Alastair Roderick2013-06-19T16:25:14-04:00Alastair Roderickhttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=alastair-roderickCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Alastair RoderickGood old fashioned elbow grease.Prism Is Not the End of Democracytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.34167502013-06-10T14:33:23-04:002013-06-11T09:44:45-04:00Alastair Roderickhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-roderick/
Democracy is not a product. It is not a slickly-oiled advertising campaign. And it certainly does not have the advantages of combat with precise objectives and unquestioned orders. It is messy, hugely bureaucratic, mind-numbingly slow, and the only way we know to ensure that most people can mostly be free most of the time.
There seems to be a prickly, you-kids-get-off-my-lawn attitude that pervades the debate surrounding the leaking of information on the PRISM surveillance programme. Simon Jenkins says that Osama bin Laden would have loved the NSA spying scandal. I doubt he would, beyond the brief schadenfreude. Bin Laden wasn't in favour of regulated security agencies established by act of democratic parliament, even ones that embarrassedly slink back into the shadows when cornered. He was in favour of men with guns kicking down doors to ensure that fathers weren't teaching daughters how to read. Would the caliphate have had an NSA? No, it would have men on pickup trucks with machine-guns, and football stadiums used for public stonings, just like the Taliban did.
I get the reasons why people are angry about PRISM, and I feel solidarity with those on the left who feel betrayed. It enables a security state. It unfairly targets the vulnerable and minorities. It criminalises legitimate dissent. The government acts in cahoots with big business to manipulate people. I also feel some sympathy with those on the right who consider it symptomatic of a government that is just too big and that squanders resources on drag-netting that could be better focused on the real criminals and terrorists.
Politics has just gone loopy when the two media organisations making the greatest fuss about PRISM are The Guardian and Fox News. The media culture that produced the phone hacking scandal is now so ideologically and politically unsure of itself that one of the world's most-noted progressive media organisations is taking the same editorial line as one of the world's least. Right is right, and wrong is wrong, some retort. But a media culture that subjugates facts and ideology to sensationalism on such a regular basis deserves to have its coherence, and its motivations, questioned.
I live in a democracy, and I think that it is a good thing. I also happen to think that cock-up is a more common explanation than conspiracy, even when it comes to the security state. Obama, Cameron, Zuckerberg, whichever executive is most responsible for this mess should take responsibility. That is how democracies work. In exchange for power and a place in history, leaders take responsibility for huge, sprawling, organisations that are barely understood, let alone controlled.
To go to the extreme and assume as your starting-point that such data is being collected by an all-powerful elite to keep the little people down demonstrates a divorce from reality. Security agencies reacted to the problem of terrorists hiding among the general population on 9/11 and 7/7 by deciding that data was the best tool they had. Speaking as someone who has only basic knowledge of Excel, I can imagine that designing the algorithms necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff, and avoid stepping on anyone's toes, to be a fool's errand. Similarly, I can imagine that the equations Facebook and Google use become some of the most valuable pieces of intellectual property in the world, and that government's trying to save lives based on how well they fight the data war might have an interest in how those codes are put together.
Woody Allen once joked that our political leaders are both incompetent and corrupt, sometimes on the same day. We seem to have this cognitive dissonance by which we think we are both helpless pawns of the matrix at the same time as being governed by idiots and impotents. Which is it? The matrix implies a minimum standard of competence. Impotence implies the opposite. North Korea is bankrupt and barely able to feed itself, but it is ruled with an iron-grip. Would the Kims have been in power for sixty years if they had been a bit more hands-off?
Far from being concerned that the NSA is collecting 'metadata', people should be glad that intelligence agencies are targeting terrorists and criminals in a modern way. It goes without saying that intelligence no longer involves men in linen suits rendezvousing in exotic souks. With trillions of bytes of data from telephone, email and other electronic media floating around, the intelligence 'war' will be won or lost on a spreadsheet, not on a battlefield. The clue is in the title: metadata. It is the trends and outliers in metadata that are of interest to the spooks, not the details of your emails. So why are people so willing to ignore this distinction? A clever little algorithm will provide what intelligence agencies are looking for, there's no room full of people combing their way by hand through the quadrillions of emails out there.
There is a curious ideological alignment on privacy between fear of over-reach into your bedroom on the left, and into your wallet on the right. Both seem irrational on this issue, unable to see that they have aligned themselves with their ideological opposite against the mainstream who can't see why it's not possible to strike a balance between being safe and not being harassed.
It is worth pointing out too that whistle-blowers are always likely to receive a sympathetic hearing from the press. In these instances the line between acting in the national interest and providing a good story becomes hazy, especially for those viewing the world through the rose-tinted spectacles of increased circulation. Watergate was important. Daniel Ellsberg was important. Bradley Manning was important. This was all important stuff - and I am not detracting from the importance of Edward Snowden's revelations. But the dust has not settled sufficiently to judge the Obama administration as George Bush Mark II, or to judge Edward Snowden as a modern day Deep-Throat.
People want to live in a world of transparency and trust. But trust works both ways. If you want safe streets and less violence, you have to trust that governments - democratic governments - are doing very undemocratic things only to those people who have explicitly broken the democratic contract. Democracy doesn't just mean freedom, it also means having to accept majority rule and trust that elected representatives will interpret our will within the parameters of the law. You can't just trust the government not to spy on you, the price of not living in a police state is a small but efficient security sector that may sometimes get things wrong.
The scandal here, so far as one exists, is the replacement of a quasi-legal, ad hoc and improperly regulated surveillance programme with one explicitly sanctioned by a so-called 'secret court' (that is a court whose proceedings are kept secret; the court's existence is openly acknowledged and established by Congress.) This is where sensible people, on both right and left, descend quickly into paranoia and conspiracy theory. It is not secret to escape scrutiny (all of the Court's records are available to the US Senate which has oversight) it is secret in the same way that other courts' proceedings are kept secret to protect certain individuals. Commercial and employment cases may be heard in closed session when evidence has market consequences. Custody or probate cases are subject to child protection issues. There is nothing wrong or suspicious, in principle, with certain courts being able to take evidence in closed session or in judges restricting reporting when appropriate.
Edward Snowden says that he doesn't want to live in a world where everything we do is recorded. Neither do I, but it depends on how we define 'recorded.' If it means men in smoky rooms listening to our conversations, then no, I don't want to be recorded. But if we are talking about a string of code trillions of digits long recording you as a zero rather than as a one, then I can't help but think that objecting to that is somewhat precious.
There are few details of my life that would really titillate or concern anyone else, and while I would consider it an imposition, it would qualify as rudeness rather than as a crime if they were to end up with someone other than I had given them to. There is a qualitative difference between such information and not sharing your bank details and other such data, precisely because that is information recognised as sensitive and protected by law. The fact that sensitive data is enumerated as such in several pieces of law, and specially protected as a result, is evidence for a general presumption of data openness, because openness relies on a minimum amount of trust that data not protected as such won't be abused.
Normal security activity in a democracy is not a violation, and there is little in the revelations to date to suggest that PRISM is engaging in anything other than the sort of activities people assumed security agencies were engaging in anyway. We seem to want our security professionals to find the needle in the haystack without disturbing any hay. There are real violations in the world, maybe including those committed by the NSA or GCHQ, but Google sharing your searches for LOLCATZ isn't one of them. This maelstrom of outrage, some justified, lots not, whereby lots of people are inconvenienced slightly, just obscures those instances of real injustice where people actually are oppressed. It also willfully confuses information, which we all have an interest in protecting, with data, which has value in a market sense, in a governance sense, and in a security sense. We undermine that value at our peril.
President Obama met Premier Xi of China last week to discuss how to avoid an actual war on the Korean Peninsula, one that could drag America and China in with it. Top of the agenda was cyber-security, at which China is ever-better at getting around. The Obama administration briefed that strong hints would be dropped that the country that produced Microsoft, Google and Facebook might be quite good at designing cyber-attacks of its own if the dogs were let off the leash. I hope that those dogs will stay on their leash, because of the implications for what will happen when cyber wars become actual wars and human beings and not data are the targets. Until then, it might be an idea to become gently more at-ease with the information society.]]>The Post 2015 Development Agenda: Now for the Hard Bittag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.33723692013-06-01T15:31:58-04:002013-06-03T13:17:24-04:00Alastair Roderickhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-roderick/report of the UN High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Agenda was released last week. The HLP is the body charged with drafting recommendations for a new development framework to replace the Millennium Development Goals, which expire in 2015, and includes David Cameron as one of the Co-Chairs.
Its title, 'A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies through Sustainable Development', gives several clues as to how the world has changed since the millennium. These are global goals; no longer targets that rich countries measure poor countries against. It is a partnership, essentially a deal between rich countries that are unusually weakened economically and poor countries that are unusually strengthened, at least temporarily. The aspiration is for economic transformation rather than technical fixes, in recognition of the economic pain that developed countries are feeling. Finally, it is aiming for sustainable development, although, as ever, the distinction between this and development that is sustainable is not drawn, despite this being critical to the debate.
The new framework specifically aims to eliminate extreme poverty by 2030. This is different from the MDG target of halving extreme poverty, a target met largely by the millions of Chinese and from the other BRIC nations who left the ranks of the very poor. But halving extreme poverty is not the same thing as being half-way towards eliminating poverty altogether, in much the same way as halving crime rates is not half-way to abolishing crime. The hardest crimes to eliminate, and the most hardened criminals, are the ones that are most likely to remain.
Essentially the target now is to tackle the harder half of poverty, rather than just the next half. If it hadn't been for the progress of the last 14 years this aim would seem naïve. As it is, a number of key lessons are spelled out by the High Level Panel that should be internalised by all those involved in turning these recommendations into an actual framework.
First, governance needs to be a larger part of the development mix, and in this regard the experience of the MDGs has put this on the agenda. The proponents of the new framework add two new Goals that are entirely without precedent in the MDGs on Good Governance and Peaceful Societies but that restore the original intention of the Millennium Declaration. This is a seal of confidence in such Goals to tackle politically difficult issues, and provokes some interesting ideas in the report. The open data campaign score a good result in access and rights to information. The need for security-sector reform is a victory for those making the (sometimes difficult) point that well-run police forces and armies can be just as important to governance as democratic elections and freedom of expression.
Secondly, the report notes that the biggest failure of the MDGs was in not integrating the very different economic, social and environmental aspects of sustainable development originally envisioned in the Millennium Declaration. The new proposal certainly seems to mix these concepts up in interesting and novel ways. For example, the idea that there is an essential trade-off between some environmental goals and some developmental goals that can not be wished away, will lead to important horse trading between environmental and development interests that was too-often dodged in the MDGs.
Thirdly, it puts sustainable development at the core of the framework, but may disappoint some activists by not specifically rebranding the goals as Sustainable Development Goals. And while on the one hand the desire to weave sustainable development through all the Goals is a good aim, done badly or unthinkingly it could result in no specific commitments to sustainability or the environment at all.
Most worrying is what it says about Climate Change. A stand-alone commitment to limiting global temperature rise to 2C is curiously misplaced in the general 'Creating an Enabling Environment' Goal 12. (Let's charitably overlook that this whole Goal exists at all. One consistent criticism of the MDGs was Goal 8, a general 'leftovers' goal that didn't have a clear focus either.) Grouping Climate Change together with targets on finance and economic justice is an interesting synthesis, but Climate Change is at least as relevant to the Food Security, Energy, and Natural Asset Management Goals. Given the acknowledged importance of Climate Change to the success of these Goals, and the systemic nature of the Climate Change problem, it should have been enough for an individual climate Goal with multiple indicators on a range of impacts.
I have written on these pages before that a new development framework will only work if it gets the politics right first. It doesn't matter how noble the target, if the human systems that determine success or failure are not carefully managed it will have no impact at all. Particularly, a politically tone-deaf focus on inequality, when the task now is to ensure that gains on poverty are not reversed by approaching environmental and resource stress, would only hinder a new framework.
Look, for example, at the rhetorical bob-and-weave when it comes to reporting the success of the MDGs. Yes, lots of people were lifted out of poverty, but many were on the cusp of being middle-income anyway because they lived in countries such as China, India or Brazil that were going through massive economic expansion. Four of the MDGs in Africa weren't met because this is where most of the very poorest live and so any improvement experienced here (and there was some) was still not sufficient to bring many countries up to global minimums.
It is the relative progress of those who are below the poverty line that matters. In other words, if Niger and Afghanistan had improved at a relatively similar rate as China and Brazil, who have had massive commodity and agricultural booms in the last fifteen years, then the value added by the MDGs would be considerable. But they haven't. Much of the development gains have accrued to particular countries, typically those that were lower-middle income to start with, and that had mineral, agricultural and manufacturing resources to exploit. Kudos to the MDGs for helping to lift 1 billion people out of poverty, but let's be in no doubt about what really happened.
I was in Kampala recently, ten years after my first visit to Uganda, and it is fascinating to see the progress made over the last decade in one country and within admittedly its richest city. One very simple illustration of what has been going on is worth pointing out.
The number of 4x4s on the road has increased exponentially, but the state of the roads has increased only marginally. A booming economy means lots of people can afford 4x4s, but it takes time for a government to make the reforms necessary to effectively raise revenue through efficient, honest tax systems and institute public works to build proper roads.
Wealthy Ugandans buy 4x4s because the roads are so bad, but this effectively neuters them as an effective constituency for road improvements because they ignore the pot-holes in air-conditioned luxury. But this creates a paradox. Good roads are needed to keep the traffic moving to aid commerce and produce more wealthy Ugandans so that further tax revenue can be generated to build good roads.
Western taxpayers have a legitimate concern in ensuring that aid spent in places like Uganda goes to help the very poorest before funding public works, especially as Kampala's road users self-evidently form a constituency from whom taxes can and should be drawn. A new bypass is being built across Kampala. Progress is slow, it is very corrupt, but it is getting there. Guess who is building it? The Chinese.
Helping the next half out of poverty will require the slaughtering of certain sacred cows, but unfortunately the new framework has little to say about aid. The Europeans will fund the very poorest, the war-torn and the disaster-ridden. The Chinese will fund long-term investments that provide long-term results (and lets not paint too jaundiced a picture of the Chinese, they are willing to wait decades for a return on investment, and even to give away roads and infrastructure at a loss if it goes towards building long-term relationships). The incentives are not aligned in a country like Uganda to develop in the way that European countries (or even, ultimately China) developed, and the denial about the function of aid in long-term political economy is unchallenged by this report.
It has been said repeatedly and repeatedly, but the MDGs worked because they got the politics right, and sacrificed the desirable for the achievable. This is how an absolute target for poverty and any sort of gender target were incorporated into the MDGs, even against heavy lobbying. A target to reduce the next half of poverty is hard enough (and if the easier half of poverty hadn't been eradicated I would have said impossible), but an inequality target is politically impossible and practically immeasurable. It is the high-water mark of a Western NGO-worldview that imagines itself to the voice of the poor and powerless, and it has unfortunately only been further legitimised by the High Level Panel's report.]]>The Post-2015 Process: Inequality Is Not the New Povertytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.32949262013-05-17T17:46:38-04:002013-05-20T06:53:46-04:00Alastair Roderickhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-roderick/UN High Level Panel meeting in New York to decide on a framework to succeed the Millennium Development Goals indicated that no target for the eradication of absolute poverty (those living on less than $1.25 a day) was to be included, despite strong lobbying by the British and other European nations.
A focus on absolute minimums is not just about morality, it is highly political. The reduction in extreme poverty is the headline achievement of the MDGs, and so not emphasising this is tantamount to criticising the very idea of development frameworks in general, and the coalition that came together over the MDGs specifically. It was also indicative of the NGO-centred worldview that says the project of lifting people out of poverty is owned by Western aid agencies.
As outlined in a previous blog, and in the Schumacher Institute's submissionto Beyond 2015, the civil society group lobbying the UN High Level Panel, the post-2015 process is in danger of misapplying the lessons of the MDGs and letting hubris overtake analysis.
The NGO world-view unfortunately treats the MDG process as a finished project whose achievements no longer need defending. However, the general consensus that the new framework needs to incorporate more environmental goals - and even add Sustainable Development Goals to the mix - hasn't begun to address how this can be achieved while protecting the gains already won.
Research from the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the CONVERGE project, among others, demonstrate that a growing crisis of environmental decline and resource shocks expected over the next few decades is likely to increase poverty, not decrease it. Yet despite the implications of systemic environmental and resource shocks for current poverty levels, the current frameworks imagines it can go one step further and not just abolish poverty but end inequality too.
Despite a major theme of the post-2015 consultations being the need to better integrate environmental and development targets, the largest aid groups rarely mention the significant barriers to pursuing these quite different goals simultaneously.
The MDGs worked so well because they were politically astute, and because a limited window of opportunity existed to build a coalition and avoid the most contentious disagreements. Even the Americans eventually signed up. The new process is based on the assumption that poverty can be redefined as inequality, and somehow this is connected to protecting the environment, as if these problems occur in discrete boxes and that protecting the environment would never be interpreted as a constraint on the economy.
Save the Children claim that the two tests that need to be passed are 'eliminating poverty in all of its forms' and 'address[ing] the inequality and discrimination' that leads to poverty, without mentioning that a significant form of poverty is caused by stress within the economic-environmental systems within which people live. Describing these as 'inequality' is even less precise than describing them as poverty.
I don't criticise the aid agencies for their motives, but I do question the outcomes. Save the Children have produced good research showing that income inequality leads to, for example, worse nutrition for the very poorest children, widening literacy gaps, and rising prices putting basic commodities out of reach even as the overall economy booms.
Oxfam, who have long invested in research, have developed the useful concept of planetary boundaries, limits to environmental damage bounded on their lower flanks by 'social floors', minimum standards of income and social protection that may require short-term growth to achieve. This at least shows some movement towards the idea that economic development has to be reconciled with environmental protection in recognition that each is dependent on the other.
But success can lead to hubris, and this can obscure the lessons of the past. One of the main reasons that the MDGs were such a success was that they set concrete, achievable and measurable goals with realistic deadlines, and the information on progress was made freely available. The data published publicly on MDG targets can be found here, but even for the headline indicator of the Goals - people living on less than $1 a day - this data is patchy and incomplete.
The current publicly-available dataset on poverty reduction dates from 2010, but only a few countries report data up until 2010 with some countries' data dating back to 1995, only five years older than the 1990 base-line and a full five years before the MDGs even began. Again, absolute poverty reduction was the gold-standard measure for the Goals. Given that the data is poor on the fairly uni-dimensional measure of those living on less than $1 a day, how are we supposed to trust the data for a multi-dimensional measure such as inequality?
Further still, the vast numbers lifted out of absolute poverty are overwhelmingly located in the BRIC nations, as much as 80% by some estimates. This reduction in poverty wasn't based on some Oxfam inequality programme, these nations have averaged 6% growth each year since the MDGs began and inequality has shot up. Which of these nations would be first in line to switch their economic strategy from high growth to inequality reduction?
There has been a growing consensus on the way forward with the Goals: keep going on things that are working; address those that aren't (such as sanitation); differentiated responsibilities; and new SDGs such as on clean water, food systems and ecosystems.
Both the UN and the aid-agencies seem to be leaving things out, however. The High Level Panel is running into the political reality of trying to define poverty and inequality in such a way as to be agreed by 190 countries including huge, fast growing economies such as the BRICs, rich countries with flat-lining economies in Europe and America, and poor countries undergoing commodity and land booms desperately trying to promote new manufacturing bases.
This worldview is happy to trumpet the headline achievement of the MDGs, a reduction of those living in absolute poverty, without being honest about where those ex-poor people live. Poverty has been reduced for these people by state-directed export and commodity-led growth strategies that owe little to Oxfam or ActionAid and the rest.
Nor are they honest about what a switch from poverty-reduction to inequality-reduction would politically entail. Inequality has grown in each of the BRIC nations in the last 15 years, as it always does in countries experiencing rapid economic growth. So to approach Post-2015 negotiations calling for a reduction in inequality when these nations have secured development success precisely by rejecting the Western-NGO's new focus on inequality is to invite failure.
There is a real danger of over-reach because of a world-view that says that what is measured is what is important, that those with money have answers, and that donor's values are universal values. Imagining that poverty is on its way to extinction, this mind-set segues seamlessly into outlawing inequality, confusing once again process with outcome.
As we are debating whether we can transition from poverty-reduction to inequality-reduction (and let's outlaw bad luck and meanness while we are at it) an actual, existential, threat hangs over this whole process. Unless you can reconcile development goals with the significant environmental change and resource depletion expected over coming decades, then all of the progress to date will be reversed and inequality will suddenly seem at lot less important again than absolute poverty.
Two worldviews collide, disorder ensues, and eventually something better rises from the ashes: synthesis. But after synthesis can come hubris, and after hubris comes nemesis. The Post-2015 process is in danger of hubris, of assuming that technical fixes can be applied to problems such as poverty and even to making the world more equal. You have to get the politics right first, and these are not hubristic times.]]>The Growing Environmental Crisis is the (Economic) Slavery of our Time.tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.32313692013-05-07T14:07:29-04:002013-05-08T09:05:49-04:00Alastair Roderickhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-roderick/economic terms the modern equivalent of slavery. Before you report me to the Daily Mail, do hear me out, and please note my emphasis on economic.
E F Schumacher observed back in the late-1960s that the problem with modern economics was that it treated some resources (particularly the things we dig out of the ground and the means by which we produce energy) as income, rather than as capital. That is, we assume that certain large and unseen inputs into our economies are limitless, to the extent that we don't bother to think about replacements or substitutes in case their supply fails.
When people talk this way about economics they are often branded as naïve idealists, ready to crash Western Civilisation in order to save some polar bears. So let me be clear on two points. One, I honestly don't care about polar bears. The Arctic supports only one large land-based predator for a reason, and it is not surprising that even small changes in its environment would put it on the endangered list. It is what this reveals about change that matters, and this is what eco-denialists deliberately mis-represent.
Second, this is not really a question of economics, or politics, or even physics. It is now a question of mathematics. The Stockholm Resilience Centre identifies nine 'planetary boundaries', physical limits such as for pollution, water quality or climate change, that are known to affect human wellbeing if exceeded. Breach these and we are not just risking polar bears but seriously endangering human life. Three have already been breached: climate change, biodiversity loss and the nitrogen cycle which, together with the phosphorus cycle (also close to being breached) is critical for growing food. Three more are close, and a further two we don't even have enough data on to say. Still think environmentalists are naïve?
Critics of environmentalism never talk about risk, the calculation of probability and error which underpins much of science. Solutions may be found for individual problems, as they have been before, but it is the inter-relationships between these problems that is the real danger, and which we have least information about. When the media narrative prefers sensation to nuance it is difficult to sell the argument that we may need to seriously rethink the way we live, and get re-acquainted with concepts like moral hazard or uncertainty.
The reason that leftists and environmentalists have a problem with free market economics is that despite what market fundamentalists tell themselves, no market is ever fully free, and when advocates of economic freedom dismiss alternatives as naïve idealism what they are usually rejecting is propping up the weak rather than the strong.
Which brings me to slavery. The Egyptians weren't just cruel, pyramids needed to be built and slaves were the only way to do it. You couldn't get Egyptian citizens to do it as there were too few of them and no incentive to work yourself literally to death hauling large stones around. The currency-based economy was not strong enough to provide sufficient financial incentives, with little capital accumulation or speculation, so instead of the carrot Pharaohs had to use the stick.
Slavery, like so many forms of employment, was eventually outsourced. New trades in tea, sugar, spices and cotton were founded on a business model where labour could be sourced cheaply from overseas because the price mechanism made it too expensive to ship workers to Barbados from Godalming and compensate them accordingly.
But the moral case against slavery was accompanied by an economic one too. A combination of self-interest and moral purpose drove two of the three great abolitionist movements of the nineteenth century: ending slavery in the British Empire and the American Civil War (the third, the emancipation of the Russian serfs, was in a nation at an entirely different stage of economic development).
The moral case for abolition became politically overwhelming as the economic case for slavery fell away. Britain gained an economic monopoly on the high seas and was able to dictate favourable terms of trade. But this only worked because Britain had a navy paid for with the profits of previous economic monopolies, including a monopoly on slave-labour. Slavery undermined its own business model because the trade allowed other powers to undercut the British on prices. Having gained so much commercial and then industrial power on the back of slave labour, and now possessing the technology that made slavery redundant, it is no surprise that Britain saw an economic case for the abolition of slavery worldwide.
Similarly, the moral fervour that led to the American Civil War was driven by the desire that Northern industrialists not be undercut by Southerners who could use slave labour to make up for their industrial weakness. The moral cause that drove Lincoln and the abolitionist movement was generated twenty years or more before the Civil War over slavery being extended west of the Mississippi and opening up more opportunity for Southern business, which was the original issue of contention more than the institution of slavery itself.
The arguments given to defend the economic-environmental status quo are, structurally, quite similar to the economic arguments that were used to defend slavery. To be clear, I am not comparing climate change denialists or oil executives to slave owners, or even that environmental damage is akin to slavery, just that the economic arguments align.
Both are based on a corruption of the price mechanism, conveniently leaving out a major part of the economic equation in order to cook the books. Slavery was based on a suppression of the true cost of labour, and was justified so long as there was no alternative to slaves picking cotton. The current economic-environmental status quo is based on a suppression of the true cost of non-renewable resources and of natural systems. The status quo holds only until the price-mechanism collapses, and the true costs of resources and natural systems reassert themselves through environmental crisis or shortages of basic goods.
Schumacher talked about this as a failure to incorporate the full costs of production into financial accounting. But let's be honest about what it really is: fraud. An accountant who knowingly counts an asset as a fixed source of income, rather than as steadily diminishing capital, would be criminally liable. Just as slavery was a fraud inflicted against an entire class of people, denying them of life and liberty, maintaining our current systems of production and consumption without being honest with ourselves about the limits to these, is fraud. And we are the victims.]]>This isn't an Excel Error, this is Mafia Economicstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31752942013-04-28T16:39:39-04:002013-04-29T07:59:55-04:00Alastair Roderickhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-roderick/"And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stolen out of holy writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil."
Richard III
The nation sighs with relief. After flirting with a triple-dip recession the British economy has experienced 0.3% growth in the first three months of 2013. Depressingly (more on that word later), given that stagnation has been the economic reality for twenty-two successive quarters (count them), 0.3% growth is in a literal sense a remarkable thing.
Don't break out the champagne yet. While we did narrowly avoid a triple-dip recession, this was the fourth contraction since the recession began: Quarters 1-4 in 2008, Q1 in 2011 (narrowly missing recession again) and Q1-3 in 2012. Growth, in fact, has not exceeded 1% since the autumn of 2007. Again, the difference here between 0.3% growth and 0.3% contraction is largely immaterial when set against the larger picture of general economic stagnation.
I would respectfully submit that there is no such thing as a triple-dip recession. It is not as if the periods of expansion separating the dips were characterised by Chinese (or even German) growth. We have instead been in a six-year economic stall where growth has barely fluctuated by more than a few tenths of a per cent either side of zero. Growth, or lack of it, has largely become a rounding error.
Six years of stagnation can only be categorised as a depression. We have effectively subsidised large business through the use of cheap (and sometimes free) money, and this has propped up large employers avoiding the mass lay-offs and bankruptcies seen in the late 1920s. This state-support to business is ironic given that many have advocated giving the money directly to consumers through direct transfers, tax credits or benefits, as consumers are likely to keep on spending the money on things like feeding their families and keeping roofs over their heads.
The Government has chosen a strategy that is both literally and figuratively obtuse by an ideologically-driven adherence to the belief that if government spends money to get the economy going it is always bad, and if business spends money to get the economy going it is always good. Never mind that government-spending might help the vulnerable quicker than the trickle-down of business spending, or that businesses might try to shore up their balance sheets rather than use bail-outs to invest, economic policy in Britain seems to be organised on the principle that FTSE 100 companies should have nothing to report, either good or bad, to their shareholders.
While we are on the subject of rounding errors, Paul Krugman has dubbed the ideological focus on austerity, and the refusal to consider its alternatives, the 'Excel Depression' following the discovery of coding errors in the data used in a famous paper, Reinhart-Rogoff, often cited by proponents of fiscal austerity for its claim that growth collapses when sovereign debt exceeds 90%.
Now a new paper, Herndon, Ash and Pollen ('HAP') that casts doubt on the conclusions of Reinhert-Rogoff ('RR') has caused enormous buzz, specifically by reproducing RR's statistics and noting that key variables were missing. In perhaps the most incendiary passage, HAP call RR's 90% debt conclusion a 'stylised fact', that is a memetic nugget of information that is both easy to take out of context and that quickly becomes a norm when used without reference to the original caveats that accompanied it and without due attention to the uses it could thereafter be put to.
HAP find that instead of growth slumping from an average of 2.8% to -0.1% when debt hits 90%, growth merely slows to 2.2% averaged over many countries and over long periods. It undermines the argument that high debt, specifically of the levels many countries found themselves after the crash of 2007-08, fatally constricts growth. HAP show that there is still correlation between high debt and slower growth, they just note that it is less extreme than posited by RR and that attempts to misrepresent RR as demonstrating a causal relationship between debt in excess of 90% and economic contraction are based on an erroneous assumption that this is settled science.
HAP acknowledge RR's caveat of potential reverse-causation in the debt-growth ratio, but they just don't think it is likely based on an honest reading of their initial (inaccurate) data. RR, in their response to HAP, issue an unqualified mea culpa to the Excel coding error that dropped a number of countries, thereby skewing their mean results. However, as they point out, a separate median result is given that is not so different to HAP and is not picked up by the later paper.
Both HAP and RR's response represent the actions of good scientists, but little of this got reported. RR's beef with HAP, and the media narrative accompanying it, is the suggestion that data was intentionally misrepresented in the paper to make an ideological case for debt reduction when there were caveats accompanying the original data. The whole saga has become a cautionary tale for the dangers of policy-based evidence-making.
Commentators and researchers eager to leap to a conclusion before the facts are in are exploited by the professional contrarians who feed on uncertainty, deliberately conflate it with inaccuracy, and make a living from exploiting the weaknesses of democracy and journalistic balance. Just witness the amount of disinformation spun on Climate Change by Christopher Booker or James Delingpole in the Telegraph, or the entire editorial voice on all manner of subjects taken by Sp!ked Magazine.
Booker and Delingpole, too easily dismissed as uninformed ignoramuses, are characterised not by their lack of information but by their command of some of it in order to spin their views. Delingpole actually takes care to calculate the amount of public subsidy contained in the Climate Change Act 2010. Booker is au fait with the minutiae of the EU Carbon Trading Scheme and its collapse into a big Enron-style mess. But the point is it is used selectively, and you have to be at least a little bit informed in order to avoid the mountains of evidence stacked up by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or to dodge the considered views of several National Academies of Science. Odd old ends stolen out of holy writ.
Camborne aren't sticking to austerity because they want an economic recovery, they want economic control, to remake the economy in the image of post-Thatcherite Toryism. To ensure the point is rammed-in that the poor, the feckless, and the weak created the inefficiencies in the great machine of British capitalism. Untermenschen who just won't play the game.
Camborne imagine a business-cycle rather than structural recession brought about by Labour's high spending, necessitating a massive liquidation of the state in order to stave off bankruptcy. Any moves to address the structural causes of the recession, or to constrain the financial sector that the Tories naively believe will owe them fealty once growth returns, only prompts fingers to be stuck in ears and loud humming.
This is mafia-economics. The mafia's business model is not about getting existing debtors to pay up. They don't really care if you pay back your loan or not, because if you don't they get to break your legs which serves as a useful incentive to other debtors to pay up at extortionate rates and cover their losses. They get their money either way, the wider point is about maintaining control.
As Kevin Spacey's character, the scheming Congressman Frank Underwood, says in the remake of House of Cards, what a waste of talent it is to choose money over power. These are not economic mistakes made in honest pursuit of the national interest, these are calculated decisions made through ideological rigidity blinding people to the consequences of actions and the dangers of error. It is done in the service of re-making Britain so that it suits some of the people better, and in as short a period of time as possible.]]>Margaret Thatcher and the New Precariattag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30939122013-04-16T14:27:31-04:002013-06-16T05:12:01-04:00Alastair Roderickhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-roderick/
Margaret Thatcher has become part of the modern creation myth of the Conservative Party. Year-Zero starts and ends with the Blessed Margaret for the party that supposedly values history. All parties do this, build myths to justify their present. Tony Blair built a reputation as the man who tamed Labour by taking on Clause Four, a largely symbolic act that meant little to those outside of the Labour Party (would Prime Ministers Kinnock or Smith really have nationalised the banks?) But he flogged that horse for all it was worth to convince the country that a man without a day of ministerial experience had the battle-scars worthy of a world leader.
Camborne Conservatives, who are an ever-shrinking part of the actual Conservative Party, have never bothered to think about their own creation myth beyond a rather vague feeling that Thatcher was always right, Brown is always to blame, and Blair and Major never existed. As this data shows, inequality jumped vividly and dramatically in Thatcher's Britain, more so than in Reagan's America which pursued similar policies during the very same years that Conservatives claim Thatcher was saving the country from national ruin.
Britain had a broadly similar income distribution before 1979 to Germany and the Netherlands, but then in the 1980s and 1990s became more like the US and Canada. Despite being locked into the wider Euro-crisis, Germany and the Netherlands have fared better in the Great Recession than the UK. Dutch public debt was 70% of GDP in 2012 and German unemployment was 5.4%. By comparison, British public debt was 90% and unemployment 7.8%. A widely-reported survey has identified a class of people as the 'New Precariat', neither rich nor poor, but for whom social mobility has permanently stalled. This new class is Thatcher's legacy.
It is not that the figures are disputed by Conservatives, they just don't think that they are relevant. The mind-set, based on a Thatcherite-pastiche of growth being the only economic output that matters, considers inequality, at best, to be a regrettable but unavoidable by-product of economics, and probably a sign that swathes of the population just remain morally weak.
Because the myth that Margaret Thatcher saved the economy is unquestioned (and as a result unfleshed-out) Conservatives are sleepwalking, again, into a decoupling from the electorate whose buttons Thatcher was so adept at pushing. Will Hutton and Polly Toynbee both make the point that those seeking to canonise Thatcher and use her death to sanctify present economic policy are conspicuously silent about how Thatcherite economics, largely unchanged under Labour and certainly not in the last three years, failed to prevent an economic stagnation that is already longer than the Great Depression.
Pre-emptive outrage at those celebrating the death of Thatcher (which was actually surprisingly muted) and predictable BBC-bashing by the Mail and Telegraph for reporting the news of other people being rude about Thatcher, rather than actually being rude themselves, smacks of a prickly, defensive, conservatism characteristic of the American Tea Party who bully away until they are called on it, at which point they play the victim card. And it certainly seems like using a dead pensioner for short-term political advantage rather than properly defending her legacy.
Conservatives have never accepted the premise that prosperity depends on more than just economic growth. The experience of Canada, Scandinavia, and increasingly several US States are just ignored. The sanctification of Thatcher takes up an extended news-cycle in which the Government can avoid talking about their lack of a plan to re-balance the economy away from the forces of finance and towards the forces of production.
Camborne have been glad to jump on the bandwagon of Thatcherite salvation, hoping to bask in some reflected glory, because they think that her legacy somehow validates their vague, muddled idea (I hesitate to say 'ideology') that market efficiency is only ever compromised by government.
The show-down with the miners, who were characterised as luddites who wouldn't accept that the world had changed, is somehow recruited in the cause of legitimising modern Conservative economics. But market forces didn't close down the mines - government policy did. The logic of market forces, the right keeps reminding us, is that if there is a problem the market will fix it. If closing the mines creates one problem you create an equal opportunity in the shape of a large pool of unused labour with particular skills, all conveniently located in one place. The market will respond to these opportunities to create new work in more specialised (and therefore more profitable, better paid) industries.
The communities of South Wales and South Yorkshire may have a different take on whether call-centres, government offices and supermarket jobs count as market specialisation. The decline was not managed by the benevolent invisible hand, it was managed by the clenched fist in the shape of police power and the soft cushion of unemployment and - this was the real change - incapacity benefits. Thatcher intervened in the market just as surely as if she had continued to subsidise coal forever.
In the Iron Lady film, Thatcher (Meryl Street) berates colleagues for not knowing the price of a tub of margarine. Whether this is part of the Thatcher-myth or not, I can't say. The idea of a Prime Minister who built her reputation on being the most serious person in the room instructing civil servants to brief her daily on the price of domestic groceries is slightly incredible. What is less plausible still is either Cameron or Osborne being concerned about the price of margarine, or even being canny enough to try and create the myth. This Government is Karaoke-Thatcher, it follows the rough tune but it is clearly not the real thing.
Thatcher's record is cited both by those who believe that inequality is bad and by those who think that free market economics is the only way to make everyone richer. The curious thing about Thatcher was not so much that she was divisive, but that in a funny way she actually united people around the idea that politics and economics were important again. As the cuts bite, and it begins to dawn on Camborne that thirty-year old myths aren't the same thing as actual ideas, they may begin to wish too that Thatcherism was being buried along with its namesake.]]>This Government Has a Very Jaundiced View of Capitalismtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30337042013-04-07T15:40:33-04:002013-06-07T05:12:01-04:00Alastair Roderickhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-roderick/I wrote recently on these pages about the Conservative part of this Government, and how its opponents seem to have misdiagnosed its driving ideology (if the collection of grievances and resentments that make up modern Conservatism can be described as 'ideology') as one of deliberate immiseration of the poor and vulnerable, when in actual fact it is just an anti-intellectual attempt to erase thirteen years of Labour Government from the national memory. Far from being doctrinaire conservative ideologues, the Conservative part of the coalition seem to be confused Marxists: "From Each According to their Greed, To Each According to their Need to Be Incentivised" would be an apt description of a punitive bedroom tax that won't save much money and tax cuts that would only count as an incentive if the richest weren't too rich to notice.
The hoopla about a sociopath killing six children and whether a culture of benefits contributed to this more than, say, his handlebar moustache is indicative of a Government weaving and bobbing in the hope that this will somehow pass for a strategy. Osborne wasn't clumsy talking about Mick Philpot, and Cameron wasn't forced into defending a vulnerable Chancellor. They saw a chance and took it. Forget six dead children, and certainly forget whatever reforms they think it is they are making to our social security system, the Conservative worldview thinks that the real crime is not to live beyond your means, but to get others to pay for it.
Neither left, nor right, talks about the economic elephant in the room. Our present economic system is organised solely around the idea of consumption, not production. The left doesn't get this, and the right doesn't care so long as those in command of the economy remain untroubled. A traumatic international demand shock (but not, importantly, a global one - this is a recession limited to the major financialised economies of Europe and America) has exposed the nature and the fragility of our economic system.
Rather than all being middle-class now, we are all consumer-class. Economic life is organised around the principle of consumption in the erroneous belief that this will drag everything along with it. Forget the faux conservative-puffery about chickens coming home to roost, the irresponsible feckless facing monumental debts for wide-screen TVs and 4x4's as some sort of punishment for gluttony. A debt-culture, and yes a benefits culture, are the logical results of structuring the economy around consuming things rather than producing things. The right feels resentment towards any entitlement, even towards the molly-coddled disabled with their parking bays. Entitlements just offend the conservative notion that in a marketised economy those with most money must be most virtuous, but entitlements are inevitable if the only economic purpose of the individual is to consume.
Do you recall George Osborne being against consumption before the crash in 2007, against British people supporting British business? The language on all of the right, and most of the left, is nothing other than more growth is a good thing, always. How can you be pro-growth and against debt? The huddled masses of Africa and Asia can yearn for IPads and BMWs as their economies can increase productivity for decades and decades; but we can only pay for more through debt.
Without a fundamental shift in worldview away from consumption and a reorientation towards production, this will never change. Camborne's view of people as only partially autonomous economic agents, whose sole purpose is to feed the machine of finance through consumption by amassing debt, does nothing to address the structural causes of recession and seeks only to rebalance the economy away from the weak and towards the strong.
As obtuse and misrepresentative as it is, at least the American Tea Party seems to talk about and be made up of the kind of wealth creators that the right always idolises. Small business owners, contractors and storekeepers, campaigning furiously for their Medicare to be taken away and for billionaires to be given another tax cut. Modern Tories don't bother with small business anymore. Like all politicians they like being photographed in factories, which is where we think that we work even if most of us don't. But the small businessman doesn't ever seem to be included in this Government's plans. The strivers that Camborne loves so dearly, the self-employed builders, the hair-salon owners, what have they actually been offered by this Government other than the feeling of savage vindication that comes from punishing neighbours with curtains drawn early in the morning when they leave for work, or wide-screen TVs blaring late at night when they return? Determined to drag people down, this Government offers nothing to actually raise people up.
The one industrial sector that always seems to need special attention (timid wallflowers such as they are) is finance. The abusive lover who has hurt us before and may leave at any time, but who we love so much because we just know they can change. What offends most about this economic myopia is that at least Tebbit and Thatcher at the height of their pomp had put in the intellectual hard work. They had risen through the ranks of a party and parliament that didn't much care for women or the working classes (sorry, Grant Shapps, the striving classes) through sheer tenacity, and then bent it to their will through strength of character. Camborne, if it needs repeating, didn't come across their conservatism through hard knocks, they just saw the world as it was and felt little desire to change it. Their resentment is wholly unearned.
Those on the left have spent such a long time avoiding being tainted with the 's' word, that they seem not to have noticed that the Government doesn't really believe in capitalism either. They don't believe in producing things, they just believe in reducing the consumption of certain groups of people. Reports that Labour is most closely associated in people's minds with welfare scroungers have created a skittish and incoherent opposition too scared to flesh out what One Nation Labour - actually a quite exciting intellectual positioning, if only they could pin it down - means in terms of policy.
The near-inevitability of a triple-dip recession, coupled with this Government's refusal to even consider demand-side depression economics, means that Labour has nothing to lose in defining itself more clearly. The British economy is not going to suddenly perform like China's, even if it does teeter back into growth. Before the election, Milliband and Balls have the political and economic space, vacated entirely by the Conservative party, to define what an alternative economic policy to business as usual might look like.]]>This Is Not Conservatism, This Is Nihilismtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29947972013-04-01T17:53:09-04:002013-06-01T05:12:01-04:00Alastair Roderickhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-roderick/
This Government has no central ideological vision of how Britain should be, other than a general sense that it didn't like the preceding 13 years very much. As reviled as Blair's New Labour may be (perhaps the only thing that the large majority of Tory and Labour Britain agree on), it at least made an analysis of what the country needed and how to build a democratic coalition to achieve it.
Ending child poverty, introducing a minimum wage, devolving power to Scotland and Wales were all things that the Tories grumbled about at the time, but they lost those battles. So the battlefield of ideas the Tories wage war on now is a narrow, cynical one defined by a section of the press (no, let's be honest, fourveryspecificnewspapers) because it beats having to actually work out what you are for when it is so much easier to just casually assume that you can shrink the state without any real effect, or that Europe is always bad, or that a large portion of the population will never understand the dignity of work.
How else do you explain a bedroom tax that will hit two-thirds of a million people, including the elderly, single-parent families, the disabled and a large number of the striving poor? The only explanation for such temerity is that they assume everybody to be as disinterested as they are. That they think everybody has drunk the austerity Kool-Aid, can't figure out that a policy designed to save the Government £550m won't make a dent on a deficit of £1.2tn commensurate with the social dislocation it will cause, or remember that the Conservatives were once the party of the family?
Camborne's recent attitude seems to be that they are very disappointed in us as we are all letting British capitalism down. Because laziness rather than ideological clarity leads Camborne, they can't understand why we don't heart capitalism more. Those spiffing, whizzy chaps in the city show us how it is done, surrendering their autonomy to the machine of finance. How could it possibly not work for the rest of us?
Camborne's worldview has finance at its peak, with a mythologised but relatively small manufacturing class just below, and the rest of us losers further down still - the Lumpen-scroungertariat if you will - failing to wake up and join the financier class. So desperate have they been to perpetuate the myth that RBS had to bailed out because of the minimum wage and the EU Working-Time Directive that it doesn't even enter the political vocabulary to question whether a return to the ancien régime is desirable.
I doubt that Camborne are curious enough to have contemplated the Marxist theory of alienation, which states that social problems arise from capitalism's pervertion of the natural relationship an individual has to their means of production. Like everything Marx and Engels wrote it is better read as critique than as manifesto, but if they had they may have recognised the irony of conservativism, a creed which thinks the noblest task of politics is to free people, refusing to accept any economic model for society other than one where we are merely cogs in a machine.
It probably goes without saying that an industrial policy based on incentivising a financier class, and ignoring the economic needs of the other 90%, doesn't really strike conservatives as counter-productive. Financiers make lots of money. Money equals efficiency. The only thing that creates inefficiency is government. Therefore the sole task of government is to make things easy for financiers.
When Thatcher said that there is no alternative she meant that something had to be done and there was no room for failure. When Camborne say it they mean that they haven't thought of an alternative, because why bother? Britain is in all this mess because greedy welfare claimants (and Europe, probably) got in the way of the productive class from trickling down all of their money to the rest of us.
Those on the left should not just be against the consequences of this thinking, they should oppose the ideology full stop. When Camborne came to power they betrayed their conservatism, with some alacrity, by doing two things. First, they felt had to purge the system of any institutional memory of new Labour. Realising that their window was short, possibly less than a Parliament, the party of Burke and Smith decided that they had to force consensus and upend tradition in as quick a period as possible, the wisdom of ages be damned. Second, after a major financial calamity that led to very un-conservative things like nationalising banks and intervening directly in the market to control prices, they decided that the best course of action was to return immediately to the very same system that caused the mess to begin with.
Whatever happened to the conservative values of learning from your mistakes, of plain-speaking, common-sense and pragmatism? Is it conservative to say that the best way to respond to this failure of capitalism is to do exactly what you did before? Or that the market has value independent of its members? As austerity bites, this Government will wear its battle-scars as badges of honour. The only thing worse than letting this Government win the political battles is to let it imagine it is winning the battle of ideas.]]>It is the Ideology That Should Be Downgraded, Not Just the Chancellortag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29477862013-03-25T08:25:25-04:002013-05-25T05:12:01-04:00Alastair Roderickhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-roderick/
Yet, there is still an unquestioned consensus that this is just a market correction, albeit a particularly severe one, rather than a global and structural economic re-alignment. Examine some of the evidence for the structural nature of the problem. The three longest US recessions since the Great Depression have coincided with spikes in oil prices: the 1974/5 oil crisis, the early 1980s recession, and the recession of 2009/10. Except, unlike the 1970s and 1980s recessions, this recovery has not resulted in a subsequent fall in oil prices. This can be explained partly by strong growth in emerging markets, partly by instability in the Middle-East and partly by the growing political strength of OPEC producers relative to Europe and America.
An orthodox economic approach to resource management is to rely on the magic of the price mechanism. But as the energy crisis shows, high oil prices have not reduced demand, nor has full substitution occurred as fracking only produces marginal long-term returns as efficiency savings are soon offset by declining accessibility. Production costs of regular oil have increased by 11% a year for the last decade, and shale oil has hardly made a dent in this, yet the price mechanism has not reduced demand for energy.
The same is true for other declining resources. We have just over a decade's reserves of titanium, essential to modern aircraft and high-quality manufacturing. A decade worth of zinc. Two decades worth of tin. A quarter century's worth of copper, the basis of the digital economy, and already commanding high prices for recycling. Modern computing and electronics are dependent on hafnium (14 years worth left), tantalum (30 years), antimony (30 years) and cadmium (50 years), all of which we assume, without any real evidence, will just be substituted for something else.
Without wishing to lay the 'woods for the trees' metaphor on too thick, the environmental-economic crisis that that many have scoffed at isn't some future threat, but might actually be something we are living through right now. World consumption of oil was barely shaken by the economic collapse, despite recessions being about the realignment of prices and production, as we desperately try to claw our way back to the oil-based economic status quo. Our use of key resources has become decoupled from the economic tools we have to manage them.
The orthodox economic response to problems of production is that we will innovate our way out of these problems. Maybe so, but the orthodox way of thinking gave us a bubble in Rare Earth Metals, and a recent collapse in the get-rich-quick REM Exchange, failing to solve the problem of how to manage these vital metals. These resource shortages will be coming to a head simultaneously over the course of one generation, and the estimates of reserves are usually quite conservative. Nobody knows what the system-wide effects of multiple shocks will be, and if the legacy of a global economic depression following a decade-long oil prices inflation is anything to go by we cannot just assume that solutions will be both timely and easy.
The same attitude that says that there is no alternative to austerity, that the best way to correct a stall is to hit the brakes, will never accept that there are other aspects to economic management in addition to more growth all the time. Like jobs, or prices, or production. The world view of much of the political class (all of the Tories and much of Labour) doesn't even contemplate, much less accept, alternatives to growth and so trying to engage people on these terms is like trying to having a conversation in two different languages.
E F Schumacher believed that the greatest weakness of economics was the misplaced assumption that the 'problem of production' had been solved. Schumacher wasn't just thinking about the ability to make things, he was talking about the tendency for things that drop out of sight to drop out of mind. He characterised orthodox economics as sloppy accounting, imagining natural resources and systems as 'off-balance sheet liabilities', when economic growth is clearly contingent upon the natural systems in which it is embedded.
Instead, a 'heterodox' economics was needed for full cost accounting of natural resource use, and the system-level effects that such use has. A heterodox approach such as Schumacher's may have recognised that a decade of increasing oil prices, higher still if not for government subsidy, would lead to a debt bubble in order to deflate prices and keep consumption high. Such a decoupling of prices from the true value of production was bound, before long, to cause a crash.
George Osborne now imagines himself in the role of noble hero, engaged in a fight to the death to purge the national soul of the toxin of debt. Yet, he has never properly asked where that debt has come from. To accuse the Chancellor of waging an ideological war is to slightly misdiagnose the ideology. Yes, the Government is seizing a limited and shrinking opportunity to use the cover of economic crisis to reduce the size of the state and permanently reduce taxes, but the ideology that is most pernicious is market absolutism. That the market is always right, and if people want more goods and more energy at ever cheaper prices then the market will inevitably supply these. The basic mathematics of production or the effects of system-level resource shocks just aren't considered. The fact that this larger ideology is accepted without question should be of far greater concern than how much longer George Osborne keeps his job.]]>Gleneagles Didn't Change Africa, Africa Changed Africatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28075242013-03-04T16:40:12-05:002013-05-04T05:12:01-04:00Alastair Roderickhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-roderick/Tony Blair wrote in support of David Cameron's commitment to African development and in particular the 43-year-old pledge to devote 0.7% of national income to the aid budget.
Blair should feel some sympathy for Cameron, being out alone on a limb supporting things his whole party seems to be against. Prime ministers are required to walk and chew gum as the Americans would say, so the intensity of right-wing noise about foreign aid or gay people shouldn't be mistaken for the limited amount of time a PM spends on overseas aid or marriage policy.
Blair's gesture comes as Cameron starts to prepare for the G8 summit later this year in Northern Ireland, the first to be held in the UK since 2005. Tony Blair declared the focus of that year's summit to be Africa, and his article mentioned the Commission for Africa, something I had not thought about for a long time and assumed was long forgotten.
I was actually at the launch of the Commission for Africa in May 2005. While the Commission made a big show about having African input into the consultations, I couldn't help but notice that the Ethiopian I was sat next to was one of the few Africans in the audience. Everyone else seemed much of a piece: officials from BINGOs (Big NGOs), western journalists, a few civil servants, and Labour Party workers.
One thing struck me enough to write it down at the time. Asked how many of the report's conclusions were now government policy, the senior FCO official replied: "all of it". One day in the future, I thought, someone might hold you to those words.
So what would Africa be like today if all the recommendations of the Commission for Africa had become policy, and not just in the UK but across the G8? The increase in aid that Blair applauds hasn't been anywhere near what was called for. Official aid jumped from $23.6bn in 2005 to $31.5bn in 2006, but then fell during the global financial crisis so that overall levels have barely increased. Assuming 2012 disbursements held at the same levels as for 2011 then total OECD aid to Africa to date was $231bn. Extrapolating this to 2015 would give $320bn of aid to Africa for the total period 2005-2015. This is well below the $500bn - $650bn promised. Blair is simply wrong when he categorises the legacy of the CfA on aid as an immense achievement.
Debt reduction has been somewhat better, but the role that Gleneagles played shouldn't be over-stated. Debt was the original issue that the Make Poverty History and Millennium Development Goal movements organised around. There was a well thought out campaign with specific objectives in the shape of the Jubilee Debt Campaign. As the One Campaign reports the World Bank HIPC and MDRI programmes have raised GDP by 2% in 36 African countries in the first decade of this century by postponing or cancelling $35bn of long-term debt and have led to an average 3% increase in social spending ensuring that some escape the debt trap permanently.
Achievements in Africa should be recognised as African achievements. This study shows that the missing aid was made up for by growth in Africa itself. Foreign direct investment in Africa actually declined in the second half of the last decade due to the financial crash, including from the BRICs, and have only now recovered to their 2006 level. Yet African economies have comfortably outperformed both the BRICs and donors over the same period.
The Gleneagles process led to some good things. The Investment Climate Facility for Africa, the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa, and Business Action for Africa were all germinated at least in part by the CfA. It is also fair to say that just because African growth can be attributed to others, it doesn't imply that the G8 didn't help.
If the legacy of Gleneagles was unambiguously positive, Blair would now be talking about a post-aid world, but this is not the language he uses. Governance, or "getting things done" as he puts it, implies African ownership, but the big news in the development world seems as reliably oriented to the donors as ever.
I don't wish to minimise such work as the IF campaign which focuses on an important weakness of the MDGs, hunger, and it includes smaller NGOs working on the frontline (go Afrikids)! However, the leaders of IF are the aid-industry usual suspects - Oxfam, ActionAid, Cafod, Christian Aid - who seem to focus on the marketing as much as the details. Just as with Blair, who seemed quite at home in the BINGO-Government complex, they are recruiting the successes of others in the service of their cause. China accounted for 40% of all the people lifted out of poverty over the period of the MDGs and the BRIC nations take this total to nearly two-thirds. Yet the policy positioning of IF seems to be: 'we met the poverty Goal and so on to the next thing.' Whatever happened to finishing what you started?
David Cameron could use the symbolism of a British G8 to build on the legacy of Gleneagles 2005, and perhaps this was the good-natured suggestion behind Blair's piece. Cameron has so far indicated that he favours more broad themes focusing on the three-'Ts': Trade, Tax, and Transparency. I really hope that he doesn't conclude that what is needed is another report written by white people about Africa's problems and how to solve them.
The late, great Dr. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, director of the MDGs for Africa and self-styled Global Agitator, said that trying to develop Africa by calling for poverty reduction is a bit like trying to win a war by calling for bullet reduction. Unfortunately, poverty reduction is still the language of the BINGO-Government complex. It is entirely problem-led, assumes that things like poverty and wealth are divorced from the systems they operate in, and can be overcome by some external and paternal force. It's also increasingly missing the point.]]>The Strange Death of Liberal Englandtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.27348372013-02-21T14:42:53-05:002013-04-23T05:12:01-04:00Alastair Roderickhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-roderick/
Whilst the predictable voices on both left and right erupted to defend either the Duchess or Hilary Mantel following Mantel's piece in the London Review of Books, I couldn't help but think that this has become somewhat formulaic. Blushing young bride, still unsullied by the misfortunes that have befallen a number of her in-laws, gets one mixed review; one half of the media blows up in outrage; the other half groan at the faux-bluster; both halves of the media spend the next two weeks making themselves the story. Jobbing authors and long-lensed paparazzo look for their next Royal opportunity.
The Royal Family has just become another depressing chapter in the British version of the Culture Wars, with one side standing against (as they see it) sneering metropolitan values with no sense of the importance of the institutions that bind society together, and the other side equally convinced that Royal apologists defend the indefensible, desperately and futilely putting off the day at which they will have to grow up and live in the real world. There is a danger that each side cares more about depriving the other than they do about their own nominal concerns.
A thoughtful review by Mantel, which was about the place of monarchy generally and contained about five paragraphs on the relationship of the Duchess of Cambridge and the media (none of which was excessivelylèse-majesté) made exactly the same point as I tried to, that the British monarchy had stopped being interesting with Henry VIII, and was now populated entirely by the mediocre and careless. Except Mantel made the argument in the august London Review of Books, more eruditely than me, and presumably got paid for the article (hint-hint, HuffPo).
There was one other difference too, of course. Hilary Mantel's words received a stern rebuke from the Prime Minister whilst on an official visit to India (if stern is a word that can be ascribed to this limpid, distracted, man.) Cameron, who cares so passionately about the issue that he managed to get the Duchess of Cambridge's name wrong twice within one sentence, took time off from reorienting British Foreign Policy towards an emerging super-power to shore up the Daily Mail vote which, incredible as it seems, he is in danger of losing and which he patronisingly assumes won't hold up unless an unsullied diet of images of nice Kate (nice hair, nice teeth, no troubling opinions) is served up to a grateful public on an regular basis.
The briefest of glances at the Mail Online (I only pick on them because their online celebrity-watching site is so wildly successful, and God don't they know it) will show that there is a well-worn and trusty formula for treating female celebrities - set them up as shallow manqués, potential friends we have been privileged to be granted access too, just like you and me really but with a smashing wardrobe and set of teeth, who will either provide an endless pipeline of daily stories of smiley smashingness, or will at some point inevitably stumble (because of the whole, you know, humanity thing) and provide endless stories about the trouble she now causes, and all the problems she creates, and aren't her clothes and hair just a mess nowadays, and what a God-awful liability her sister is now she's lost her looks.
Rewind the tape thirty years. As that nervous virgin walked slowly down the aisle, lamb to the slaughter, would anyone really have imagined that the country was in for the traumas of squidgy-gate, tampon-gate, the divorces, the bankruptcies, the death, the fancy dress parties, the general failure to engage with modernity? Can we really say that anyone other than certain sections of the print media have benefited from there being a Royal Family in this country over the past generation? Sure, the press will be as obsequious and ingratiating as possible when cornered, but is there any evidence to suggest that they view the Royals as being anything other than relatively un-litigious celebrities, who have the two chief benefits of being incredibly recognisable (so shifting papers, or increasingly, prompting clicks on links) whilst never be able to resort to the nuclear option of withdrawing their fame?
The media considers the Royals to be a just another branch of celebrity, and just as they discard Big Brother 'stars' when they start to fade, Kate is just being set up for a bigger fall. France discarded its Royals with the guillotine; the Americans renounced their loyalty to the crown with some of the most powerful political scorn committed to print; even the sordid, grubby, dispatching of the Russian Tsar involved drama and intrigue. We are in serious danger of having the slowest, most agonised, and downright humiliating unravelling of a monarchy ever: death by tabloid nihilism. The Royal Family was once known for its love of blood-sports, it must be truly squalid to find yourself the quarry.
A consistent complaint of pro-Monarchists, not without merit, is that republicans are patronising, condescending sneerers and metropolitan elitists, too quick to dismiss fans of the Windsors as unsophisticated bumpkins. Republicans are seen as insensitive to the quiet dignity of civic pride, the glories of patriotism, and the admirable qualities of diligence, hard-work and selflessness that the Royals, and especially the Queen, represent. But a large part of this must be due to republicanism being the sin that dare not speak its name. Rather than healthy, principled opposition to Monarchy, many settle for snark or (more commonly) just ignoring the Royals altogether.
Institutions are fine and valuable, and if the Monarchy is the institution that you hold most affection for, then root for it with all your might. We are a democracy, after all, and ultimately democracy wins. But Britain has more than enough institutions to make up for the loss of the House of Windsor, and so those who think that British democracy and public life is more than the sum of Elizabeth II, her heirs and successors, should have the courage to say so.
Britain was fortunate, rare apart from the bicycling Scandinavians, in being able to combine liberal democracy with monarchy. Figureheads, avatars, are useful things; but don't confuse them with actual institutions that work and adapt and remain relevant, like parliamentary democracy, an independent judiciary, a professional civil service, the free movement of people and capital, and a welfare state. I wish Elizabeth II a long life, but she is eighty-six. The moment is ripe to rediscover if this country remains the cradle of democracy and pluralism, or whether we are destined just to be a playground for the tabloid press.]]>These Kate Middleton Pictures Infantilize Us Alltag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.26802582013-02-13T15:50:57-05:002013-04-15T05:12:01-04:00Alastair Roderickhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-roderick/ It has been suggested that Britain retains its crown because it just did things earlier than others. The French Revolution was so much more disruptive and bloody than England's slow Cromwellian trauma because enough time had passed for a revolutionary class to effectively challenge the status quo in France. There is a real danger that we are selling our national heritage short as a result of the affection we feel for the monarchy (and let's be clear - this specific Monarch). It is possible that the country that has given the world so much in the way of democracy and freedom may have peaked too early.
British history is the history of freedom, how it has spread about the world, and of course the incomplete project it remains. I don't object to Government plans to emphasise more British history in schools, just as long as we are teaching all of it and not just reciting lists of long-dead aristocrats. Let's find room for the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Reform and Parliament Acts, votes for women and the ending of the property qualification. Let's acknowledge our early mistake with slavery and realisation that we had to rid it from the earth. Let's remember the contribution to the political development of the world of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith, Tom Paine and John Stewart Mill, as well as learning who followed Alfred and Athelstan.
From the French and American Revolutions through to the UN Charter and the European Convention on Human Rights, British thoughts on freedom, pluralism and rights have remade the world. So why are we so timid at home?
Consider the major Royal 'story' of the week: the publication of pictures of a pregnant Duchess of Cambridge in the foreign press. The British press, who are a model of post-Leveson self-restraint (as they keep loudly reminding us), made a big show of not publishing the pictures of the Duchess on holiday in Mustique. Whilst reminding us about their selflessness in not republishing the photos, the Daily Mail did find space to publish photographs of the resort at which she stayed, how much the resort cost to build, how much the holiday cost, a picture of a lodge in which the Royal couple may have stayed, a description of how Kate looked in the photos that the Daily Mail was ethically unable to publish ("...a tiny bikini which showed off her visible bump..."), a photograph of the Duchess's mother, father, brother and sister who weren't on the holiday, and a side-bar update on how her late mother-in-law died in a car crash in case the Duchess needed reminding of the doe-eyed and inconveniently dead benchmark against which she will always be judged.
I have nothing against the Royal Family; I just having nothing for them. I don't care if Charles is a homeopathy fan or if Philip likes shooting things. Each to their own, which was the basic point of Locke and Mill and all the rest of them. I just think that there are cheaper ways we can all support the Daily Mail other than through state-sponsored celebrities.
The Queen is an admirable woman in many respects, but just as when the keystone is removed from an arch what will happen after she passes, we realise that this is not the Britain of the early-1950s, and the press no longer feels honour-bound by the last lingering fidelity it holds to the current monarch?
Our morbid fascination with this bizarre, ordinary, family invests them with a sort of inverted dignity just by them doing and saying nothing of real consequence. Elizabeth II has perfected this art of saying nothing and having everyone assume that she is some sort of a wise sphinx. Other royals let their guard down and forget about photographers when going about their ordinary business of cheating on their spouse or dressing as Nazis, but the Queen has the misfortune, and the advantage, of constant media attention to every appearance or utterance she makes, no matter how small or banal.
It's enough that we make her open community centres in East Nowhere, do we really have to pretend that each one is an event so auspicious that it needs a head of state just so the few words of civic nicety will be uttered by the last of a long line of the bored and duty-bound that stopped being interesting when Henry VIII retired to his chamber with terminal gout? Is it too much to ask for an actual, functioning, Head of State the next time a vacancy arises? At 86, it should be apparent to all that the Queen won't be with us forever, and people may soon find that affection for the individual does not transfer seamlessly to affection for an institution that 90% of British subjects have never associated with another person.
I was enthralled by the uncovering of Richard III's tomb in Leicester. I was fascinated by this very real link to our nation's past, but I couldn't help thinking that digging up these long-forgotten bones and the respectful re-interment of them was some kind of metaphor. Long-lens photographs of a pregnant woman on holiday don't really honour our heritage in the same way as discovering important evidence about what ultimately happened to a significant figure in British history, whose death saw the end of one Royal house and the beginning of another. Maybe it's time to just very gently and affectionately let go.]]>The Confidence Fairy... It's Called a Depression for a Reason.tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.25746322013-01-29T12:26:57-05:002013-03-31T05:12:01-04:00Alastair Roderickhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-roderick/
But we are not five years into the Great Depression, we are five years into the Great Recession.
There is a taboo that about using the 'D' word. That naming it makes it so, and that using the 'D' word will spook the market. You have to wonder about this thing called The Market, which is made up of self-styled masters of the universe who run for cover under the bed at the slightest jitter in the stock-market. People who treat the market as if it were a paranoid agoraphobe, and confidence as if it was some sort of mythical, unknown potion that could be bottled just so long as we got the formula right.
If you want to have confidence, be confident. We have constructed a system that ensures that those whose money is borrowed (the people with pensions and mortgages) don't get to have a say at all; the least that the economic gate-keepers could do is to pretend that they occasionally bear the same risks of losing their well-tailored shirts. British companies are currently sitting on three-quarters of a trillion pounds in cash reserves, and inflation is still pretty low. Would a gun to the head make you feel more confident?
People seem to be using the term Great Recession in order to distinguish it from the Depression of the 1930s, which is understandable as the term 'depression' is linked with that period and all the things that went with it. The glamorous cars, the gangsters' molls, the hats. But what Keynes noticed, and Paul Krugman has been banging on about for years, is that depressions are not cyclical events but break-downs in the business cycle that function by a different logic. So a focus on budget deficits would only be sensible strategy if you were trying to win the last war. Cameron and Osborne are the generals who showed up to the Somme with bayonets and cavalry.
Witness the abrupt about-face as Q4 output figures were released showing a looming triple-dip recession. Actually increasing spending on capital projects (transferring money from cash-rich but confidence-poor business to confidence-rich but cash-poor Government) was back on the table fast as anything, whereas a week previously such capital investment was the height of irresponsibility because the world would end if anything threatened the sanctity of the British triple-A rating.
So why do we keep pretending as if managing a system so complicated and subtle as an economy is a matter of pulling a lever here, and twirling a knob there, and so long as you get the levers pulled in the right order and the knobs twirled in roughly the right way things will generally turn out right? The metaphor often given by the Chancellor and Prime Minister is that of an oil-tanker which takes a long time to turn around, but even that doesn't work as an analogy for the economy, as oil-tankers can only turn to port or starboard and slow down or speed up. They don't suddenly go underwater or discover that they can fly, or decide to switch to sail halfway through a voyage.
As an economy is so uncertain, what organisational theorists might call a complex dynamic system, why not endow it with a presumption towards justice? That is, when undertaking normal business-cycle management (and, at the moment, abnormal business-cycle management) have a statutory obligation to consider economic justice in decision-making when no other over-riding evidence exists for economic claims. To be clear, I am not calling for redistribution of wealth, what I am calling for is incentivising the use of datain economic policy making so that, for example, reducing the size of the deficit by cutting public services only happens when the assumption that social protection in deep recessions can be most easily guaranteed by reducing public debt is proven beyond reasonable doubt.
It isn't an accident that the collapse of aggregate demand and its failure to respond to normal economic management (like cutting interest rates, flooding the market with new money, and intervention in the bond market) is known as a depression. Depression, while often stigmatised and poorly understood, is often treated by 'unlearning' current behaviours, 'reverse-engineering' the logical pathways of thoughts by which simple problems become unsolvable crises and separate issues become generalised feelings of dread. Treatment focuses on breaking these pathways and finding new means to turn panic into problem-solving. In short, the first step in overcoming depression is to realise that what you had been calling logic really wasn't that at all, and that new thinking is needed based on new evidence.
Similarly (and extending the metaphor to breaking point) sailing into a depression means that sails are aerodynamically propelled by lift, and sailing out they are propelled by drag. Different sails are required depending on local conditions. My point is that your technique and your tools change depending on local conditions, and assuming that what worked once will work again, and especially a misguided clinging to the idea that all you need to make one set of tools work is just to be ultra-disciplined is a false logic. And logic that fails to respond to facts is called ideology.
The market is not the same thing as the economy, and if the fundamentals of this economy are as sound as we are told they are by Messrs Cameron and Osborne, and economic policy can turn on as much of a dime as it has in recent days, then why not make justice its central focus? As Oscar Wilde never said: If a recession may be regarded as a misfortune, and a double-dip recession as carelessness, a triple-dip recession just looks like cruelty.]]>Special Pleading Will Destroy the Legacy of the Millennium Development Goalstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.24886282013-01-16T13:04:30-05:002013-03-18T05:12:01-04:00Alastair Roderickhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-roderick/
The lesson needs to be learned, quickly, that the process can't be an opportunity for special pleading by NGOs. The political climate in 2013 is very different to that in 2001 when the original MDGs were negotiated, a few months before 9/11 and a long time before global recession.
Good intentions are no substitute for good politics. David Cameron, a co-chair of the UN High Level panel negotiating the post-2015 framework, has not had much political cover in protecting overseas aid from the cuts. The Independent Commission for Aid Impact established in May 2011 to audit the work of DFID is no doubt doing important work, but it is at least partly political when many avenues already exist for scrutinising aid, principally the National Audit Office, Parliament, the OECD, and the International id Transparency Initiative. The knives are out for foreign aid, and stories about aid money going to meddling Eurocrats (Telegraph), and corrupt Indian bureaucrats (Mail) will keep up this daily pressure.
There is a significant political opportunity, therefore, to support David Cameron out on that limb he finds himself by constructing a powerful post-2015 framework that ensures civil society and government, both north and south, sing from the same hymn-sheet.
This, unfortunately, is not happening.
In addition to the UN High Level Panel, which is generally supported by the EU, US and OECD, a second process has been established by an Open Working Group of the G77 nations (a club for developing nations) who support the outcomes of the Rio+20 Earth Summit, specifically Sustainable Development Goals as successors to the MDGs. Further complicating the issue is the possible formation of Peace and Security Goals created by the Busan forum on aid effectiveness in 2011. A German think-tank has already called creating a single-track process to produce a bargain between the UN HLP and the G77 to be one of the most urgent issues for diplomats in 2013.
It is not just the structures that need coordinating, the issues do too. So far, Beyond 2015, a British campaign, has solicited suggestions ranging from more joined-up goals to 'weighting' depending on income. One theme that emerges from both multilateral bodies and civil society is the need to look at cross-cutting issues such as gender equality and social protection, more than specific technical targets such as curing particular diseases or improving water quality.
Dialogue is great, and consultation is important. Many critics have complained that the MDGs originally neglected the views of beneficiaries and intermediaries like NGOs and developing country governments. So it is good that the post-2015 process is starting with these groups. But another danger lurks, and that is to fail to learn the lessons of what the MDGs got right.
First of all, they had wide-spread support. The MDGs were the product of a pre-9/11 period of cooperation aided by a relative global peace and general economic good fortune. 192 countries eventually signed up to the MDGs this created enormous legitimacy in a way few international agreements ever achieve.
Second, it stuck to simple messages about achievable, but ambitious, targets. It confronted the big ones, such as those living on less than $1 a day (later extended to $1.25), education, and the major diseases of poverty, on the principle that if you get the big things right then other good things will follow such as women's rights and strengthening public health.
Third of all, it communicated its aims effectively. The mantra of eight concise goals was adopted by the media, reproduced over and over on the internet, and drummed into people the world over from African classrooms to Wall Street boardrooms.
Fourth, it got lucky. Food security didn't dramatically worsen. China, India and others lifted 1 billion people out of poverty, and Sub-Saharan Africa is today the strongest growing region in the world. Governance, whilst awful in certain places like Zimbabwe, N Korea and Libya, got generally better in many places.
However well intended consultations are, compromise just to keep people happy is in danger of obscuring the goals. Exciting and ambitious proposals have been proposed such as introducing a 'social floor' below which nobody should slip (an idea promoted by the ILO). The trouble with something like a social floor is that could unite rich and poor countries alike by implicating the poor in their own failure and suggesting that rich nations are obligated to pay for it.
Most countries have the opposite development experience. Inequality, and the poverty of a minority underclass, actually gets worse before it gets better. A social floor is a wonderful aspiration, but more work is needed on the balance of economic incentives and policy reforms needed for effective social protection.
The framers of the original MDGs (I have been trying to think of an appropriate description for them: James Madison scribbling hurriedly on the back of an envelope is closest) had the nous, or perhaps no other option, to focus on the politics first and the details second. Trying to fill in the gaps that the MDGs left, trying to keep everybody happy, or failing to read where the world might be in 2025 or 2030, will squander the legacy of the MDGs just as surely as not acting at all.]]>The Sustainable Development Goals: Confronting the Major Challenges of the Twenty-First Centurytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.22495932012-12-06T08:30:39-05:002013-02-05T05:12:01-05:00Alastair Roderickhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-roderick/
Although the report card is disappointing the challenge was great and the record of global development targets was poor. In this regard, and on the specific issue of keeping the Goals visible for a decade and a half, the MDGs can be judged to have been a great success. If the details of the Goals are unpicked, and we look at some of the 60 indicators used, we see important progress on issues such as income equality, educating girls, childhood diseases, HIV/AIDS, urban slums and reducing debt.
However, these were explicit goals and not just a series of loosely-related aspirations: having committed themselves (almost without exception) to being measured in a particular way, the nations of the world have to assess them at face-value. This means that the Post-2015 process, and the international High Level Panel convened by Ban Ki-Moon which David Cameron co-chairs, needs to focus on how to structure global development targets as much as on what they should include.
It has become almost a cliché to declare each New Year as critical in international development, but 2013 will be decisive in determining a successful framework for what comes after the MDGs. As part of the 'global conversation' the Post-2015 process is supposed to have generated, the Schumacher Institute convened in Bristol a forum of twenty local and national organisations concerned about what follows the MDGs, and how such frameworks will impact city systems such as Bristol. As a group of organisations concerned, generally, with environment and sustainability, we were especially interested in the prospect of a potential successor that came out of the Rio+20 summit this last summer: Sustainable Development Goals.
Any post-2015 framework has to address the long-term problem of promoting development for the poorest while managing critical resource depletion and global environmental change. At present, proposals focus on one or the other, or present an unfocused mash-up of filling in various gaps in the current MDGs. Neither development nor sustainability adequately describes the task ahead, and composite terms such as sustainable development just don't fit the bill either. What we call for is a new social contract between nations and people based on Contraction and Convergence criteria - the mechanism underpinning the Kyoto climate protocol - which structures environmental agreements in such a way as to strike a balance between the needs of rich countries to remain economically stable and of poor countries to develop.
Unfortunately, the Post-2015 process seems to be business as usual; the fundamental question of how you maintain a development model based solely on economic growth in a world of resource constraints rarely comes up. The High Level Panel has charged itself with building a "...broad political consensus on an ambitious yet achievable Post-2015 development agenda around the three dimensions of economic growth, social equality and environmental sustainability" but hasn't yet expressed an opinion about how compatible those things may be. It is tempting to believe that all good things go together, but just a cursory look at development here in the UK shows us that growth, equality and sustainability require difficult, and political, trade-offs.
Unless game-changing technological advances are made in recycling and conservation, we have on conservative estimates forty years of oil left, seventy years of coal, thirty years of gas, twenty years of uranium and twenty-five years of copper (which makes all those wires that carry the electricity). All of those solar panels we will have to get power from in the future? Many of them use Indium, of which there is only 15 years' worth left. Phosphorous, a fundamental component of many industrial processes and of the fertilisers that allow modern agriculture to sustain seven billion people will possibly last 80 years but as this article notes, contraction of supply creates geopolitical shocks decades before critical resources are exhausted.
Political lessons should be learnt from fixing global targets, and these are proving to be just as important as the technical ones. The first is that of consent. The Millennium Declaration gained support from both donors and developing countries, but preceded an unusual (but brief) period of growth in both donors and recipients (and many developing countries have actually continued to grow during the global downturn.) Any new framework will experience very different economic circumstances, altering the balance of power between an unusually weak 'rich' world, and an unusually strong 'poor' world.
The second lesson is to remember how rich countries got rich in the first place. After decades of structural adjustment, Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, and neo-liberal economic consensus, several (but not all) poor countries are in a position to claim that having taken their economic medicine for so long they are now entitled to claim its rewards. Certain developing countries have significant economic advantages over their richer competitors, most importantly under-exploited agricultural and mineral resources, land and cheap labour. Any attempts to restrain growth in the name of slowing environmental change, or to prevent the same economic practices that allowed rich countries to become rich such as import tariffs, export subsidies and infant industry protection, is likely to meet with stiff resistance from the global south.
What we seek is a new social contract for development: one that pursues economic growth within planetary limits, and asks both rich and poor to make compromises based on their ability to adapt. The MDGs were a high-water mark for global cooperation, and have effectively changed the debate from development being something that only a few can afford to something that is within the reach of many. A poor successor, based on compromise or on over-reach will turn the clock back on global development cooperation.]]>