Just the background
Jeffery Sachs ('shock therapy'), Robert Rubin (Wall Street)
and Stanley Fischer (IMF) types have really given the
economists everywhere a bad name...with their insistence of inflation
busting (to protect the creditors) and causing downturns
and slow recoveries, as well as insisting on rapid capital market
liberalisation that ruined East Asia (in spite of their high saving rate),
Argentina and Russia in the recent past. A recent trip to Indonesia
made me realise how drastically their currency has been devalued
- USD 1 = 1,000000 Indonesian Rupiah)..and their economy
is still to recover to the pre-crisis level.
The US Treasury and even the World Bank (which is slowly changing its
ways) are party to this.
All these have mostly benefitted special interests -Wall
Street, and cartels (Steel industry and Alcoa) in US and also the
financial insitutions and pampered farmers in Europe. Switzerland
spends about USD 5-7 per cow per day - and each cow has
bigger files than even the PM of Nepal. Why cows live under
USD 5-7 dollars per day while the billions live under USD 1 per day is
what the world has come to.
The US's foreign policy is dictated by corporate interests...
and aligned with the Right wing and the neo-cons.
WTO resides in pointlessness, with the US and EU coopting
India and Brazil thus weakening the position of the South last July
in Geneva, accomplishing in 24 hours what could not be accomplished
in 7-8 years. Divide and rule. Coopt. US and EU subsidies are protected
under Blue and Green boxes...while NAMA has been a victory for MNCs.
While economists in general have failed to speak out for the
developing world ('because they know which side their
bread is buttered') or have mostly promoted market fundamentalism -
which is a blind ideology- and have rarely taken into account the
distributional effects of their policies, their blind adherence to
textbook economics, without exploring alternatives has
really been sad.
The US sociologists are now making a comeback to challenge the
intellectual stranghold of economists. Let's hope that the sociologists
with their grassroots feel - and with their new found purpose -
will have a salubrious effect on the way economic policies are made.
I, for one, feel economists have so much to learn from
anthropologists and sociologists. Time to stop the hegemony of the
Western economists with their "The one size fits all' prescriptions
which are foisted on the developing world, without regard to
peculiar socio-economic and cultural contexts of the latter.
----------------------
For more, please see:
Four days in California
US sociologists are finally challenging the intellectual
stranglehold of economists
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,9830,1289616,00.html
.png)
