally understand it's not an easy situation for anyone to be in. The difficulty is [that] because it's not easy, too many political leaders will take what appears to be the easy option of saying, "I tell you what, let's just go and borrow a load of dollars offshore. Nigeria's going to go and issue a lot of dollar debt and we'll use that to try and sort these problems out." Kenya's done the same, Ghana's done the same, Pakistan's done the same. And the risk then is that you end up in default situations. So that feeds into one of the other chapters in the book as well.But I think it's very difficult. I think realistically governments need to say, what can we do here? And this is how long it's going to take. And it's going to be not a five-year story, it's going be a 20-year story, a 30-year story to get it right. And people, sadly, need to be patient, which is hard; when for generations people have been waiting for things to get much, much better and little progress has been made, relatively little progress has been made compared to Asia and that causes a lot of political frustration. I think.Tobi;I mean, speaking about Asia and I mean your point about taking away the right to protest, I think Africa and Nigeria sort of missed that window when we had military governments everywhere. So, uh, let me give you one experience I've had in trying to discuss your book with friends. So I get two reactions to the fertility section.It's almost automatic, you know, when you discuss fertility being at a certain level and I try to, you know, successfully argue your point, you get two strands of reactions in my experience, one goes immediately to the China issue - the one-child policy; that, "oh, so are you trying to say we should do what China did?" The other slightly more technical objection I get goes to the relationship between population growth and economic growth that is quite pervasive in the growth literature. Did you also experience that while writing the book and debating with colleagues?Charlie;Now I'll take each point in turn. Um, the China one-child policy story helps explain this massive rise in Chinese savings and then their very strong growth. What I'm trying to show in the book, of course, is that every rich country has seen a fertility decline. And what I'm arguing is probably the right sort of level for countries to aim for is about two to three kids on average. I don't care if people have five kids or one kid, it's just as a country the average of two to three kids is consistent with a very high, well, a big jump in the level of sayings. And with those savings, you can then industrialize and grow, and grow fast. Um, China I think actually made a mistake. I think China got it wrong by going for the one-child policy because they kind of turbocharged that story, that story that every rich country has got, of lower fertility, it took a really long time in Europe. I mean it took a really, really long time in Europe and that's why Europe had the slowest growth of any industrial revolution. It was done faster by the communism [they had] in Russia and they did faster growth and we've done even faster in China. But the consequence of this one-child policy and what the Chinese have discovered is it's bloody hard to get the fertility rate back up again once you've had one kid. I was talking to a Chinese professor on a plane back from Asia once and she was saying all of her friends, they can't get married, they can't stay married. They get married and they can't stay married because they're all used to being a one-child kind of princess or prince in the family who gets everything they want and then they try married life and they discover as you might well know, that you never get everything you want in a marriage, and you have to compromise.And it's certainly created a problem now that China can't get the kids, they can't raise the fertility level and it's not just China that's discovered that once you've got a low fertility rate, too low, I think of one, you have a problem raising it. Again, Italy's had the same problem, Iran, uh, Russia. So I think China did it too fast. And you certainly don't need to do it and loads of other countries show you that just aiming for that two to three kids figure really helps your economy and gets you onto the path to being middle-income and then a rich country. So I don't think you need to do the China one child. No. Um, the second issue, the population growth versus economic growth. What I show, what we did in this was we looked back at every country's growth rate since 1960 and I compared the per capita GDP growth, the per personal growth of an economy, it's the best way to measure how well an economy itself is really doing. And I compared that growth rate against the share of adults to kids that I was talking to you about a little earlier.Tobi;Yeah.Charlie;And where it's 50-50 roughly, between adults and kids, per capita GDP grows at 1% and that was the story of Asia in the sixties and seventies. It's still the story for a good number of countries including Nigeria today. So per capita GDP growth is about 1% when half your population can't work because they're kids. But once you get two-thirds of the population being adults, your average per capita growth in lower-income countries by half of America's wealth level, so not even lower-income, lower or middle-income countries, your per capita growth, and it averages three to 5% a year. So the structure of your population tells you what your per capita GDP growth is. So it's just... I can't see that there's any other way to explain this than you've gotta get that fertility rate down first before you can start to get the high per capita GDP growth. Um, and it's connected to the savings, of course; cause once you've got two kids instead of six, you're saving money in the bank, the bank starts to have more cash to lend out. There's more money for lending for investment. The government can borrow more cheaply so it can build infrastructure, roads and rail, electricity and cheap electricity cause interest rates are low cause the savings are high because most families are able to put some money aside at the end of the week. But that doesn't happen when 50% of the population are kids. They're not earning any money, they're not saving anything and the poor parents are trying to manage to feed five, six kids on average. You know, they've got nothing left at the end of the week to put into a bank.So the bank's got no cash. So interest rates are really high cause there's no money in the bank. Um, so money's really expensive. So the government can't afford to invest in infrastructure and if it does build electricity it has to charge a lot of money cause it's having to pay a lot of interest on the debt it's taken on. So to me, I've yet to find someone demolish the argument and uh, you know, it could happen.Tobi;Yeah.Charlie;But so far it seems you've got to get the fertility rate down first if you want to get fast growth. Now if you don't want to grow at three, four, 5% a year, you could do it really slowly like Europe did and you grow at say, one and a half, two, eventually, you get from European farming in 1800 to factories that are producing not great stuff by 1900, a hundred years later. But when I'm looking at Nigeria today, I don't want Nigeria to be waiting a hundred years to be doing what Europe took a hundred years to do. I also don't think the Chinese model of it taking 30 years, 20, 30 years but then having a population problem of being too old, I don't think that's the right solution either. But there's somewhere in between. At the moment though, Nigeria's on that long growth story, it's not yet ready for the faster growth storyTobi;On the China question, um, thinking about your answer there, is extremely low fertility or what they say "fertility below the replacement rate" a feature of the kind of explosive growth 30, 35, 40-year trajectory that we've seen in Asia. Because if you look at Korea, Korea even have worse demographic numbers than China and there was no draconian population policy, but it's kind of gone through this explosive growth phase that is even faster and bigger than China's.Charlie;Well, it's been going on for longer. So what the Koreans got right was they raised their adult literacy rate to, you know, they said about 90% by 1960. China, despite being communist and communists tend to say they really appreciate education, didn't get to over 70% literacy until 1990, sometime in the early 1990s, which is 25, 35 years later than Korea. Uh, so Korea was already booming in 1970 at a time when China was having the catastrophic mistakes of the cultural revolution and really bad growth and people feared mass famine. Well many, many did die in China in the sixties. So what I would argue is that Korea had a slower fertility decline and the growth rates were not as fast as China's but they've been growing for 50, 60 years already. So Korea's two to three times richer than China is today. But as you say, they're so ageing that they're gonna be the oldest country in the world by 2030.And what's gonna get interesting then, and I can't really answer this in the book cause we haven't seen it yet, but what's interesting about Korea and we're going to have to watch it carefully, is that you are going to end up with, not 70% adults and 30% kids, it'll be less and less working-age adults, maybe 60%, I dunno maybe eventually 50% and it'll be 50% kids and old age pensioners who can't work. And my guess is that Korean growth is going to slow back to about the 1% per capita growth that Nigeria's got at the moment because Korea's going to be too old. You know, and that's not something that I think people should be thinking about or worrying about. [People should be thinking about] Pakistan, East Africa, Southern Africa, West Africa at the moment. It's [Korea is] just not a...you know, that's a problem to worry about in 50, 60 years. But it is going to be interesting to watch what does happen to growth in really old countries. Um, can pensioners actually still do work? You know, maybe they end up retiring at 70 or 75 or 80, I dunno. It's gonna be quite interesting to see.Tobi;So I mean the question then is, uh, for countries that have fertility rates that are higher than what you described in the book.Charlie;Yeah.Tobi;It then becomes how do we get it to the point where domestic savings start going up, interest rate for the domestic investment environment then benefits from that virtuous cycle. You talked about access to uh, reproductive interventions like contraception, also education, which takes us to where we started this conversation from, especially the education of women and girls, generally. I was taking a look at David Le Bris recently where he was talking about equality between siblings and inequality between siblings and how it affects the overall capital formation, whether it's physical capital or human capital in the society. So my question then is, do you see individual sort of personalized household decision-making affecting this more or it is sort of a national policy thing?Charlie;When it's something as important as family, you know, the individual decisions matter a huge amount. And as I said earlier, I've got no issues with anyone doing what they choose to do. But that big family story, I was just talking to a former minister, actually, of a... former finance minister of a country and he's got five kids, he's saying that he's been able to help fund them go to university, but he can't afford to help them buy a house cause he just hasn't got the cash. And I thought that was a really interesting example of even in a wealthier country, you know, it still matters how big that family is. You know, when I looked into this on how do you get the fertility rate down and there's been quite a lot written about it. I don't have a magic or a single answer, but the theories are first: girls if they're staying at school until they're 18, versus girls who leave school at 13. If you leave school at 13, perhaps you have your first kid at 14, maybe a second kid at 17, third kid at 20. But if you stay at school until you're 18, perhaps the first kid's at 20. So already you've reduced the fertility rate by two just by keeping girls at school. And the key figure, but just kind of remind, well tell people is the key figure is at about three to four kids per woman on average, the banking system has got deposits cash in it of about 35% of GDP, at four to five kids, it's around 30, 25 to 30. At five to six kids, which is where Nigeria is, it's about 20% of GDP. Um, so 20, 30, you know, these sort of levels. If you get to two to three kids though, if you get it below three kids, it more than doubles to about 60% of GDP.That's when banks suddenly have loads of cash. When banks have got loads of cash, there's loads of lending, suddenly access to finance isn't a problem anymore. So how do you get it below three kids? So you educate girls, there's an incentive when women are educated for them to work cause they can start to make decent money in a textile factory that you can't do unless you've got that literacy. Um, the government just telling people that low fertility is a good thing is shown to have some success. From Indonesia to India, these kinds of government campaigns suggesting lower fertility rates have made a difference. The third thing, which really surprised me cause it's such a strong correlation, is [to] stop kids [from] dying. And I was pretty upset, actually, to see the numbers where, for Nigeria, you've got a 10% chance, just over a 10% chance of dying before the age of five because you're born in Nigeria. And when I was comparing that to Covid - which the world spent, what, trillions trying to fight - with a fatality rate of about one or 2%, you think of those with more than a 10% chance of dying just before the age of five in Nigeria. Anyway, it's kind of shockingly high, but when you have such a high chance of losing a child, you tend to have more children and the correlation is really quite strong. So, if you can try and address infant, [and] young child mortality rates, which doesn't cost that much, you can see countries with Nigeria's wealth level that have a mortality rate of not over 10%, but five or even 3%. And usually, countries with such a low mortality rate then have a much lower fertility rate as well. So, people tend to have less kids when they are more confident that all their kids are going to survive childhood. So, some investment in basic healthcare for children, education of girls, contraception availability, yes it does help, and government information campaigns. You put those things together and then you get a country like Bangladesh. Bangladesh which had the same population as Nigeria about 15 years ago. But today Nigeria's got tens of millions more. But Bangladesh is growing as fast as India. Bangladesh's per capita GDP is over $2,000. And it keeps on growing at six, seven, 8% every year. Because they have on average two kids per woman, they've got savings, they don't have much foreign debt because they don't need to borrow dollars from abroad to fund their growth, because they've got their own savings, because the fertility rate is low. Muslim Bangladesh: tremendous success story over the last two or three decades.Tobi;You sort of made allowances for countries that can't quite get their savings right up to the levels where they can get the desired domestic savings and really positively affect their investment environment in a big way. And you talked about debt in the book, which would be familiar to anybody that's been in the new cycle about Nigeria currently, which is that government revenue has collapsed. Debt servicing is rapidly approaching a hundred percent of what the government can collect. And it's only a matter of time before we are talking about a debt crisis. But, like you said, a debt crisis is, like, unavoidable if you're trying to grow and you don't have to requisite domestic savings to sort of mitigate that. But this inevitably brings in the question of debt restructuring which, again, some would also argue does not help you grow. So, in terms of just the sheer macroeconomics management of this, how do you go about it?Charlie;It's tough. The book's arguing, obviously, that a whole chunk of this stuff is really long term. You got to get the education right. So, you've got to have enough teachers and that takes, well, at best Korea did it in 15, 20 years. But even if you've got the education, then you've got to get the fertility rate down. And that takes at best 10 years to get it down by about two kids per woman. Nigeria's at 5.3 kids or so at the moment. It needs to be below three to have the local savings. So, we're talking at least 15 years, even if every priority was made today to try and improve education, do all this reproductive education and so on. So, the governments then have the choice of what do you do? I mean, if you're going to wait 15 years, you can grow at 1% a year per person. But you'll find the population is getting pretty cross because you've got all these other countries in the world growing at three, four, 5% per person every year. You know, why is my country growing at one [percent]? So, the politicians then...[it] becomes so attractive to go out and borrow and, you know, every country, not every single one, but the vast majority of debt defaults in the second half of the 20th century were in high fertility countries. The fertility rate I think was around, on average, five - five kids per woman was the average fertility rate in countries that defaulted in the second half of the 20th century. Wherever they were in the world. A lot of them were in Latin America in the debt crisis of 1980s. So firstly, debt crises are really common in high fertility countries because governments say I want to speed up my growth and they borrow when the markets let them.And we've certainly seen that in Africa in the last 10 years too. And then they borrow too much and then they go into default and then they can lose maybe a decade. And that is what happened in Latin America in the 1980s. But the alternative is to only grow at 1% a year. And yeah, you can avoid debt default. I'm not saying every high fertility country defaults. I'm saying almost all the countries that have defaulted are high fertility. So, you can settle for the low growth but if you don't want to settle for the low growth, the debt becomes a very attractive way to try and get faster growth. But it causes a problem. I end up finding roughly two other ways that you can try.Tobi;Okay.Charlie;And grow faster. Is it okay to jump on to those?Tobi;Yeah, go ahead please.Charlie;Yeah. First is to try and bring in as much foreign investment as you can. Cause you haven't got enough local savings, you don't want to take on too much debt cause eventually you'll default. So, you can try and make yourself very attractive for foreign investors. Foreign direct investors. The only problem with that model is that those foreign direct investors do also want their cheap electricity and the good infrastructure that unfortunately high fertility countries haven't got the money to pay for. So, it's difficult to get in a lot of foreign direct investment. Foreign direct investment in China, I was just reading a really good book by David Lubin, who's the chief economist of Citi for Emerging Markets and he did a book called Dance of the Trillions. Highly recommend, it's brilliant on emerging markets. And he says FDI suddenly started in China in the 1990s. Now, I know why. My book is explaining why I think, which is you finally had a literate population, 70% literacy and you also had the low fertility rate. So, you had the high savings, you had the good infrastructure. But the FDI didn't come 10 years before into China. It only really picked up in the 1990s. So, the point of then is, I mean yeah, try and get some [FDI] if you can, but the last option that I can see other than to just, perhaps, try to go full Stalinist, kind of communist, take control of every part of the economy. But even that still education and low fertility really helps... Um, the last option which any country can do is to run a current account surplus, I think. Have a currency level that's so cheap that you are running a trade surplus. A current account surplus, which is obviously trade plus services and remittances and so on.If you've got a surplus on that current account, you are bringing dollars into the economy and those dollars help reduce interest rates. And Nigeria saw that actually in 2005, six, seven and eight when the oil price was booming. Nigeria had that flood of dollars coming into the economy. Interest rates were really low below inflation and investment was relatively cheap and easy to finance. Now it's a problem to manage when it's a commodity-driven boom because commodities then bust. So, all that flood of money that came in suddenly disappeared again, you know, once the oil price collapsed there wasn't that current account surplus anymore. But if you run a cheap currency policy to make sure you always run a current account surplus, then that helps give you that supply of savings that you can then use to start investing. So that seems to me one of the few ways that a low-income country that's got not enough local savings, doesn't want to wait forever until its fertility rate's down [and] low enough to build the domestic savings, this is one way that looks sustainable that can bring in some foreign cash to help support growth.Tobi;But one minor aside on FDI and you can really correct me here if I'm wrong, wouldn't that really be a bit unstable? Because if you have loads of FDI, if other indicators are really working in your favour and at the slightest hint of a crisis, all that money then flows out.Charlie;Yeah. Well, I'll just differentiate between foreign direct investment and foreign portfolio investment. And, again, David Lubin's book is very good on this because the Washington consensus, which is this set of policies that were drawn up by policy makers around 1989, 1990, it said countries should welcome foreign direct investment. Building factories that it's pretty hard to move out of the country, that that should be welcomed. But when the original guys who drew up the Washington Consensus wrote down the kind of 10 principles, they weren't that keen on foreign portfolio investment. This is the hot money that will include a lot of my investors who will come in and buy shares in companies in the Nigerian Stock Exchange and might come in and buy bonds. And I think it's fair to say that that money can leave in times of trouble and doesn't really support...isn't necessarily as supportive [of growth] and that money we count on the capital account because it is foreign capital.What I was talking about on the current account surplus was obviously the trade surplus, the remittances, the services and so on. So, I think it's more debatable. I think a number of countries have restricted foreign portfolio flows into equity market or the bond market. And if they've got other things going for them, like a low fertility rate, they can kind of get away with that. Um, what I'm highlighting is that for some countries they just don't have that choice. And when America was short of capital in the 19th century, it was British capital that went over and built their railways, that bought all the shares in their infrastructure companies. The Brits owned America for much of the 19th century and then the French actually owned most of Russia. Uh, the railways and the ports and some of the industry, the coal mines [were] very significantly owned by French investors, portfolio funds, and portfolio guys are there to make money as well. You know, they're there to make profit and if you're making good profit, five, 10% a year or whatever sitting in Nigerian equity market, people will stay, and it won't leave. They'll be happy to stay there for many, many years as people are and have been doing in India, actually, since India's education fertility and electricity numbers have all come together in the last 10 years in a really good way. Foreign portfolio guys are saying, "Hey, we wanna put our money into the Indian stock market too." And Indian shares are pretty expensive right now because of that. But the money doesn't want to leave. It'll leave when policy mistakes are made but fundamentally doesn't want to leave. However, I don't deny that there is a reasonable argument you can make to say we're going to choose foreign direct investment, we're going to be more restrictive on foreign portfolio investment. Because that can be more volatile. It can leave quicker. And I wouldn't argue with that. Well, I mean we could debate it, but I think it's harder to prove that you must have foreign portfolio investments to thrive. I think the current account surplus is a better policy choice because it's in your control. Foreign portfolio investors and what they do, that's not in your control.Tobi;One question that stayed with me throughout your book, which is a bit silent in the book itself, maybe it's implied, you can tell me, is that it's really difficult to find a country at any particular point where all these three factors align at the same time. Where you have the requisite adult literacy rate, electricity and fertility, they rarely align at the same point in time in the history of any one country. Because your book did not really distinguish between any particular political preference or institutional arrangements, which I like that, but what institutional arrangement favours the consistency for all these factors to sort of come together, uh, in the economic history basically of a country. Because we know that political leaders tend to favour what benefits their ambition at any particular point in time, you know? And a lot of these things are investments that do pay off in the long run, you know? Like we talked about on savings, a lot of political leaders would want to borrow a lot of money and then leave the debt crisis to the next administration.Charlie;Yeah. Yeah. Happens a lot.Tobi;Yeah. You know, and so many other things, whether you are investing in electricity or education or whatever, they don't really want to do the hard work. They want to do the easy stuff and just leave it to the next guy.So, what institutional arrangements have you found in your observation and study of this that favours the patient consistent build-up to the alignment of these three factors?Charlie;I think it's really, um, it's kind of interesting actually because in each chapter I try and say which countries are at the right place for industrialization, education, which countries are at the right place for electricity, and which countries are at the right place for fertility. Perhaps I didn't properly bring that together in one chapter at the end to say, "so, who's the fast growth story?" But right now, the countries that have brought them together are Vietnam, India, Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and I think those five countries, Morocco actually six, um, those six countries should be the countries that will show the really good growth for the next 30 to 40 years. Um it's going to be great. And I'm then trying to highlight who's closest to joining them on a 10 year view. Um, Pakistan and Egypt both got big debt problems right now, but five to 10 years they could be joining that group as well and Ghana and actually Kenya and I would argue southern Nigeria could be, could be there in the 2030s.Um, so I am trying to say when they come together. The question you are asking, though, about institutions or perhaps leadership and so on, I think is a really important one because I guess this book in lots of ways is an argument against Why Nations Fail, which was a really interesting book; and [it] said it is all about institutions and the right institutions and that's why if you walk a kilometre across the US border into Mexico, things are run so very differently. It's got to be the institutions, that book argues, that makes the difference between a country succeeding or not. And what I'm arguing is that I don't think that's true. I think you appear to have the good institutions when everything else is running well and you appear to have the terrible institutions when you don't have the education or you don't have the electricity or you don't have the low fertility or worst of all, you haven't got any of them.So, a country that hasn't got any of them, like Niger, Chad, Somalia, you know, these are countries in a terrible place. But I'm saying that they can't have good institutions cause there's no money in the economy, there are not enough educated people in the economy. There's just no way that you're going to get a good setup in those countries. And actually, even at the beginning when, at the first 10 years or so, when you've got these things all coming together, you still don't think the institutions are good. You know, you go to India today, people don't think, "wow, this is a brilliantly run civil service. It's so uncorrupt[ed]." Such wonderful institutions everywhere. They don't say that. They don't say that about Philippines' Duterte, the president who's been just recently retired, by people who were worried the institutions found it difficult to control his populism. And yet Philippines boomed under Duterte, and India's boomed under Modi and countries like Korea boomed even with a level of corruption that means in the last 10 years we've seen four presidents go to jail for corruption.Um, so I argue that the better institutions come afterwards and that's why four presidents have gone to jail in Korea because they're now getting the institutions better. And I read a really good book about why democracies die by some American academics about three or four years ago now. I recommend it. And they pointed out that Latin America, across Latin America, they just copied the American institutions. They said, look, what's working in the Americas is North America. It's United States, they've got it right. Let's copy their institutions, we'll put them into my country, be it Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, whoever. And then they discovered that actually if the human capital is not as advanced, people will undermine the institutions. And you arguably saw Trump try it in the United States itself, but the human capital and the rest of the place was good enough to stop him from going too far.This is all debatable stuff, but you know, this is... So, I think the institutions do work when everything else has been working for some time and before then it's very hard to argue that the institutions work or can make a huge difference. I think the fundamental economic reality of are you growing at 1% a year or three to 5% a year per capita? That isn't about the institutions. Having said all of that? I think there's no doubt that you can have, if you're lucky, very lucky, really good leadership. A leader like Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, who has got vision, understands or is lucky, but he prioritized education and all the rest, who gets it right and takes the country onto a new path. When I think of some of the most obvious successes, a lot of them are small Singapore, Hong Kong, even Taiwan really.And maybe it's just tougher to do it in a country the size of Nigeria with over 200 million people or, or uh, India with over a billion, which is why it took India so long or Brazil. But I remember even the French president, Charles de Gaulle, I think in the sixties or seventies said, "how is it possible to govern a country with 350 types of cheese?".Um, and in India you'd say, "how can you govern a country of over a billion people with that many different dialects, different customs, different local cultures?" Um, and it is hard, but once you get these fundamentals of education, electricity and fertility right, suddenly, it looks like you can govern well. So, I want to think there is a role for good leadership, um, and it can make a difference and it does help. I just think history's telling us over the last 300 years that we can't count on luck and that lucky guy who happens to be the right leader to come in, sometimes woman who can come in, and push reform in the right way. What we can count on is that if you get the education, electricity and fertility numbers right, you will get out of poverty, you will get better off and your kids will have a much, much better future and your grandchildren even more so.So, I think that's probably one area [where] my book differs from many in the last 10, 15 years is saying, "I don't think it is so much about the things that we all like to pay attention to [like] who's going to win the next election and what are their different policies going to be?" And you know, most of the time I'm arguing it doesn't really make as much difference as we'd like to think.Tobi;Now, another point that came in the later chapters in the book, which I found interesting, and which is quite also a bit of a political issue right now, surrounds migration. Uh, a lot of Nigerians are leaving, I mean it's become even a social media trend and meme - "who is...Charlie;The Japa trend.Tobi;Who is leaving next, uh, yeah, yeah, Japa. So, like, who is leaving next, you know? Right. But you argued in the book that as countries grow richer, there will be more migration not less because what you often hear is that the reason why people are living is because the country is so bad and they're looking for a way to make better lives for themselves, which is true anyway. So, and that the way to really stop this migration wave is if you can improve the domestic economy and then suddenly you see a drop, but you are saying no, um, we are actually going to see more migration as countries grow richer. Now, how do you suppose that this can be resolved with the current, should I say, political environment in Europe and to some extent in America that is increasingly seeing migration from poorer countries as a problem, right? Is it a case of as countries grow richer, then the migration demographic just, sort of, changes to more educated people leaving and less tension and political rancour about migration?Charlie;Um, I doubt, I mean, I doubt that these political problems about immigration in Europe and The States are going to disappear. Cause we've seen election results just in the last two, three weeks in Italy with the far right becoming dominant, in Sweden as well. Where they took in a huge amount of, I think, it was Syrian refugees and before that Somalian refugees. Um, and you're trying to integrate people coming from a country with very low adult literacy into, particularly in Somalia's case, into a country like Sweden, which had a hundred percent, nearly a hundred percent adult literacy already by 1900. That's an integration process that takes generations. As America's still struggling 150 years after civil war, still struggling to manage integration. So, I think that political problem is going to carry on, but it is going to get more acute for Europe, um, and eventually United States because Europe is this aging old continent that hasn't got enough people.I was in Germany two weeks ago and there, there was a surprising number of industrialists saying "we must have a much more open border situation." I said, well, you know, that'll be really interesting to see if you do that because the backlash that we're seeing elsewhere says there is a limit to what countries politics seem ready to accept. And, I think, I even think the Brexit vote was about that. It was about the East European migration into the UK, which had the most open approach to east European countries from Poland and Hungary and Czech coming to the UK. Every other country in Europe kept in a border, well, restrictions, but the UK didn't. And I think that backfired on the UK when it had a Brexit vote that said, "oh, we have too many Polish people eating sausage in our supermarkets. And I, I, yeah, I mean really people cared.I don't understand it. I love the variety obviously, but while I don't understand, while I don't feel the same, [some] people do. So, I think that's the political problem. And even educated people who are needed by the economy might find it hard to integrate, say, beyond the bigger urban centres. I was really shocked when I was writing the book and I was looking at what happens when you've got an educated population but a high fertility rate. What happens across history is people leave. Cause there aren't enough jobs at home. Cause the fertility rate's so high, there's thousands, millions of people coming into the workforce. The savings aren't there to help create the jobs. So, they leave and it's the Philippines, you know, in the 20th century, it's Pakistanis now, where a number of people are well educated, not everyone sadly. But 150 years ago, it was Ireland, and it was Norway, and they were sending their excess population to America, and it caused huge controversy.There was, you know, rioting between, kind of, the Italian immigrants and the Irish immigrants in New York. T

Bangladesh has transformed tremendously in the last twenty-five years. Average incomes have more than quadrupled, and many of its human development indicators have improved alongside. It has also become an export powerhouse with its garment industry, and generally a shining example of development - though things are far from perfect. Five decades ago, when Bangladesh became an independent country, many were not hopeful about its chances of development. So how did Bangladesh turn its story around? Well, it turns out the history of its transformation is longer than credited - and the process is more complex than what is cleanly presented.I could not think of a better person to help me unpack the Bangladeshi miracle than Dr. Akhtar Mahmood. He is an economist and was a lead private sector specialist for the World Bank Group - where he worked in various parts of the world for three decades on privatization, state enterprise reforms, investment climate, competitiveness, and more broadly private sector development. He has written some excellent books (see embedded links), and his column for the Dhaka Tribune is one of my wisest sources of economic development commentary.TranscriptTobi;Welcome to the show Akhtar Mahmood. It's a pleasure talking to you. I am very fascinated and curious about Bangladesh, and you are my number one option for such a journey. It's a pleasure, personally, for me to be having these conversations. I've been reading your column for about a year now with the Dhaka Tribune, and I've learned so much. They are very perceptive, and I'm going to be putting up links to some of my favourites in the show notes for this episode. Welcome once again, and thank you so much for doing this.Akhtar;Thank you very much for having me. Thanks, Tobi.Tobi;There's so much that I want to talk to you about, as you'd imagine, but let me start right at the end, which is now. There has been a lot of attention on Bangladesh, recently, at least in my own orbit, there have been two quite detailed and interesting columns in the Financial Times about Bangladesh. There is also Stefan Dercon's book, which used Bangladesh as a positive case for what he was describing about the development process. But also, there's the issue of what's going on right now with the global economy. First, it started with COVID and how the economy suddenly stopped, and all the reverberation that comes with that - the supply chain, and now, a lot of countries are going through a sort of sovereign debt crisis and Bangladesh, again, is in the spotlight. So, I just want you to give me an overview, and how this, sort of, blends with countries that put so much into development…you know, in terms of policy, in terms of the things they are doing right, in terms of investment and attracting investment, and the exposure to these sorts of global economic risks and volatility. [This is] because, usually, what you get in Western discourse is that a lot of countries are victims of some of these risks because of some of the wrong policy decisions they make. But in the case of Bangladesh, at least to my knowledge, nothing like that is going on. And yet, it is usually talked about as a very exposed country in that regard. I know you wrote a column recently about this. So I just want you to give me a brief [insight]—is there anything to worry about? How do countries that are trying to get rich, that are trying to do things right, how do they usually manage these sorts of global risks?Akhtar;Right? I think, inevitably, we'll have to go a bit into the history of how we came here. But since you started with the current situation, let me briefly comment on that, and then maybe I'll go to the history. Right now, yes, like most other countries, we are facing challenges, but I think there has been a bit of hype about how serious the challenge is, in terms of the risk of a debt default, the risk of foreign exchange reserves going down very sharply. And I think there is a bit of the Sri Lanka effect, and then also the Pakistan effect, as people are trying to put Bangladesh in the same bracket, which I think is very, very misplaced. I think the IMF has made it clear, [not only] in its latest country report, which came out in March 2022 but also in many recent statements, that Bangladesh has both a solvency situation and a liquidity situation. As you know [that] the solvency is typically measured by the external debt to GDP ratio, one of the ratios is external debt by GDP and the liquidity is measured by debt service requirements - the external debt service requirements by the export earnings ratio. And there are these certain thresholds, and if you go beyond that, it's considered a bit risky. Bangladesh on both these accounts is much below the threshold. So there's already a lot of headroom in the sense that even if things get worse over the next few months and maybe a year or two, Bangladesh would still be able to manage the situation. So I just wanted to make that clear at the beginning. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't other issues in Bangladesh, issues which have been brewing for quite some time. For example, many of us are concerned with the efficiency of public expenditures. We know of projects where there have been cost overruns. Some of it may be for genuine reasons, some of it may be related to corruption, which sadly still remains a serious problem in Bangladesh. I feel that I've written about it, and you may have read some of these articles about the spectre of rising cronyism, which, again, is not surprising; when an economy grows as fast as Bangladesh's has, there are certain people who become economically powerful. And at some stage they acquire political power as well, and then you start seeing the problem of cronyism. So we have that, we have a serious problem in the banking sector with a lot of non-performing loans. I'm not suggesting that we don't have serious problems, we do. But there is a disconnect between the typical headlines and where the real problems lie in Bangladesh.  Now, this may be a good moment to bring up a little bit of history, and I can go deeper into it. The Bangladesh economy has certain resilience. And I just want to comment on that. One which is not discussed much, because the story often is about garments and remittances, is the transformation that has happened in the rural areas. It started with agriculture, it actually started with rice production, which is the most important crop in Bangladesh. And then it expanded into other crops, and then even non-farm activities in the rural areas, we can go into the details of this later. But agriculture provides a certain resilience. And we saw that again during COVID. Because the agricultural activities in Bangladesh were not affected that much by COVID, and that was a big benefit. The other is the unleashing of an entrepreneurial spirit in Bangladesh. And this spirit has been unleashed across the board, so it's not just some large conglomerates or some large government manufacturers who have become entrepreneurial. This is something which has happened across the board, from small farmers to large conglomerates. And that, I think, is a big asset for the country. Because we don't have natural resources; unlike Nigeria, we don't have natural resources. In some ways, it's actually a good thing. Because then we are forced to use other assets and latent entrepreneurship… you know, Albert Hirschman, the famous economist, wrote a book in 1956, which is a classic, on the strategy of economic development, and he made a very interesting comment. He said, in developing countries, you have a lot of latent resources. In developed countries, the task is how to allocate the resources you have; how to best allocate them. In developing countries, it is about bringing out the latent resources you have; and entrepreneurship is one of the latent resources developing countries have, but many countries have not been able to bring that out and make use of it. Bangladesh has, and that gives a certain resilience to the economy. So yes, the shocks are going to affect us, especially because our major industry, in fact, is export-oriented, which is garments. So that is affected by the shocks, but unlike commodity prices, export earnings don't fluctuate that much. And the industry has proven to be resilient over the years.Tobi;Yeah, I'm glad you touched on history because, really, that's where I wanted to start. But I just want to get the pulse of the moment and how to make sense of all the headlines that we're seeing around. So usually, and I'll refer to the two pieces I've read in the FT [Financial Times] recently that I referenced in my first question. The development trajectory of Bangladesh is usually dated as something that started around 1990. But Bangladesh became an independent country two decades before that. So my question then is: that intervening period before that sort of consensus about the takeoff point, what were the things that were brewing in the background that culminated in that takeoff? I know a lot of things went down, and just to mention that one of the reasons I'm very interested in Bangladesh is that it sort of defies some of the seductive examples of development and progress - the Asian tigers, you know, so to speak - where things seem to be very clear, the prescriptions are very precise, you need to do this and do this. Bangladesh seems like a regular country - like Nigeria, with its history, its complexities, its problems like every other country in the world, but that has also managed, despite a situation that has seemed hopeless, at first, to people who look at these things in terms of hard boundaries - that has emerged as this fantastic example of economic growth and development. So what were the major things that happened before 1990 that sort of made this takeoff possible?Akhtar;Now, one may debate on whether 1990 is the point of the takeoff. In any case, it's very difficult to pinpoint. But anyway, it's good. So 1990, twenty years after independence and also a transition to democratic rule after fifteen years or so of military or quasi military rule. So that's another reason people take that as a counterpoint. But it's a good counterpoint to start discussing these things. Professor Stefan Dercon, whom I think you had on your show recently, who wrote this book Gambling on Development; he has been saying that actually, in some ways, it's a Bangladesh experience which may be more relevant for many developing countries than the East Asian [experience]. And one of the reasons he mentions is, I think, what you just alluded to - that there is a certain messiness, and yet Bangladesh developed. So countries which think that they are also in a somewhat messy situation, or whatever dimensions, say in governance or other dimensions - whether it's possible for them to develop. And that's why the Bangladesh example may be more relevant and encouraging than the East Asian, where one common characteristic has been the strong capabilities of the state. In China, it has been there for hundreds or more,  thousands of years. In East Asia, yes, I'm sure they also have that but they certainly acquired that quite fast. So how do you develop in a country context where the state capacity, the governance quality are not that great, and then you have many other problems as well. So you're right. In that sense, Bangladesh may be very relevant. I think I'd like to first start with, um, even deeper history, because if you look at the region which now constitutes Bangladesh, it used to be part of a province in British India. So it was East Bengal, and then you had West Bengal and then together it was Bengal. Now there was a time in history when Bengal including East Bengal was supposed to be reasonably rich, perhaps the richest province in [the] whole of India before the British came. But if we go back to the beginning of the twentieth century, East Bengal was actually quite backward economically and in many other ways. And if you look at the political discourse in the first half of the twentieth century, before the British left, the political and intellectual discourse in what is now Bangladesh, you'll see there's a lot of talk about peasants being exploited. We were a very peasant dominated economy and society. In many ways we still are, although there has been a lot of urbanisation and industrial activity. At that time it was very much peasant dominated, and the theme which dominated the discourse was exploitation of the peasants. And the aspiration that the leaders whether political or intellectual had is how can we improve the conditions of the poor people. And that sort of got ingrained in the minds of the leaders, and that continued during the time when we were a part of Pakistan. Because you may have heard that there was a lot of disparity and there was a lot of discriminatory treatment by the Pakistani establishment. So that theme was there. When we became independent in ‘71, you could think of the political leadership, you could think of the professional leadership, the bureaucracy, the intellectuals, the media, this theme of doing something for the poor, was actually very strong. So right at the beginning, and, I heard somewhere that our first prime minister, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was asked by a foreign journalist: what is the number one problem of your country? And he said, I actually have two number one problems. One is food security, and one is population. And we need to take care of that. So right from the beginning, even in the midst of all the turmoil in the first few years, and all the challenges of relief and rehabilitation, work had started on ensuring agricultural growth and food security. And we were fortunate that the HYV rice, the high yielding variety of rice, had been introduced just before independence, so we had something to work with. So that was very important. And there was a strong program to bring down the rate of growth of [the] population and we succeeded on both counts. So by the time we come to 1990, agriculture is taking off. Rice production had taken off significantly, farmers were diversifying into other crops. And we had started to see the beginnings of a rural non farm sector. So agriculture and non agriculture together. And, Bangladeshis had been going out as migrants, and they're sending back remittances, most of it going into the rural areas. So there was a vibrancy in the rural area by the time you come to 1990. Secondly, sometime in the late 70s, the government decided that not only should we move away from the early talk about socialism, [but] towards a more private sector-oriented or market-oriented economy. They also understood that industry has to grow to absorb the surplus labour in agriculture, and export orientation has to grow, because the market in Bangladesh is simply not large enough. So there was an early emphasis on exports. And of course, fortuitously, you know, the South Koreans were running out of their garment quota, so they wanted to relocate some of the production to Bangladesh, but we were ready to take advantage because by then the government and let's say the elite of the class had decided that we need to industrialise and the major driver of industrialization is going to be exports. And then throughout the 80s, we saw the takeoff of the garment industry. The third thing which happened was the liberalisation of policies, mostly in the 80s. So, privatisation was done, the banking sector was open to the private sector. The agricultural input market, which was previously dominated by the government, was gradually liberalised and towards the late 80s, there was a significant liberalisation of that. And finally, as remittances started coming in, our foreign exchange constraint was relaxed. So that also gave government some comfort that we can decontrol certain things. And we can allow industry to move ahead without too many controls. So all these things coming together sort of created the context in which we entered the 1990s. So a lot of the preconditions - the population growth rate had fallen significantly by the time it came to the 1990s, agricultural growth had taken off, industry was taking off, especially the labour intensive garments, which is export-oriented, that industry was taking off.Tobi;That was such a loaded answer, which has preempted some of my further questions. But let me quickly make one digression on agriculture, because over the past seven years or so, in Nigeria, there's been this debate. There's been a huge debate about agriculture, the current administration sort of prioritised agriculture and a lot of resources (capital) was allocated to that sector. And there's been challenges and there's been critics, sometimes I've found myself on the critic's side of things. Now, what I want to know from you is that,the link between agriculture, especially investment and the agricultural productivity that is necessary for the vibrance of that particular sector, how was the Bangladeshi experience? How did Bangladesh achieve food security, especially in terms of improving yield and productivity?Akhtar;Right, so a few things. Firstly, as I said, the high yielding variety of rice had been introduced in the late 60s, and then just after independence, government continued, but more vigorously with a model of… it was more [of a] public sector driven model, where the public sector would import the major inputs. One is irrigation equipment, because this rice needed irrigation, and the other was fertiliser. So, they're imported by the public sector, then they're distributed by the public sector going all the way to the farmers. Maybe at the last mile, there were some private traders who act as dealers on behalf of the government. So, the government took that responsibility. Later on, as I said, in the 80s, they started liberalising it. We'll come to that later. Second is, there's been quite a bit of investment in agricultural research. Now the HYV rice came from abroad, but as it was being applied in Bangladeshi farms, in many cases, we realised that there was some adaptation needed, because the conditions were not always well suited for this variety. The crop conditions varied even within Bangladesh, even though it's a small country, lots of variation. Later on, for example, salinity became a problem, because a lot of water was coming from the Bay of Bengal into Bangladesh. So there are all kinds of problems - there's flooding also. There were many areas where after floods, the waters don't recede that fast, so they remain underwater for a long time. So the agricultural scientists in Bangladesh, and they were all in the public sector, they came up with innovations to come up with rice varieties and later other varieties like maize varieties or vegetables, which are better suited to the conditions in Bangladesh. And then the public sector effort was also complemented, supplemented by NGO efforts. You may have heard about BRAC [Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee], which is the largest NGO in the world, and we often talk about their activities in the health sector, in education, in microfinance. They were actually doing a lot of work in the economic sphere as well. R&D in agriculture was one of the things that we're doing, in collaboration with the government often, so there was R&D. Another thing happened, which I forgot to mention, when I mentioned sort of the run up to the 90s. In the 80s, the government started a massive program to build rural roads, connecting the rural areas to the small towns and the small towns to the bigger towns. So,a huge rural road network was built starting from the late 80s. And it continued into the 90s, which broadened the markets of the farmers. So in all of this, the core player was the small farmer. As I said, Bangladesh is a peasant, small farmer dominated economy, so it is remarkable that these farmers were willing to innovate, they were willing to move away from what their parents and grandparents had done for many, many years, and adopt these new varieties. So the combination of the government with some NGOs and the farmers, I think that created the basis for productivity improvements in agriculture. And that was sustained because the market was sustained. There were lots of public policies. And at some point, when the government thought the public sector delivery model was not working that well, they allowed the private sector to come in.Tobi;I don't want to infer anything, but from your answer, I can tell what Nigeria is doing wrong, but maybe we'll get to that later. So let's talk about the conditions, which you've also sort of answered for me but I want to know if there is more. Dercon in his book, I'm talking about Professor Stefan Dercon, talked about elite consensus that sort of becomes the bedrock of deciding to pursue economic development. So this broad consensus amongst the Bangladeshi political elites to improve the conditions of the poor, and, which, I'm speculating sort of enabled an ecosystem of policy consistency, even if there are deviations at the margins, how did it emerge? And how was it sustained?Akhtar;Okay, as I had mentioned to Professor Dercon ‘cause I also had a conversation with him for our Bangladeshi group. And I said that – and, he agreed that, it's really difficult to define if there was an elite consensus because it's not that the elite are sitting in a room discussing and bargaining and one day they come out and say, okay, here is an agreement, we have agreed on these three things, it doesn't happen. And there is a bit of tautology in his book as well. And he agreed with that, that in his country chapters, he says, these countries had an elite bargain. And then he says, Okay, this is how the countries grew. And if they have grown, therefore, they must have had a bargain. So there's a bit of tautology there. But coming back to this, I think, I started giving you a flavour of that when I brought in history, even before the British left and how in East Bengal, there was this deeply ingrained feeling that something has to be done for the poor people. And then just after independence in ‘74, we had a big famine. And that sort of strengthened this feeling amongst Bangladeshis. And you know, you mentioned the word elite and it's a bit difficult to define the elite. I would say that it's a broader… I'm talking about people who can influence policy, both the formulation and the quality of implementation. There are a lot of people in the bureaucracy who may not, in that sense, be called part of the elite, but they do have some authority. Now, most of these people, they actually are not too far away from the poor people of Bangladesh. Many of them still have very strong connections with their villages. They go back regularly. They know what the conditions are there. And in a densely populated country like Bangladesh, you see poverty all around you. So all these things, I think, have ingrained in the minds of the elite, however you define it, this commitment to doing something to safeguard the interests of the poor, but that is the security side - food security, [to] address the vulnerability. But somewhere down the line, people started recognizing that Bangladeshis also have an entrepreneurial potential. And there was a feeling that we should try and help unleash that potential. So, as I said, it's difficult to pinpoint a particular period where there has been a consensus but in a subtle way, there has been this consensus that to achieve food security, to help take advantage of the latent entrepreneurship of Bangladeshis, we should be focusing a lot on growth and more generally on development. And that has survived the transitions in administrations, from one government to another, that common element has been there.Tobi;It's not exactly a push back, and I should note that there is a lot more; there's vastly a lot more to Bangladesh than Dercon's book. So, and I don't want to be caught in debating his book. But, why I find that particular line of thought relevant is that, from what you have described, it's amazing to me, so maybe you can help me understand the difference. Now, how a country can set out to do some of these things; invest in agriculture, agricultural R&D, and all these other support programs with big macro effects. Whereas a Nigeria can set out to do those same things and then you find divergent outcomes in their implementation, particularly the inability to execute. You know? There's always a plan. We want to improve the lot of the poor. We want to invest in agriculture. We want to improve productivity. We want to build infrastructure, you know, this, that, they are always so nice and interesting. But the difference is always at the end of the day, countries often don't do these things, right, they never stay true to these things. And of course, we can talk about various reasons why it fell astray - corruption, state capacity, and all that. But what I… which you mentioned in your last sentence [is] how policies survive, even though there are political transitions, election cycles come and go, the particular direction that policy goes, survives this transition, I think that's really what I'm trying to get at.Akhtar;Okay, so I don't know that much about Nigeria. Now, people say that the fact that you have natural resources may have been in some ways a curse, I don't know if it's true or not, but certainly, that sometimes gives governments a sense of complacency and therefore, even if they start on a certain course, they may not have the discipline to stay that course. Now Bangladesh, we never had the advantage of having natural resources. Nowadays, certain things have improved, you know, foreign exchange reserves have been at comfortable levels for several years. So, that may induce a certain degree of complacency, but for a long time, the government knew that we were operating with very narrow degrees of freedom. So that was the context in which Bangladesh had to operate. Which also meant that we were somewhat dependent on donors and that certainly imposed an additional set of disciplines on Bangladesh. But later on, I may come and comment on exactly the kind of relationships I think existed between donors and Bangladesh. But maybe the best way to answer your question would be to say a little bit about the way in which policies have evolved in Bangladesh. And in a sense, it's a bit of a “muddling through” process. And I wrote a blog for the Brookings Institute a year ago, where I said that Bangladesh did it, alluding to that famous song of Frank Sinatra - “I did it my way.” So what was that “my way?” We all know that the Bangladeshi Government has never been tremendously competent, there's always been corruption problems as well. So the way it has happened is the following. Things happened in the economy, let's say agricultural productivity is improving. But then it hits certain constraints, and the economic actors, or people acting on behalf of the actors; like academics, donors, journalists, will bring up those issues. And they will probably say that, “here are ten things which need to be done.” Now what the governments in Bangladesh have done, successive governments, [is] they have responded to that, not by doing all the ten things. No. They may have picked up two or three things. And they may have done a little bit. Why a little bit? Because they were risk averse. They wanted to test out what would happen in the market, how the market players respond. [As the government], if I do just three or four things and not everything, and then see the response…and here comes the entrepreneurial side - the response was usually quite good, and when the response was good, the government felt encouraged. And then the government said “okay, let's do a few more of the things that were demanded.” The other thing which happened was, as the response came, newer constraints were revealed, or constraints which were not binding before became binding. For example, initially when the agricultural growth was not that great, when production wasn't that huge, the fact that we did not have a good rural road network connecting the rural areas to broader markets wasn't that big a constraint, because you're not producing enough to go out in a big market. When you started producing a lot of marketable surplus, you needed a broader market. And that's when you started feeling the constraint. And people started talking about the need to build up the rural road network. And to the credit of the government, they responded. So, this is what I call the sort of back and forth, policy dynamics - things happen in the economy, government notices it or it is brought to their notice, they react not in a grand way, just doing a little bit here and there;nd then the market responds, may be much more than in many other countries, because of the entrepreneurial spirit, and then the government responds. And that process has gone on uninterrupted throughout the last fifty years. And so, once you accumulate, even if these are modest steps, once you accumulate all of that, you'll see a tremendous result. And that's what we're seeing here. So, what it means is countries – the governments don't have to be very competent, they just have to pick the signals. So, you know, you have this phrase called “picking the winners” and a lot of people say, no, governments should not be in the business of picking winners. I say, in Bangladesh, that what the government just does is pick signals. They've picked signals from the private sector, from the farmers, and they have acted accordingly. And I think the accumulation of all these, the synergies created by all these is, I think, what has made the difference.Tobi;That's interesting. So, generally, the usual story with development is structural transformation. That is, for you to grow rich, the economy has to transform from a largely agrarian, low productivity economy to preferably an industrial high productivity economy. And, I mean, to an extent, we've seen the same process also in Bangladesh. Manufacturing, particularly the garment industry, is eighty or so percent of exports and employment is largely created also in that industry. Now, what I want to ask you is, the role of foreign direct investments in that cannot be understated. You talked about South Korea earlier, and how it played a role in that. For South Korea, so many other scholars would cite the role of Japan in kickstarting the South Korean garment industry; garment and textile industry itself. So, my question then is, is there a link here? I mean, also in your columns, I've read about the role of Samsung, and the electronics industry in Vietnam. Right. So the role of FDI in development, and especially getting industrialization started, what are the favourable conditions? To what degree is it external and internal? I guess that would be my question.Akhtar;Okay. Well, you use the term kickstarting, because in Bangladesh, in the garment industry, a foreign investor helped kickstart that industry, but didn't do much beyond that. So, Bangladesh's Government has been largely domestic…[it is] a case of domestic entrepreneurship leading the sector to the heights that it has achieved now. Yes, we have some Export Processing Zones where we have a number of foreign invested garment factories, but the bulk of it is domestic entrepreneurship. But you're right. The initial thrust came from this partnership with Daewoothe IU. It was a five year partnership. Daewoo trained Bangladeshis, (they) took them to their plants in Korea, trained them. They obviously had the market connections and market knowledge, all that was very useful. But what many people don't know is that the Bangladeshi partner actually quit that agreement just one year into that five year period. So after one year, he thought that he had learned everything that needed to be learned. Now, if he hadn't done that, I believe Daewoo had other plans of coming into other sectors, which we may have lost. But then we did end up with this vibrant mostly domestic-owned garment industry. But foreign investment had a role in jumpstarting that. If you go a little beyond industry, think about sectors which facilitate industry. The entire mobile phone development in Bangladesh, which is also remarkable, was foreign investment led. So, foreign investment played a major role there. So, I agree that foreign investment can play an important role in kickstarting industries, and that is something very important now that we want to diversify our exports, make them more sophisticated, we can come to that subject later. Now, you asked me about what are the conditions which are conducive for foreign investment. And this is where I would say that in Bangladesh, the conditions are still not that conducive. In the case of garments in the late 70s, it was the exhaustion of the South Korean quota of garments, which was the major inducement for them to come in. But also, as I said, the new government, which came into power in ‘75 was talking a lot about export promotion. So, that was there. But the most important constraint that Bangladesh faces, and it's true of many other countries, is policy and regulatory uncertainty. So, Bangladesh often says that we have got a policy regime which is very friendly to foreign investors. And that may well be true. But the execution has problems. And there are a lot of case by case decisions which are taken, which affect the foreign investors adversely. And that creates uncertainty. And those stories are told to other prospective investors. And when they hear those stories, they get discouraged. And the World Bank where I used to work, in fact, the last unit that I worked on, they did a survey of CEOs of multinational corporations just a few years ago, asking them about what are the factors which are very important for you when you decide to invest or not invest in a country, and policy and regulatory uncertainty was top of the list. So that is where Bangladesh still has got a lot of work to do. It is attractive in many other ways - very large domestic market, relatively cheap labour, the labour is quite fast at learning, a lot of good things there. But I think the policy environment, particularly the implementation, the certainty, that has to be ensured.Tobi;I have a further question, particularly on that point, and referencing another one of your columns, I think I'll just stick to your columns today for all my questions. For example, in Nigeria, I'll give you an example. In Nigeria, recently, foreign airlines are threatening to quit. Over the past three, four years, foreign investment (FDI) has plummeted. It's barely a billion dollars, currently, one of the lowest even in Africa. And of course, a lot of these things you mentioned are the problems that investors and business people talk about - policy uncertainty, especially around the control of the exchange rates and inability of companies to repatriate their capital, and to fund their operating expenses, and so forth. So, I mean, that's one constraint. But one distinction you made is like the types of FDI. There are different categories of FDI; market-seeking FDI, natural resource-seeking, efficiency-seeking [FDI]. And the reason I'm asking this is that there seems to be one problem, which, to my mind, Bangladesh has solved, it's not perfect, that Nigeria is struggling with, which is this inertia to get things started, you know, once you start on a journey, you can muddle through, but the inertia to get that process going is still something that Nigeria struggles with, in my opinion. So, now talking about FDI, if I were a policymaker today talking to you; advise me, what kind of FDI should I prioritise in trying to lure investors into my country, for them to create jobs and [create] a nest of high productivity manufacturing industry? So is it market seeking? Is it natural resources seeking? Is it efficiency seeking? Which one is the best in terms of the necessary incentives for sustainability?Akhtar;Okay, so one of the articles, not as part of the regular column, I think, but I wrote for the same newspaper a few years ago, was titled “investment for what?” So that's a question the governments have to ask. Because everyone talks about attracting FDI. It's a mantra all over the developing world. But governments need to ask why exactly do we want FDI? How is it aligned with our development aspirations and development programs? I wanted to just emphasise that because often governments just go blindly trying to attract foreign investors. And whoever comes in, we welcome that. That's not necessarily a good strategy always. For example, in Bangladesh, if we now have a lot of foreign investors coming in, to make jeans and T-shirts, using the same technology as before, we don't really need that, we can't afford to give our scarce land and utility and other things to do things which our domestic entrepreneurs have become reasonably good at doing. So it has to be something new that comes in. Now, at the same time, we also have to recognize that the foreign investors also have their own interest and their own calculations. So we have to come to a balance between the two as well. Now, it's difficult to say a priori that we prefer market-seeking or efficiency-seeking. On a natural resource, it's a slightly different issue if you have natural resources, and if you don't have the capacity to develop them yourself, you may need foreign investors. And obviously, we all know why foreign investors are often very attracted to that. But let me confine my answer to the choice between market-seeking and efficiency-seeking. Now, let's take the case of Bangladesh. We are now talking about diversifying our exports. And we are talking about going into more sophisticated products like electronics. If that is our objective, we may want to target some people who come and make electronics. Now they may come for two reasons. Bangladesh has a huge market, our per capita income may not be that high, but our total economy size is actually pretty large. We are amongst the top 40 economies in the world. And if you look at the size in the purchasing power parity terms, we're actually in the top 30. That's a very large economy. So, naturally foreign investors would come in looking at the market as well. But if our objective in this sector is to make a breakthrough in the global value chains, and not just serve the domestic market, then we'd like to have foreign investors come in with an efficiency-seeking objective that, in Bangladesh, we can make these things more efficiently, at lower cost, than in other places. So that Bangladesh then can ride on the backs of the foreign investors, who know the markets, who have the brand recognition and show the world that things can be made efficiently in Bangladesh. And, then once we have shown that with the help of foreign investors, maybe Bangladeshi entrepreneurs can also start doing it. So here you see I give you an example, where you have a strategic objective, and you attract foreign investors of a particular type. Now, there are also many needs in the domestic market. Bangladesh needs to develop a very good logistics system. And we may need foreign investors to come in and invest there, but will be more market-seeking. I mentioned the case of mobile telephones, that was not an export-oriented industry, although it may have facilitated exports, that was domestic market-oriented. And we encouraged foreign investors to come in, who were obviously coming in as market-seeking investors. So the answer would vary depending on the sector or the activity. But that brings me back to my first point, the government should have a clearer idea of what is the role of foreign investment in implementing the various dimensions of your development strategy. And accordingly, you're going to target efficiency-seeking investors in some cases, and market-oriented investors in other cases.Tobi;So, now, from a policy perspective, because really, that's what's sort of dominating this conversation. One thing that keeps coming up is the role of government, the strategy it pursues, you know, this, that. But inevitably, that leads to the question of what… in terms of economic development, what role does the government play by itself? Now, China, and, of course, other East Asian economies are very, very popular in the development discourse and these are largely autocratic governance. Right. And, to an extent the gospel of state-led development has travelled far and wide, sometimes in contrast to what is generally called the neoliberal or the Washington Consensus-type policies. But at the same time, at the nexus of all this is the role of markets, how the economy is regulated, liberalisation. How does a government approach regulation and policymaking generally, with the right incentives for the government to take the lead in areas where, maybe because of access to market or not seeing the prospect of returns, private actors are reluctant? And also at the other end, this sort of control, excessive control, that you see in so many developing countries, like Nigeria, and so many others in Africa, where government sees itself as the primary player in the economy, right? What is the balance? What is the heuristic generally, in trying to, [or] should I say, make policy and regulations to encourage economic development, and, of course, your Bangladeshi experience of that?Akhtar;Okay. So, when you say state-led, there are many ways you can define that. One is the direct participation of the state in productive activities. And in China, that is still pronounced, there are different models of state-owned enterprises, including public private partnerships, but the state plays a dominant, or at least an important direct role in the production of activities. That's one thing. The other is playing a direct role, not in production, but in things that facilitate production. So I had mentioned the case of research and development in the agricultural sector of Bangladesh, which was there right from the beginning. It was largely a private sector activity, but that was meant to facilitate productive activities by the private sector, in this case, thousands and thousands of farmers. So, the whole spectrum of things that the government does and, of course, there is the whole regulatory function of the government. And I think in choosing the balance, and the balance itself may shift over time as the economy develops. And I give an example of that, again, from the agricultural sector of Bangladesh, how the government moved away from the direct import and distribution of agricultural inputs, giving more and more space to the private sector over time. So initially, in the 70s, maybe that was the right thing to do. And then later on, the right thing to do was to withdraw and create space for the private sector. So the balance, (a) has to be thought of carefully, in terms of the capacity of the government, that's very important. And, again, if I [could] mention Stefan Dercon, he talks about the self awareness of [the] government. Are governments aware of what they can do and what they cannot do? And that answer would vary by country. Often governments make the mistake of thinking that they can do a lot of things, and therefore they; (a) go into productive activities themselves directly, and (b) also controlling too much the activities of the private sector. Controlling is not that easy. It requires a lot of skills, and many governments actually don't have the skills of doing that. The thing that may have happened in Bangladesh is the government has been more or less self aware, not always, but more or less self aware of what they can do and what they cannot do. And that has led to a certain division of labour between the government and the private sector, and the NGOs. With that division of labour also changing over time. That's very important. So the government needs to be aware of where its capacities are, and they need to also have some faith that the private sector, if given the opportunity, can come and do certain things. Because governments often say, okay, but if we don't intervene, the private sector is not going to come in. Or we have a big factory, if we close it down, then a lot of people will lose their jobs, and the private sector will not be forthcoming to create jobs for them. If you want, I can give you a good example of that kind of thinking. In Bangladesh, we had the world's largest jute mill called the Adamjee Jute Mill, and it was bleeding like hell, and every year the government had to subsidise. So there was lots of debate on whether the factory should be (a) privatised, and there was no taker, then the question is whether it should be closed down. Then, about 20 years ago, exactly 20 years ago, a very bold decision was taken to actually close down the factory. It was a controversial decision. About 26,000 workers lost their jobs. Some of them were ghost workers, maybe 20,000. Now the story of what happened after that is very interesting. That land was converted into an export processing zone. And now the latest figures are that about 65 to 70,000 jobs have been created there. So you had lost about 20 [thousand jobs] and you have created so many. These are all private sector firms, they're all export oriented firms, the government doesn't need to subsidise them. So you can see once given the opportunity what the private sector can come and do. So you don't have to hold on to a loss making enterprise just because you're worried about job losses.Tobi;Let me sort of ask you a big picture question on this particular point, which is the role of democracy in development, generally. Democracies have been taking a beating recently, so maybe you can speak up for it, somewhat. Do you think democracy has some kind of unique weakness in terms of trying to engineer economic development, particularly because of elections? I mean, to cite the example of the jute mill you mentioned, some regime that is sensitive, maybe in an election year, or maybe that wants to appeal to a particular constituency, or, maybe workers Union or something might actually kick the can down the road. An example is (fuel) petrol subsidy in Nigeria, which the bill keeps increasing, but I mean, each government promises to remove it or reduce it, and then kicks it to the next government because nobody wants to annoy the workers union, nobody wants to lose votes, the party wants to remain in power, you know, and these incentives that are common in democracies. So, do you think this makes democracies weak in a way, in trying to develop the national economy? Because a lot of people will say that's why China has developed much faster than India, for example. What's your take?Akhtar;Okay, let me start by giving you an anecdote. So this is from about I think it was 2008 or so, 2007 maybe. Bangladesh then had a quasi military government, it was called a caretaker government, whose major responsibility was to conduct free and fair elections. So they were in power for about two years. And I was actually working in Bangladesh at that time. And we had, I think we had a natural disaster, or maybe we had floods. So conditions were pretty bad. And one of the… well, they were called advisors, but they were de facto ministers, who was having to deal with this problem of getting food to poor people, dealing with rising prices [and] all that; he said to me, “I can feel a certain handicap being part of this kind of government.” What is the handicap? Right now what I need a lot is information from the grassroots, I need to know what is happening in different parts of the country, and I need that information very fast. I need it right now, about what's happening earlier today, or what has happened yesterday. Fortunately, I have some connections in the NGO world, this gentleman was an academic. I'm getting some information. But if this was a political campaign, I would rely on my political network, my workers, my small town leaders, and within a few hours, I'll be getting information from all over the country on what the conditions are. Now, why do I mention this anecdote? Because in a democratic system, your feedback mechanisms may work very well. Yes, there can also be a lot of noise. But otherwise, the feedback which is very, very important for government, they need to know what's going on throughout the country with different groups of people, with different localities etc. That is something that autocratic governments lack. Yes, information flows, flows from lower level bureaucrats, but I'm sure they are modified on their way. Because, the boss often doesn't want to hear certain things. It may happen in political democratic setups, but generally, the flow of information is much better for politicians. Now, how they act upon that information is another issue, but that's very important. Secondly, politicians operating within a democratic setup, (a) they develop a lot of empathy, because of their interactions with people, [b] they also get a good idea of what the trade-offs can be. And these are very, very important in decision making. So those are the good sides of democracy. Now, yes, in democracy, you also need to cater to your political constituencies, and that may lead to certain decisions, which technocrats may feel are sub optimal. But that is the price you pay for democracy. Compared to the gains for having a democratic system, that is sometimes a small price to pay, although sometimes that can get out of hand. But if it gets out of hand, it's usually where you may in name have a democracy system, but in practice, you don't. So the kinds of disciplines that democracy imposes on the government are lacking there. So that is my answer. Now, as you can see, implicit in my answer was some definition of democracy. It's not just about electoral politics. It's not just about having regular elections and free and fair elections. It is the monitoring mechanism. Are governments picking the signals, are they getting the information? How wide is the information that they're getting? That's a very important characteristic of development.Tobi;So another one of my sort of big picture questions to you, and in this case, using the Bangladeshi experience and example, is, in the last couple of years, there has been this big debate in development over, oh, do you prioritise the big things or the small things you can measure? You were with the World Bank, I'm sure you have some familiarity with the so-called empirical revolution and how it has sort of taken over the field of development economics where, yeah, there is a lot more preference in terms of international aid funding for interventions, things that you can measure. So, the RCTs, or, whether it is conditional cash transfers, and all these things – and the atmosphere with which this debate happens sometimes, personally, I find it frustrating because it makes it seem like a zero-sum kind of thing. Like, you can either have one or the other. You either pursue growth, or you forego that and choose to do all these small scale, local and domestic interventions. But Bangladesh, like you mentioned, the issue of BRAC and also people like Naomi and co. have written about – Naomi Hussein [that] Bangladesh managed both. There was a sort of productive combination of both frameworks, that is, the role of non governmental organisations who were able to provide some support for the rural communities. And of course, there was the big macro policies that were explicitly designed to pursue economic growth, get businesses going, create jobs, you know, and all the other things that happen in the private sector. So, my question would be, how did that sort of synergy happen in Bangladesh? How was that cooperation, so to speak… I mean, you talked about the role of BRAC in R&D and agriculture, you know, how did that happen? How did, perhaps, it wasn't intended, but in practice, how does it work?Akhtar;Okay. Let me start by recounting something I heard Abhijit Banerjee, the Nobel laureate, who got a Nobel prize for his work on RCTs, said something about the rationale for going into RCTs. And he's saying that the kinds of interventions that we talk about in the context of RCTs, they're not the only interventions that bring about development. In fact, the most profound development impact may come from other kinds of interventions and policies, and other factors. But his point was that, let's say, as a development practitioner, we are not able to influence these big things. So I'm going to focus on the things that we can influence. So I'm doing a project here, a project there, and we can change the parameters of the project in certain ways that we achieve the most significant impact. And how do we change the parameters or what parameters we choose or how do we design the project? That's where randomised control trials can give us very useful insights. And we can get more bang for the buck from the development expenditures in those kinds of projects. Now, he never said that that's all about development. There are many other things that need to be done. And governments, in their collective wisdom, may have a better idea of what those things can be. And that's different from a particular project team trying to do a project. They won't have all that knowledge, which can lead them to think about much bigger things, but governments can; not perfectly, but governments can. Or large organisations like BRAC can within certain spheres of operation. So, yes, I agree with you that this is a false dichotomy, that you either completely forget about RCTs or you get completely immersed into RCTs. So, one has to find the right places where the randomised control trials, which are after all an instrument, one of the tools in your toolbox… which is the best time and place to deploy it. I would say in Bangladesh, yes, the scope for applying them is more than the actual application so far, which means that we have a scope to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of public spending by using these techniques judiciously in certain areas. Now, coming back to, I think you mentioned the question of BRAC in the context of R&D, but also BRAC has played an important role in market development through their social enterprise world. So, as I said before that the part of BRAC's work which is not discussed much is the work on the economic sphere. So what happened there? I'll just give one or two examples. I think giving concrete examples is the best way to illustrate this. So, they got into, let's say, they got into dairy [farming]. Actually, the way BRAC started most of these activities was from a livelihood concern. They wanted to create livelihood opportunities for the poor people in the rural areas of Bangladesh. So they said, okay, we have dairy farmers whose incomes are limited, we want to do something to help enhance their inputs [output]. So they came up with certain small interventions, which helped improve the productivity of their dairy farming, and they ended up with more production, then they had a problem. Now, milk is not something that you can preserve for a long time, you need to have some cold storage facilities, some refrigeration facilities, and that was lacking. So a lot of these increased output was actually being wasted. That led BRAC to start thinking about what else it needs to do. So then it went into refrigeration plants. So, they set up refrigeration plants, where the dairy farmers would come from adjoining villages and store their milk. And that led to other things also down the road. So there are many examples of BRAC where they went into a certain activity, they went into poultry, for example, and then discovered that there isn't a good supply of day old chicks, which is an important ingredient in poultry. So they went into that. And the interesting thing is, in many cases, BRAC was the first one to go into that, later the private sector came in and came in in a big way. And when they did, BRAC withdrew. Because BRAC thought, okay, we have played the role of a pioneer, we have catalysed the entry of private enterprises, we can now withdraw and attend to certain other things. So what's going on here? What's going on here is, you have value chains, which are underdeveloped - there are gaps in the value chain. And one aspect of development is to make the value chains more complete. And here you have an actor, BRAC, which has entered the market… [enters] one part of the market, trying to do something, discovering that there is not much it can do unless it intervenes in other parts of the value chain. Well, it can do something but the impact will not be that great, so then it intervenes. But at one point, it realises that other players who are better at scaling this up have entered the field so let me withdraw. So judicious entry, and judicious withdrawal. And that is also true of the government. It's also true of BRAC. I think that's the kind of dynamics of development which is very important. And somewhere there, yes, you may have some trials, which may be randomised control trials, it may be just informally observing from your own experience of what is working, what is not working, but this idea of learning by doing, learning by doing, the government has done it in Bangladesh, BRAC and other BRAC-type institutions have done it. The private sector is also doing it.Tobi;The last of my big-picture questions to you is– Another dichotomy that I have observed is the business cycle concerns of an economy and policy and these sorts of other long-run development growth policies. For example, in Nigeria, it's a common refrain that we had growth in some years, but we never really had development. Income didn't grow as fast as GDP, and growth has been cyclical, it's not sustained. And some of the issues that really plague governments and policymakers is that even in trying to make policies that are tolerant and favourable to long-run growth, there are short term issues that you have to deal with [like] foreign exchange policy, inflation, and sometimes I've heard people say that, Oh, as a developing country, you have a lot more tolerance for inflation than developed economies. I think you'll have to tell me whether that's true or not. Because inflation does not happen in a vacuum, it affects the purchasing power of people, poor people even more so. Right. So how do policymakers in growing countries manage these tensions in terms of – and, I'm working my way through your book with Gustav Ranis on this – how policymakers mine through these everyday concerns of the economy, versus the long-term prospects and the projects you are trying to put forth as a government?Akhtar;Okay. Well, since you alluded to that book, I will first briefly mention the main theme of the book, and then come to this specific [question]. The main theme of the book, which we illustrated through a comparative study of East Asian countries and Latin American countries, [was that] we talked about the East Asian pattern of government behaviour and the Latin American pattern of government behaviour. And the period covered was from the mid 60s to the mid 80s so things may have changed after that. And in any case, it's difficult to talk about (a) East Asian pattern, and (b) Latin American pattern. But what we were talking about is that during the course of a business cycle, or terms of trade cycle, as your terms of trade improve, your foreign exchange reserves go on increasing, obviously, growth accelerates. The question is what does a government do when things are good? Do they let growth accelerate according to some normal – “normal trajectory”, or they get excited, and they try to push growth beyond the “normal trajectory”-- making it higher than what the good times normally would make it? So, in the “Latin American” scenario, when things were good, growth was happening, government wanted to have more of it. So they went for expansionary fiscal policies, expansionary monetary policies to push growth beyond what the natural trajectory is. And then inevitably, because we are talking of cycles, inevitably a time came, where things started going down. And conditions were not as conducive as before. At that time, what the East Asian countries did– but first– they never tried to artificially push growth above the natural level. When the downturn came, they allowed the growth to fall. So they went for contractionary policies, they allowed the growth to fall. But in the Latin American scenario, having pushed growth beyond the natural path, it's almost like being intoxicated, you could not get rid of that habit. So, you try to artificially maintain growth even though the signs were all pointing downwards. And then the time came when things just crashed. And you fell into a deep crisis. Whereas the East Asians, they had their ups and downs, but they didn't have a serious crisis at that time. They had later, but not at that time. So that was the main thing about how you conduct your policies during the upturn, and then also during the downturn. Now, coming back to the specific situation like the one we observe now, when there are many economic challenges facing countries, and what can governments do to ensure that the course on which they had been before the crisis started, or the challenges started, and hopefully it was a course of development, how can they stay on that course as best as they can? First is, governments should look for existing inefficiencies. For example, in your public expenditures, there may be a lot of inefficiencies, and if you can identify those and get rid of those [inefficiencies], then you can bring things under control in the context of the challenges without sacrificing growth. Most developing countries, including Bangladesh, do have inefficiencies in their public expenditures. So the question is, do you target those inefficiencies and curtail them? Or, do you target those parts of expenditures which are actually very useful? So that's number one. And that's why we often have this phrase, “don't let a crisis go to waste.” Because a crisis can often focus attention better than good times can. And a crisis can also create the political and social consensus to take some tough decisions. So that's one thing. Second is the importance of social protection. And we must remember that for people at the margin, and in our kind of countries, Nigeria, Bangladesh, a lot of people are still at the margin. Even a small shock which takes them below the threshold is not a temporary damage that after some time they can come back [from], often it's a permanent damage. They have to sell off their productive assets, which means even when things start improving, their conditions won't improve. So that's why it's very, very important to have good social protection systems in place.Third, coming back to a point I made earlier, it's very important to have good monitoring systems. ‘Cause we really want to know what's going on, how the lives of different people across the country is being affected by the tough conditions in which you are, without that your policies will be suboptimal. So that monitoring is very, very important. And it's very important to engage different stakeholders in society. And for two reasons. One is part of the monitoring, because economists, business people, journalists, and others, would know a lot beyond what the government knows and it's important to tap into that knowledge, but also to build consensus about some of the tough decisions that need to be taken. So, at the end of the day, it is a lot about governance. It's a governance challenge that countries face when they're facing an economic challenge.Tobi;My final question to you, I have a couple of other questions, but… from a policy-making perspective, how do you then make knowledge count? Because from everything you have talked about, the role of knowledge… which takes me back to where we started, you know, talking about agriculture. The role of knowledge is actually very important. But you have situations where you can have knowledgeable people in government, world class economists, and the government itself might be making policies that are clearly wrong, which means there's a disconnect somewhere. And I mean, in Bangladesh, it's often talked about how there is a policy knowledge ecosystem that informs the public and shapes their accountability and expectations, and also informs policymakers at the other end of that spectrum. How does a country build and nurture that? Especially, how does knowledge of, whether it is knowledge of economics, whether it is knowledge of society and other programs, how it transmits to the key decision makers, and influence some of the actions or policies, or regulations, that are taken? How does that happen?Akhtar;Okay, so you mentioned the sort of the ecosystem linking policy and knowledge in Bangladesh. We have an ecosystem, I wouldn't say it always functions very well. And we do have many instances where people in government feel that the

This week on Sinica, Jude Blanchette (Freeman Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies) and Ryan Hass (Armacost Chair at the John L. Thornton Center at the Brookings Institute) join Kaiser to discuss their new essay in Foreign Affairs, "The Taiwan Long Game: Why the Best Solution Is No Solution.”3:05 – Reconceptualizing Taiwan as “a strategic problem with a defense component” 6:00 – Why expanding the scope of the Taiwan issue beyond the military dimension should not be conflated with capitulation13:34 – Has current U.S. policy abandoned preserving status quo cross-strait relations?17:27 – Why has China refrained from the use of force thus far?27:05 – China, U.S., and Taiwan's heightened sense of urgency31:22 – How Ukraine alters China's decision calculus on Taiwan36:44 – What pertinent challenges should the US be planning for rather than exclusively focusing on the threat of invasion?43:58 – The issue with democracy vs authoritarianism framing46:01 – The importance of considering Taiwanese agency when crafting US policy48:40 – How the U.S. should define its one-China policy53:19 – Opportunities for a detente between Washington and BeijingA transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.Recommendations:Ryan: "How We Would Know When China Is Preparing to Invade Taiwan," by John Culver; the film White Christmas Jude: The podcast In the Dark from American Public MediaKaiser: "A Professor Who Challenges the Washington Consensus on China," Ian Johnson's piece in The New Yorker about Jessica Chen WeissSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

EPISODE: Decolonization, Multipolarity & the Demise of the Monroe Doctrine GUEST: Frederick Mills, professor of philosophy at Bowie State University and Deputy Director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. He researches and writes on ethics, philosophy, U.S. --Latin America relations and has recently published a book, Enrique Dussel's Ethics of Liberation: An Introduction.BACKGROUND:December 3, 2023 will mark the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine. It will also mark its obsolescence in the face of popular resistance and the Pink Tide of progressive governments in Latin America that have been elected over the past two and a half decades. The prevailing ideology of these left and left of center movements rejects the “Washington Consensus” and opts for a new consensus based on the decolonization of the political, economic, social and cultural spheres. This consensus is accompanied by encounters and conferences that advance liberatory traditions developed since the 1960's as well as those deeply rooted in indigenous cultures. It is Washington's failure to respect and adjust to this political and ideological process of transformation that precludes, at this time, a constructive and cooperative U.S. foreign policy towards the region.FOLLOW OUR GUEST:Frederick B. Mills: Council on Hemispheric Affairs:ADDITIONAL LINKS:Decolonization, Multipolarity and the Demise of the Monroe DoctrineWTF is Going on in Latin America & the Caribbean is a Popular Resistance broadcast in partnership with CODEPINK, Common Frontiers, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Friends of Latin America, InterReligious Task Force on Central America, Massachusetts Peace Action and Task Force on the Americas.

Question 1: What is the relationship between time management and academic success? Question 2: What has been the nature of neoliberal globalization in a developed society such as the US or UK versus the developing such as Jamaica, Ghana etc. & what accounts for the contrast of experiences of poverty/inequality? Segment 1: What is the relationship between time management and Academic Success? It is said that life is short and time's limited. So, time is the most valuable and priceless thing in our lives, as it is the space within which we operate and conduct the entirety of our lives. This involves a plethora and myriad of stimuli coming at us in order to realize the zenith of our life. As such, time management becomes paramount as it is an excellent tool and skill for directing and guiding one's life's activities; so as, to minimize time wasting and the distractions that pose threats to the realization of one's academic goals; because life is short and time is limited. Yet, most of us take time management for granted. In fact, research shows that students who utilized effective time management skills, usually take it with them throughout their academic and professional life and realize greater success and less burn out and distractions (Source). Hence, Time Management is a vital skill and activity within learning strategy that may help to realize successful completion of one's academic goals. Segments 2 and 3: Sharing the Journey Part 2: The Masters project paper examined whether or not Jamaica's inequality trends from 1985 – 2007 was a consequence of the structural adjustment policies stipulated by the neo-liberal technocrats of the ‘Washington Consensus' on Jamaica. We began this examination by questioning the premise on which this variable lies: Neo-Liberalism creates inequality and poverty. Having established that “neoliberalism” creates inequality and poverty, we then asked ourselves, why and how the Jamaican government adopted and implemented structural adjustment policies by tracing the evolution of structural adjustment policies. Thirdly, we examined the results/implications of structural adjustment on Jamaica by presenting and analyzing Jamaica's income inequality and poverty trends. Finally, we assess whether or not these trends correlate with our assertions. Unlike the Graduate programs at Penn that I completed previously, the PHD in Communication at the Annenberg will explore post-industrial experience of neoliberal globalization on the working class and their response. Essentially, we want to know what has been the nature of neoliberal globalization in a developed society such as the United States. How different or similar are the experiences of poverty and inequality in Jamaica and the Caribbean vis-a-viz the United States under neoliberal globalization? And what accounts for these differences? What has been the response or the mitigating factor against neoliberal globalization, and if so, how effective is it? The answer may lie in my anecdotal analysis that requires further investigation: The decentralization of social media is the greatest victory for peoples in society, especially those that are marginalized and most vulnerable. The people of the global south, black and brown peoples have all suffered under Neoliberal Globalization and strategies of power that poses problems for human progress and people everywhere. Digital technology and the decentralization creates opportunities and greater competition and limits access so that there is this leveling of the playing field. Yet there is this drive to regulate information as the status quo uses countervailing tactics to re-monopolize information so that communication is no longer to make monopoly what was the monopoly. This may lead us to ask, what is the role of the neoliberal state? See Part 3. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/theneoliberal/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/theneoliberal/support

On this week's Education Gadfly Show podcast, Checker Finn joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss his article (co-authored with Rick Hess) in National Affairs about the bipartisan history—and uncertain future—of school reform. Then on the Research Minute, Amber Northern reviews a study on how politicized issues like Covid-19 safety measures and Critical Race Theory are affecting principals and teachers. Recommended content: ·      Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Frederick M. Hess's article: “The End of School Reform?” National Affairs (Summer 2022).·      Michael J. Petrilli's article on education reform: “Education reform is alive and well, even if the Washington Consensus is dead for now,” August 11, 2022.·      Daniel Buck's article on the new education consensus: “The new education consensus is conservative, and that's a good thing,” August 11, 2022.·      The study that Amber reviewed on the Research Minute: Ashley Woo et al., “Walking a Fine Line—Educators' Views on Politicized Topics in Schooling,” RAND Corporation (2022).  Feedback Welcome!Have ideas on our podcast? Send them to our podcast producers Nathaniel Grossman and Lilly Sibel at ngrossman@fordhaminstitute.org and lsibel@fordhaminstitute.org 

As Ukrainians flee the war in their home country, some have found their way to the U.S. southern border where they are immediately escorted into the country. Because they're seeking refuge from a dangerous conflict and seeking asylum in the land of the free. And they're getting in. Quickly. Through Mexico. Meanwhile... you can probably guess where this is headed. Anyhoo, today's episode looks at immigration policy in the United States and fingers (ew) the real bad guy in our story that crafted today's anti-immigrant narrative and passed three meaningful pieces of legislation that made it a crime to be a non-native born American. Chapters Intro: 00:00:13 Chapter One: 00:05:52 Chapter Two: 00:11:11 Chapter Three: 00:16:43 Chapter Four: 00:23:25 Chapter Five: 00:29:20 Post Show Musings: 00:34:18 Outro: 00:46:28 Resources BBC News: How many Ukrainians have fled their homes and where have they gone? The Intercept: As Immigration Plummeted, Conservatives Falsely Accused Biden of Fueling a Crisis OECD Statistics: Net Migration National Immigration Law Center: Overview of Immigrant Eligibility for Federal Programs Marketplace: Undocumented immigrants quietly pay billions into Social Security and receive no benefits Congress.gov: H.R.3355 - Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 Legal Information Institute: Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act The Atlantic: Bill Clinton Owes My Father an Apology Pew Research Center: Most Cuban American voters identify as Republican in 2020 Pew Research Center: The Hispanic Vote in Presidential Elections, 1980-2012 International Policy Digest: U.S. Agriculture is in Crisis The New York Times: Fleeing War in Ukraine, They're Met With Employers Offering Paychecks Schoolhouse Rock: The Great American Melting Pot Book Love Howard Zinn: A People's History of the United States UNFTR Episode Resources The American Propaganda Machine. F*ck Milton Friedman. The Washington Consensus. Libertarians Are Exhausting Part 1. Libertarians Are Exhausting Part 2. Fox in the Outhouse: Invasion, Immigration & Inflation. -- If you like #UNFTR, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts: unftr.com/rate and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at @UNFTRpod. Visit us online at unftr.com. Buy yourself some Unf*cking Coffee at shop.unftr.com. Subscribe to Unf*cking The Republic on Substack at unftr.substack.com to get the essays these episode are framed around sent to your inbox every week. Check out the UNFTR Pod Love playlist on Spotify: spoti.fi/3yzIlUP. Visit our bookshop.org page at bookshop.org/shop/UNFTRpod to find the full UNFTR book list, and find book recommendations from our Unf*ckers at bookshop.org/lists/unf-cker-book-recommendations. Access the UNFTR Musicless feed by following the instructions at unftr.com/accessibility. Unf*cking the Republic is produced by 99 and engineered by Manny Faces Media (mannyfacesmedia.com). Original music is by Tom McGovern (tommcgovern.com). The show is written and hosted by Maximo and distributed by immigrants. Podcast art description: Image of the US Congress ripped in the middle revealing white text on a blue background that says, "Unf*cking the Republic." See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Olúfẹmi Táíwò guest hosts an interview with Daniela Gabor and Ndongo Samba Sylla on how financial power has shaped the global economic order from colonialism through Bretton Woods, the Washington Consensus, and today's Wall Street Consensus. Read Daniela's work: people.uwe.ac.uk/Person/DanielaGaborRead Ndongo's work: rosalux.de/en/profile/es_detail/N8SVHTS8SA/ndongo-samba-sylla?cHash=ccf0c8d371bde0fecbac8337bbc6f832Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDigBuy The Border Crossed Us by Justin Akers Chacón: haymarketbooks.org/books/1655-the-border-crossed-us See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Olúfẹmi Táíwò guest hosts an interview with Daniela Gabor and Ndongo Samba Sylla on how financial power has shaped the global economic order from colonialism through Bretton Woods, the Washington Consensus, and today's Wall Street Consensus. Read Daniela's work: people.uwe.ac.uk/Person/DanielaGabor Read Ndongo's work: rosalux.de/en/profile/es_detail/N8SVHTS8SA/ndongo-samba-sylla?cHash=ccf0c8d371bde0fecbac8337bbc6f832 Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig Buy The Border Crossed Us by Justin Akers Chacón: haymarketbooks.org/books/1655-the-border-crossed-us

 SOCIAL CHANGE AND THE GLOBAL MIDDLE EAST  Interviewer: MATTHEW BERKMAN. Many accounts of the Arab Spring of 2010-11 view it primarily through a political lens: whatever the underlying grievances, its goals centered around removing autocrats from power and replacing them with more responsive governments. Historian JOEL BEININ argues that in fact the Arab Spring protests, particularly in Egypt and Tunisia, were rooted in a worker's movement that had, over decades, launched numerous protests against harsh economic conditions imposed by the so-called Washington Consensus. In his discussion with political scientist Matthew Berkman, Beinin outlines the evolution of economic policy in the Middle East, points to the sources of funding for the post-Arab Spring counter-revolution, and describes the network of business interests – far beyond a narrowly conceived “Israel lobby” – that have cemented Israel's place in American foreign policy.

The Washington Consensus, first devised in 1989, is an economic paradigm that was reflected in the prevailing economic thinking as well as policy recommendations. However, as the world faces more fragilities and shocks than it used to, one might start wondering whether we should go further to address the acute and chronic issues that threaten the resilience of our societies. Economic orthodoxy might be shifting. In this episode, Thomas Wieser joins Maria Demertzis and André Sapir to talk about his recent report for the G7 'Global Economic Resilience: Building Forward Better' in which the authors present a new economic agenda, the Cornwall Consensus, to address the risk to economic resilience: environmental and health, and geo-political and socio-economic.

For the first time in centuries, the centers of global power are not concentrated on the European continent as 2 periphery states, China and the United States, compete to mold the future of the international system. Whether it is the continuation of the Washington Consensus or the dawn of the Tianxia "All Under Heaven" System, the current multipolar world is more multi-faceted than ever before. To better understand the foundation of modern Chinese strategic political and military thinking, it is essential to understand the 36 Stratagems in relation to the agenda of the Chinese Communist Party around the world. Through an evaluation of the Stratagems, NOT STRATEGIES, the mystique that wraps around the Chinese halls of power can be gradually cleared.

Economist John Williamson presented a paper titled The Washington Consensus in 1989. More of a reflection than a policy statement, the Washington Consensus became a policy framework in the neoliberal school of expansion and trade, particularly as it relates to Latin America and the Caribbean. Today we examine the legacy of Williamson's seminal paper, how it has echoed throughout American foreign policy over time and what it portends for an uncertain economic future in the era of climate change. Oh, and it gives us another opportunity to say Fuck Milton Friedman. Resources Nancy Birdsall, Augusto de la Torre and Felipe Valencia Caicedo: The Washington Consensus- Assessing a Damaged Brand Wall Street Journal: Era of Brady Bonds Ends For Developing Nations WWF: Environmental Problems In Brazil Leonardo Gasparini, María Emma Santos and Leopoldo Tornarolli: Poverty in Latin America John Williamson: The Washington Consensus as Policy Prescription for Development John Williamson: The World According to John Williamson: Part II Book Love Imperialism, Neoliberalism, and Social Struggles in Latin America Neoliberal Meltdown and Social Protest by Carlos M. Vilas The Harvest of Neoliberalism by Jose Bell Lara and Delia Luisa Lopez Pod Love Best of the Left: #1426 The Liberation and Assimilation of Pride Month (6/26/21) Gender Reveal: Starter Packs Métis in Space Unf*cker Love China Heritage: On This Day: 11 September 2021, a Commemoration in Three Chapters -- If you like #UNFTR, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts: unftr.com/rate and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at @UNFTRpod. Visit us online at unftr.com. Buy yourself some Unf*cking Coffee at shop.unftr.com. Subscribe to Unf*cking The Republic on Substack at unftr.substack.com to get the essays these episode are framed around sent to your inbox every week. Check out the UNFTR Pod Love playlist on Spotify: spoti.fi/3yzIlUP. Visit our bookshop.org page at bookshop.org/shop/UNFTRpod to find the full UNFTR book list. Access the UNFTR Musicless feed by following the instructions at unftr.com/accessibility. Unf*cking the Republic is produced and engineered by Manny Faces Media (mannyfacesmedia.com). Original music is by Tom McGovern (tommcgovern.com). The show is written and hosted by the Phantom of the Opera and distributed by three blind mice. Podcast art description: Image of the US Congress ripped in the middle revealing white text on a blue background that says, "Unf*cking the Republic." See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sean, Jamie and Andy are joined by Anton Jaeger (@antonjagermm), Marxist researcher of populism, to discuss the history, present and future of populism whether in the left or right mold. Several years ago it seemed as though left populism - exemplified by practitioners such as Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders - had a decent shot at upending the Washington Consensus on austerity, markets and foreign policy. With the failure and retreat of these candidates and others, what is left of this project? Why does right populism seem everywhere ascendant? What do these movements say about the economy and the political order? How can we understand the populist mode of politics in relation to the fight to abolish capital? For bonus content, access to our Discord and first dibs at calling in for out streams (twitch.tv/theantifada) become a patron today at Patreon.com/theantifada Works by Anton: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/populism-douglas-hofstadter-donald-trump-democracy https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii128/articles/anton-jager-rebel-regions https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2021/02/welfare-without-welfare-state-death-postwar-welfarist-consensus https://jacobinmag.com/2019/11/we-bet-the-house-on-left-populism-and-lost https://catalyst-journal.com/2020/03/making-sense-of-populism https://nonsite.org/back-to-work-review-of-david-graebers-bullshit-jobs/ Intro: Cincinnati's University Singers -The Hand the Holds the Bread https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqiAT6o7Kks Outro: Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson - Populism Yea Yea

Rick Rowden is Senior Economist at Global Financial Integrity and Lecturer in the School of International Service at American University. He completed his PhD on India-Africa economic relations in the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi. His academic areas of specialization are International Relations (IR), International Political Economy (IPE) and development economics, and he has expertise in the long-term national economic development strategies of developing countries and the emerging field of South-South economic relations. Currently he is an Adjunct Professorial Lecturer in the School of International Service (SIS) at American University and a senior economist at the Washington DC-based research NGO, Global Financial Integrity (GFI). Previously, he has worked for international development NGOs, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva, and has lectured in Global Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) and in Political Science at Golden Gate University in San Francisco. He has served as a consultant to many international development NGOs and UN agencies, including the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the World Health Organization (WHO). He is the author of “India-Africa Economic Relations in the 21st Century: Emerging Connections in South-South Economics” (Routledge, forthcoming in 2021). Subscribe to our newsletter today A Correction Podcast Episodes RSS

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The full conversation with Ricardo Hausmann - now with Transcript. This is a subscriber-only post.TranscriptOpening musicYou are listening to ideas Untrapped with Tobi Lawson. Tobi Lawson (intro) Welcome to another episode of ideas Untrapped and my guest today is Ricardo Hausmann, who is a professor of economic development at Harvard University, he is a former director of centre for International Development, and is currently the Director of the center's growth lab. Ricardo pioneered an approach of looking at economic development called economic complexity. My brief synopsis of the central idea is that an economy only grows and develop by learning to do many things by expanding its productive capabilities. I start by asking Ricardo, what we can learn, particularly from the East Asian experience, and what has happened in economic development over the last few decades. Thank you for always listening to the show and I hope you enjoy this one. Tobi Lawson You've been one of the most important thinkers in economic development throughout my adult life. So, it's a pleasure to speak to you. Ricardo Hausmann Pleasure to be with you. Tobi LawsonFrom Around 1990, when the results of the economic trajectory of East Asia became apparent, so many policy propositions have been developed by scholars. But, in your opinion, what do you think has been the most important lesson from that East Asian growth episode? Ricardo Hausmann I think the general experience of development is really, that development is about the growth of productive capabilities In a society, it's what our society is capable of doing and, what a society is capable of doing depends a little bit on, what are the tools and machines it has available to do things nd what are the recipes and formulas and routines and protocols it's aware of, but it's mostly about what is the know-how that it's people have and this idea of know-how is not just, you know, low and high. It's mostly How different is what each member of society knows. Because if everybody knows a lot of the same thing, the whole doesn't know much more than each individual. But if each individual knows different than the whole can know a lot, even if each individual doesn't know that much. So this division of know how in society allows for individuals to specialise and society to diversify, that a society is able to do more, because it's individuals are all different. I am originally from Venezuela, and we're Nigeria. And we all think that we are rich because we have¹ oil. And then something bad happened to explain why, given that we're rich, we're not so rich, but we're rich, because we have our, our society is rich, not because of what it has. But because of what it knows how to do. And the growth and development of a society is the growth and development of what it knows how to do well. That's the core of things. And so if you ask about East Asia, well, they started in agriculture, they move to garments, then they move to textiles, then they move to electronics, then they move to cars, and move to chemicals and shapes, and so on. So, if you look at what they have been good at, that is something that has been very rapidly changing. They become good at more things. And they can become sufficiently good at those things that they can sell them outside of the country. And if you look at their export baskets, they have been evolving dramatically. In the directions I just mentioned, if you look at the export basket of Nigeria, or the export basket or Venezuela, the only thing you'll find there is oil. But when you look at the amount of oil we're talking about, it's really peanuts. It's really, so it's not that we have a lot of oil, it's that it's the only game in town. You know, Nigeria is a society of about 200 million people, cruises about 2 million barrels of oil a day. That's like a 100th of a barrel of oil per capita. That's 100th of a $60. That's 60 cents. That's not much money that's coming out of here, right? So it's not that you have a lot of oil, it's that it's the only game in town. And that's a reflection of how little The company has got more things with the possible exception of Nollywood. Tobi Lawson You've finished Nigeria, I wouldn't just say Nollywood, sectors like telecommunications have been booming in the last 20 years. But looking broadly.... Ricardo Hausmann Wait, one second, one second, one second, that has allowed Nigerians to call each other. But that opens an enormous opportunity now, because one of the things that COVID has taught us is that many things that we used to do in the office, we can do from home. But anything that can be done from home, can be done from abroad. So there are many, many tasks that are currently done in rich countries. But that could be done by zoom in poor countries, in less developed countries. And that opens up new avenues for diversification, it will open up, you know, the possibility to participate in value chains that were unthinkable before, because people thought that, you know, the people doing those tasks had to live there. Now, we know that they don't have to live there. So you know, one message for all the youth in Nigeria, is that there's plenty of work in platforms like Upwork, and other such platforms where you can find jobs to do on the web. And that's thanks to the fact that you have you know, ICT information communication technology that has diffuse, but so far, that  diffusion has not changed what Nigeria is able to sell abroad. And that's, I think, where we have to aim, I mean, forms of livelihood, for Nigerians in Nigeria, by selling to people in the rest of the world Tobi Lawson Looking at your economic complexity approach to development, from your writings, and the writings of other scholars in that school, a society that knows how to do many things will grow rich, but how do we square that with the works of people like Robert Wade, who stressed the importance of manufacturing and industrialization in achieving growth and development? How should policymakers think about the knowledge we are getting from the sub discipline of economic developmentRicardo Hausmann Manufacturing was a very, very important stepping stone, for many of the societies that became rich, it was a very important stepping stone, because manufacturing require relatively low skilled labour. So it was easy to take people out of agriculture, with little education, put them in manufacturing, and manufacturing was, you know, generating much higher levels of productivity in agriculture at the time, and the levels of productivity manufacturing worldwide. So, for East Asia, this movement of people from agriculture to manufacturing was a very important stepping stone in the process of development. Some people think that manufacturing has become less unskilled labour intensive, it has become more skill intensive and more capital intensive. So it doesn't necessarily generate as many jobs as before and there aren't that many sort of like entry level jobs as as before. But I think they're still there. They're still there. So I think that, you know, a prosperous Nigeria would have much more manufacturing than it has today and creating the ecosystem for that manufacturing to happen is very important. And for that, I think that creating the ecosystem means what? It means that needs spaces where people can locate their factories, say, so that workers can go in and out efficiently and not spend two hours going there and two hours back home, that the materials can get in and out that you're relatively close to an efficient port, where you can bring materials from the rest of the world or send materials to the rest of the world, that you can participate in global value chain so that you give up on this idea that everything that you want to manufacture has to be manufactured with locally available raw materials, which is one of the most destructive ideas that is very popular in Africa that you want to, as you say, what's the term that you use there "beneficiate" your raw materials locally, and that that's like the angle of development. We can elaborate but that's a very, very dangerous and counterproductive idea. So you will need you know, a place that has electricity, water, security. So creating those spaces where manufacturing can thrive definitely is a path going forward and I would I would put the less attention to some of the things that goes by the older industrial policy name, and more attention to just making sure that you create spaces where a Nigerian manufacturer can be very, very productive. Tobi Lawson Let's talk a bit about the political economy of this. What exactly is the role of the state because what mostly obtains in countries like Nigeria, and the rest is heavy state involvement in trying to industrialise and doing industrial policy, allocate resources and credit and, there isn't more emphasis on the role of the private sector and even in the market. So how important is the state in this process, and what exactly is the role of the state in nurturing a growing economy? Ricardo Hausmann So, I think that the role of the state is huge. But it has to be smart, it has to be complimentary, it has to enhance the possibilities of the rest of society and not substitute the possibilities of the rest of society. So let me give you an example. Every technology you can imagine, is a combination of some things that you can buy in the market, and some things that cannot be purchased in the market that either they are provided by the state, or they're not provided. So you know, there is a market for cars, and you can go out and buy a car and different kinds of cars. There's no market for roads, or for traffic lights, or for driving rules, or for traffic police. So a car is a private good, it exists in a universe full of public goods. If the state does not provide the roads, the cars are not very useful, right? That's what I mean by the state complementing the rest of society. So society can organise some things and not others. So it's very important that the state be very good at providing the things that cannot be provided by markets. And those are quite a few. So for example, electricity penetration in Nigeria is still very low and remains a very, very significant obstacle to progress in spite of massive investments in that area. So electricity, you know, an efficient port system and efficient road system, and efficient urban transportation system, public education, you know no public health, there are so many so many tasks. Now in learning, things that can be done by markets, there's also a lot that can be done, let me tell you a little bit of a secret of the US success. If you look at Silicon Valley, for example, well, let's look first at the US as a whole, the US as a whole 14% of the population of the US is foreign born. But, if you look at the entrepreneurs in the US, 29% are foreign born. So the foreign born represent you know double the share of the entrepreneurs, than they represent the share of the population. If you look in Silicon Valley, and everybody's trying to imitate Silicon Valley, 54% of the science, technology, engineering and math workers of Silicon Valley, the stem workers 54% are foreign born, and the other 46% were not born in California, even though California is a state that has 40 million people. So the secret of Silicon Valley, is not that they have fantastic school systems and fantastic universities, and so on and so forth. It is really that they're able to attract global talent and one of the things that Africa has done in general, is that it has closed itself to the attraction of foreign talent. In many countries, it's very hard to get a visa to become a permanent resident or work permit. There is no path to citizenship. There are restrictions in how many foreigners a firm can hire, etc, etc. So, you know, in Africa, many countries cannot stop their citizens from going and working abroad. But the countries are very effective in preventing foreigners to come in, except at the very low end. So, one of the things that you want to think about in order to industrialise and to get into other things is to be able to attract talent, global talent that is capable of enhancing the capabilities you have. There's no shame in doing that. That's how it's being done in the in the rich countries. You know, everybody wants to become Singapore. But they don't know that Singapore is 45% foreign born. Singapore is what it is because it's able to attract global talent. So, you know, a lot of the improvements in the South African financial system is because they were able to attract all the Zimbabweans that were leaving Mugabe and get jobs, you know, all the educated Zimbabweans moved to South Africa. And that was very good for South Africa. So there's a lot in terms of attracting new know-how that can be done by trying to attract foreign talent. Another thing that you can do is to leverage your diaspora. Most African countries have a very significant diaspora. Much of that diaspora is in richer countries more developed countries and that diaspora is being exposed to new ways of doing business, to new industries, to new ideas, they can become a very, very important source of diversification of progress that has been documented by analysts at cellion, for the case of Taiwan, for the case of India, for the case of Israel, for many instances in which diasporas were very important in transforming the opportunities of the country. So, you want to leverage all of these things that can allow society to become more productive, more capable, more able to do more things. And no, the role of the government is in some sense not to prevent that from happening, to complement that with all the things that cannot be organised through markets, through private firms, and then, you know, maybe here and there, there's an additional space for, you know, focusing things, you know, just if there were good industrial zones, well connected by infrastructure ports, were supplied by electricity and water, well connected to places where workers live through an urban transport system, and so on. I'm sure that a lot of people would look into doing manufacturing in Nigeria. Tobi LawsonI want to get more from your answer by extending that question to state capacity. So many scholars have argued that state capacity is even the secret sauce, so to speak, of the success of East Asia, including China, and you get the impression that a state has to have fully formed capacity to deliver on so many things before it can then nurture growth and development. But you have argued in one of your lectures that I just saw that there is a coevolution, that happens between the state and the economy in terms of capabilities. So how does this co evolution work in practice, as opposed to the standard view of a fully formed capable state? Ricardo Hausmann Some people would like to say, Well, you know, first you have to have a capable state, and then you can have development. But until you get a capable state, you cannot get development. So focus on getting a capable state. But then you ask yourself the question, and how is that capable state going to rise? What's going to find that capable state if it's not a society that is able to pay the taxes and so on to feed that capable state. So So in fact, what you ended up having is a society that needs to develop in order to feed a more capable state, and a more capable state that is able to help society continuous development process. So at every point in time, you have states of very different capacities. And as a consequence, societies have a certain level of capacity consistent with that capacity of the state. So what you end up having is, the more society develops, the more resources can be put available to the state for it to do its thing. And the more the state does its thing, the more the society can develop. So these things are growing at the same time, or they're growing together. But a very important important question that you have to ask yourself, when you're thinking about the state, you're thinking about the Nigerian state. Now, what does it mean to be Nigerian? Who is Nigerian? Who is included in being Nigerian? When the state acts on behalf of Nigerians? It acts on behalf of whom? Is that on behalf of the Hausa? Does it act on behalf of the Yoruba? Does it act on behalf of the ibo? What does it mean to be Ibo and Nigerian or Hausa and Nigeria? How many things do you want to be decided in Abuja? And how many things we want to have decided at the different states, state government? So you have a relatively federal structure in Nigeria? Is that because you think that people have stronger regional identities than they have for a national identity? When you talk about Japan, or you talk about Korea, you're talking about societies that are internally very homogeneous. A Japanese person is somebody who speaks Japanese. A Korean person is somebody who speaks Korean. How many languages are spoken in Nigeria? Tobi Lawson (interjects) About 500… Ricardo Hausmann So obviously, it's not having a state is somebody's state, whose state is it? So I think one of the things that is a challenge is the construction of a Nigerian identity that can support the state. Right? Because the state is underpinned by a certain sense of us. The state is our state, it is done for us. It is how we do things collectively and it's Very important to clarify what do we mean by that we, who is inside the way, who's not inside the we, who is us, who's not us and those things are what makes often no state development difficult. Because, you know, if some people think that the state is going to be favouring some other group, then you would rather have a weak state than a state controlled by somebody who's not you and those things makes statecraft harder. Tobi LawsonI mean, devolution of powers from the centre is one of the conversations that Nigeria is having right now, especially in the light of the recent insecurity, issues and poverty, we would see how that works. But let me quickly pick up on another theme. Politicians usually valourize the role of small businesses in our economy, but in one of your essays that has made a very big impression on me. You took a different approach by looking at the role of big businesses in nurturing development and enrichment. Can you expatiate a bit on the role of big businesses in an economy. Ricardo HausmannSo I think when you have a very developed society, you tend to have, you know, markets for every possible input you want. You want electricity, somebody sells electricity, you want to photocopy or you want to print this stuff, there is a store that prints stuff for you, you want to design a campaign ad or television ad or cover it, you know, there's some people that design that. So you can start a business and buy everything else from the stuff that people produce around you. Right, so all of your possible inputs are things that other firms can do for you. So you can start small, and buy everything you need from everybody else. When you start in a less developed society. Many of those things that you wish you could buy from everybody else are just not there. And maybe you have to self provide your own electricity, maybe you'll have to print your own stuff, maybe you'll have to design your own covers, maybe we'll have to have all of these things done inside the company, because there are no reliable suppliers outside the company. So as a consequence, you know, modern firms tend to start bigger in less developed countries than in more developed countries, in more developed countries, you can just rely on other people doing stuff for you. As a consequence, no existing Corporation, or in some sense, organisations that have developed the capacity to provide internally things that markets cannot do for them. So once they exist, they have typically financial capital, they have a managerial capital, they have a reputational capital, that allows them to make it much easier for them to start a new line of business. You know, the Silicon Valley way to start a new line of business is that you create a startup, a startup is very easy to create in Silicon Valley, or in a very advanced place, because everything that the startup needs they can buy out there. But in the place where you cannot buy everything out there. You cannot start that small. But a corporation, a conglomerate, if it were to decide to diversify into more line of business, it could just reallocate some of its managers, it could reallocate some of its cash flows. It could because of its reputation, it could do joint ventures with other companies, maybe some foreign company or something that can bring in some technology and they can do things as a group that a startup cannot do. So that's why I wrote this piece saying, you know, a conglomerates can be and war in the case of Japan and Korea, a fundamental story of the growth process. Japan and Korea diversified because Toyota, Mitsubishi, di Woo, Samsung diversified internally as conglomerates. Right? It's not that just more companies appeared, it's that those companies diversified. So, I think that it's an important avenue for growth that a country should consider, but,  conglomerates can come You know, can be a force for good or they can be a force for bad either. conglomerates can just become you know, monopolist in one industry move to the next industry and become a monopolist there move to next industry and become a monopolist there and then suddenly become a huge barrier to entry for other people. It's very important that the conglomerates do well and this was the case of Japan and Korea, They are exporters, you tolerate conglomerates because they are exporters', a conglomerate that only sells domestically. It's like one of the local football teams. A conglomerate that exports is like the the national team. It's like the one that's playing at the World Cup. It's facing massive competition from other companies in other countries. So it deserves all the support of society. But a conglomerate that only sells domestically, you know, it has the danger of just becoming the local monopolist and stifling everybody else from competing against them. So, conglomerates can be a stepping stone, can be an avenue for growth, but they have to be good conglomerates. Tobi Lawson Let's talk about trade and I will set the scenario this way, a little over a year ago, about a year and a half. Nigeria closed its borders to all forms of trade. The justification was that the country is far too much of a dumping ground, especially for agricultural products, which we can actually produce locally. They were extreme measures to prevent imports of some of these products and the result, some would argue, as they argued against the move at the time, has been disastrous. Food inflation is through the roof, people became poorer. People are having to spend more on food than anything else, mostly vulnerable households. But you still hear people, either policymakers or even intellectuals, say that these are necessary sacrifices that developing countries have to make in order to industrialise. You have people like Ha Joon Chang, who provide intellectual guidance for this view, and that the West in its own process of industrialization went through much of the same thing, as a scholar who has also done a lot of work on trade for a poor developing country. What is the right way to think about trade policy? Ricardo HausmannOkay, first of all, let's separate trade from just macro-economic mismanagement. Because a lot of the problem of Nigeria comes not from trade mismanagement, but from the trade consequences of macro-economic mismanagement, you have exchange controls, dual exchange rate regimes, etc. That's not because you want to have an industrial policy. That's because you have messed up your macro policies. That is you have a government that has a deficit that is insufficiently finance. So it has to print money to finance it. As it prints the money, the dollar goes through the roof, the naira tanks, right. And then the government doesn't like that, And it wants to say that, you know, it's running out of foreign exchange. So it puts exchange controls, it tries to limit people's access to dollars, and so on. And in that context, it creates an environment where it's very hard for companies to get tools and machines from abroad, it's very hard for them to get raw materials, intermediate inputs, spare parts from abroad and it just makes them extremely unproductive and as a consequence, they have uncompetitive products that they cannot sell anywhere else, but in Nigeria, through enormous protection. Now, trying to do things without importing the tools, the raw materials, the intermediate inputs, the spare parts, is just trying to do things in a very, very difficult way. It's trying to, you know, as my father likes to say, "Why make things difficult if you can make them impossible," the way the world works, is that you don't have to make everything yourself. You just have to do some steps that add value to the things that they that you're going to put together. I remember having a conversation with Governor Fashola in Legos. And he's saying, you know, we want to have a furniture industry. So we want to prohibit the imports of foreign wood for furniture, we want it done with Nigerian wood, and said, You know, you're the governor of Lagos, not all furniture has to be made out of wood, could be made out of metals, it could be made out of plastics, it could be made out of other materials, right and all of the materials you want for furniture industry, or as far as the Lagos sport. So if you want a furniture industry, by all means have a furniture industry, but don't dump on the furniture industry the responsibility of only making furniture by buying inputs in Nigeria, because that's a recipe for disaster. If for some reason your inputs you couldn't buy in Nigeria for x or y or you could buy some inputs and not the others. Like you can buy two legs of the chair but not the other two legs. Well, then that's not a chair. So focus on making sure that your units of production have what it takes for them to succeed and that often implies access to the raw materials that intermediate inputs, the tools, spare parts that no Nigeria doesn't currently make. But that's fine. That's how East Asia did it. If you look at, you know, they started exporting garments, they weren't making the textiles, and they weren't making the fibres, and they weren't making the cotton. They started cutting and sewing and then they move from cutting and sewing to designing the shirts and so on, then they move to making the textiles then they move to maybe making the artificial threads that went into new forms of textiles and they did that gradually. But they did not start by closing themselves off from all the inputs that the world produces, and that you could use to make stuff in Nigeria. So I would say the problem in Nigeria, is that you have a fiscal problem that is being solved by printing too much money that generates an exchange rate mess, that exchange rate mess, creates an environment that makes it very difficult for companies to operate. And in that process, it generates an overvalued exchange rate, which makes manufacturing artificially uncompetitive, and you get less of it, not more of it, less of it because you want, you know, you're constraining the exchange rate at which they could be exporting. And you're constraining their access to raw materials and intermediate inputs. So if anything, you're hurting the chances for growth, not helping them. Tobi Lawson Part of the reasons asscribed to countries like Nigeria, finding it impossible to industrialise, or even diversify their sources of income is the "resource curse" hypothesis. First of all,  is this a real thing, are countries like Venezuela and Nigeria poor because of the so called Dutch disease? And secondly, how do countries that are also resource rich like Norway and Australia, who are rich and highly developed? How did they manage to break out of the "resource curse." Ricardo Hausmann So there are different interpretations of the resource curse when the Dutch disease was coined. It was coined because there was a boom in the Netherlands of a natural gas exports. And those natural gas exports meant that they were exporting a lot, generating a lot of foreign exchange, and their local currency strengthened and that strengthening of the local currency made the rest of the economy uncompetitive. So, if that were the problem, then that would have been a problem in 2007 In Nigeria when the price of oil reached $140 a barrel. But then it goes away as a problem now after 2014 when the price of oil went under $40. Right. So that's no longer the problem, right? I mean, Nigeria's exports of oil are coming down, oil production is stagnant, domestic oil consumption is up. So oil exports are going nowhere, and the price of oil is now lower than it was 10 years ago. Okay. So excess of foreign exchange that used to be called the Dutch disease is no longer a problem. I wrote a paper with my colleague Roberto Rigobon, saying that the problem may not be just how much foreign exchange your oil makes, but just the fact that it's a very volatile amount. Now that it goes up in some years down another year. So the exchange rate as a consequence is very unstable and unpredictable and it makes business in the country, very risky, because you don't know what is the exchange rate or you're going to face and that's not so much because you have a lot of oil, it's just because oil income is very volatile. So that's a separate problem. And that one typically has to be addressed by having some mechanism that stabilises government finances. So you have to run a government that has unstable income and wants to have stable spending programmes. So you want kids to be able to go to school every year. You want roads cleaned and repaired every year. You want to have the hospitals open every year. You want to police services every year but your income is going up and down. How do you do that? That's a problem of stabilising the government accounts and that's a different kind of problem of living with oil. A third problem of living with oil is something that they call rent-seeking. That is, all the money is in the government, then people who are very entrepreneurial, instead of setting up businesses may dedicate themselves to trying to grab the money that the government has. And so it distorts the incentives of society from, you know, doing things that are productive to doing things that are unproductive but profitable in just trying to seek the rents that the state has. I honestly, don't think that that's that big of a problem in Nigeria, given how small our oil revenues, vis a vis, the size of the society. So I think the big puzzle in Nigeria is why the country has not diversified more, given how little oil it has, you know, in a country like Kuwait or in a country like the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi, you know, you can ask yourself a question, Well, why would they diversify, they have so much foreign exchange that they don't know what to do with it? The question in Nigeria is why have you not diversified in spite of the fact that oil is generating so little revenue these days? Tobi LawsonI'll just ask you a few off the cuff question, what is your opinion on on the so called Washington Consensus, has it failed In Africa or Latin America? Is it misunderstood? Do developing countries need to think beyond macroeconomic stability and all the other recipes proposed by the IMF? What was the way to think about this? Ricardo Hausmann Okay, so the Washington Consensus is a term that was coined by John Williamson who just passed away a week or two ago in a seminar in 1989 or 1990. I think it was 1990, a seminar that was called 'Latin American adjustment, how much has happened?' So it was really a Latin American question. Latin America was in a debt crisis, the debt crisis was associated with the fact that during the oil boom of the 1970s, it had borrowed too much money, then it was unable to pay that money and it was mired in, in a debt crisis and the question is, how do you get out of there and john Williamson said, there are these 10 things that sort of like Washington institutions agree, would be good to sort of like get out of the Latin American debt crisis. But then these 10 things became like the 10 commandments. You can take them to Eastern Europe, you can take them to sub Saharan Africa, you can take them to North Africa and the Middle East. You take them out of context, and they're supposed to work marvels no matter what. It's, it's it, in my mind, policies have to be solutions to problems. Tell me the problem, let's design a solution. It's not here are 10 solutions. You haven't told me what the problem is. So I think that policies have to be problem driven, and not solution driven and Washington Consensus is a set of solutions without a problem. So in my mind, it ended up creating an environment in which people stopped thinking about what are the policies that they need to adopt, and just as to whether they have or haven't adopted the 10 policies in the list, even if those 10 policies in the list wouldn't solve the problem that we're trying to solve? Because, you know, you haven't even asked the question, what is the problem you're trying to solve? So that's why, with my colleagues, Andres Velasco and Dani Rodrik, we develop this idea of growth diagnostics, that the first thing you have to do is to try to understand what the problem is and once you have a clear idea of what the nature of the problem is, then let's explore the solution space and most likely, you're not going to end in the Washington Consensus, because you know, it will be a coincidence that you do. So from a certain point of view, the worst thing that was delivered by the Washington Consensus, is that it encouraged people to stop thinking of what the right policies are and just assuming that they have an implemented as list of policies that may not be the right ones. Tobi LawsonYou've also been in government in Venezuela. So I'll ask you, what you think holds up the use of knowledge by policymakers? Or should I say what prevents the right diagnosis of the problems that some poor countries have? Because, what you find is that and Nigeria is also a good example of this. What you find is that a lot of these countries, even though different administrations different political actors, they come into power and repeat the same policies that have been tried in the past and failed. So, what prevents the diffusion of knowledge at a governmental level? Ricardo HausmannWell, I mean, I think that people do not act on the basis of how they see the world on the ideas that they have in their heads, and on the interpretations they make of the world. So ideas can change the world, if they change how people think about the world, how people interpret the world, how, how those ideas, help them to think how to act on the world. And I'm an optimist in the sense that I've tried to develop ideas, diffuse ideas, train people, educate people, work with governments, try to help them think through issues that they face. That's why I created the growth lab, the growth lab is a group of about 50 people, and we not only do fundamental research on the issues of economic development and growth. But, we also work with countries around the world, trying to help them think through these issues and we also you know, teach and educate them, and so on. So, I think ideas have a complicated way of diffusing. I think a lot of the problems in the world are related to the diffusion or the popularity of some bad ideas and if I didn't believe that I wouldn't be in the business of trying to produce new ideas, diffuse good ideas, and so on, or what I think are good ideas. So for example, I think that the Washington Consensus has been pretty much superseded by the idea that policies have to be solutions to problems and not solutions in search of a problem and that you don't start by assuming that you know, what the solution is, before you clarify what the nature of the problem is and I think those ideas have permeated even, you know, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and so on, with difficulty, because the alternative paradigm is still popular. I mean, this whole idea of best practices, very dangerous idea, it supposes that people know how to do things, like here's the right the right way to do things, which presumes something like, you know, there is the perfect suit and you know, there's no such thing as a perfect suit, there's only a perfectly tailored suit, and everybody has a different body. So you have to tailor the suit differently and there's a lot of detail in the tailoring. So one thing is how do you defuse better ideas? And the other thing is, is it a problem of politicians not wanting to know, because the ideas they have, are an expression more of their interests than not their knowledge? It's like they like the idea because it advances their interests? Or is it just that they are wrong, or they have the wrong view of the world and you know, there's a big debate on whether its interests or whether it's ideas, the nature of the problem. I'm an optimist in the sense that I think that a lot of the things that happen in the world can be fixed by proving the ideas with which people see the world, analyse the world, interpret the world, think about the world and that's why I'm in the business of, you know, research, and teaching, you know, researching better ideas and teaching about them and by the way, Nigeria is one of the countries that sends more people to our executive education courses at the Harvard Kennedy School. There's, there's a huge community of people who have had some connection with the Harvard Kennedy School in Nigeria and you know, these are the ideas that will teach. So I'm hoping that the, you know, the reason why you have a podcast, the reason why you are trying to promote these discussions is because you also believe that the nature of the ideas with which people think the world is important for progress. That's why you do what you do. Tobi Lawson Thank you. I have a question, the relationship between democracy and development is also one that comes up regularly. I know there is a Acemoglu and Naidu paper that more or less, infer that democracy is good for growth. But lots of people, I will see people with other interests, but that's speculative, would say, Oh, well look at China. China is an authoritarian one party state and look at all the growth they have, what are the nuances on these relationships between democracy and growth or any political system? Ricardo Hausmann So I like very much the ideas about this that have been, you know, growing in a certain political economy literature, where people like Hans Rosling or Mounk or Yascha Mounk, or Dani Rodrik have been proposing, and that's that you really want to distinguish between three different rights. Okay, One is the right of the majority to make decisions about democracy. Right. So, you know, the governments are decided by a majority of people. So that's, you know, making sure that the government represents a significant swath of the population. That's, that's one idea, call that democracy. A second idea, is the idea of some kind of universal rights, that they yes, no, you might be in the minority. But that doesn't mean that the majority can kill, you can expropriate, you can harm you and torture you. Right, that there are some inalienable rights that are protected for everybody, whether you're in the majority or in the minority. And that's different. That's an idea that is often associated with liberalism. So the idea of liberal democracy is this funny balance between the majority rules, but everybody has some guarantees, right and then there is the third problem. So this second problem is called individual rights, it's very important if you're going to have something like a market economy, because if property is going to be poorly distributed as as it is everywhere, then if the majority decides to expropriate the minority, then the minority is not going to play ball and if they are the ones that have dropped the knowledge, their capacity to organise businesses and so on, they don't play ball, then there's no development. So you have to balance this individual rights with these with the idea of majority rule and on top of that, you may have other rights, a social rights that that people might want to have protected, you know, the majority might be a Muslim, and and there's a Christian minority or vice versa, do the social rights of the minority, are they protected? So there's like individual rights, social rights and majority rule and when we say democracy, we don't necessarily make these distinctions. But, what I will tell you is that the protection of individual rights is fundamental. That majority rule is also important, that these two things making them compatible is difficult and what makes it difficult to make it compatible is that somebody has to tell the majority, the elected government, the majority of society, you cannot do these things to the others and who's that thing? Well, it's suppose it's, it's an independent judiciary, something that is not under majority rule and those are the things that these populists like to destroy.  These checks and balances, that are in the system to defend the rights of the individual or the rights of minorities. So I will tell you that democracy if it's majority rule, that does not protect the rights of the individual is not going to be good for development and a lot of the development of the 19th century in Europe, happen in liberal governments, that is governments that protected individual rights, that were not democratic. So I would, instead of asking the question, you know, democracy, good or bad, I would ask the question, majority rule, individual rights, minority social rights, are they being protected? And obviously, it's great if you have all three. But let's not assume that just because you have majority rule you have all three. Tobi LawsonWhat about the issue of globalisation? I know your colleague, Dani Rodrik has written about this, he has this famous trilemma. How much should developing countries worry about things like the globalisation of capital, the level of interconnectedness of the economies with the developed countries and other parts of the world and some of the risk that may come with that, like the global financial crisis of 2008. So how should developing countries think about this, we also have the Asian Financial currency crisis of 1997 as a backdrop. Ricardo  Hausmann So as a backdrop, so the way I think about it is that, you know, Nigeria is a country of 200 million people give or take, that give or take is about 3% of the world population. If ideas were one per capita, then 97% of the ideas are outside of Nigeria and you want to use all of the ideas available to create progress in Nigeria. So you want Nigeria to connect to this global social brain. So inserting Nigeria in the flow of these ideas, these know-hows, these technologies, these ways of doing things is very important for Nigeria's development and this quote unquote, 'globalisation' this interconnection. Now people emphasize a lot, on capital flows and, or maybe goods and services. But I want to emphasise insertion of Nigeria into other flows into the flows of people Nigerians abroad and how they connect back home that they asked for, or foreigners in Nigeria? How can they bring in stuff? ideas? Know how there was not there before? How do you connect your universities abroad? How you connect your research centres with the rest of the world, etc. So how interconnected are your possibilities with, you know, all the advances of the world. So from that point of view, I will say that globalisation is a force for good. I think that, as I mentioned before, one of the key developments going forward is going to be the fact that a lot of the tasks in the world can be done from anywhere and that creates an opportunity for Nigerians to be able to perform tasks, sell their their ideas, do stuff for the rest of the world, through zoom, or, you know, Microsoft Teams, or whatever. So, you know, right now, we are producing a podcast, you're in Nigeria, I'm in the US, we didn't ask permission for anybody to do this, we're producing something jointly and you wouldn't want a world where this becomes illegal or becomes regulated or restricted. So I think that these opportunities are probably more valuable for developing countries and therefore developed countries, it's a very important stepping stone forward. So I hope the world remains sufficiently open, so that the countries in the global south are able to tap into the flows of progress that are happening elsewhere in the world. Now, that doesn't mean that you have to renounce national sovereignty too much. But it's very important to understand that there are two competing goals. One goal is to have sovereign policy. So every polity, every political community can decide more or less what it is that they want to do and that's a good thing. The other good thing is to have common policies that, you know, if we can agree on, you know, whether computers are going to run 120 volts, or 240 volts, doesn't really matter. They can work equally well, at 120, or 240. But if we have a standard, it's easier for everybody, so my stuff can work in your country and your stuff can work in my country. So having common policies is also good, and to the extent that a lot of the human interactions are happening between people who belong to different political jurisdictions, you know, people who are in different countries, then the value of common rules becomes that much more important. I like to say that sovereign state can be half a bridge over say, the river that separates it from the neighbouring country, but the other half of the bridge has to be built by the other country and on half a bridge, you don't get half the traffic, you get zero. So there is some value of having common rules. I think part of the tension that is at the core of this is that there is a good thing of having sovereign national rules that the local political community can agree on, and have in common rules, rules that are respected both by us and by people in the rest of the world that are interacting with us and that that tension is a little bit what the world is trying to figure out. But, the forces that are favouring deeper globalisation, I think are technological in nature and they're very powerful they are not, it used to be the decline in the cost of transportation. Now, it's incredible expansion of the ability to move information around and you know, you just see by the magnitude of just the number of things that are available online for you to watch whether it's Netflix or Amazon Prime, 500 different television channels, and the news of the world, etc. You would want every society to have access to COVID-19 vaccines, you wouldn't want every society to have to produce its own vaccine. So there's enormous benefits from a world where international interactions are deeper, we just need to figure out what's the political arrangements that makes that as compatible as possible with local preferences. Tobi Lawson What about inequality, which is also a very topical issue now, whether it's on TV or Davos, talking, everybody's worried about inequality issue. Is the optimal point for poor countries or developing countries to start seeing these as a problem. So what I'm saying is, do countries need to concentrate on growth first, is there a trade off, because most of the remedies to inequality at least the policy proposals involve redistribution and poor economies may not have the fiscal capacity, some attempt it, but they may not have the capacity to do the kind of redistribution that some politicians are proposing to deal with the problem. So how do you think about this? Ricardo Hausmann So I think it's very important to finish the sentence, inequality of what, because if we don't specify the what we don't know what we're talking about, and I think that a lot of the discussion presumes a what we are concerned about what inequality we're concerned about and a lot of the discussion is what you might want to call the inequality of income and the idea out there is that there's sort of like a national pie, and some people are getting very big slices of the national pie and other people are getting small slices of the national pie. And then as you say, maybe can we redistribute how people are slicing the national pie. But an alternative way of thinking about this is that there is really no national pie. There are different pies that are being baked by different organisations, by companies or firms of a different size, and so on and so in reality, what you have is an enormous inequality in the sizes of the pies that different parts of society are baking. Okay, so it's inequality in the sizes of the pie, not in the way each pie is being sliced. Imagine that each pie is a corporation, it's a company or an organisation of some kind. Well, we know some of them are informal family, micro enterprises, and some are, you know, bigger companies, and so on. So, and inside each one of them, there is a division of, of the pie in slices. But what would strike you is enormous inequality in the sizes of these pies, to call it by another name, there is enormous inequality in productivity. There are some parts of society that are operating at very low levels of productivity, you know, I drove from Abuja to Kaduna and then on to Kano, and I stopped in a bunch of rural villages, and I looked at the farms and how they were farming and how much corn they were getting per hectare, and how many hectares they had to produce, and how they were doing things. Amazingly low productivity farms, where, you know, farmers would be able working very, very hard to tender to one or two hectares, and at very low productivity and very low incomes. So one thing I really worry a lot about is what can we do to reduce the inequality in productivities and I think that the inequalities in productivities, are very large, because there's many people who are excluded from access to the things that will make them more productive to the networks of energy, or transportation, of labour markets, of knowledge, of agricultural extension services, of value chains, of storage facilities, of logistics, and so on, that would allow their work to be much more productive. So to me, a strategy of inclusion, so as to make everybody's work more productive, especially the ones that are operating at the lowest level of productivity gains, that would be good for growth, because growth has to do with how productive are people and you're able to make them more productive, output will be higher. So it's a strategy for growth. But because we're focusing on the least productive and making them more productive, you're also reducing income inequality. So our strategy for inclusion is a win-win strategy. It's a strategy that makes everybody better off and it would reduce inequality to strategy for growth. It's a strategy that would reduce inequality, a strategy of redistribution. It's sort of like compensating people for their exclusion, saying, Well, given that, you know, you have to operate in a place where there's no electricity, there's no irrigation, or no good roads, there's no storage facilities, there's no logistics, you know, so there's nobody to take your crop when it's time and it's starting to run. So you have to sell it at whatever price you can get. So we live in an environment that is very unproductive and because of that, here's a check, or here's some money. Well, that's compensating them for the fact that they cannot operate in a more productive environment, and that that's a very, very secondary improvement. These people would be much happier. If instead of compensating them for their exclusion, you would stop excluding them and focus on including them and that can be as expensive or more expensive from a fiscal space point of view than redistribution. But it implies a completely different way to think about the problem and to allocate resources. So I think that what less developed societies need is a strategy for inclusion because it's Win win and because it's better. Tobi Lawson Africa is currently at about 50% urbanisation and that's projected to reach about 75% by the middle of the century. We are quite worried about our cities, overpopulation, infrastructure, and so many other things. What do you think of new ideas and development that are coming up, like charter cities, these was first proposed by Paul Romer, a little over a decade ago, but it's gaining some traction in some circles. I know there are experiments in Honduras, and some other places, what's your opinion about fancy ideas or  radical ideas like this?Ricardo HausmannSo first of all, I think the fact that Africa is urbanising is potentially a very good thing. You're mentioning that, you know, it's dangerous, because it might require more infrastructure and so on. Well, the truth is, it's cheaper to provide infrastructure and public services in urban areas than in rural areas. So it just makes, you know, the lack of provision of infrastructure more visible maybe. But it's cheaper to provide that infrastructure in urban areas than it is in rural areas. So in principle, urbanisation can be a good thing. Unfortunately, Africa has figured out ways, and Latin America too, to make cities that are poor, and that are disastrous, and that suddenly, you might get the increases in crime and insecurity and other sorts of problems that were not there in rural life. So it's very important to get urbanisation right and I think that a critical determinant of whether a city is successful or is not successful, is one of the things that can be done in the city, and sold outside of the city, or to people who live outside of the city, every place in the country and every place in the world is dependent on being able to buy things that it doesn't make and the way to buy things that you don't make is to trade for them and for that, you have to make things that are bought by people outside of their place. So whether it's a village, whether it's a state, whether it's a city or a country, it's very, very important that you have things that you can sell to people who live outside of your place. So you can trade for the things that your place doesn't do and what we found is many cities just don't develop those things and they end up for example, one of the reasons why capital cities are so big, it's because the way they get money is by taxing the rest of the country and spending the money. But it's not that the city itself is a source of activity and wealth and production and so on. So that's why it's so important that we get cities that are competitive in a line of things that can be sold outside the city. That's the critical thing. I am not particularly enamoured by the idea that charter city is a solution for something. The idea that Paul Romer deservedly won the Nobel Prize for making us understand how difficult it is to explain growth and he has a theory of, you know, what does it take to explain global growth, that is growth at the technological frontier of the world. He doesn't really have a theory of what explains why some countries catch up and other countries don't catch up. What explains the distance that countries have relative to the technological frontier? It's a country like Singapore, with a income per capita, say of 60,000? Why are countries at $1,000 or $2,000 so? What can you do to get to $60,000? Paul Romer's contribution to economics doesn't answer that question. It asks, What determines the rate of growth of countries that are at $60,000? So he, in some sense, borrowed the idea of the problem why countries are not at $60,000 the things that prevent you from being at the technological frontier. He thinks that the reason why countries don't approach the technological frontier is because they have bad institutions. That's his explanation. That they have bad institutions and, and charter cities are a way of like buying good institutions, important, good institutions and that's his interpretation of what happened in Hong Kong. Hong Kong because of, you know, the settlement of the wars with China, it was given to Britain and it was run by Britain and it was British rules that led to the growth of Hong Kong. So he's saying why can't we make other places like Hong Kong, I will put it to you that the reason why countries don't approach the technological frontier is not necessarily institutions that you can import. It's technology itself. Technology has trouble diffusing. So the distance with technological frontiers is of technological distance and the reason why you don't catch up in that technological distance is because of the nature of technology itself. The kinds of institutions that you can import are not the only thing there was because you know, after all, the British Empire had a bunch of charter cities under British rule. That didn't make Ghana or Bangladesh or Sri Lanka rich, right. So I don't necessarily think that that technological gap can be fixed by the kind of importing of institutions by chartering your city to somebody who knows how to run things. It might be in some sense, a way of importing government technology if you want to put it in my language. So I think that the problem is really trying to understand how technology diffuses, I think the future is a lot in the hands of people that it's much easier to move brains than it is to move know how into brains. That's why I emphasise before migration diasporas promoting foreign direct investment, maybe having your conglomerates internationalise and connect your country to the rest of the world, that it is through these channels that technology flows, and it's those channels that we need to focus on. Tobi Lawson One of my final question will be going further on that note, again, last couple of years, we've seen the rise of the use of RCT in economics research, particularly development economics, built on the work of Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, and, I'm Michael Kremer, who are Nobel winners and you can see the idea gained a lot of traction where you have nonprofit organisations like Givewell adopting a lot of the findings from the research from these new school of thought so to speak. What are your impressions of this turn in development economics research, generally, especially the influence on policy? I'll give you an example. Nigeria, for example has been trying we have this national policy of lifting a 100 million people out of poverty. But when you change the proposal, what you will find is this basket of proposals that have been lifted from RCTs, you know, social interventions, cash transfers and they haven't really worked and you will find that international aid organisations and policymakers love them. So, what is your impression of this turn in development economics, have we given up on growth, is that it? Ricardo Hausmann So I think that, you know, randomised controlled trials, RCTs are a tool and, you know, they are very good to answer some questions, they are useless to answer other questions. So for example, if you want to know if it's better, to give money to farmers at the time of harvesting, or give money to farmers at the time of sowing, and in terms of you know, the impact on their well being, and so on, maybe you find that it's better to give farmers money at the time of sowing because then they can use that money to sow and if you give them the money at time of harvesting, then they already have money. So giving them more money at the time when they already have money is not the ideal time to give them money. So so maybe that's something you can answer with a randomised control trial. What kind of structure should a country have? What Social Security structure should a country have? What infrastructure plan should a country have? What exchange rate regime should a country have? What, even educational system should a country have, those things you cannot do RCT on? You know, they're just not the instrument to answer those questions. So if you only do things for which you can do an RCT, you are going to be doing some kinds of things just because, you know, as they say, you look for the keys under the lamppost, not because you lost the keys on the lamppost, it's because it's the only place where you can see something. RCTs I think, have twisted the development agenda away from policies that are probably the most impactful, but for which you cannot do RCTs and into something that my good friend Lance Pritchard likes to call kinky development policies, that they are kinky in the sense that they want to do a small kink. So for example, you can do an RCT and whether putting flip charts in a school improves learning, or whether giving tablets to kids in a school improves learning, or whether taking a picture of teachers when they attend school improves teacher attendance and consequently, student learning. So all of these things you can do an RCT on, you can take a bunch of schools, you do it in some schools or another schools, and you see if it made a difference. But those are answers to super small questions to small kinks, in if you want in the way you do things. They don't go to answer more fundamental questions as to how to organise many, many aspects of society. So in my mind, the idea, by the way, and the answer much less than the promise, for example, they can tell you that if you do it this way, it works better than if you do it that way. If you give micronutrients to children in Guatemala, that it improves their learning. Okay, it doesn't answer two questions. The first question is, how does it do it? Does it do it? Because it improves their nutrition? Does it do it because we connected the family to a set of services that had other benefits for other reasons. For example, you can do an RCT, give half a million people, we force them to smoke and the other half a million people you force them not to smoke and then we look at the difference in cancer rates to see if smoking causes cancer. But, it doesn't tell you what about smoking causes cancer. What is the substance in smoking that triggers the cancer? We learn nothing about the biology of the process, the mechanism of the process and secondly, if you say give macronutrients in Guatemala, and it works, you don't know if it would work in Nigeria or if it would work in Norway, or in Singapore because maybe in other places kids don't have those deficiencies. You can do an RCT to find that, you know, whether if you give tablets to kids in school, you want to know if they can improve learning or not and you find out that it didn't improve learning. What have you learned? Well, you've already learned that that tablet used in that particular way, with that particular teaching materials in the tablet, by teachers trained in that particular way, didn't make much difference. But it doesn't answer the question. If you were to try to improve education in the school, and one of the elements would be the tablet, how should we use the tablet? What teaching materials should the tablet include? How should the teacher use those teaching materials? What should students be expected to do with those teaching materials? and so on? So it doesn't answer any of those questions? It just tells you, you did x, do some didn't have some effect or not have that effect. And as a consequence, I think one of the bad things that the RCT revolution has done is it has tended to put donors and a lot of attention to these small questions that can be answered by RCTs away from the really important questions that may not be answerable to RCTs. Tobi Lawson Do you think that economists should be more involved or influential in the politics in developing economies, for example, it's impossible to know this, but I want to pose the hypothetical anyway. How would Venezuela have fared if you were the president instead of the economic Minister? Ricardo Hausmann So, I think for economics to do its work? Well, it should be a science that answers questions. But that politics should be decided not only on the basis of technical solutions to questions, but also in terms of social preferences of what people want done, what priorities people have, what's more important for them, what do they want? And so I think that science cannot be a substitute of the political process. I think science should participate in the political process. I don't like when people say, you know, government should do what scientists tells them to do. Science doesn't answer the questions that many political systems need to address. For example, science can tell you if there is contagion, or there is a contagion in schools or how much contagion in schools varies. It might help you understand how are people getting infected and how they get

The Agenda

Russia-China relations are strong and getting deeper. We are told this is dangerous for the Washington-led world. Is it? Why are Moscow and Beijing moving closer together? Did the miscalculations of the Washington Consensus have anything to do with it? Is the China-Russia alliance made in America? CrossTalking with Lanxin Xiang, John Gong, and Alexander Lukin.

Self-described "militant anthropologist" Professor Adrienne Pine speaks with us today about the 2009 coup in Honduras. We discuss the Washington Consensus, hybrid wars, embodied somatic solidarity, and explore the role that nurses played as agents of change and healing during the coup in 2009. Dr. Pine also shares her own journey with us, and talks about how she has balanced the extractive demands of neoliberal academia with bodily solidarity with the people she has worked with around the world, and how she's further balanced this with being a mother. Her recommended article, discussed during this episode: Pine A (2013), Revolution as a care plan: ethnography, nursing and somatic solidarity in Honduras. Soc Sci Med. 99:143-152. bit.ly/3voxDyZ Also check out Dr. Pine's recent edited book, Asylum For Sale: Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry (Oakland: PM Press, 2020), where she breaks down the disaster capitalist network of players who benefit off the chronic transmigration of displaced persons. Super relevant!

We are in the middle of an economic sea-change in the United States. The prevailing views of the past 40 years--call them Reaganomics or neo-liberalism or the Washington Consensus--are being pushed aside. The inequality they left in their wake are being addressed by new policies that focus on investing in the middle class and the most vulnerable. The leader of this revolution is not some young firebrand but a seasoned figure of the Washington establishment, President Joe Biden. We discuss his bold economic vision and its potential consequences with Ed Luce and Rana Foroohar of the Financial Times. It's a great, provocative discussion. Don' miss it.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/deepstateradio. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We are in the middle of an economic sea-change in the United States. The prevailing views of the past 40 years--call them Reaganomics or neo-liberalism or the Washington Consensus--are being pushed aside. The inequality they left in their wake are being addressed by new policies that focus on investing in the middle class and the most vulnerable. The leader of this revolution is not some young firebrand but a seasoned figure of the Washington establishment, President Joe Biden. We discuss his bold economic vision and its potential consequences with Ed Luce and Rana Foroohar of the Financial Times. It's a great, provocative discussion. Don' miss it.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/deepstateradio. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this latest issue of my weekly podcast, we pay tribute to John Williamson and Walter Mondale, RIP. Williamson died at the age of 84. He is most famous for in 1989 defining the "Washington Consensus," a list of what emerging market economies should or must do to succeed. While his theory is no longer popular, it was highly influential following the Reagan and Thatcher era. Mondale died at the age of 93. He famously lost the presidential election of 1984 in an abject defeat to Ronald Reagan. He only received 13 electoral votes, a historic low for a Democratic candidate. But perhaps his most enduring legacy is elevating the role of the VP. Myanmar in chaos. Daily protests continue since the military coup began on February 1. Tens of thousands of civil servants, teachers, and doctors are on strike, paralyzing the military's ability to rule. But the generals aren't backing down. They have jailed 3,000 citizens and killed an additional 700 demonstrators. Myanmar is turning into a failed state.Putin and Xi v Biden. Russia is amassing soldiers on the Ukraine border. And China continues to send warplanes over Taiwan. Both actions seem to be testing Biden. How far can they go before he reacts? Meanwhile, Biden announces US departure from Afghanistan by 9/11/21. Putin and Xi both want to know--at what point does Putin push back?Surge at the border. The number of working-age Mexicans apprehended at the border has more than doubled in recent months. The increase coincides with a surge in unaccompanied children and family migrants, presenting a major quandary for the Biden administration. **********The content featured here is a small part of Hedgeye’s Demography Unplugged, a game-changing market intelligence product brought to you by historian, demographer and best-selling author Neil Howe. Visit us to find out more and subscribe.

Western imperialism has fundamentally shaped the developing world. In particular, Great Britain and the United States – the dominant capitalist powers of the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively, have played a major role in this historical process. But why did they pursue imperialism? And what effects did such imperial practices have on the developing world? These are the key questions that Atul Kohli examines in his brilliant new book, Imperialism and the Developing World: How Britain and the U.S. Shaped the Global Periphery (Oxford University Press, 2020). Kohli meticulously examines both the causes and consequences of modern imperialism. He finds that the impact of imperialism on the developing world has been primarily negative. Indeed, the key argument in the book is that there is an inverse relationship between imperialism and development, i.e., the less control a state has over its own affairs, the less likely it is that the people of the state will experience steady and inclusive economic progress.Atul Kohli is the David K.E. Bruce Professor of International Affairs at Princeton University and one of the world’s leading experts in comparative political economy with a focus on developing countries.Dan Banik and In Pursuit of Development on Twitter

Today, Brain Mier join from Brasil Wire joins us to discuss the topic of Lavajato, Jair Bolsonaro, Lula Da Silva and Brazil. If you have not already listened to it, please listen to our previous episodes with Brian Mier: Getting your Hands Dirty in the Car Wash and Judge, Jury Executioner. In part 3, we hear about the latest updates.Recently, Lula Da Silva has been cleared of all the charges that impeded his ability to run in the 2018 election that catapulted Jair Bolsonaro into power. Show Notes3:00 - What are Us Interests? And why we should oppose those “interests”?5:00 - Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and how it has been a tool of imperialism.9:30 - A Wikileaks Cable from the State Department about LavajatoTwo large urban centers with proven judicial support for illicit financing cases, in particular Sao Paulo, Campo Grande, or Curitiba, should be selected as the location for this type of training.10:46 - What is the Washington Consensus?11:57 - Why did the FCPA Fines Petrobras and not Haliburton?17:00 - How Lula’s Government cured extreme poverty in Brazil?19:00 - Esha and Brian talk about the 2003 World Social Forum21:00 - Time Magazine Person of the Year Sergio Moro28:20 - Lula’s Trial and how the Judge gave Prosecutor instructions33:00 - Fernando Hadad and why He could not defeat Bolosnaro41:00 - Esha needing to do relaxation exercises after hearing about the Obama administration conduct49:00 - Wondering how this could have been avoided?53:00 - “Die a hero or live and be a villain?”60:00 - “Authoritarianism” 70:00 - Advice for journalists and the left. To support Brian Mier and independent journalism, please visit his patreon. Get full access to Historic.ly at historicly.substack.com/subscribe

What set of policies are recommended when an economy wants to work towards a free market, and also wants to bolster economic growth? So here we bring forth to you the famous Washington consensus.

I detta avsnitt fokuserar vi på makro och marknaden, vad händer egentligen med räntorna och hur påverkar de börsen? Hur har vi på Erik Penser Banks kapitalförvaltning agerat nu när volatiliteten ökar och vad har Knut Wicksell och Washington Consensus med allt att göra? Vi talar också om kreditmarknaden och intressanta kreditobligationer samt vilka bolag på Stockholmsbörsen som vi investerat i och hur förvaltarna tänker kring dessa investeringar? Lyssna och få svaren! Medverkar i podden gör Jonas Thulin, Erika Madebrink, David Cederberg samt Daniel Ljungström.

I detta avsnitt fokuserar vi på makro och marknaden, vad händer egentligen med räntorna och hur påverkar de börsen? Hur har vi på Erik Penser Banks kapitalförvaltning agerat nu när volatiliteten ökar och vad har Knut Wicksell och Washington Consensus med allt att göra? Vi talar också om kreditmarknaden och intressanta kreditobligationer samt vilka bolag på Stockholmsbörsen som vi investerat i och hur förvaltarna tänker kring dessa investeringar? Lyssna och få svaren! Medverkar i podden gör Jonas Thulin, Erika Madebrink, David Cederberg samt Daniel Ljungström.

Structural Adjustment as DevelopmentTuesday, December 8, 2020Hoover Institution, Stanford UniversityStructural Adjustment Programs are commonly understood to refer to the conditional lending programs promoted by the World Bank and the IMF during the 1980s and 1990s, that aimed to downsize the state sector and encourage "Washington Consensus" economic governance standards across the Global South. This lecture argues that structural adjustment was in fact a much more ambitious project that began immediately in the wake of the colonial era, and that encompassed anti-Third World politics, the strategic use of debt crises to impose liberalizations, the application of shock therapies applied to ex-communist countries of Eastern Europe, and even the austerity programs applied in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. The history of structural adjustment is thus a cipher for the march and triumph of neoliberalism. However, as the neoliberal era now draws to a close, we can see that the unintended albeit ironic consequence has been China's decision to pursue a radical trade surplus strategy that has deindustrialize the West.ABOUT THE HOOVER HISTORY WORKING GROUPhttps://www.hoover.org/research-teams/history-working-group  This interview is part of the History Working Group Seminar Series. A central piece of the History Working Group is the seminar series, which is hosted in partnership with the Hoover Library & Archives. The seminar series was launched in the fall of 2019, and thus far has included six talks from Hoover research fellows, visiting scholars, and Stanford faculty. The seminars provide outside experts with an opportunity to present their research and receive feedback on their work. While the lunch seminars have grown in reputation, they have been purposefully kept small in order to ensure that the discussion retains a good seminar atmosphere.

In 1985, then Treasury Secretary James Baker gave a speech in South Korea laying out a series of economic proposals that would transform economics around the world.

Welcome, Chop Shop fans, to the post-American world! We'll tell you why the RCEP means the US order ain't coming back, the Million MAGAt March that wasn't, the latest Brexit woes, and more!

The Covid-19 pandemic has not so much catalysed a “whole new world,” as much as it has accelerated the trends that were already afoot over the past decade, specifically: multipolarity, deglobalisation, Sino-American conflict, the death of laissez-faire, and rise of tech. Some of these paradigms have been accelerated by the extraordinary events in 2020, but others will either dissipate or be moderated over the course of the next decade. The crucial regime shift that will dominate the coming decade is the transition from the Washington Consensus to the Buenos Aires Consensus. Meanwhile, ignore the bears. We are at the threshold of an epic bull market buoyed by the emerging Buenos Aires Consensus and desensitisation to Covid-19. But beware the long-term, as policymakers are sowing the seeds for a nominal rally, with inflation eventually re-emerging in the new decade. - Marko Papic, Clocktower Group. Earn 0.50 CE/CPD hrs on Portfolio Construction Forum

In this sixth and final part in our series on economic growth and development, I discuss in more detail some of the key institutions necessary for economic growth to begin, focusing on property rights, enforcement of contracts, and control of corruption. I review the importance of these institutions in the context of historical case studies of countries ranging from the Soviet Union to Mexico, and outline how the most critical institutions vary with the level of development, giving rise to a middle income trap. I also discuss the Washington Consensus and critically analyse the arguments of critics that such institutional reform is not essential for growth. I conclude with a summary of all we have learned and discussed throughout the growth series. The recommended pre-listening is Episode 107: Economic Growth and Development Part V. If you enjoyed the podcast please consider supporting the show by making a paypal donation or becoming a patreon supporter. https://www.patreon.com/jamesfodor https://www.paypal.me/ScienceofEverything

In Safe Hands? The Future Of Financial Services, an original report by SAMI Consulting and Z/Yen in 2012, asked whether the Washington Consensus might break. In 2020 we perceive that this is happening faster than we expected. In 2020, for the first time in recent history, we are facing a period in which global population starts to decline. In 2020, many of the current Financial Services institutions such as insurance are finding themselves on shaky ground. And, of course, the covid-19 pandemic accelerates many changes i the works, from home-working to moves towards government socialism of the economy. This briefing and update with Gill Ringland and Patricia Lustig will be followed by Q&A moderated by Professor Michael Mainelli. Speakers: Gill Ringland is now a Director of Ethical Reading. She was head of strategy at ICL (now part of Fujitsu) and is an Emeritus Fellow of SAMI Consulting. She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society, and of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been co-opted onto EC and British government advisory bodies covering IT, Economic and Social Research, and Foresight. She has worked in Europe, Mexico, Malaysia, Japan and the USA. She is the author or co-author of eight books and numerous articles. She was the author and editor of the In Safe Hands report launched in 2012. Patricia Lustig leads LASA Insight Ltd, a strategic foresight company. She uses foresight, horizon scanning and futures tools to help organisations develop insight into emerging trends, develop a successful strategy and implement the changes. She has worked in EMEA, Asia and the USA at major blue-chip companies BP, Motorola and Logica. She is the author or co-author of four books and numerous articles. She is a Board member of the Association of Professional Futurists. Her recent award-winning book, Strategic Foresight: learning from the future is under negotiation for translation into Chinese by Science Press, Beijing. Patricia and Gill jointly published Megatrends And How To Survive Them: Preparing For 2032. They provide the scenario planning expertise for the ‘Study On Building & Piloting A Strategic Intelligence Foresight System For Future Research & Innovation (R& ) Framework Programmes' for the European Commission. Their next book aims to explore post-Covid-19 futures. Interested in watching our webinars live, or taking part in the production of our research? Join our community at: https://bit.ly/3sXPpb5

Emma and Chloe turn their attention to the USA, in a decade where America, for better or worse, defined the world order. They discuss the mixed achievements of Bill Clinton’s presidency, including the 1994 assault weapons ban that, while a huge success at the time was compromised by a ‘sunset clause’ that ensured no permanent change to American gun culture. They then consider Republican attempts to frustrate Clinton’s presidency, and the right-wing operatives who, after cameo appearances in the Clinton impeachment saga took leading roles in the Trump presidency. Finally, they look at how America remade the global economy in its own image, and in ways that served its own interests, and the market dogmatism that may now, finally, be unravelling in the liberal West.Dan Roberts, “Clintons continue to tout legacy where others see era of mistakes and scandal,” The Guardian, 22 May 2016.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/21/hillary-clinton-bill-90s-nostalgia-reform-scandalPatrick Andelic, “As it celebrates its 25th birthday, how does the Clinton administration look today?” The Conversation, 17 January 2018.https://theconversation.com/as-it-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-how-does-the-clinton-administration-look-today-89718German Lopez, “Joe Biden's controversial criminal justice record, explained,” Vox, 26 August 2015.https://www.vox.com/2015/8/26/9208983/joe-biden-black-lives-matter?__c=1Ron Elving, “The U.S. Once Had A Ban On Assault Weapons — Why Did It Expire?” NPR, 13 August 2019.https://www.npr.org/2019/08/13/750656174/the-u-s-once-had-a-ban-on-assault-weapons-why-did-it-expireEd Pilkington, “How the Drudge Report ushered in the age of Trump,” The Guardian, 25 January 2018.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/24/how-the-drudge-report-ushered-in-the-age-of-trumpDavid Smith, “Kenneth Starr, driver of Clinton impeachment, does about-face for Trump,” The Guardian, 28 January 2020https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/27/kenneth-starr-trump-impeachment-trialAndrew Chatzky, James McBride, and Mohammed Aly Sergie, “NAFTA and the USMCA: Weighing the Impact of North American Trade,” Council on Foreign Relations, 24 February 2020.https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/nafta-and-usmca-weighing-impact-north-american-tradeStephen Grenville, “No consensus on the Washington Consensus,” The Interpreter, 7 June 2017.https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/no-consensus-washington-consensus'Theme for Barely Getting' By' written and produced by Stuart Cullenhttp://stuartcullen.nethello@stuartcullen.netTony Blair, Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton excerpts courtesy of The William J. Clinton, Presidential Library.Donald Trump excerpt courtesy of The White House

Emma and Chloe turn their attention to the USA, in a decade where America, for better or worse, defined the world order. They discuss the mixed achievements of Bill Clinton’s presidency, including the 1994 assault weapons ban that, while a huge success at the time was compromised by a ‘sunset clause’ that ensured no permanent change to American gun culture. They then consider Republican attempts to frustrate Clinton’s presidency, and the right-wing operatives who, after cameo appearances in the Clinton impeachment saga took leading roles in the Trump presidency. Finally, they look at how America remade the global economy in its own image, and in ways that served its own interests, and the market dogmatism that may now, finally, be unravelling in the liberal West.Dan Roberts, “Clintons continue to tout legacy where others see era of mistakes and scandal,” The Guardian, 22 May 2016.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/21/hillary-clinton-bill-90s-nostalgia-reform-scandalPatrick Andelic, “As it celebrates its 25th birthday, how does the Clinton administration look today?” The Conversation, 17 January 2018.https://theconversation.com/as-it-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-how-does-the-clinton-administration-look-today-89718German Lopez, “Joe Biden's controversial criminal justice record, explained,” Vox, 26 August 2015.https://www.vox.com/2015/8/26/9208983/joe-biden-black-lives-matter?__c=1Ron Elving, “The U.S. Once Had A Ban On Assault Weapons — Why Did It Expire?” NPR, 13 August 2019.https://www.npr.org/2019/08/13/750656174/the-u-s-once-had-a-ban-on-assault-weapons-why-did-it-expireEd Pilkington, “How the Drudge Report ushered in the age of Trump,” The Guardian, 25 January 2018.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/24/how-the-drudge-report-ushered-in-the-age-of-trumpDavid Smith, “Kenneth Starr, driver of Clinton impeachment, does about-face for Trump,” The Guardian, 28 January 2020https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/27/kenneth-starr-trump-impeachment-trialAndrew Chatzky, James McBride, and Mohammed Aly Sergie, “NAFTA and the USMCA: Weighing the Impact of North American Trade,” Council on Foreign Relations, 24 February 2020.https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/nafta-and-usmca-weighing-impact-north-american-tradeStephen Grenville, “No consensus on the Washington Consensus,” The Interpreter, 7 June 2017.https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/no-consensus-washington-consensus'Theme for Barely Getting' By' written and produced by Stuart Cullenhttp://stuartcullen.nethello@stuartcullen.netTony Blair, Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton excerpts courtesy of The William J. Clinton, Presidential Library.Donald Trump excerpt courtesy of The White House

Emma and Chloe turn their attention to the USA, in a decade where America, for better or worse, defined the world order. They discuss the mixed achievements of Bill Clinton’s presidency, including the 1994 assault weapons ban that, while a huge success at the time was compromised by a ‘sunset clause’ that ensured no permanent change to American gun culture. They then consider Republican attempts to frustrate Clinton’s presidency, and the right-wing operatives who, after cameo appearances in the Clinton impeachment saga took leading roles in the Trump presidency. Finally, they look at how America remade the global economy in its own image, and in ways that served its own interests, and the market dogmatism that may now, finally, be unravelling in the liberal West.Dan Roberts, “Clintons continue to tout legacy where others see era of mistakes and scandal,” The Guardian, 22 May 2016.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/21/hillary-clinton-bill-90s-nostalgia-reform-scandalPatrick Andelic, “As it celebrates its 25th birthday, how does the Clinton administration look today?” The Conversation, 17 January 2018.https://theconversation.com/as-it-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-how-does-the-clinton-administration-look-today-89718German Lopez, “Joe Biden's controversial criminal justice record, explained,” Vox, 26 August 2015.https://www.vox.com/2015/8/26/9208983/joe-biden-black-lives-matter?__c=1Ron Elving, “The U.S. Once Had A Ban On Assault Weapons — Why Did It Expire?” NPR, 13 August 2019.https://www.npr.org/2019/08/13/750656174/the-u-s-once-had-a-ban-on-assault-weapons-why-did-it-expireEd Pilkington, “How the Drudge Report ushered in the age of Trump,” The Guardian, 25 January 2018.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/24/how-the-drudge-report-ushered-in-the-age-of-trumpDavid Smith, “Kenneth Starr, driver of Clinton impeachment, does about-face for Trump,” The Guardian, 28 January 2020https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/27/kenneth-starr-trump-impeachment-trialAndrew Chatzky, James McBride, and Mohammed Aly Sergie, “NAFTA and the USMCA: Weighing the Impact of North American Trade,” Council on Foreign Relations, 24 February 2020.https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/nafta-and-usmca-weighing-impact-north-american-tradeStephen Grenville, “No consensus on the Washington Consensus,” The Interpreter, 7 June 2017.https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/no-consensus-washington-consensus'Theme for Barely Getting' By' written and produced by Stuart Cullenhttp://stuartcullen.nethello@stuartcullen.netTony Blair, Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton excerpts courtesy of The William J. Clinton, Presidential Library.Donald Trump excerpt courtesy of The White House

Lebanon has served for decades as one of the world’s leading experiments in extreme libertarianism, illustrating what happens to a society with little to no government regulation or social protection.  The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the weaknesses of a health system suffering from corruption and gaping inequalities between public and private hospitals. What role have neoliberal international aid demands for austerity and privatization—known as the Washington Consensus—played in setting up Lebanon’s health system for failure? And what does Lebanon’s case show about the need to reinvest in strong public goods?  On this episode of Order from Ashes, Sima Ghaddar joins Kareem Chehayeb, who in a recent commentary for The Century Foundation argued that austerity and privatization have left residents of Lebanon extremely vulnerable during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants include: Kareem Chehayeb, journalist, Beirut Sima Ghaddar, doctoral candidate, University of California, Los Angeles Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

Thirty years after it was first formulated by John Williamson, the Washington Consensus continues to spark controversy around the world. In this week’s interview on Trend Lines, WPR’s Elliot Waldman is joined by Daniel McDowell for a conversation about the history of the Washington Consensus. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. Sign up here. Then subscribe. Relevant Articles on WPR: Chile’s Protests Are a Rejection of the Excesses of Neoliberalism The Failed Assumptions Behind Central America’s Refugee Crisis Lagarde Leaves the IMF Better Off, but New Troubles Loom for Her Successor Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie. To send feedback or questions, email us at podcast@worldpoliticsreview.com

Washington commentator and columnist for the Financial Times Ed Luce recounts the many misunderstandings we've had over the past few decades. From the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the collapse of the neoliberal Washington Consensus in 2008, Luce illustrates how political developments frame how we experience economic events, and how economics can predict politics. Ultimately, he asks us to consider the price we must pay for social peace and warns about the stakes of the 2020 election in the US.

Politics & Philosophy

Episode 398with Şevket Pamukhosted by Matthew GhazarianDownload the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloudWhat forces have governed Turkey's economic growth over the past two centuries? In this episode we speak with Şevket Pamuk about development in Turkey since 1820. In the late Ottoman period, low barriers to trade, agrarian exports, and European financial control defined the limits of economic expansion, while the transition from Empire to Republic brought more inward-looking policies aimed at protecting domestic industries. From the 1980s until the present, the Turkish government came to embrace the set of policy recommendations now called the Washington Consensus, defined by trade liberalization, privatization, and de-regulation. We discuss key moments during each of these periods, comparing Turkey to other countries around the world. We also discuss broader historical debates about Islam in economic history as well as approaches to the economic as an object of study. « Click for More »

Episode 398with Şevket Pamukhosted by Matthew GhazarianDownload the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloudWhat forces have governed Turkey's economic growth over the past two centuries? In this episode we speak with Şevket Pamuk about development in Turkey since 1820. In the late Ottoman period, low barriers to trade, agrarian exports, and European financial control defined the limits of economic expansion, while the transition from Empire to Republic brought more inward-looking policies aimed at protecting domestic industries. From the 1980s until the present, the Turkish government came to embrace the set of policy recommendations now called the Washington Consensus, defined by trade liberalization, privatization, and de-regulation. We discuss key moments during each of these periods, comparing Turkey to other countries around the world. We also discuss broader historical debates about Islam in economic history as well as approaches to the economic as an object of study. « Click for More »

Episode 398with Şevket Pamukhosted by Matthew GhazarianDownload the podcastFeed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloudWhat forces have governed Turkey's economic growth over the past two centuries? In this episode we speak with Şevket Pamuk about development in Turkey since 1820. In the late Ottoman period, low barriers to trade, agrarian exports, and European financial control defined the limits of economic expansion, while the transition from Empire to Republic brought more inward-looking policies aimed at protecting domestic industries. From the 1980s until the present, the Turkish government came to embrace the set of policy recommendations now called the Washington Consensus, defined by trade liberalization, privatization, and de-regulation. We discuss key moments during each of these periods, comparing Turkey to other countries around the world. We also discuss broader historical debates about Islam in economic history as well as approaches to the economic as an object of study. « Click for More »

President Trump shocked the British directed war party in London and Washington yesterday by announcing, via twitter, a complete U.S. pullout from Syria. Almost all of his own Washington Consensus born and bred advisors and their allies in Congress reacted with shock and wails of outrage. Russia, Iran, Turkey simultaneously announced that a committee of Syrian citizens is now working on developing a constitution for that war torn country, the necessary first step in a reconciliation and rebuilding process. At the same time, incoming Mexican President Obrador announced that Mexico, in a deal with Trump, would be receiving up to $10 billion in new U.S. investment to create jobs, doubling U.S. government investment there. This is part of a proposed developments in both Mexico and Central America to revolve the immigration crisis, a crisis which is, in reality, a necessary effect of deliberate underdevelopment. AMLO said, "This is a new, different way of dealing with the problem of migration, which addresses the causes. The day is going to come, very soon, in which people are not going to emigrate from Mexico — at least, that is my dream."

The Pax Americana – the global order established after the collapse of the Soviet Empire – is increasingly being challenged especially by former imperial behemoths China and Russia. There is a growing chorus questioning the so-called “Washington Consensus” in favor of a “Beijing Consensus” in economic policy. As the United States ceases to be the sole superpower willing and able to maintain a global PAX, today there is an increasing global “disorder.”Deepak Lal offers a study of the causes and consequences for this disorder, examining alternative claims for a desirable future economic policy. He argues that the origins of this increasing disorder lie, in part, in the great economic recession of 2008 in the United States, which has tarnished the free market based capitalism of the West. He examines how the U.S. (and its European outpost, the E.U), China, Russia, India and, potentially, Japan will be involved in this new “Great Game” and how their strategic decisions will determine whether we see a repeat of the past, with potentially another completely unnecessary world war, or if they will succeed in avoiding a reversion to their earlier types. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

IFPRI Policy Seminar: The cocoa coast: The board-managed cocoa sector in Ghana – 3/8/2018 Speaker: Shashidhara Kolavalli, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI After almost 20 years of declining cocoa production, Ghana has been able in the last decade to increase the share of export prices going to producers, more than doubling production. Contrary to Washington Consensus prescriptions, these accomplishments were achieved through reforms but without liberalization of domestic and export marketing. The Cocoa Coast: The Board-Managed Cocoa Sector in Ghana seeks to understand the success of a sector that was not liberalized.

IFPRI Policy Seminar: The cocoa coast: The board-managed cocoa sector in Ghana – 3/8/2018 Panelist: Simran Sethi, Fellow, Institute for Food and Development Policy After almost 20 years of declining cocoa production, Ghana has been able in the last decade to increase the share of export prices going to producers, more than doubling production. Contrary to Washington Consensus prescriptions, these accomplishments were achieved through reforms but without liberalization of domestic and export marketing. The Cocoa Coast: The Board-Managed Cocoa Sector in Ghana seeks to understand the success of a sector that was not liberalized.

IFPRI Policy Seminar: The cocoa coast: The board-managed cocoa sector in Ghana – 3/8/2018 Panelist: His Excellency Dr. Barfuor Adjei-Barwuah, Ambassador of the Republic of Ghana to the United States of America After almost 20 years of declining cocoa production, Ghana has been able in the last decade to increase the share of export prices going to producers, more than doubling production. Contrary to Washington Consensus prescriptions, these accomplishments were achieved through reforms but without liberalization of domestic and export marketing. The Cocoa Coast: The Board-Managed Cocoa Sector in Ghana seeks to understand the success of a sector that was not liberalized.

IFPRI Policy Seminar: The cocoa coast: The board-managed cocoa sector in Ghana – 3/8/2018 Panelist: Bill Guyton, Founder, Guyton Strategies International After almost 20 years of declining cocoa production, Ghana has been able in the last decade to increase the share of export prices going to producers, more than doubling production. Contrary to Washington Consensus prescriptions, these accomplishments were achieved through reforms but without liberalization of domestic and export marketing. The Cocoa Coast: The Board-Managed Cocoa Sector in Ghana seeks to understand the success of a sector that was not liberalized.

E. Michael Jones returns to Our Interesting Times to discuss his articles "Julius Nyerere and the Heart of Darkness" and "Crisis in the Maryknoll Missionary Order." We talk about the collapse of development economics and how the example of the missionary work of the Jesuits in the New World perhaps offers an alternative model to the current usurious neo-liberal Washington consensus.

Matías Vernengo is Professor of Economics at Bucknell University, Pennsylvania, USA. Dr. Vernengo is co-author of ‘Conta de Juros Grande & Favela’ and has also edited four books including ‘Banking, Monetary Policy and the Political Economy of Financial Regulation - Essays in the Tradition of Jane D’Arista’ He has published over fifty academic and popular articles, and contributes to the blogs Naked Keynesianism and Triple Crisis. He is also the co-editor of the Review of Keynesian Economics (ROKE). Matías’ methodological view emphasizes the importance of the history of ideas for the development of economic theory, and is based on the surplus approach of the classical political economy authors and Marx and the heterodox followers of Keynes. Dr. Vernengo has written on the effects of external liberalization in Latin America and alternatives to the Washington Consensus, on the international role of the dollar, on current monetary and fiscal policy, on macroeconomic policy during the 1930s and on the history of economic ideas. Check out the show notes page for all links, books and resources mentioned in this episode at www.economicrockstar.com/matias

Financing Our Own Oppression: Prof Michael Hudson (www.michael-hudson.com) in another blistering critique on the systemic flaws enabling US imperialism. The New Currency Cold War between the Washington Consensus and Oceania reflects on the need for secular opportunity in the coming era. Go on, share this one. Support our work.Show Notes

Jon Abando argues that the 'Washington consensus' should be reversed: in his view it IS possible for governments and public bodies to assure long-term competitiveness and prosperity at national level without hindering the free market.

China presents a major challenge to the United States. China is not just a strategic partner, or a holder of US debt, or a potential military threat. It is all these and more, according to Stefan Halper, a leading expert in international relations. In his new book, The Beijing Consensus, Halper presents the many sides of the China-US relationship and proposes a framework for how the US can effectively counter China’s authoritarian model. He argues that instead of playing by America’s rules, as did the Soviet Union, China has redefined the rules of the game on its own terms. China doles out money to dictators—with no strings attached. China buys resources from Africa and South America—without forcing transparency or reform. In short, China is showing the world how to achieve economic growth while maintaining an illiberal government, presenting the world’s despots with a viable alternative to the so-called Washington Consensus. Halper joins the Council to discuss China’s foreign policy in all its complexity and how the United States and its allies might counter it.

Nobel Laureate Michael Spence of Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the Commission on Growth and Development talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the determinants of economic growth. Spence discusses the findings of the Commission's recent report and how it compares to earlier attempts to uncover the sources of growth and the lack of growth such as the Washington Consensus. Spence makes the case for government provision of infrastructure including education and the problems of corruption and governance. The conversation closes with a look at Spence's career and the lessons of that experience.

Nobel Laureate Michael Spence of Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the Commission on Growth and Development talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the determinants of economic growth. Spence discusses the findings of the Commission's recent report and how it compares to earlier attempts to uncover the sources of growth and the lack of growth such as the Washington Consensus. Spence makes the case for government provision of infrastructure including education and the problems of corruption and governance. The conversation closes with a look at Spence's career and the lessons of that experience.