Aff AT: Neoliberalism Kritik
Extinction First
Extinction outweighs
Bostrom 12 - Professor of Philosophy at Oxford
(Nick, directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, Interview with Ross Andersen, correspondent at The Atlantic, 3/6, “We're Underestimating
the Risk of Human Extinction”, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/were-underestimating-the-risk-of-humanextinction/253821/)//BB
Bostrom, who directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human extinction
risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely underestimated
by society. Some of these existential risks are
fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But others are obscure or even exotic. Most worrying to Bostrom is the subset of
existential risks that arise from human technology, a subset that he expects to grow in number and potency over the next century.¶
Despite his concerns about the risks posed to humans by technological progress, Bostrom is no luddite. In fact, he is a longtime advocate
of transhumanism---the effort to improve the human condition, and even human nature itself, through technological means. In the long
run he sees technology as a bridge, a bridge we humans must cross with great care, in order to reach new and better modes of being. In
his work, Bostrom uses the tools of philosophy and mathematics, in particular probability theory, to try and determine how we as a
species might achieve this safe passage. What follows is my conversation with Bostrom about some of the most interesting and worrying
existential risks that humanity might encounter in the decades and centuries to come, and about what we can do to make sure we outlast
them.¶ Some have argued that we ought to be directing our resources toward humanity's existing problems, rather than future existential
risks, because many of the latter are highly improbable. You have responded by suggesting that existential risk mitigation
may in fact be a dominant moral priority over the alleviation of present suffering. Can you explain
why? ¶ Bostrom: Well suppose you have a moral view that counts future people as being worth as much as present people. You might
say that fundamentally it doesn't matter whether someone exists at the current time or at some future time, just as many people think that
from a fundamental moral point of view, it doesn't matter where somebody is spatially---somebody isn't automatically worth less
because you move them to the moon or to Africa or something. A human life is a human life. If you have that moral point of
view that future
generations matter in proportion to their population numbers, then you get this very stark implication that
existential risk mitigation has a much higher utility than pretty much anything else that you could
do. There are so many people that could come into existence in the future if humanity survives this
critical period of time---we might live for billions of years, our descendants might colonize billions of solar systems, and there could be
billions and billions times more people than exist currently. Therefore, even a very small reduction in the probability
of realizing this enormous good will tend to outweigh
even immense benefits like
poverty or curing malaria, which would be tremendous under ordinary standards.
eliminating
FW
Prefer specificity, neolib isn’t the root cause and utopian alternatives are
educationally unproductive
Giordano and Li 12 - *Paolo, PhD in Economics from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, Lead Economist @ the Integratoin and
Trade Sector of the IADB, **Kun, Research Fellow @ IADB
(“An Updated Assessment of the Trade and Poverty Nexus in Latin America,” p. 375-377)//BB
Despite the move towards more open trade regimes, Latin American economies are still ¶ relatively closed to international trade. Under
the pressure of globalisation, it is likely that in the ¶ coming years the region will need to open further and adjust to compete in an
increasingly ¶ challenging global environment. Latin America being one of the most unequal regions of the ¶
world, the assessment of the trade and poverty nexus is crucial to devise policies aiming at ¶ better
distributing the gains from trade. Latin America-specific research on this topic will ¶ provide
policymakers and stakeholders with evidence necessary to underpin a debate which ¶ seems to be
nurtured more by anxiety than rigorous knowledge . ¶ In this light, it is useful to refer to a few
conclusions with the aim of building up a solid base ¶ for policy debates and future research .¶ There is a gap in the
availability of methodologies to explore the link between macro policy ¶ reforms like trade liberalisation and micro-economic
determinants of welfare and poverty. It is ¶ therefore crucial to invest in the generation of data and research techniques, to
adapt the ¶ research agenda to
the specificity of Latin America and to consider qualitative issues that are ¶ difficult to
measure. Meanwhile, normative statements referring to the trade policy nexus should ¶ cautiously consider the limitations of current
positive knowledge.¶ Trade openness, inequality and poverty are wide multidimensional concepts.
Measuring and ¶ attributing causal relations among these variables without carefully qualifying the
specific ¶ dimensions explored or the particular transmission mechanisms at play may be misleading . It is ¶ important
to disentangle the specific dimension of the trade and poverty nexus from the wider ¶ debate on globalisation and financial integration,
the competing concepts of relative and ¶ absolute inequality and the objective and subjective dimension of poverty and deprivation. ¶
Despite the impossibility to rigorously and unambiguously assert that trade openness is ¶ conducive to
growth and poverty
reduction, the preponderance of evidence supports this ¶ conclusion. However,
the majority of empirical macro studies also show that the impact of trade ¶ on growth and poverty is also generally small and that the
is in fact extremely arduous to find evidence that
supports the notion that trade ¶ protection is good for the poor. The question is therefore how to
make trade and growth more ¶ pro-poor and not how to devise improbable
causes of indigence are to be found ¶ elsewhere. But it
alternatives to trade integration aiming at improving ¶ the livelihood of the poor.¶ Specific evidence on
Latin America reveals that
deductive generalisations of the neoclassical ¶ trade theory
cross-country empirical studies may
and global
be of little help in understanding ¶ the trade and poverty nexus in
the region . Several factors may explain why the integration of ¶ Latin America into the global economy may not necessarily bring
about rising wages of ¶ unskilled workers and poverty reduction. The most compelling arguments are related to the ¶ existence of
rigidities in the labour markets, the historical pattern of protection that created rents ¶ in unskilled intensive sectors, the emergence of
low wage countries such as China and India that ¶ shifts the comparative advantage of Latin American economies, and institutional
factors that ¶ protract the effects of an initial unequal distribution of factor endowments against the poor. ¶ Trade liberalisation
may in fact be associated with rising inequality. But
country case
studies ¶ present contrasting
indications . Although there is some evidence of rising inequality in the ¶ aftermath of trade opening, such as in the case of
Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Chile, it ¶ seems that the
specific effects of trade liberalisation are small or
indirect. Skill-biased technical ¶ change, often directly related with the increase of foreign direct investment or with capital
¶ account liberalisation, seems to have a stronger explanatory power than trade liberalisation . ¶ There is also
little evidence that trade opening has generated more informality. On the other ¶ hand, the case of Brazil, where trade
liberalisation seems to have contributed to the reduction of ¶ wage inequality, is illustrative of the
conditions under which trade reforms may have ¶ progressive distributive effects¶ The empirical analysis addressing the direct
effect of trade integration on poverty reveals a ¶ similar landscape. Trade
poor
but the effects are small. ¶ Generalisations
integration seems to be good for the
should be taken with a great deal of caution because this is a
domain where data ¶ may present considerable shortcomings. In any event it seems that foreign trade reforms are ¶ more important for
poverty reduction than unilateral ones or than the national component of ¶ reciprocal trade reforms. The countries of the region may
therefore expect further contributions ¶ of trade integration to poverty reduction, particularly from the liberalisation of the agriculture ¶
sector where the greatest pockets of residual protectionism are still concentrated. However, ¶ predicting ex ante the pro-poor
effects of trade reforms is an extremely sensitive task highly¶ dependent on the quality of the data and the correct
specification of the simulation
capacity of policymaking
instruments. ¶ It
is hard to overstate the importance of strengthening the
in this area.
Experimentation is preferable to theoretical rejection – political pragmatism is key
orient growth in pro-poor directions
Ferguson 10 – Professor of Anthropology @ Stanford
(James, “Toward a left art of government: from ‘Foucauldian critique’ to Foucauldian politics”, History of the Human Sciences, 24, SAGE)//BB
One of the founding premises of this special issue and the conference with which it began is that Foucault has been read, and used, in
different ways in different academic disciplines. In this article I will discuss one common way of using Foucault’s thought in my own
discipline of anthropology. I will suggest that the strategy of using Foucauldian modes of analysis to ‘critique power’
(as it is often put) has frequently led to a rather sterile form of political engagement. Attention to some of
Foucault’s own remarks about politics hints at a different political sensibility, in which empirical experimentation rather than moralistic
denunciation takes center place. I will reference some examples of such experimentation that come out of my current research on the
politics of social assistance in southern Africa (though I do not have space here to give a full exposition of these). The sort of use of
Foucault that I have in mind is well represented in the anthropology of development (and the related field of what is sometimes called
critical development studies). Here, the characteristic strategy is to use Foucauldian analysis to reveal the way that
interventions, projects, etc., which claim to be merely technical or benevolent, really involve relations of
power. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but too often, in this field, such a simple demonstration is
apparently seen as the end of the exercise. Power has been ‘critiqued’, an oppressive system has
been exposed as such, and that seems to be taken as a satisfactory end to the matter. This impasse in
development studies and anthropology is related, I think, to a wider predicament that progressive or left politics seems to find itself in
today. The predicament is that the left seems increasingly to be defined by a series of gestures of
refusal – what I call ‘the antis’ (anti-globalization, anti-neo-liberalism, anti-privatization, anti-Bush,
sometimes even anti-capitalism – but always ‘anti’, never ‘pro’). The current world system, the politics of the ‘anti-’
points out, rests on inequality and exploitation. The global poor are being screwed, while the rich are benefiting. The
powerless are getting the short end of the stick. This is all perfectly true, of course, if not terribly illuminating. But such
lines of argument typically have very little to propose by way of an alternative ‘art of
government’. Governing is exercising power over others, which is what the powerful do to the downtrodden. It appears as
something to be resisted or denounced, not improved or experimented with. My first observation about this
sort of analysis is that it rests on what seems tome a very un-Foucauldian idea of the political. Foucault did, certainly,
valorize certain forms of resistance, and worked tirelessly to undermine and denaturalize taken-forgranted arrangements of power. But he never suggested that power ought not be exercised, or that it
was illegitimate for someto seek to govern the conduct of others.On the contrary, he repeatedly insisted that it made no sense (in his
scheme of things) to wish for a world without power.1 Naive readings of Foucault turned his skeptical analytics of power into a simple
denunciation. Thus the question (once posed to him by an interviewer) of whether it would be an intolerable use of power for a parent to
prevent a child from scribbling on the walls of a house. Foucault’s instructive answer was: If I accepted the picture of power that is
frequently adopted – namely, that it’s something horrible and repressive for the individual – it’s clear that preventing a child from
scribbling would be an unbearable tyranny. But that’s not it. I say that power is a relation. A relation in which one guides the behavior of
others. And there’s no reason why this manner of guiding the behavior of others should not ultimately have results which are positive,
valuable, interesting, and so on. If I had a kid, I assure you he would not write on the walls – or if he did, it would be against my will.
The very idea! (Foucault, 1988a: 11–13) In the same interview, he complained of those who . . . think I’m a sort of radical anarchist who
has an absolute hatred of power. No! What I’m trying to do is to approach this extremely important and tangled phenomenon in our
society, the exercise of power, with the most reflective, and I would say prudent, attitude. . . . To question the relations of power in the
most scrupulous and attentive manner possible, looking into all the domains of its exercise, that’s not the same thing as constructing a
mythology of power as the beast of the apocalypse. (ibid.: 11–13) In fact, Foucault was as fascinated and attracted by
power as he was by resistance, and his fundamental concern was with how (not whether) power is
exercised. This led him, naturally enough, to the problem of government, which he inevitably took
up as a pragmatic puzzle. Some contemporary practitioners of what I have termed ‘Foucauldian critique’ seem to
think it is some sort of scandal that people should be governed at all – supposing it to be somehow illegitimate
that some should seek to guide the conduct of others. But Foucault took a deep and largely sympathetic interest in the development of
what he called ‘arts of government’. Indeed, he once suggested (in a provocative set of remarks on neo-liberalism) that while
the right had, in the mid- to late 20th century, invented powerful new arts of government, the left had suffered
from the ‘absence of a socialist art of government’, and a historic failure to develop an ‘autonomous governmentality’
comparable to liberalism (Foucault, 2008: 93–4). This observation leads to a question that must be a central one for what I am here
terming ‘Foucauldian politics’. That is: What might a genuinely ‘left’ art of government look like? And where
might we find the specific governmental techniques and rationalities that might enable such an art ?
Looking at the world as a whole – and especially at the poorest and most disadvantaged parts of it, in which both I and my discipline
have long taken a special interest – it seems evident that we can only answer such questions if we are willing to question some of the
foundational assumptions that have dominated left thought throughout the last century or more. Let me cite just two reasons for this.
First, in much of the world (and especially in the poorest parts of it), formal wage labor does not play the
central role that so much left thought ascribes to it. The semimythical figure of the proletarian was, of course, at the
heart of ideologies of state socialism, even as the extraction of labor was foundational to its political economy. But the ‘able bodied
worker’ was hardly less central to the workings of social democracies and welfare states, where Keynesian policies implied a kind of
pact between capital and labor, mediated by the state. ‘Society’, in such a scheme, was grounded on the (normatively male) wage
earning worker and ‘his family’, while ‘social welfare’ intervention was available for those left outside the security of labor (whether
through injury, old age, or periodic dips in the business cycle). Insurance rationality provided the technical means for universalizing
certain sorts of social citizenship (at the level of the nation-state) on the basis of the non-universal (but sufficiently widespread) social
condition of wage labor. This template never really applied very well to Africa, where wage laborers have always been a small minority
of the population. And it applies even less well today, when economic restructuring and de-
industrialization have meant that formal wage employment is ever more the exception than the rule.
In the rapidly expanding cities of today’s Africa, the great mass of the population is not ‘employed’ in the usual sense of the word, and increasingly lacks connections (or rights) to land as well. Neither workers nor peasants, they dwell in the socalled ‘informal economy’,
eking out a meagre survival through an impressive range of improvised bits of this and that (cf. Davis, 2007). The poverty of our
analytical vocabulary in describing such people and their way of life (Are they ‘the lumpen’? ‘The youth’? ‘The informal’ – whatever
that means?) ismatched by our inability to conceive of forms of politics that would given them a central place. Certainly, the old left
strategy of dismissing such people as a residual and degenerate fringe (Marx’s ‘lumpenproletariat’) can hardly suffice when we are
talking (as we often are today) about the majority of the population. The second challenge I wish to note to
conventional left thinking is the rise of forms of social assistance that bypass nation-states.
The usual left stance
identifies ‘neo-liberalism’ as the enemy of the state, and thus of such social goods as welfare and pensions. But in much of Africa, most forms of ‘social assistance’ are funded and implemented by non-state agencies. This has long been the case, in many areas, thanks to the
key role of Christian missions in providing education, health care and other social services from the colonial era onward. The NGO revolution of the recent decades has only accentuated the pattern, to the point where many of the key governmental relations that servicer
most common left response to this
transnationalization of ‘the social’ has been to oppose such developments (again, the ‘anti’), and to
defend the sovereignty of African states, which are imagined as being (at least potentially) the agents of development and
resistors of imperialism. Such stances have sometimes been justified, but they have not led to very
eceiving Africans have are not with state bureaucracies, but with NGOs funded by transnational philanthropic foundations
. The
effective forms of politics . Might another sort of left politics not be possible – one that would
look forward and try to identify new possibilities and openings in the current transnational regime,
instead of looking back to an (often misremembered or idealized) era of sovereign ‘developmental
states’? And (crucially for my purposes here), might it not be possible to identify or discover new
‘arts of government’ that might take advantage of (rather than simply fighting against) recent
transformations in the spatial organization of government and social assistance? This is the sort of
rethinking that will be necessary if we are to get beyond the politics of the ‘anti’ and arrive at a convincing response to Foucault’s
challenge to develop a true left art of government. Such rethinking will have to be willing to decenter the two
sacred touchstones of 20th-century progressive politics – the worker and the nation-state – while
finding or reinventing techniques of government that can gain traction in settings where most of
‘the masses’ are not workers, and most social services are not delivered by states. In such
circumstances, simply attacking ‘neo-liberalism’ and defending ‘the welfare state’ is not terribly
helpful . What is needed instead is a revitalized notion of the political good – and of what ‘social assistance’ might mean in a world
where so many of the assumptions of the Keynesian welfare state no longer obtain. In matters of ‘social policy’, Foucault’s 1983
observation remains true nearly a quarter-century later: We are still bound up with an outlook that was formed between 1920 and 1940,
mainly under the influence of Beveridge, a man who was born over a hundred years ago. For the moment . . . we completely lack the
intellectual tools necessary to envisage in new terms the form in which we might attain what we are looking for. (Foucault, 1988b: 166)
My recent work is concerned with empirical domains in which some of the conceptual innovation that Foucault called for may be under
way. Perhaps the most provocative finding to date is that some of the most interesting and promising
new forms of government being devised seem to be taking market mechanisms that we are used to
associating with neo-liberalism, and putting them to new political uses . Consider, for instance, new antipoverty programs in southern Africa that seek to provide cash support for incomes, and thus (in theory) harness markets to the task of
meeting the needs of the poor. This is happening in several African countries, but also in a great many other postcolonial states – from
Brazil and Venezuela to Mexico and Bangladesh – where leftist and rightist regimes alike have seen fit to introduce policies that transfer
cash directly into the hands of the poor (Fiszbein and Schady, 2009; cf. Ferguson, 2010). The South African Basic Income Grant
campaign is the example I know best. This involves a proposal to deal with a crisis of persistent poverty by providing a small
unconditional minimum monthly payment to all. The argument goes like this: markets are not working for poor people because they are
too poor to participate in them. Government programs are not working for them because the state is inefficient. So: provide income
support directly, in the form of cash, then say to the poor: ‘You are now empowered to solve your own problems in the way you see
best.’ In contrast to older forms of ‘welfare’ assistance, the claim is that such grants rely on poor people’s own ability to solve their own
problems, without imposing the policing, paternalism and surveillance of the traditional welfare state. The ‘social’ of the social welfare
state is largely discarded, in this scheme. Assistance is largely decoupled from familistic assumptions and insurance rationality alike,
while the state is imagined as both universally engaged (as a kind of direct provider for each and every citizen) and maximally
disengaged (taking no real interest in shaping the conduct of those under its care, who are seen as knowing their own needs better than
the state does). (See Standing and Samson, 2003; Barchiesi, 20007; Ferguson, 2007.) Similar new lines of thought are visible in recent
campaigns for an increased role for direct cash transfers in many forms of social and humanitarian policy. For instance, an increasingly
influential argument in the area of humanitarian assistance maintains that hunger is best dealt with by boosting the purchasing power of
those at risk, rather than by distributing food aid. The current international food aid system involves taking excess grain (produced under
subsidized conditions in rich countries) and transporting it to places (largely in Africa) where people are at risk of hunger. Following
Amartya Sen, critics have long noted the perverse effects of this: depressing producer prices for local farmers, and damaging the local
institutions for producing and distributing food crops. Once food aid has arrived, local food production often never recovers, and the
‘temporary’ crisis becomes permanent. As an alternative, Sen’s followers have pushed for cash payments to be made directly to those at
risk of food deficit. People with money in their pockets, Sen points out, do not starve. And the economic chain of events that is set in
motion by boosting purchasing power leads (through market forces) to increased capacity for local production and distribution (Sen,
1983; Dreze and Sen, 1991). The argument recalls Jane Guyer’s groundbreaking work on feeding African cities (1989). Consider, Guyer
suggests, how food ends up in bellies in the vast mega-cities of West Africa such as Lagos. The logistical task of moving thousands of
tons of food each day fromthousands of local producers to millions of urban consumerswould be beyond the organizational capacity of
any state (to say nothing of the less-than-exemplary Nigerian one). Here, market mechanisms, drawing on the power of vast selforganizing networks, are very powerful, and very efficient. Such forms of organization must appear especially attractive where states
lack capacity (and let us remember how many progressive dreams in Africa have crashed on the rocks of low state capacity). Why
should relying on this sort of mechanism be inherently right-wing? Well, the answer is obvious: markets
serve only those with purchasing power. But the food aid example shows a way of redirecting
markets toward the poor, by intervening not to restrict the market, but to boost purchasing power. I have become
convinced that (at least in the case of food aid) this is good public policy . Is it also neo-liberal?
Perhaps that is not the right question. Let us rather ask: Are there specific sorts of social policy that
might draw on characteristic neo-liberal ‘moves’ (like using markets to deliver services) that would also be
genuinely pro-poor? That seems to me a question worth asking. It seems clear that the governmental programs I
have discussed here do draw on recognizably neo-liberal elements (including the valorization of market
efficiency, individual choice and autonomy; themes of entrepreneurship; and skepticism about the state as a service provider).2 But
those who advocate and fight for these policies would insist that they are, in fact ‘pro-poor’, and that
they are ways of fighting against (rather than capitulating to) the growing inequality that recent ‘neo-liberal’ economic restructuring has
produced. These claims, I think, are not easily dismissed. And this, in turn, raises the fascinating possibility that the
‘neo-liberal’ and the ‘pro-poor’ may not be so automatically opposed as we are used to
supposing . What is of special interest here is the way that certain sorts of new progressive
initiatives may involve not simply ‘opposing the neo-liberal project’, but appropriating key
mechanisms of neo-liberal government for different ends. This does not mean that these political projects are
therefore suspect – ‘contaminated’ by their association with neo-liberal rationality. Rather, it means that they are
appropriating certain characteristic neo-liberal ‘moves’ (and I think of these discursive and programmatic moves as
analogous to the moves one might make in a game) that while recognizably ‘neo-liberal’, can be used for quite
different purposes than that term usually implies.
As I have argued in a related paper (Ferguson, 2010), this situation may be analogous to the way that statistical techniques that were
developed in the 19th century for calculating the probabilities of workplace injuries eventually became building blocks of the insurance techniques that enabled the rise of the welfare state. Such techniques were originally developed in the 19th century by large employers to
control costs, but they eventually became the technical basis for social insurance, and ultimately helped enable unprecedented gains for the working class across much of the world (Ewald, 1986). Techniques have no necessary loyalty to the political program within which
they were developed, and mechanisms of government that were invented to serve one purpose can easily enough be appropriated for surprising other uses. ‘Market’ techniques of government such as those I have discussed were, like workplace statistics, undoubtedly
. To be sure: we need to be
skeptical about the facile idea that problems of poor people can be solved simply by inviting them
to participate in markets and enterprise. Such claims (which often ascribe almost magical transformative powers to such
unlikely vehicles as ‘social entrepreneurship’ or ‘microcredit’) are almost always misleading, and often fraudulent. But it would be
a mistake to dismiss the coupling of pro-poor social policy with market mechanisms out of hand,
conservative in their original uses. But it seems at least possible that they may be in the process of being creatively appropriated, and repurposed for different and more progressive sorts of ends
out of a reflexive sense that the latter are ‘neo-liberal’ and thus ‘bad’. Again, my interest here is in the potential
mobility of a set of governmental devices. These devices originated within a neo-liberal project that deserves all the criticism it gets. But
they may be in the process of being redeployed in creative ways. If so, some emergent political initiatives that might
appear at first blush to be worryingly ‘neo-liberal’ may, on closer inspection, amount to something
a good deal more hopeful. This leaves us with a politics that requires more of us than simply
denouncing neo-liberalism . The political demands and policy measures I have mentioned here (whether conditional
cash transfers, basic income, or cash-based food aid) do not merit, I think, either wholesale denunciation or uncritical acceptance.
Instead, they call on us to remain skeptical and vigilant, but also curious and hopeful. They leave us less with strong opinions than with
the sense that we need to think about them a bit more, and learn a bit more about the specific empirical effects that they may produce.
Are cash transfers, for instance, a device for demobilizing the poor (as some traditional Marxists claim) – effectively buying the political
quiescence of those who have the most to gain from radical social change for a paltry sum? Or do they have the contrary effect, as many
proponents of basic income argue – opening up a new space of mobilization and political demand by radically decoupling labor and
consumption and opening a new domain of decommodification? This is not a question to be answered theoretically or ideologically; the
only answer that really convinces is the empirical and experimental one: Let us find out! Such a stance, I suggest, brings us much closer
toward a truly Foucauldian politics. For politics, for Foucault, was always more about experimentation than
denunciation. In an interview on social security, Foucault insisted that what was required for a progressive rethinking of social
policy was not a theoretically derived ‘line’, but, as he put it, ‘a certain empiricism’. We have to transform the field of social institutions
into a vast experimental field, in such a way as to decide which taps need turning, which bolts need to be loosened here or there, to get
the desired change. . . . What we have to do . . . is to increase the experiments wherever possible in this particularly interesting and
important area of social life. (Foucault, 1988b: 165) What this implies is a form of politics that has less to do with
critique and denunciation than with experimentation and assessment . It is a matter not of refusing
power, but rather exercising it in a way that would be provisional, reversible, and open to surprise . If we are indeed to arrive
at viable left ‘arts of government’, we will need to be open to the unexpected, ready to ‘increase the
experiments wherever possible’, and attentive to the ways that governmental techniques originally
deployed for nefarious purposes can be appropriated toward other ends. To do this, we will need to
forgo the pleasures of the easy , dismissive critique , and instead turn a keen and sympathetic
eye toward the rich world of actual social and political practice , the world of tap-turning and
experimentation. That is a world still full of invention and surprise, where the landscape of political possibility and constraint that we
have come to take for granted is being redrawn, even as we speak.
Institutional solutions that limit the negative effects of trade are
COMPARATIVELY more productive than wishing away globalization
Liverman and Vilas 6 – *Diana, Professor of Environmental Science at Oxford University, **Oxford
(“Neoliberalism and the Environment in Latin America,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources, vol. 31, Web of Sciences)//BB
Despite the surge in antineoliberal sentiment in Latin America, it is unlikely that many
environmentally significant neoliberal policies will be reversed because governments do not have the
financial resources to reinstate subsidies and renationalize land and water and are unlikely to
disengage from the global trading system. More probable is a search for institutional
solutions that mediate the most negative social and ecological effects of free trade and less
government. This might include stronger oversight of private water and fisheries, enforceable standards for forest use and
industrial activities, and targeted financial assistance from government, international institutions, and
nongovernmental organizations to certain ecological regions or social groups. This suggests a need for more
empirical and comparative studies that assess what policies and institutions best sustain landscapes and
livelihoods in particular places, especially under pressures of global integration and in the context of local conditions.
FW – Defense of Representations
Our RHETORICAL defense of free trade is a valuable counter to anti-globalization
indignation
Chen 2k – Professor of Law @ U Minnesota
(Jim, “Pax Mercatoria: Globalization as a Second Chance at “Peace for Our Time”,” Fordham International Law Journal)//BB
Despite their impressive magnitude, gains from globalization attract scant scholarly notice and
even less popular attention. Globalization's benefits are distributed among too many people and
across too much geographic space to compete for attention in an affluent but self-absorbed First
World.20 4 Why indeed were the demonstrators who swamped the WTO in Seat- tle "overwhelmingly Anglo?" 20 5 By contrast,
real and imagined¶ job losses from globalization easily captivate a First World popu- lace that
sympathizes much more readily with relatively wealthy, media-savvy First World workers than with any group in develop- ing or
formerly socialist countries. "If patriotism is . . . the last refuge of the scoundrel, wrapping outdated industry in the man- tle of national
interest is the last refuge of the economically dis- possessed."20 ' And given the human propensity to notice strife over
serenity, it hardly surprises that one bad week in Seattle has overshadowed half a century
of earnest work toward pax mercatoria. "To attain any genuine measure of social justice on a global
scale, we must eliminate First World localism. '20 7 We must fight it in the hills , we must fight it in
the streets , we must fight it even in the law reviews .
Their protest legitimates protectionism – our impact turns are a DA even if “the
debate doesn’t leave the room”
Wolf, 04 (Martin, Honorary doctor of Economics from the University of London and winner of the Wincott Foundation senior prize for
excellence in financial journalism in 1989 and 1997, 2004, Why Globalization Works, pg 317-320)//DH
How are we to reconcile the reality of a world divided into unequal sovereignties ¶ with exploitation of the opportunities offered by
international¶ economic integration? That is the challenge we confront. How far, in turn, do¶ the critics of market-led
globalization help us to answer this question? The¶ answer is: hardly at all, partly because of the
divergence of opinions they offer¶ and partly because many live in a fantasy world. Anarchists, for
example,¶ believe in the possibility of a society without government and coercion. But ¶ without a state, power rests with gangsters:
Sierra Leone is hardly a model on¶ which the world can - or should - be expected to build. Those in favour of¶ economic
localization apparently believe the power of corporations would be¶ smaller if they were freed from
the pressures of global competition. Again,¶ deep greens want to halt economic advance, whatever the
wishes of humanity.¶ Protest may be fun. But it is a basis for neither effective policy nor mature¶
politics.¶ Many of the critics argue that more sovereign discretion should be granted¶ to countries than at present, particularly in
relation to the World Bank and¶ International Monetary Fund, but also in relation to the rules of the World ¶ Trade Organization. Yet
many - sometimes even the same people - argue that¶ such discretion should be limited in order to ensure environmental protection. The
argument then is not about the principle of sovereign autonomy, but¶ rather about what countries should be required to do and not to do.
Yet others¶ argue in favour of autonomy for developing countries to pursue the strategies ¶ they desire, while expecting high-income
countries to maintain open borders¶ and provide more development assistance. Others, in turn, argue that highincome¶ countries should
be free to protect their workers from unfair competition¶ from developing countries, while forcing developing countries to accept ¶
minimum environmental and labour standards. This is a cacophony, with loud ¶ disagreements over whether countries should be free to
do as they wish, over¶ which countries should enjoy such freedom, and over what areas of policy they¶ should be allowed to choose.¶ A
narrower set of questions is how far the specific criticisms analysed in Part¶ IV should inform our ideas about the appropriate direction
for reform. The¶ analysis suggests that at least some of the points that critics have made do need ¶ to be taken into account. Among the
most important are:¶ • the case for permitting infant industry promotion (though not necessarily¶ protection) in developing countries;¶ •
the arguments for high-income countries to open their markets in favour of¶ exports from developing countries;¶ • the need to be aware
of the risks of mismanaged liberalization of capital¶ controls;¶ • the risk that institutions might be captured by special interests, as was
the¶ case for the agreement on trade-related intellectual property in the Uruguay¶ Round;¶ • the case for international regimes that deal
with global environmental¶ challenges;¶ • the need to set the argument for international economic integration ¶ together with those for
sound public finances, macroeconomic stability,¶ financial stability, adequate investment in education, health and infrastructure, ¶
encouragement for innovation and, above all, the rule of law.¶ These are legitimate, albeit limited, concerns. But the more hysterical¶
complaints of the critics of international economic integration are nonsense .¶ Transnational
companies do not rule the world. Neither the WTO nor the IMF¶ can force countries to do what
they would prefer not to do. Crises do not afflict¶ sound financial systems. Global economic
integration does not render states¶ helpless . Nor has it created unprecedented poverty and
inequality. The critics¶ represent the latest - and least intellectually impressive - of a long
series of¶ assaults on the market economy. Yet, however unimpressive their arguments,¶ these
critics are dangerous , because they can give protectionist interests legitimacy .¶ The critique
allows protectionists to claim that they benefit the poor¶ of the world as they deprive them of the opportunity to earn their living on ¶
world markets.¶ What sort of world should people who understand the power of market forces ¶ for human betterment now support? What
role should international institutions¶ play? And what are the proper limits of national sovereignty? None of¶ these are simple questions.
Difficult choices arise. There is no one set of right¶ answers. My suggestions come in 'ten commandments of globalization'.¶ First, the
market economy is the only arrangement capable of generating¶ sustained increases in prosperity,
providing the underpinnings of stable liberal¶ democracies and giving individual human beings the
opportunity to seek what¶ they desire in life.¶ Second, individual states remain the locus of political debate and
legitimacy.¶ Supranational institutions gain their legitimacy and authority from the states¶ that belong to them.¶ Third, it is in the interest
of both states and their citizens to participate in¶ international treaty-based regimes and institutions that deliver global public¶ goods,
including open markets, environmental protection, health and international¶ security.¶ Fourth, such regimes need to be specific, focused
and enforceable.¶ Fifth, the WTO, though enormously successful, has already strayed too far¶ from its primary function of promoting
trade liberalization. The arguments¶ for a single undertaking that binds all members need to be reconsidered, since¶ that brings into the
negotiations a large number of small countries with negligible¶ impact on world trade and gives them disproportionate power. ¶ Sixth, the
case for regimes covering investment and global competition is¶ strong. But it would be best to create regimes that include fewer
countries, but¶ contain higher standards.¶ Seventh, it is in the long-run interest of countries to integrate into global¶ financial markets. But
they should do so carefully, in full understanding of the¶ risks.¶ Eighth, in the absence of a global lender of last resort, it is necessary to¶
accept standstills and renegotiation of sovereign debt.¶ Ninth, official development assistance is far from a guarantee of successful¶
development. But the sums now provided are so small, just over a fifth of a per ¶ cent of the gross domestic product of the donor
countries, that more would¶ help if given to countries with reasonably sound policy regimes. But aid should¶ never be so large that it
frees a government from the need to raise most of its¶ money from its own people.¶ Tenth, countries should learn from their own
mistakes. But the global¶ community also needs the capacity and will to intervene where states have¶ failed altogether.¶ All these
commandments matter. But the first two are the most important.¶ The view that states and markets are in opposition
to one another is the¶ obverse of the truth. The world needs more globalization, not less. But we
will¶ only have more and better globalization if we have better states. Above all, we¶ must recognize that
inequality and persistent poverty are the consequence not¶ of the still limited integration of the
world's economy but of its political¶ fragmentation. If we wish to make our world a better place, we
must look not¶ at the failures of the market economy, but at the hypocrisy, greed and stupidity¶ that
so often mar our politics, in both developing and developed countries.¶ The sight of the affluent young of the
west wishing to protect the poor of¶ the world from the processes that delivered their own
remarkable prosperity is¶ depressing . So, too, is the return of all the old anti-capitalist cliches is
as if the¶ collapse of Soviet communism had never happened . We must, and can, make¶ the
world a better place to live in. But we will do so only by ignoring these siren¶ voices. The open
society has, as always, its enemies both within and without.¶ Our time is no exception. We owe it to
posterity to ensure that they do not¶ triumph.¶
Uniqueness
Absolute poverty declining now due to liberalization and interdependence –
continued liberal trajectory COMPLETELY wipes it out
Kenny 13 - Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, MA in International Economics and Development Studies
(Charles, “The end of absolute poverty is closer than you think,” Globe and Mail, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/the-end-ofabsolute-poverty-is-closer-than-you-think/article8374398/)//BB
While the world’s rich countries have been wallowing in stagnation and growing inequality over the past few years, the good news is
that the poor
countries have been experiencing economic growth – and making incredibly rapid
progress in the fight against absolute poverty. A new report by a World Bank economist projects that another
billion people can be raised out of absolute poverty over the next 12 to 17 years – in effect almost wiping
out absolute poverty by 2030.¶ That’s great news for the world’s poorest people. But but ensuring that
these projections become reality should be a priority for the rich world’s policy makers. ¶ The planet’s ‘absolute poverty line’ is $1.25 a
day. That’s around one-tenth of the value of the poverty line in the United States. People in absolute poverty spend the considerable
majority of that income on buying the calories necessary just to stay alive. Everything else – including shelter, clothing, medicines,
education, communication and transport – gets a budget of maybe 30 or 40 cents a day. Not surprisingly, the absolute poor die
younger, are less likely to be literate or numerate, and more likely to be victims of violence and
crime than richer people in the same country or across the world. And every day presents agonizing choices – buy pills to treat a
child’s sickness or a bus ticket to look for work, shell out for a school textbook or buy a few fresh vegetables. ¶ So it is
wonderful news for humanity that the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day has been
plummeting worldwide . According to a recent paper by Martin Ravallion, former director of the World Bank’s research
department, 43 per cent of the population of the developing world lived in absolute poverty in 1990. By 2010 that had dropped to 21 per
cent – it had more than halved. Behind that performance is the historically unprecedented growth performance
of China over the past two decades, but also rapid economic growth across the rest of Asia, African and Latin America. Over the last
decade, GDP growth rates in the developing world as a whole have averaged 6 per cent. Thanks to more rapid progress against poverty
in developing countries other than China since 2000, 280 million more people have been lifted above the absolute poverty line.¶ Still, as
many as 1.2 billion people worldwide lived on less than $1.25 a day in 2010. And how fast that number drops depends on
continuing economic growth across the developing world. Assuming China continues to see robust GDP per capita
performance over the next twenty years, there will be close to zero absolutely poor in that country. Mr. Ravallion estimates that if the
rest of the developing world continues to perform as well as it has in the first decade of the new millennium, as many as one billion
people will be lifted out of absolute poverty worldwide by 2027. The global proportion of people in complete deprivation would be 3 per
cent in that year. If economic performance lagged in the developing world outside China, Mr. Ravallion estimates the global absolute
poverty rate would remain as high as 12 per cent by 2030.¶ Mr. Ravallion’s numbers jibe with forecasts in a 2012 paper that I wrote with
Andy Sumner and Jonathan Karver, colleagues at the Center for Global Development. Using a different forecasting approach, we
suggested that on a pessimistic scenario, 8 per cent of the world’s population would live on less than $1.25 a day in 2030, and under an
optimistic scenario that proportion would drop to 2.8 per cent. Both Mr. Ravallion’s and our estimates suggest the world could be within
striking distance of wiping out absolute deprivation by 2030.¶ So what can the rich countries of the world to help ensure we do
actually lift a billion or more out of absolute poverty by 2030? Aid can play a role. The Bolsa Familia program in Brazil targets
poor families with cash transfers, conditional on parents sending their kids to school and getting them vaccinated. Such programs target
poverty directly, but also help ensure the next generation has the health and education to keep themselves above the poverty line. Aid
be dramatically scaled up.¶ Beyond aid there’s a
reducing barriers on imports from poor countries, encouraging Canadian
already supports similar programs in other countries – but they could
far larger agenda – not least
companies to invest in Africa, increasing the proportion of immigrants that the country admits each year that come from lowincome countries and supporting the development of new technologies – from malaria vaccines to cheap solar
cells – that could
benefit poor people worldwide . Together, these pro-poor policies could have a huge
impact on sustaining the global fight against absolute deprivation.¶ The battle against global poverty still
won’t be won if we wipe out absolute deprivation by 2030. People on an income of $1.25 have far too little income to afford a good
quality of life. People on four or five times that amount earn an income that would be unacceptable in the West. But it would be a start.
And for all we in North America are mired in stagnation, we should play our part making sure it happens.
Quality of life is skyrocketing worldwide by all measures
Ridley 10 – professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
(Matt, The Rational Optimist, pg. 13-15)//BB
If my fictional family is not to your taste, perhaps you prefer statistics. Since
1800, the population of the world has
multiplied six times , yet average life expectancy has more than doubled and real income has
risen more than nine times . Taking a shorter perspective, in 2005, compared with 1955, the average human being
on Planet Earth earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-third more calories of food, buried one-third
as many of her children and could expect to live one-third longer. She was less likely to die as a result of war, murder,
childbirth, accidents, tornadoes, flooding, famine, whooping cough, tuberculosis, malaria,
diphtheria, typhus, typhoid, measles, smallpox, scurvy or polio. She was less likely, at any given age, to get
cancer, heart disease or stroke. She was more likely to be literate and to have finished school. She was more likely to own a
telephone, a flush toilet, a refrigerator and a bicycle. All this during a half-century when the world population has more than doubled, so
that far from being rationed by population pressure, the goods and services available to the people of the
world have
expanded. It is, by any standard, an astonishing human achievement. Averages conceal a lot. But even if you break
down the world into bits, it is hard to find any region that was worse off in 2005 than it was in
1955. Over that half-century, real income per head ended a little lower in only six countries (Afghanistan, Haiti, Congo, Liberia, Sierra
Leone and Somalia), life expectancy in three (Russia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe), and infant survival in none. In the rest they have
rocketed upward. Africa’s rate of improvement has been distressingly slow and patchy compared with the rest of the world, and many
southern African countries saw life expectancy plunge in the 1990s as the AIDS epidemic took hold (before recovering in recent years).
There were also moments in the half-century when you could have caught countries in episodes of dreadful deterioration of living
standards or life chances – China in the 1960s, Cambodia in the 1970s, Ethiopia in the 1980s, Rwanda in the 1990s, Congo in the 2000s,
North Korea throughout. Argentina had a disappointingly stagnant twentieth century. But overall, after fifty years, the outcome for the
world is remarkably, astonishingly, dramatically positive. The average South Korean lives twenty-six more years and earns fifteen times
as much income each year as he did in 1955 (and earns fifteen times as much as his North Korean counter part). The average Mexican
lives longer now than the average Briton did in 1955. The average Botswanan earns more than the average Finn did in 1955. Infant
mortality is lower today in Nepal than it was in Italy in 1951. The proportion of Vietnamese living on less than $2 a
day has dropped from 90 per cent to 30 per cent in twenty years. The rich have got richer, but the poor have done even
better. The poor in the developing world grew their consumption twice as fast as the world as a
whole between 1980 and 2000. The Chinese are ten times as rich, one-third as fecund and twenty-eight years longer-lived than they
were fifty years ago. Even Nigerians are twice as rich, 25 per cent less fecund and nine years longer-lived than they were in 1955.
Despite a doubling of the world population, even the raw number of people living in absolute
poverty (defined as less than a 1985 dollar a day) has fallen
since the 1950s. The percentage living in such absolute
poverty has dropped by more than half – to less than 18 per cent. That number is, of course, still all too horribly high, but the trend is
hardly a cause for despair: at the current rate of decline, it would hit zero around 2035 – though it probably won’t. The United Nations
estimates that poverty was reduced more in the last fifty years than in the previous 500.
Broader trends outweigh income inequality – tech and genius have lowered cost of
living
Kenny 11 – fellow at the New America Foundation and Center for Global Development
(Charles, also a senior economist at the World Bank, Getting Better, pg. 10-11)//BB
How can we reconcile the evidence of income stagnation in many of the world’s poorest countries
with
evidence of dramatic advances in quality of life even for people stuck in those stagnant economies? And what accounts
for the comparatively weak link between growth in GDP per capita and rates of improvement in quality of life? The short answer is that
the biggest success of development has not been making people richer but, rather, has been making
the things that really matter—things like health and education—cheaper and more widely available. It is the invention and spread of
tech nology and ideas that have, literally, reduced the cost of living. A considerable majority of people
worldwide have benefited more in terms of quality of life from technological change and the spread of ideas than they have from income
growth. Even people today who remain as poor as their parents, grandparents, and ancestors back
through time have seen quality-of-life improvements that would astound their grandparents and, in many
cases, would have been beyond the reach of their ancestors, however rich they might have been. For example, probably no country
in the world saw much more than 90 percent of children survive their first year of life in 1900. It
did not matter how rich the parents; the state of health technology placed a significant upper limit on an infant’s chance of
The United States saw an infant mortality rate of nearly 15 percent, despite an average
income that was one of the highest in the world at the time—a little above $4,000 measured in today’s dollars. In this
survival.
first decade of the twenty-first century, the country with the highest recorded infant mortality in the world is Sierra Leone, whose
mortality rate is only 2 percent higher than the rate in the United States a century earlier—17 percent. Yet income per person in Sierra
Leone has dipped as low as $404 in the recent past, or one-tenth the level of the United States a century ago. Countries as poor and
wretched as Haiti, Burma, and the Congo have infant mortality rates today that are lower than those that any country in the world
achieved in 1900.
Life expectancy increasing
Richards 9 – PhD in Philosophy @ Princeton
(Jay Richards, PhD with honors in Philosophy and Theology from Princeton, “Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not
the Problem,” pg. 200)//BB
Long-term trends in life expectancy—surely an important indicator of environmental health—are
good, not bad. Those trends are the result of human innovations made possible by societies that enjoy
political and economic freedom . Life expectancy has gone up worldwide in the last fifty
years, even in poor countries. The trends go down only in countries with widespread war and extremely corrupt and despotic
governments.29 Before listing its litany of traditional complaints, even the United Nations admitted as much. Its
unreported 2007 document titled “State of the Future” began: “People around the world are becoming healthier ,
wealthier , better educated , more peaceful , more connected , and they are living
longer .”30 The document even goes so far as to admit that these improvements are the fruit of free trade
and technology .
We control uniqueness – global calamities on the decline now
Fettweis 11 – Professor of Political Science @ Tulane
(Christopher, Professor of Political Science @ Tulane, Dangerous Times?: The International Politics of Great Power Peace, pg. 85-86)//BB
The evidence supports the latter. Major wars tend to be rather memorable, so there is little need to demonstrate
that there has been no such conflict since the end of the Cold War. But the data seem to support the
'trickle-down" theory of stability as well. Empirical analyses of warfare have consistently shown that the number of
all types of wars-interstate, civil, ethnic, revolutionary, and so forth-declined throughout the 1990s and into
the new century, after a brief surge of postcolonial conflicts in the first few years of that decade.' Overall levels of conflict tell only part
of the story, however. Many other aspects of international behavior, including some that might he considered secondary
effects of warfare, are
on the decline as well. Some of the more important, if perhaps underreported, aggregate global trends
conflict. Ethnonational wars for independence have declined to their
include the following: • Ethnic
lowest level since 1960, the first year for which we have data.' • Repression and poh twa! discrimination against ethnic minorities.
The Minorities at Risk project at the University of Maryland has tracked a decline in the number of minority groups around the world
that experience discrimination at the hands of states, from seventy-five in 1991 to forty-one in 2003.1 • War termination versus
outbreak. War termination settlements have proven to be more stable over time, and the number of
new conflicts is lower than ever before.' • Magnitude of conflict/battle deaths. The average number of
battle deaths per conflict per year has been steadily declining."' The risk for the average person of dying in battle
has been plummeting since World War IT-and rather drastically so since the end of the Cold War.' • Genocide. Since war is usually a
necessary condition for genocide,-9 perhaps it should be unsurprising that the incidence of genocide and other mass
slaughters declined by 90 percent between 1989 and 2005, memorable tragedies notwithstanding.' • Coups.
Armed overthrow of government is becoming increasingly rare , even as the number of national
governments is expanding along with the number of states-"' Would-he coup plotters no longer garner the kind of automatic outside
support that they could have expected during the Cold Ware or at virtually any time of great power tension. Third party intervention.
Those conflicts that do persist have less support from outside actors, just as the constructivists expected. When the great powers have
intervened in local conflicts, it has usually been in the attempt to bring a conflict to an end or, in the case of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, to
punish aggression." •
Human rights abuses , Though not completely gone, the number of large-scale
abuses of human rights is also declining . Overall, there has been a clear, if uneven, decrease in what the Human
Security Centre calls "one-sided violence against civilians" since 1989.1 • Global military spending. World military spending
declined by one third in the first decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall.` Today that spending is less than 2.5 percent of global CliP;
which is about twothirds of what it was during the Cold War. • Terrorist attacks. In perhaps the most counterintuitive trend, the
number of worldwide terrorist incidents is far smaller than it was during the Cold War. if Iraq and
South Asia were to he removed from the data, a clear, steady downward trend would become
apparent. There were 300 terrorist incidents worldwide in 1991, for instance, and 58 in 2005:' International conflict and crises have
steadily declined in number and intensity since the end of the Cold Var. By virtually all measures, the world is a far more
peaceful place than it has been at any time in recorded history . Taken together, these trends
seem to suggest that the rules by which international politics are run may indeed he changing.
Epistemology
Prefer our evidence – theirs ignores STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT data
proving neoliberalism solves poverty
Mishkin 6 – PhD in Economics, Professor of Economics @ Columbia
(Frederic, “The Next Great Globalization: How Disadvantaged Nations Can Harness Their Financial Systems to Get Rich,” Ch 1)//BB
Have the participants in this new Age of Globalization experienced the good economic outcomes and the
reduction of poverty associated with the previous Age of Globalization? Data suggest that they have . World
economic growth from 1960 to today has been at the highest pace in the history of the world: world
income per person has been rising at a 2% annual rate.18 Critics of globalization point out that income inequality
across countries has grown and argue that for this reason globalization has not been good for the poor. But they have not
looked carefully enough at the data . Income inequality across countries has risen only
because, as in the period before World War I, those countries that have been active in global markets have
grown very rapidly. Meanwhile those who have not (such as most countries in sub-Saharan Africa) have not
only seen their position relative to globalizers fall but also experienced absolute drops in income
per person. As before, the globalizers have won and the non-globalizers have lost. In 1960 the income of the
average person in Somalia was 10% higher than that of his South Korean counterpart. Over the next forty-five years, Somalians
experienced a drop in their income, so that Somalia’s income per person is now less than one-tenth that of South Korea’s: Somalia’s
income per person decreased by 33% while South Korea’s increased by more than 1000%.19 ¶ What we have seen in this new Age of
Globalization is a convergence of income per person among countries that have been able to take advantage of globalization by
becoming export oriented. For this set of countries, income inequality has decreased; for the non-globalizers, it hasn’t.20 Furthermore,
there is little evidence that globalization has increased income inequality within developing
countries.21 (There has, however, been an increase in income inequality within rich countries in recent years that might be related to
globalization.)22 Thus we are led to the same conclusion that we reached for the pre–World War I era: this new Age of
Globalization has seen a reduction of poverty in developing countries that have been willing and
able to globalize.¶ Another way of looking at the data also suggests that globalization has been associated
with reductions in poverty. If, instead of looking at inequality across countries, where all countries are weighted equally, we
instead look at inequality across the world population, where each person is weighted equally, we get a very different picture. The great
success stories in recent years have been in Asia, which has two of the most populous countries in the world, India and China. Both
countries came to globalization late and have sometimes used unorthodox methods to develop their economies, but their embrace of
globalization has had high payoffs. Rapid growth in India and China has removed over a billion people from extreme poverty. When we
realize that these billion make up a sixth of the world’s population, it becomes obvious why research that weights every human being
equally in computing inequality finds that income inequality has actually fallen, not risen, in recent years.23 The great success
stories of India and China in reducing poverty are reflected not just in economic data but also in life
expectancy. In 1955 life expectancies in India and China were thirty-nine and forty-one years, respectively; today they have risen to
sixty-two years in India and seventy years in China.24¶ These success stories are not meant to minimize the terrible plight of certain
parts of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa, where poverty has increased and life expectancy has actually fallen to disastrously low
levels in recent years because of the AIDS epidemic. (Those in poverty, defined as having income of less than $2 per day, rose from
73% of the population to over 76% today, while life expectancy has dropped from fifty years in 1990 to less than forty-six years
currently.)25 The plight of these countries, however, is due not to globalization but rather to the failure to
globalize. This observation has been cogently expressed by economists Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson: “As far as we can tell,
there are no anti-global victories to report for the postwar Third World.”26 ¶ A word of caution: The association of the reduction in
poverty with countries that have globalized could be the result of reverse causality. That is, countries that had the capability to grow fast
were also the ones that could take advantage of globalization. Evidence and analysis presented later in this book, however, suggest
that causality is likely to run from globalization to high economic growth and reductions in
poverty.¶ Financial Globalization in Emerging Market Economies: The Next Great Globalization?¶ Although economic globalization
has come a long way, in one particular dimension it is far from complete. As is documented in Maurice Obstfeld and Alan Taylor’s
book, Global Capital Markets, financial globalization is primarily confined to rich countries.27 Despite the huge increase in international
capital flows in recent years, they primarily flow from North to North, that is, from rich countries to other rich countries that are mostly
in the Northern Hemisphere, rather than from North to South, from rich to poor countries.28 Most international capital flows are
exchanges of assets between rich countries and are undertaken primarily for diversification. These flows enable people in rich countries
to put their eggs into different baskets by holding assets from other rich countries. International capital does not generally flow to poor
countries to enhance their development.¶ As Nobel laureate Robert Lucas has pointed out, this feature of international capital flows is a
paradox: Why doesn’t capital flow from rich to poor countries?29 We know that labor is incredibly cheap in poor countries, and so we
might think that capital would be especially productive there. Just think of how hugely profitable a factory might be in a poor country
where wages are one-tenth of what they are in the United States. We should expect massive flows of capital from rich countries (where
the returns on capital should be far lower) to poor countries (where they should be higher). While there has been a big increase in the
amount of capital moving to emerging market countries in recent years, capital still flows primarily from one rich country to another,
where the returns on capital are similar.30¶ The amount of private capital flowing to emerging market countries increased dramatically in
the 1990s, and its annual rate is now over $300 billion. That may sound like a lot, but it is only one-fifth of total international capital
flows from private sources.31 When governments are added into the picture, recent developments are even more surprising. Emerging
market countries have actually been sending capital back to rich countries. The United States is currently running enormous trade and
current account deficits of over $600 billion because Americans are buying more goods and services from other countries than they are
selling to other countries. These deficits are being financed by loans from foreigners, with emerging market countries providing the
United States with about $200 billion per year. The Chinese government, for example, has accumulated almost $800 billion of foreign
assets, and it is now one of the largest holders of U.S. Treasury securities in the world. ¶ Also remarkable is the finding that capital flows
from North to South relative to total capital flows are far smaller than they were in the first Age of Globalization in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. By 1914 around half of the capital in Argentina was supplied by rich foreign countries, particularly Great
Britain.32 Today less than one-tenth of Argentine capital is being supplied by foreigners.33 This change in the pattern of capital flows
has not been confined to Argentina. In 1913 over 25% of the world stock of foreign capital went to countries with income per person
less than one-fifth that of the United States; by 1997 this figure had fallen to around 5%.34 ¶ As these numbers show, financial
globalization is far from complete. Will financial systems in emerging market economies become more integrated with those in the rest
of the world? Will the next great globalization be financial? If it is, will further financial globalization benefit poorer countries?¶ Is
Financial Globalization Always Beneficial?¶ The
benefits of globalization of trade in goods and services are
not a controversial subject among economists . Polls of economists indicate that one of the
few things they agree on is that the globalization of international trade, in which markets are
opened to flows of foreign goods and services, is desirable .35 (Globalization of trade is, however, controversial
among the general public and more will be said about it in Chapters 8 and 12.) Financial globalization, opening markets to flows of
foreign capital, is, however, highly controversial even among economists.
Prefer our evidence – their evidence is futile intellectual pride
Saunders 7 – Professor @ Australian Graduate School
(Peter, Adjunct Professor at the Australian Graduate School of Management, Why Capitalism is Good for the Soul,
http://www.insideronline.org/archives/2008/spring/chap3.pdf)//BB
Andrew Norton notes that disaffected intellectuals since Rousseau have been attacking capitalism
for its failure
to meet ‘true human needs.’(26) The claim is unfounded , so what is it about capitalism that so upsets
them?
Joseph Schumpeter offered part of the answer. He observed that capitalism has brought into being an
educated class that has no responsibility for practical affairs, and that this class can only make a
mark by criticising the system that feeds them.(27) Intellectuals attack capitalism because that
is how they sell books and build careers . More recently, Robert Nozick has noted that
intellectuals spend their childhoods excelling at school, where they occupy the top positions in the
hierarchy, only to find later in life that their market value is much lower than they believe they are
worth. Seeing ‘mere traders’ enjoying higher pay than them is unbearable, and it generates irreconcilable disaffection with the market
system.(28)
But the best explanation for the intellectuals’ distaste for capitalism was offered by Friedrich Hayek in The Fatal
Conceit.(29) Hayek understood that
capitalism offends intellectual pride , while socialism flatters it.
Humans like to believe they can design better systems than those that tradition or evolution have
bequeathed. We distrust evolved systems, like markets, which seem to work without intelligent
direction according to laws and dynamics that no one fully understands. Nobody planned the
global capitalist system, nobody runs it, and nobody really comprehends it. This particularly
offends intellectuals, for capitalism renders them redundant. It gets on perfectly well without them. It does not need them
to make it run, to coordinate it, or to redesign it. The intellectual critics of capitalism believe they know what
is good for us, but millions of people interacting in the marketplace keep rebuffing them. This,
ultimately, is why they believe capitalism is “bad for the soul”: it fulfills human needs without first seeking their moral
approval.” to end at a paragraph.
Their authors scapegoat corporations – hold them to a high standard of causal
evidence
Norberg 3 – MA in History
(Johan Norberg, MA with a focus in economics and philosophy, In Defense of Global Capitalism, pg. 290-291)//BB
All change arouses suspicion and anxiety, sometimes justifiably so; even positive changes can have troublesome consequences in the
short term. Decisionmakers are unwilling to shoulder responsibility for failures and problems. It is
preferable to be able to blame someone else. Globalization makes an excellent scapegoat . It
contains all the anonymous forces that have served this purpose throughout history: other countries,
other races and ethnic groups, the uncaring market. Globalization does not speak up for itself when
politicians blame it for overturning economies, increasing poverty, and enriching a tiny minority, or when entrepreneurs say that
globalization, rather than their own decisions, is forcing them to pollute the environment, cut jobs, or raise their own salaries. And
globalization doesn't usually get any credit when good things happen —when the
environment improves, the economy runs at high speed and poverty diminishes. Then there are
plenty of people willing to accept full responsibility for the course of events. Globalization does
not defend itself. So if the trend toward greater globalization is to continue, an ideological
defense will be needed for freedom from borders and controls.
Epistemology – Economics Good
Economics is a necessary tool to avert extinction
Wagner 11 - works in the office of economic policy and analysis @ EDF
Gernot, “But Will the Planet Notice? How Smart Economics Can Save the World.” Hill and Wang Press, p. 11-12
The fundamental forces guiding the behavior of billions are much larger than any one
of us. It's about
changing our system, creating a new business as usual. And to do that we need to think about what makes our system run. In the end, it
comes down to markets , and the rules of the game that govern what we chase and how we chase it. Scientists can tell us
how bad it will get. Activists can make us pay attention to the ensuing instabilities and make politicians take note. When the task
comes to formulating policy, only economists can help guide us out of this morass and save the planet .
In an earlier time with simpler problems, environmentalists took direct action against the market's brutal
forces by erecting roadblocks or chaining themselves to trees. That works if the opposing force is a lumberjack with a chain saw. It
might even work for an entire industry when the task is to ban a particular chemical or scrub a pollutant out of smokestacks. But that
model breaks down when the opposing force is ourselves: each and every one of us demanding that the globalized
market provide us with cheaper and better food, clothes, and vacations. There is no blocking the full, collective desires of
the billions who are now part of the market economy and the billions more who want to—and ought to—be part of it. The only
solution is to guide all-powerful market forces in the right direction and create incentives for each of
us to make choices that work for all of us. The guideposts we have today for market forces evolved helter- skelter from a
historical process that gave almost no weight to the survival of the planet, largely because the
survival of the planet was not at stake. Now it is. Since we can't live without market forces,
we need to guide them to help us keep the human adventure going in workable ways, rather than continue on the
present path right off the edge of a cliff.
It’s uniquely situated to overcome inequality
Frakt 9 – PhD, Professor of Health Care Financing & Economics at the VA Boston Healthcare System, studying the health insurance
experience of vulnerable non-elderly populations including the disabled. Currently, Dr. Frakt is working on a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
project to study the private fee for service plans in Medicare using the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey. For the Agency for Healthcare
Research and Quality and the VA, Dr. Frakt is studying non-elderly veterans and non-veterans who may be disabled and/or uninsured using
Medical Expenditure Panel Survey data
(Austin, “Reader Response: In Defense of Economics,” The Incidental Economist, http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/reader-responsein-defense-of-economics/)//BB
In a comment to the post by me and Julian Jamison on income inequality Gomez wrote¶ Economics and game theory are
inappropriate to address social concerns of income inequality, except as a matter of sheer curiosity.¶ Of course if I
agreed I could not continue doing my job. So, naturally,
I could not disagree more
with Gomez. Here’s why:¶
Economics is a tool. One can debate the appropriateness of its influence but I think such a debate misses the point. Economics
offers the ability to study a problem with a degree of precision not offered by other disciplines.
That precision doesn’t tell us what to do, but it does provide insight we ought to at least consider.¶ The
conclusion of my post The Curse of Nonuniqueness expresses similar sentiments, though the focus there was health reform not income
inequality. I wrote,¶ The value of welfare economics in particular and economics in general is the clarity of
thought it enforces. A welfare analysis of almost any type will lead the analyst to consider
particulars and consequences that are opaque to casual thought .¶ I’m all for removing opacity. It is
hard to imagine an issue of public policy for which ignorance would be beneficial in the long
run, if even in the short run.¶ More importantly, economics, its rhetoric, paradigms, and conclusions are
accepted in the arena of policy debate. They may not convince, but they’re admitted . That is,
economics opens a door . People of influence–policymakers, journalist, etc.–will hear
economics . They often seek it. I think to dismiss it is a self-inflicted wound. The opposition (whatever
not lay down the arsenal of economics so readily. Then you’ll be outgunned. Is that a good idea? I don’t think so.
you perceive that to be) may
Prefer economists – ideologically diverse, policy-divorced, objective scientists whose
only detractors are, themselves, implicated by ideological motivations.
Colander 04 – Christian A. Johnson Distinguished Professor of Economics at Middlebury College (David Charles, “Economics as an
Ideologically Challenged Science”, September 2004; < http://cat2.middlebury.edu/econ/repec/mdl/ancoec/0422.pdf>, p. 2-8)//Beddow
I find myself largely unconvinced by these heterodox charges of bias . Since the reason I am
unconvinced probably has as much to do with the reference point I am using as it does with the actual nature of mainstream economics,
let me begin my consideration by giving what I see as my reference point. I see myself as a general economist and historian of economic
thought who has been critical of the mainstream profession, but who nonetheless sees himself as part of that broader mainstream. I have
no strong emotional tie to mainstream economics, but I do have a strong sense of the inevitable institutional realities and the
imperfections of the world; I am a realist, not an idealist. Heterodox
economists’ charges would likely have
been considered more sympathetically from a non-economist, academic, reference point,
which, in its postmodern version, sees ideology everywhere (except possibly in itself),
whereas mainstream economics would likely be considered more sympathetically from the
lay-public reference point, where, at least in the United States, the majority view is that
academics have a left-leaning ideological bias, and the economists are probably the best of
a highly-ideologically tainted group. Net let me discuss what I mean by ideologically challenged. By
ideologically challenged I do not mean that there is an ideological component to
economists’ argument. Obviously, there is. The question one asks, the frame that one uses
in structuring an approach to an issue, and even the language one uses, all embody
ideological content and thus every researcher is in some sense ideologically biased. As Leroux
(2004) points out, there is no escaping the Mannheim Paradox. So it goes without saying that there is an
ideological component in economics. Even at its best, any field of study can only reflect the culture of which it is a
part. What I take from this insight about the pervasiveness of ideology is the following: When everything, even the
consideration of ideology, is ideological, then the ideological reference point must be in
term s of relative degrees of ideological bias. To condemn any field for being ideological is
useless; all fields of inquiry are guilty as charged. But so too are the chargers. Thus, I will avoid
any consideration of postmodern arguments of deep structural ideological bias and focus m y consideration on intentional ideological
bias, or, if unintentional, on bias that exceeds that ideological background level of ideology that affects us all. This is, of necessity, a
judgment call, not a proof, but I believe that m a king a judgment on whether economics exceeds this threshold is important because that
judgment plays a role in deciding whether to take the results of mainstream economic research at face value, or whether those results
should be passed through an ideological filter b e f o re using them in a decision process. In judging economics’ ideological bias two
other issues m u s t also be taken into account. The first is that economics is involved in policy deliberations, and those deliberations
necessarily require value judgments to arrive at any conclusion. As Michael Frieden (20 03) write s: “Ideologies need, after all, to
straddle the worlds of political thought and political action, for one of their central functions is to link the two.” (p. 76- 77) The point is
that policy prescriptions must be based on values; one cannot violate Hume’s Dictum that a “should” can only be derived from another
“should.” Sophisticated considerations of ideology, such as Kenneth Hoover’s Economics as Ideology (2003), see ideology as necessary
to give definition and meanings for such contentious concepts as equality, justice, and freedom. Ideologies
are thus m o re
prevalent in a policy than in a pure science. One can see that when supposedly pure science
enters into policy issues, as is occurring in the global warming debate, the charges of
ideological bias increase substantially. A second issue that needs to be considered is what might be called the status
quo bias. For Marx, ideology referred to the way in which groups holding power subtly structure the meaning an d interpretation of
reality, and what is viewed as natural, to achieve their ends. Amadae, Foley, and other thoughtful critics of economics seem to me to be
following Marx, and, in many ways, that choice leads them to their conclusion that economics is ideologically biased. While I agree with
Marx’s observation, I do not see Marx’s observations as providing much guidance about a useful reference point from which to judge
the ideological bias of a field of study. The reason is that not
only is it impossible for society to escape an
ideological bias, it is also impossible for society to avoid the status quo bias. Groups holding
power will inevitably structure things to support their position; money will flow easier to those who support the system than it will to
those who oppose it. That is the only evolutionary stable equilibrium. The status quo bias allows some challenges to the system ; a
successful evolving complex system operating in a changing environment needs challenges, but the status quo bias poses obstacles to
any challengers, m a king only the hardiest challenges survive. Academia is democratic capitalism’s incubator for challenges to the
system, and thus academia has m o re freedom than most parts of society, but the status quo bias means that the chances for survival of
arguments critic al of the system are much lower than the chances of survival for arguments supportive of the system . Because of the
status quo bias, even if, on average, economists openly analyzed issues in as nonideological a manner as possible, the groups holding
power would pick and choose subsets of mainstream research favoring the existing system to support and to publicize .
To set the
ideological bar at what might be called the Marxian level, which presumes no status quo
bias, is, in m y view, essentially to condemn all sustainable mainstream research, be it in
economics or any field, if that research is not strongly critical of the status quo. But that
leaves no one to argue in favor of the status quo without their being guilty of having an
ideological bias in favor of the current system. That, to me, is not a useful bar, because it
does not distinguish between shades of ideological bias with in mainstream work—in this view,
the only difference between mainstream scientists and pro-status quo ideologues is that mainstream economists are more subtle in hiding
their ideological views; they are both tainted. 2 I believe that it is important to distinguish these different levels, and that the ideological
bias bar must be set at a level that accounts for an expected level of status quo bias. Let me begin with a few observations about
mainstream economics. My first observation is that one seldom sees mainstream economists discussing ideology in their research. It is in
heterodox economics that that ideology is discussed. What is the reason f o r this lack of interest in ideology? Are mainstream
the reason most mainstream
economists don’t discuss ideology is that they don’t think much about it, and have little to
say about it. As I argued in Colander (1991), most academic economists are local utility maximizers;
they operate within a narrowly defined institutional structure. By that I mean that most
economists go about their daily business doing what they were taught to do— analyzing
problems, bringing the tools they learned to bear on problem s, providing empirical
analysis of policy issues, teaching, or doing whatever else goes along with the normal
process of advancing along in their career. They spend little time thinking about the
broader meaning of their research, or broader ideological issues in general. Any discussion
of ideology, or any broader philosophical issue, is usually pushed aside as a hobby, not a
part of doing economics. Modern U.S. academic economists do not see themselves as
directly involved in policy; they see themselves as technicians. 3 Their input into policy is not front line,
economists intentionally hiding their ideology by burying it? I believe not; I believe that
but in the background, finding empirical relations hips and studying whether policies work. They see themselves as scientists, but in
term s of t heir policy work, they are better seen as engineers. The following statement of a student whom I recently interviewed at top
graduate program s in the U.S. is typical of their views. 4 He states, “Although a direct link to policy formation is not always present,
economists serve a crucial role in providing clarification of issues both technically and in policy debates.” Most of the students (68%) I
surveyed did not consider political reasons to be important in their decision to do graduate work in economics; only 11% saw them as
very important. Fifty percent of the students I surveyed listed desire to engage in policy formulation as very important, but they did not
What I take from
this evidence is that the role most U.S. economists see themselves playing is not that of a
person directly involved in m a king policy within a political arena, but instead as that of a
person engaged in policy formation via providing expert empirical support rather than
recommending direct policy implementation. This disregard for ideology has, of course,
ideological overtones. But, in m y view, it falls within the level of back ground ideology,
like background radiation, that permeates everything we do. My second observation is that most
economists have political views similar to those of the population from which they come. They are not highly reactionary
or conservative, although listening to many left wing heterodox economists might lead one
to believe that they are. In m y recent survey of graduate students at top U.S. schools, 4 7 percent of the student s classified
see this policy interest as incompatible with their academic careers, and with being non-political technicians.
themselves as liberal, 24 percent as moderate, 16 percent as conservative, and 6 percent as radical. These divisions would make the m
significantly m o re liberal than the U.S. population at large, which is almost evenly split between liberal and conservative. 5 The
students perceived their views as slightly m o re liberal than those of their parents, 40 percent of whom they classified as liberal, 36
percent as moderate, 16 per cent as conservative, and 3 percent as radical. The large majority of these students (80 percent) felt that their
politic al views did not change in graduate schools, although there w a s a slight movement toward conservative views over time. In the
survey, I also asked those who did change their views in what direction their views changed. For most schools the change went both
ways. One student captured what likely is happening when he stated, “I became more eclectic. Both conservatives and liberals have their
favorite pipe dream s at odds with reasonable economics.” The fact that the student thought he could distinguish a reasonable economics
from the conservative an d liberal economics is a sign, to me, of a field that is in within the range of acceptable ideological bias.
Although in the United States the economics profession is more conservative, and less radical, than are most academics, that is not the
case in relation to the U.S. population at large, which is much more conservative than are academics. But it is an open question whether
it is most academics who are out of line, or is it economics? Let me give an example: I consider m y self to be a committed pluralist. As
part of m y educational philosophy I believe that students should be presented with many views, so that they can choose. That
philosophy led m y school to hire some left-leaning heterodox economists. When I later wanted to add a right-leaning heterodox
economist to the faculty, these left-leaning economists strongly opposed it, arguing that these right-leaning economists did not measure
up, and had an obvious ideological bias. My argument that that right-leaning ideological bias w a s simply a counterweight to their leftleaning ideological bias did not sway them. A standard comment of a typical left-leaning (right- leaning) academic is that they would be
happy to hire a right-leaning (left-leaning) economist, if they could find a bright one, but finding a bright one is next to impossible.
Charges of ideological bias of mainstream economics do not come only from the left.
Within economics, there are critics who claim that mainstream economics is a bastion of
liberal thinking and activist sentiments. (Coleman, 2002) I find these charges as unpersuasive as I find the charges
from the left. (Colander, 2003) Modern mainstream economics is a large tent that includes
individuals with a wide variety of political views. It is not a monolithic group that has a
definite ideological slant distinct from that of the population at large. This means, for
western European and U.S. economists that they are ideologically favorable to democracy,
feel that markets are an acceptable means around which to organize society as long as
government plays a role in guiding those markets, and are concerned about equality, but do
not believe that the system should be condemned for its failure to achieve a m o re equal
distribution of income. My third observation is that heterodox critics of economics, such as Fullbrook or Lee do not, as I read
them, have that baseline ideological nature of a field of inquiry in mind when they charge that economics is ideologically biased ,
because if they did, their consideration would be less personal. It would simply be the way things are—these are the interpretations and
ideas that have won out. As
I interpret most heterodox critics, they mean that mainstream
economics is intentionally ideological—that it has a purpose and its purpose is not an
objective consideration of the economy arriving at conclusions in a relatively nonideological fashion; that purpose is to support a particular belief, and to prevent other sets
of beliefs from being considered. That is not m y read of the economics profession. Let me
consider Fullbrook’s charges that the rem oval of history of economics thought from the graduate school curriculum , which he claim e d
was done in order to “facilitate indoctrination ” , as an example of mainstream economics’ ideological bias. As a former president of the
History of Economic s Society, and the author of an history of economics thought textbook, I have been involve d in discussions about
the rem oval of history of thought from t h e graduate school curriculum and have opposed it, so I share with Fullbrook an opposition to
these changes. However, I do not see the reason graduate schools are eliminating history of thought as having anything to do with
indoctrination, or ideological bias. There are two reasons why. First, in m y view, there is nothing necessarily anti-indoctrinating or
nonideological in the history of thought, since it can be taught in many different ways; for example, one could structure the course in a
Whig fashion that portray s the latest developments in economics as the natural evolution of our search for the truth. Second, based on m
y discussions with economists in graduate program s, indoctrination is not the reason for dropping the course. Rather, in the minds of the
graduate professors, the history of thought courses are being eliminated to open up room for m o re technical training in statistics and
technical field courses. Now one can argue that technical training is a type of indoctrination, but that argument is a much more subtle
one than Fullbrook makes. And, even if he had made it, I would not find it convincing since there is nothing necessarily pro market
about math. Marx can be presented in a highly mathematical way, as can be seen in the work of John Rom e r or Michio Morishima. The
reality is that the mainstream economics profession sees the history of thought as an avocation, not as part of economics. W h i l e I do
not share that view, it is a view shared by a group of historians of economic thought who would like to move the history of economic
thought to a history, philosophy, or history of science department, in order to improve its scholarship. (Weintraub, 1996). My point is
that the debate about history of thought’s role in graduate training has little relevance to the debate about the ideological content of
mainstream economics. This is the point that Roy Weintraub and I were m a king on the HES discussion group that Fred Lee was
responding to. We were not disparaging the history of economic thought; we were simply telling graduate students: this is the way it is;
if you want to survive in economics, recognize its structure and d live with it because students are unlikely to be able to change the
system. The fact that o n e operates within a system does not necessarily mean that one prefers that system, or that one is ideologically
committed to that system. It might simply be that one has com e to the conclusion that one can often be m o re effective at changing a
system from within than from without. The
decision when to fight a system and when to accept it and
operate within it is a complicated one, and mainstream economics includes economists of
many ideological persuasions, many quite at odds with the status quo ideological
persuasions. They have simply chosen to work for change from within rather than from
outside; they are mainstream, but they are not orthodox. 6 My fourth observation is that for me to take
heterodox charges of mainstream ideological bias seriously, I would want the accusers to
be as ideologically neutral as possible. They do not seem to be. They are organized around
ideological and policy lines. Consider the post Autistic movement. It had left-leaning heterodox
economists--radicals, feminists, institutionalists, and post Keynesians- -but it had no
Austrians or libertarians in it. Heterodox groups can almost always be classified as belonging to the right or the left. When
I have suggested to either side that they combine, I often find m o re animosity towards each other than I find against the mainstream.
Why are there no Marxists at George Mason University, a center for Austrian economics in the United States? And why are there no
Austrians at the New School, a center for left radical economists? My view of the majority of the
heterodox critics is that
they want economics to reflect their ideology, not that they want economics to be
nonideological. I would feel much better about heterodox charges of mainstream ideological bias if they weren’t associated with
a particular political position. 7 Let me now summarize what I take from these four observations in regard to modern economics and
Modern economics is much more eclectic than what is usually classified by
heterodox economists as neoclassical economics. That is what I mean when I have argued that neoclassical
economics is dead. (Colander, 2000) Economics today is distinguished by modeling technique, not
ideological viewpoint. T h e holy trinity of greed, rationality, and equilibrium that is often attributed to neoclassical
economics has given way to the broader trinity of enlightened self-interest, purposeful behavior, and sustainability. Today’s
mainstream economists care far less about what you say, or what position you take on an
issue, than they do about how you say it, and whether it tells them something they didn’t at
least think that they already knew. Mainstream economists are far more rigid in form than
in content.
ideology.
Economists aren’t dirty money-grubbing idiots – their caricature is unproductive
Lucas 9 – Professor of Economics @ U Chicago
(Robert, “In defence of the dismal science,” http://www.economist.com/node/14165405)/BB
THERE is widespread disappointment with economists now because
we did not forecast or prevent the
financial crisis of 2008. The Economist's articles of July 18th on the state of economics were an interesting attempt to take stock of
two fields, macroeconomics and financial economics, but both pieces were dominated by the views of people who have seized
on the crisis as an opportunity to restate criticisms they had voiced long before 2008. Macroeconomists in
particular were caricatured as a lost generation educated in the use of valueless, even harmful, mathematical models,
an education that made them incapable of conducting sensible economic policy. I think this caricature is
nonsense and of no value in thinking about the larger questions: What can the public reasonably expect of
specialists in these areas, and how well has it been served by them in the current crisis?¶ One thing we are not going to have, now or
ever, is a set of models that forecasts sudden falls in the value of financial assets, like the declines that followed the failure of Lehman
Brothers in September. This is nothing new. It has been known for more than 40 years and is one of the main implications of Eugene
Fama's “efficient-market hypothesis” (EMH), which states that the price of a financial asset reflects all relevant, generally available
information. If an economist had a formula that could reliably forecast crises a week in advance, say, then that formula would become
part of generally available information and prices would fall a week earlier. (The term “efficient” as used here means that individuals use
information in their own private interest. It has nothing to do with socially desirable pricing; people often confuse the two.) ¶ Mr Fama
arrived at the EMH through some simple theoretical examples. This simplicity was criticised in The Economist's briefing, as though the
EMH applied only to these hypothetical cases. But Mr Fama tested the predictions of the EMH on the behaviour of actual prices. These
tests could have come out either way, but they came out very favourably. His empirical work was novel and carefully executed. It has
been thoroughly challenged by a flood of criticism which has served mainly to confirm the accuracy of the hypothesis. Over the years
exceptions and “anomalies” have been discovered (even tiny departures are interesting if you are managing enough money) but for the
purposes of macroeconomic analysis and forecasting these departures are too small to matter. The main lesson we should take away
from the EMH for policymaking purposes is the futility of trying to deal with crises and recessions by finding central bankers and
regulators who can identify and puncture bubbles. If these people exist, we will not be able to afford them. ¶ The Economist's briefing
also cited as an example of macroeconomic failure the “reassuring” simulations that Frederic Mishkin, then a governor of the Federal
Reserve, presented in the summer of 2007. The charge is that the Fed's FRB/US forecasting model failed to predict the events of
September 2008. Yet the simulations were not presented as assurance that no crisis would occur, but as a forecast of what could be
expected conditional on a crisis not occurring. Until the Lehman failure the recession was pretty typical of the modest downturns of the
post-war period. There was a recession under way, led by the decline in housing construction. Mr Mishkin's forecast was a reasonable
estimate of what would have followed if the housing decline had continued to be the only or the main factor involved in the economic
downturn. After the Lehman bankruptcy, too, models very like the one Mr Mishkin had used, combined with new information, gave
what turned out to be very accurate estimates of the private-spending reductions that ensued over the next two quarters. When Ben
Bernanke, the chairman of the Fed, warned Hank Paulson, the then treasury secretary, of the economic danger facing America
immediately after Lehman's failure, he knew what he was talking about. ¶ Mr Mishkin recognised the potential for a financial crisis in
2007, of course. Mr Bernanke certainly did as well. But recommending pre-emptive monetary policies on the scale of the policies that
were applied later on would have been like turning abruptly off the road because of the potential for someone suddenly to swerve headon into your lane. The best and only realistic thing you can do in this context is to keep your eyes open and hope for the best.¶ After
Lehman collapsed and the potential for crisis had become a reality, the situation was completely altered. The interest on Treasury bills
was close to zero, and those who viewed interest-rate reductions as the only stimulus available to the Fed thought that monetary policy
was now exhausted. But Mr Bernanke immediately switched gears, began pumping cash into the banking system, and convinced the
Treasury to do the same. Commercial-bank reserves grew from $50 billion at the time of the Lehman failure to something like $800
billion by the end of the year. The injection of Troubled Asset Relief Programme funds added more money to the financial system.¶
There is understandable controversy about many aspects of these actions but they had the great advantages of speed and reversibility.
My own view, as expressed elsewhere, is that these policies were central to relieving a fear-driven rush to liquidity and so alleviating (if
only partially) the perceived need for consumers and businesses to reduce spending. The recession is now under control and no
responsible forecasters see anything remotely like the 1929-33 contraction in America on the horizon. This outcome did not have to
happen, but it did.¶ Not bad for a Dark Age¶ Both Mr Bernanke and Mr Mishkin are in the mainstream of what one critic cited in The
Economist's briefing calls a “Dark Age of macroeconomics”. They are exponents and creative builders of dynamic
models and have taught these “spectacularly useless” tools, directly and through textbooks that have become industry standards, to
generations of students. Over the past two years they (and many other accomplished macroeconomists) have been centrally
involved in responding to the most difficult American economic crisis since the 1930s. They have forecasted what
can be forecast and formulated contingency plans ready for use when unforeseeable shocks
occurred. They and their colleagues have drawn on recently developed theoretical models when they judged them to have something
to contribute. They have drawn on the ideas and research of Keynes from the 1930s, of Friedman and Schwartz in the 1960s, and of
many others. I simply see
no connection between the reality of the macroeconomics that these
people represent and the caricature provided by the critics whose views dominated The Economist's briefing.
Economists are not systematically biased or paid off – in a disagreement of opinion,
trust the experts
Caplan 6 –professor of Economics at George Mason University
(Bryan, “The Myth of the Rational Voter”, 11/5/6; < http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/11/05/bryan-caplan/myth-rational-voter>)//Beddow
The main drawback of this approach is that many interesting questions are too complex to resolve with an almanac. But there is another mirror to
hold up to public opinion. We can track down people who are unusually likely to know the right answer, see what they think, then check
whether the public agrees. Who might these unusually-likely-to-know people be? The most obvious candidates are experts.[3] To see if the
average voter’s beliefs about the economic effects of immigration are right, for example, you can ask the general public and professional
economists, and see if, on average, they agree. Is this an infallible test? No; experts have been wrong before. But it is hard to get around the
strong presumption that if experts and laymen disagree, the experts are probably right, and the laymen are probably wrong. More
importantly,
if you have some specific reason to doubt the objectivity of the experts, you can
control for it. If you think that economists’ high income biases their beliefs, for example,
you can check whether lay men and experts agree after statistically adjusting for income.
This was precisely the approach that I used to analyze the best available data set on economic beliefs, the Survey of Americans and Economists
on the Economy. The overarching finding: Economists and the public hold radically different beliefs about the economy.[4] Compared to the
experts, laymen are much more skeptical of markets, especially international and labor markets, and much more pessimistic about the past,
present, and future of the economy. When laymen see business conspiracies, economists see supply-and-demand. When laymen see ruinous
competition from foreigners, economists see the wonder of comparative advantage. When laymen see dangerous downsizing, economists see
wealth-enhancing reallocation of labor. When laymen see decline, economists see progress.[5] While critics of the economics profession like to
attribute these patterns to economists’ affluence, job security, and/or right-wing ideology, the facts are not with them. Controlling for
income, income growth, job security, gender, and race only mildly reduces the size of the lay-expert belief gap. And, since the typical
economist is actually a moderate Democrat, controlling for party identification and ideology makes the lay-expert belief gap get a little
bigger. Economists think that markets work well not because of their extreme right-wing ideology, but despite their mild left-wing
ideology.
Economic failures have been caused by TOO LITTLE influence from economists
Smith 10 – Professor of Economics @ UNC Chapel-Hill
(Karl, “In Defense of Economics: Further Reply to Manzi,” http://modeledbehavior.com/2010/11/29/in-defense-of-economics-further-reply-tomanzi/)//BB
Moreover, this is all virtually anyone in any discipline has. I sometimes tell my students that scientists don’t prove, mathematicians and
philosophers prove. Scientists accumulate evidence that seems to suggest.¶ This I think is true in all fields of science and is
doubly true when that science is applied to actually engineering results in the real world. Not only have well relied upon theories in
physics been upended upon careful examination but there is no one I know of who can design an airplane using a physics textbook. Nor,
would many people trust an airplane to fly without testing it first. ¶ And, despite despite all of the testing that is done, airplanes can a do
malfunction and crash. There simply isn’t a “proving it” when it comes to making predictions about the
real world. What we hope to do is give an answer that’s better than random and better than folk
wisdom .¶ Now perhaps Jim is not confident that we can achieve our goal of beating randomness and folk wisdom. There are
two basic lines of reasoning I can offer.¶ One is evidence and logic. We can talk about why in this case
stimulus makes sense, why the evidence looks like it points in the direction that it does and why it
seems to be telling us something different than mere folk wisdom.¶ Throughout human history evidence and logic
have shown themselves useful. They are by no means omnipotent. The smartest people make mistakes. The most carefully
argued cases are sometimes wrong. Nonetheless, as a general guide evidence and logic are useful.¶ Thus you should
“rely” on my predication because you follow my evidence and logic. And, if you don’t follow my evidence and logic then we should
talk about it. I talk about this for a living and am more than willing to devote as much time to it as Jim or anyone else wants. I crave the
opportunity to offer evidence and logic for these positions. This what I hope to do with this blog.¶ So, to be clear, I am not asking at all
that you simply submit to my superior knowledge, modeling or intuition. I am offering that intuition and if you want to see behind the
hood and understand why I say all of these things then I am offering that too.¶ The second line I offer is that of experience. That
when economists had the helm we really were able to produce results . In the 1980s Central
Banks were largely turned over to their economists who produced low inflation and low
unemployment by manipulating the overnight lending rate.¶ Indeed, the two major failures in that period, Japan
and the current recession, coincided with the overnight lending rate hitting zero and thus no longer being under
the economist’s control. So our basic argument was that we can steady the economy so long as we have
control over the overnight rate seems to be validated.
Economics is inevitable – using it for progressive means is key
Thompson 3 (Barton Thompson Jr. Vice Dean of Stanford Law School, “synergy or conflict: the roles or ethics, economics, & science in
environmental policy decisions: What Good Is Economics?,” 37 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 175,//HK)
Environmental moralists are naturally skeptical of economics. Economics appears to speak of
human wants, individual preferences, and self-interested behavior, while most variants of environmental
ethics emphasize the importance of the entire biotic community, the relevance of societal values, and the need to
look beyond one's immediate interests. Used as a normative tool, economics can clash with environmental
ethics. Used in other contexts, economic analysis accepts a world that the environmental moralist rejects. Environmental
moralists may wish for a different world. Yet economics remains an undeniable and powerful
force. The environmental moralist who wishes to accomplish immediate change must confront
economic truths and learn to utilize economic analysis in support of the environment. As discussed,
economics can supply supplemental arguments for protecting and improving the environment, provide
insight into why even environmentally enlightened individuals often harm the environment, help
defuse opposition to valuable environmental measures, and furnish new and more effective tools
for accomplishing environmental goals. In many of these contexts, environmental moralists can make use
of economics without undermining ethical precepts or education. Recent studies raise the additional
and intriguing possibility that environmental moralists might be able to use economic tools to help
develop new environmental mores, encourage environmental altruism, or both. Social scientists
still know little about how governmental policies affect societal norms and the willingness of individuals to
behave altruistically. At least some economic incentive systems, however, may encourage environmental
altruism. If so, environmental moralists might find economics not only a tool for immediate
environmental change but for longer-term shifts in the way in which society regards and treats the
environment.
Epistemology – Economics Good – Environment
Economics is key to shape pro-environment policies
Thompson 3 (Barton Thompson Jr. Vice Dean of Stanford Law School, “synergy or conflict: the roles or ethics, economics, & science in
environmental policy decisions: What Good Is Economics?,” 37 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 175,//HK)
Economics can be used in at least four partially overlapping ways. First, it can be used
as a normative tool to
determine the appropriate type and level of environmental protection. This is the realm of costbenefit analysis, where the economic benefits of various environmental proposals in the form of avoided health injuries,
increased recreational opportunities, species value, and the like are balanced against the economic costs of lost jobs, new
equipment, and reduced consumer choices. Much of the criticism of economic analysis in the environmental context has focused on this
normative use of economics. To the environmental moralist, cost-benefit analysis errs at the outset by focusing on the Heaven-rejected
"lore of nicely-calculated less or more" n2 rather than the ethical importance of a healthy and sustainable environment. Beyond the
question of whether cost-benefit analysis uses the correct criteria, critics also object to how the government makes cost-benefit
comparisons. Critics, for example, have challenged the methods used to measure the benefits of environmental programs, the decision to
measure benefits based on individuals' current preferences, the comparison of benefits and costs that environmental moralists find
economically "incommensurable," and the decision to discount future benefits (such as lives saved many decades from now due to
current environmental protection measures). n3 Economics, however, can be used for purposes other than
normative evaluations of potential environmental measures. A second use to which economics is frequently
put, for example, is as a diagnostic tool to determine why society is not achieving the desired type and
level of environmental protection (regardless of how the desired types and levels of protection are determined). Garrett
Hardin's famous discussion of the [*178] "tragedy of the commons" is a good example of this diagnostic use
of economics: when a common resource is free, users enjoy all of the benefits of use but share the
losses and thus tend to overutilize the resource. n4 Used as a diagnostic tool, economics can help point to
the reasons for, and thus the most effective solutions to, a wide variety of environmental problems.
Third, environmental advocates can use economics as a strategic political tool to help overcome
opposition to environmental measures and increase the chances of successful adoption. Economic
concerns often generate opposition to environmental measures, and opponents frequently cite
economic concerns as a rationale for not enacting the measures. Although proponents might view many of these
economic concerns as normatively irrelevant or misconceived, the concerns are nonetheless a political reality.
Economic analysis can sometimes disprove the basis for these concerns and thus hopefully
eliminate them as a source of political opposition. Studies of a particular measure, for example, may demonstrate that
the measure will not reduce employment as unions fear. In other cases, environmental proponents can use economic
analysis to find means of minimizing economic impacts on key political stakeholders while still
achieving environmental goals. Finally, economics can be used as a design tool to evaluate and devise approaches or
techniques for achieving various environmental goals. Economics lies behind the market concepts that have been much in vogue over
the last several decades - pollution taxes, tradable pollution permits, water markets, individual tradable quotas (ITQs) for fisheries,
mitigation banks for wetlands and species habitat.
Epistemology – Economic Models Good
Economic models are preferable to their speculation
Harford 12 – Author of four books, MPA in Economics
(Tim, The Undercover Economist, p. 15-16)//BB
Portable models¶ David Ricardo managed to write an analysis of cappuccino bars in train stations before either cappuccino bars or train
stations existed. This is the kind of trick that makes people either hate or love economics. Those who hate it argue that if we want to
understand how the modern coffee business works, we should not be reading an analysis of farming published in 1817.¶ But many of us
love the fact that Ricardo was able, nearly two hundred years ago, to produce insights that illuminate our
under-standing today. It's easy to see die difference between nineteenth-century farming and twenty-first-century frothing, but
not so easy to see the similarity before it is pointed out to us. Economics is partly about modeling, about articulating basic
principles and patterns that operate behind seemingly complex subjects like die rent on farms or coffee
kiosks.¶ There are other models of the coffee business, useful for dif-ferent things. A model of the design and architecture of coffee
kiosks could be useful as a case study for interior designers. A physics model could outline the salient features of the
machine that generates the ten atmospheres of pressure required to brew espresso; the same model might be useful for talking about
suction pumps or the internal combustion engine. Today we have models of the ecological impacts of different disposal
methods for coffee grounds. Each model is useful for different things, but a "model" that tried to describe the design, the engineering,
the ecology, and the economics would be no simpler than reality itself and so would add nothing to our understanding. ¶ ¶ Ricardo's
model is useful for discussing the relationship between scarcity and bargaining strength, which goes far beyond coffee or farming and
ultimately explains much of the world around us. When economists see the world, they see
hidden social patterns ,
patterns that become evident only when one focuses on the essen-tial underlying processes. This
focus leads critics to say that eco-nomics doesn't consider the whole story, the whole "system." How else,
though, could a nineteenth-century analysis of farming proclaim the truth about rwenty-first-century coffee kiosks, except through
grossly failing to notice all kinds of important differences? The truth is that it's simply not possible to understand
anything complicated without focusing on certain elements to reduce that complexity. Economists
have certain things they like to focus on, and scarcity is one of them. This focus means that we do not notice the mechanics of
the espresso machine, nor the color schemes of the coffee kiosks, nor other interesting, important facts. But
we gain from
that focus , too, and one of the things we gain is an un-derstanding of the "system"—the economic
system, which is far more all-encompassing than many people realize.
Modeling corrects cognitive biases and intuitions
Dillow 12 – Investor’s Chronicle
(Chris, “In defence of economics,” http://www.investorschronicle.co.uk/2012/04/12/comment/chris-dillow/in-defence-of-economicsQv8r779InnUm1DNTRkHBCI/article.html)//BB
1. Although economists don't know the future of asset returns, we do know their distribution and risks. It's
become increasingly clear that returns follow a cubic power law. This means large losses are more likely than you think. ¶
Economists also know that there are various types of risk – not just market risk, but cyclical risk, correlation risk,
liquidity risk, behavioural risk, and so on.¶ 2. Economists have made detailed empirical studies of
investors' actual behaviour. These have yielded important results. Not least are that most active stock-pickers lose
money, and that professional fund managers have only a handful of good stock ideas. ¶ 3. Economists know the maths of portfolio
formation. This tells us when diversification works and when it doesn't. It also has what might be a surprising result – that cautious
investors should not hold more defensive stocks than more risk-seeking ones.¶ 4. Economists have become
increasingly aware of the cognitive biases
that lead investors astray. Some of these – such as the tendency to
overconfidence – can cost money by encouraging too much trading. More rarely, some others, such as the tendency to under-react, can
help make money by allowing us to exploit momentum effects.
Link Turn – Discourse of Scarcity
Our rhetoric of scarcity and danger constitute a key invocation against
neoliberalism’s worst excesses
McCarthy 4 – Professor of Geography @ Penn State
(James, Geoforum 35.3, Science Direct)//BB
Demonstrating the enduring salience of Polanyi’s dual movement thesis, if neoliberalism has attacked the Keynesian environmental
state, it is also true that contemporary environmental concerns and their politics have been, in many
respects, the most passionately articulated and effective political sources of response and resistance
to neoliberal projects, contending with neoliberalism as a basis of post-Fordist social regulation. In something of a reprise of
environmentally motivated responses to classical liberalism, new environmental social movements have organized
around a diverse range of concerns, including health, endangered species and spaces, and threatened
amenity values, all questioning and contesting neoliberal attempts to sever social controls and regulations
governing environmental transformations. It is a highly telling testament to the power of environmentalism that the
“Reagan revolution,” the “Contract with America,” and the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999––three defining moments for neoliberalism
in the U.S., at least––all faltered badly precisely on questions surrounding environmental regulations and standards. There is some
evidence, then, for the view that environmental concerns are at least seen to cross divisions of class, sub-national geography, and so on:
American voters who seem comfortable with unraveling the Keynesian net in many areas,
apparently convinced that it does not benefit them, have made clear their remaining attachment to
certain environmental protections. In this respect, many citizens––at least in the richer capitalist nations––apparently take
for granted that environmental risks affect them as individuals, a perception central to Beck’s notion of the “risk society” (Beck and
Ritter, 1992; Beck, 1999). We believe that these widely held beliefs about scarcity and risk, propagated by
environmental groups in significant measure, have acted as significant checks on neoliberal
projects, sustaining a much needed and highly compelling alternative subjectivity to homoeconomicus, one that challenges unrestrained materialism , rampant instrumentalism
and crass utilitarianism .
This is not to deny that issues of scarcity, distribution, and justice are inextricably intertwined,
giving rise to complex politics. Environmentalist discourses of scarcity are highly disciplinary, technocratic, and overly rationalist: their
construction of “good” citizenship stresses the regulation of desires and practices according to strict metrics governed by science and the
administrative state, with decidedly authoritarian tendencies (Dryzek, 1997; Darier, 1999). Environmentalists have often invoked
scarcity without regard to equity ( Harvey, 1974 and Harvey, 1996). The resulting universalist pretensions of these constructions are
problematic if they fail to address the fact that exposure to even pervasive scarcities and environmental risks in fact varies widely across
social strata, while responses are mobilized in ways that reproduce spatially uneven social geographies (e.g., disposal of toxic wastes).
Such problems are compounded by the rarity of environmental discourses that trace “problems” of scarcity or risk to their origins in the
political economy of capitalism ( Benton, T., 1997. Beyond left and right: ecological politics, capitalism and modernity. In: Jacobs, M.,
Editor, , 1997. Greening the Millenium: The New Politics of the Environment, The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. (Blackwell),
London, pp. 34–46.Benton, 1997). All of this notwithstanding, however, we think there is no way around the
need for some discourse of restraint as a response to mass consumerism, and the discourse of
scarcity is a powerful counterpoint to neoliberal Prometheanism (Benton, 1989). In very simple terms, the
conviction that the pie cannot grow indefinitely––whether ultimately theoretically defensible or
not––logically points to questions of distribution and equity, precisely the questions that defenders
of neoliberalism attempt to dismiss with assertions of rising tides raising all boats. While many
environmentalists have not pursued this line of thinking along what we see as its logical path, the connections between
environmentalism and social justice are nonetheless there to be made as a powerful counter to neoliberal agendas., 10
Link Turn – BECC
BECC solves
Liverman and Vilas 6 – *Diana, Professor of Environmental Science at Oxford University, **Oxford
(“Neoliberalism and the Environment in Latin America,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources, vol. 31, Web of Sciences)//BB
The Border Environment Cooperation Commission (BECC) certifies environmental infrastructure projects as to
their sustainability, thus making them eligible for preferential grants and loans (http://www.cocef.org/). BECC has provided
more than 30 million dollars in technical assistance to 131 communities and has certified 105 projects
(69 in the United States and 36 in Mexico) mostly for water provision or water or waste treatment facilities (45). Although BECC
has been praised for providing opportunities for public participation and for some environmental improvements, it is
also accused of bias toward the United States and larger projects as well as of tokenism in participation (46, 47)
Link Turn – Embargo
Embargo is worse than the plan
Nichols 5 – National Executive of the Democratic Social Perspective
(Dick, The Cuban Revolution in the Epoch of Neoliberal Globalisation, http://readingfromtheleft.com/PDF/CubaNeoLiberalEpoch.pdf)
Washington’s policy towards the Cuban Revolution remains what it has always been — to eliminate the Castro leadership and to show
that any revolution in its “backyard” is doomed to fail, as “proven” by the examples of Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador and
Guatemala. The determination of the Cuban people to defend their revolution and the refusal of the Cuban leadership to compromise
on their support for popular struggles means that there can be no question of any type of peaceful coexistence between Washington and
Havana. The principle factor is not the weight of the counter-revolutionary Miami lobby in US domestic politics (overridden in the Elián
González case to avoid exposing Washington’s anti-Cuba policy even more than occurred) but Cuba’s role as example, as a
social alternative that has put an end to capitalist rule. Thus, even though certain sections of US business
(the farm lobby, computing) would gain from an end to the economic war against the island, the
overall interests of US imperialism dictate maintenance of the blockade, which all objective accounts
show to have inflicted massive damage on the Cuban economy and people (US$181 billion according to the
damages claim of the National Assembly of People’s Power). ¶ 11. The blockade is not, as some liberal opponents
claim, a “mistake” by a US government that doesn’t understand its own interests and whose
removal would supposedly free the Cuban people to overthrow the “dictator” Castro. It is a vital
weapon in a US counter-revolutionary strategy that is composed of five interrelated elements: (1)
terrorist acts, economic sabotage, biological war and even military attacks; (2) an intensified
economic war, which includes the Torricelli Act (1992), the Helms-Burton Act (1996) and a
campaign to dissuade investors from doing business with the island or buying Cuban exports; (3)
incitement of Cubans to leave Cuba illegally through the provisions of the Cuban Adjustment Act, which grants automatic residency
rights to Cubans reaching US territory; (4) a campaign of financing domestic dissidence in the name of “building civil society”; and,
(5) a propaganda and disinformation war implemented in violation of international law through 24 radio transmitters and Television
Martí.
Embargo worse than the plan – U.S hostility and lack of trade
Xianglin and Brena 07 (Mao Xianglin and Mariana Ortega Breña, Mariana Ortega Breña is a freelance translator based in Canberra,
Australia and Mao Xianglin works at the Institute of Latin American Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, “Cuban Reform and
Economic Opening: Restrospective and Assessment.” Latin American Perspectives Vol. 34 No. 6 Aggressive capital and Democratic Resistance
pp. 93-105 JSTOR//HK)
Secondly, the United States adopted a hostile policy toward the island that ¶ eventually led to an
economic embargo. Cuba then gravitated toward the ¶ Soviet Union and the socialist countries of
Eastern Europe, joined the Council ¶ for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) in 1972, and decided to construct its
¶ socialist system with the aid of these nations. Until the late 1980s, trade with ¶ the CMEA represented 85 percent of
Cuba's foreign trade. Of this total, 70-75 ¶ percent was with the Soviet Union, with which Cuba contracted a debt of ¶ more than US$20
billion. At the same time, the island enjoyed a privileged trade ¶ relationship with the European socialist
countries and received billions of ¶ dollars' worth of Soviet aid and credits, amounting to 20-30
percent of its ¶ gross domestic product (GDP) (EIU, 1993:10-12, 30-31, 35-36). While relation ¶ ships with the
CMEA were crucial for Cuba's sustainable economic development ¶ (Castro, 1986: 20), this also limited
the rationalization of the domestic economy and the healthy and diverse development of free trade
Cuba is changing – the alternative corrupts that
Shreve 12 Executive Editor of the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, Heather, “Harmonization, But Not Homogenization: The Case
for Cuban Autonomy in Globalizing Economic Reforms,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 19:1, Winter, pp. 365-390//HK)
Ultimately, the available explanations for Cuban economic change— necessity, age, and economics—
fail to capture the reason for and the significance of the Cuban economic reform. Cuba, a nation that
would seemingly resist globalization altogether, is reconfiguring itself as a state to remain in power in a
globalized world. The State of Cuba remains ever-important to the decisions made regarding the
state’s policies; for that, the predominate models of globalization cannot and will not be
implemented in Cuba. As Cuba remains in power by choosing to globalize differently than the other
models, it reveals the incredible malleability of globalization. Globalization is not about a one world model, nor
is it about a few templates for engagement; rather it creates, embraces, and elevates differences, linkages, and
interplay between countries. Indeed, globalization is a powerful, transformative force that prevents any state from remaining
in isolation if it hopes to survive. It is also a force that does not require homogenization for states to
integrate into the global community. Cuba’s policies, if successful, will provide it with the requisite stability to engage in
the global economy.144 Cuban reform shows that the state, as an actor, may remain ideologically resolute,
yet alter its economy to enter into a globalized society. Certainly, globalization does not mark the
end of socialist Cuba, but instead draws all parties in the global economy to common engagement
to succeed.
Globalization helps Cuba
Shreve 12 (Executive Editor of the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, Heather, “Harmonization, But Not Homogenization: The Case
for Cuban Autonomy in Globalizing Economic Reforms,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 19:1, Winter, pp. 365-390//HK)
These antiquated, simplistic models of globalization are vestiges of a “one world,” homogenous
view of global economic interaction. However, as time has progressed, it is clear that neither globalization nor global
economic engagement requires uniformity and conformity of states. Whereas this Note asserts that global economic
engagement does not require homogenization of economic and societal values but is infinitely
flexible and can accommodate different models of engagement, these other theories of globalization
avow that globalization can only function in a singular model and that states, which desire to engage in the global economy, must
conform to that singular model, thus precluding the possibility of an ideological state, such as Cuba,
from inclusion and engagement. While a one world model precludes the role of the state, instead focusing on uniformity in
economic progress and policy in all nations, it is clear that this is an inaccurate assessment of the role of the state in a globalized world.
Instead, the state continues to play a role— albeit reconfigured to remain in power—in the globalized
world. Indeed, state power is “decentered”27 in an interconnected world, as problems and global actors are increasingly
transterritorial,28 and yet, states are not sidelined in the global scheme. States are required to engage with other
global actors—other states, world organizations, and transnational corporations—in the decisionmaking process. The decision-making process is no longer made in a vacuum by a wholly sovereign body.
Globalization is overwhelmingly good for Cuba
Shreve 12 (Executive Editor of the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, Heather, “Harmonization, But Not Homogenization: The Case
for Cuban Autonomy in Globalizing Economic Reforms,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 19:1, Winter, pp. 365-390//HK)
Through all of these relations and linkages, although they vary by state, the reconfiguration of the
state as a global actor allows it to remain in power by the way in which it chooses to globalize.
Ultimately, states retain their importance, even in a decentralized, globalized economy, as the linkage
and permeation of governments, cultures, and countries do not necessarily lead to mindless uniformity
in policy making. Instead, globalization provides incentives for states to harmonize their policies with others in the global
economy and to “achieve some level of concordance with other legal systems.”30 In this context, globalization decentralizes
the very policies and theoretical underpinnings of governments allowing for concordance between
nations that contain vastly different ideologies,31 as with the United States and China.
Globalization may change the way in which states make decisions, but it is the state itself that
implements its policies;32 a role remains for states within a globalized world, albeit in a different form.33
Rather than the linear, uniform models of one world globalization, the reconfigured state may
globalize in its own way. All said, Cuba is a fascinating case study in the role of the globalizing state,
for, despite the ideological reasons why Cuba would remain isolated, it instead is globalizing and
doing so by its own model.
Neolib now
Havana times 12 (a Cuban independent blog edited from Nicaragua, and hosted in Germany and an independent source for news and
opinion on and from Cuba, 4/29/12, “The Ideological Success of Neoliberalism in Cuba”, http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=68708//SJ)
Despite this, we know that the Cuban government has affected a neoliberal shift in its reform
policies.¶ Nonetheless, even today it’s difficult to find a direct connection between the socioeconomic “reforms” implemented by the
government and fundamentals of international neoliberalism.¶ The similarities, which clearly exist, fail to form a definite pattern of
neoliberal-style economic and social policy.¶ This is why it’s so difficult to follow the economic moves of the political elite in their
desperate retreat toward the deregulation of the economy.¶ However at the ideological level, this complicity is
apparent. It’s at this level that neoliberalism has become hegemonic in Cuba.¶ The ideological
foundations of neoliberalism have achieved a tremendous success in the sphere of the government
on the island.¶ The authorities have proclaimed the deregulation of Cuba’s economy as inevitable,
as they quietly accept the consolidation of inequality as well as decreased social spending and the
renunciation of full employment as a goal.¶ These are basic principles of neoliberalism, ones reflected by
measures which they say should guide economic policy over the times to come.¶ The government is
convinced that neoliberalism has won the ideological battle on the field of international relations,
despite its economic and social failures.¶ Because of this they are paving the way for a future of the radicalized
application of its principles of economic deregulation and social inequality. ¶ Given this, the proposed real alternatives to
the neoliberal model will remain the responsibility of the Cuban people and non-official social
movements that are consolidating themselves across the country.¶ Those on top will continue to sell out the
country to the highest bidder, which will always be some empire at the world scale.
Neolib Good – War
Neolib solves internal upheaval and interstate conflict
Tures 3 – Professor of Economics @ LaGrange
(John, “ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND CONFLICT REDUCTION: EVIDENCE FROM THE 1970S, 1980S, AND 1990S,” CATO Journal,
22.3)//BB
The last three decades have witnessed an unprecedented expansion of market-based reforms and the profusion of
economic freedom in the international system. This shift in economic policy has sparked a debate about whether free
markets are superior to state controls. Numerous studies have compared the neoliberal and statist policies on
issues of production capacity, economic growth, commercial vol- umes, and egalitarianism. An overlooked research agenda,
however, is the relationship between levels of economic freedom and violence within countries.¶ Proponents of
the statist approach might note that a strong gov- ernment can bend the market to its will, directing activity toward policies necessary to
achieve greater levels of gross domestic product and growth. By extracting more resources for the economy, a pow- erful state can
redistribute benefits to keep the populace happy. Higher taxes can also pay for an army and police force that intimidate people. Such
governments range from command economies of totali- tarian systems to autocratic dictators and military juntas. Other eco- nomically
unfree systems include some of the authoritarian “Asian tigers.”¶ A combination of historical evidence, modern
theorists, and statis- tical findings, however, has indicated that a reduced role for the state in regulating
economic transactions is associated with a decrease in internal conflicts. Countries where the
government dominates the commercial realm experience an increase in the level of domestic
violence. Scholars have traced the history of revolutions to explain the relationship between statism
and internal upheavals. Contemporary authors also posit a relationship between economic liberty
and peace. Statistical tests show a strong connection between economic freedom and
conflict reduction during the past three decades.
Neoliberalism solves war – best data
Boudreaux 06 – professor of economics and law at George Mason University and former president of the Foundation for Economic
Integration (Donald J., “Want World Peace? Support Free Trade”, 11/20/06; < http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1120/p09s02coop.html>)//Beddow
Everyone knows that a key to the Democrats' big electoral win was their opposition to the Iraq war. But also, as the Wall Street Journal reported
recently, "Democrats' stances against free trade helped build the party's success at the polls and could tip the balance on trade matters. The new
dynamic could put a definitive end to the already troubled effort to reach a global agreement to reduce tariffs and open markets...." Protectionists
(of whatever party) believe that consumers who buy goods and services from foreigners cause domestic employment – and wages – to fall.
Economists since before Adam Smith have shown that this belief is mistaken, largely because foreigners sell things to us only because they either
want to buy things from us or invest in our economy. These activities employ workers here at home and raise their wages. Mountains of empirical
evidence show that protectionism is economically destructive. The facts also show that protectionism is inconsistent with a desire for peace – a
desire admirably expressed by many Democrats during the recent campaigns. Back in 1748, Baron de Montesquieu observed that "Peace is the
natural effect of trade. Two nations who differ with each other become reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has
an interest in selling; and thus their union is founded on their mutual necessities." If Mr. Montesquieu is correct that trade promotes peace, then
protectionism – a retreat from open trade – raises the chances of war. Plenty of empirical evidence confirms the wisdom of Montesquieu's insight:
Trade does indeed promote peace. During the past 30 years, Solomon Polachek, an economist at the State University of New York at
Binghamton, has researched the relationship between trade and peace. In his most recent paper on the topic, he and co-author Carlos Seiglie of
Rutgers University review the massive amount of research on trade, war, and peace. They find that "the overwhelming evidence indicates that
trade reduces conflict." Likewise for foreign investment. The greater the amounts that foreigners invest in the United States, or the more that
Americans invest abroad, the lower is the likelihood of war between America and those countries with which it has investment relationships.
Professors Polachek and Seiglie conclude that, "The policy implication of our finding is that further international cooperation in reducing barriers
to both trade and capital flows can promote a more peaceful world." Columbia University political scientist Erik Gartzke reaches a similar but
more general conclusion: Peace is fostered by economic freedom. Economic freedom certainly includes, but is broader than, the freedom of
ordinary people to trade internationally. It includes also low and transparent rates of taxation, the easy ability of entrepreneurs to start new
businesses, the lightness of regulations on labor, product, and credit markets, ready access to sound money, and other factors that encourage the
allocation of resources by markets rather than by government officials. Professor Gartzke ranks countries on an economic-freedom index from 1
to 10, with 1 being very unfree and 10 being very free. He then examines military conflicts from 1816 through 2000. His findings are powerful:
Countries that rank lowest on an economic-freedom index – with scores of 2 or less – are 14 times more likely to be involved in military
conflicts than are countries whose people enjoy significant economic freedom (that is, countries with scores of 8 or higher). Also
important, the findings of Polachek and Gartzke improve our understanding of the long-recognized reluctance of democratic nations to wage war
against one another. These scholars argue that the so-called democratic peace is really the capitalist peace. Democratic institutions are heavily
concentrated in countries that also have strong protections for private property rights, openness to foreign commerce, and other features broadly
consistent with capitalism. That's why the observation that any two democracies are quite unlikely to go to war against each other might reflect
the consequences of capitalism more than democracy. And that's just what the data show. Polachek and Seiglie find that openness to trade is
much more effective at encouraging peace than is democracy per se. Similarly, Gartzke discovered that, "When measures of both economic
freedom and democracy are included in a statistical study, economic freedom is about 50 times more effective than democracy in diminishing
violent conflict." These findings make sense. By promoting prosperity, economic freedom gives ordinary people a large stake in peace. This
prosperity is threatened during wartime. War almost always gives government more control over resources and imposes the burdens of higher
taxes, higher inflation, and other disruptions of the everyday commercial relationships that support prosperity. When commerce reaches across
political borders, the peace-promoting effects of economic freedom intensify. Why? It's bad for the bottom line to shoot your customers or your
suppliers, so the more you trade with foreigners the less likely you are to seek, or even to tolerate, harm to these foreigners. Senators-elect
Sherrod Brown (D) of Ohio and Jim Webb (D) of Virginia probably don't realize it, but by endorsing trade protection, they actually work against
the long-run prospects for peace that they so fervently desire.
Neoliberalism solves war
Tures 3 – Professor of Economics @ LaGrange
(John, “ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND CONFLICT REDUCTION: EVIDENCE FROM THE 1970S, 1980S, AND 1990S,” CATO Journal,
22.3)//BB
Conclusion
Clearly, economic
freedom is strongly connected with conflict re- duction. Free states fight fewer
conflicts and wars in general. They also engage in such battles at levels well below their
distribution in the sample, as well as levels below what an “expected model” predicts. Partly Free states had more
domestic battles than their Free coun- terparts, and constituted sizable portions of conflicts and wars in the sample, yet
these cases differed little from what our model predicted. Not Free states were the most prone to conflict and to
wage war against their own people; they also had more cases of conflict and war than expected
(while experiencing less peace than expected).¶ The major lesson from our study is that
peace.
Consequently, the
economic freedom pro- motes
more a government erodes economic liberties, the greater the likelihood
that a severe crisis or war will erupt .
Neolib Good – Human Welfare
Neoliberalism promotes human welfare
Gerring and Thacker 8 – *Professors of Political Science and IR @ Boston University
(“Do Neoliberal Economic Policies Kill or Save Lives?” Business and Politics, 10.3)//BB
While far from exhaustive, the robustness tests undertaken in this study
suggest that the main findings are
not likely to be an artifact of arbitrary model specifications or estimation techniques. On balance,
there appears to be a strong relationship between neoliberal economic policies and improved
human welfare, as measured by infant mortality rates. It is important to note that this relationship persists even while controlling
for level of economic development. This is an interesting finding, since we tend to think of neoliberal economic policies operating upon
human development primarily in an indirect manner. According to proponents, market-friendly policies should enhance growth, which
should, in turn, improve human wellbeing. The fact that, independent of their effect of economic development,
these neoliberal economic policies are still significantly associated with improved human
welfare suggests that an even stronger overall causal relationship may be at work. If, that is,
neoliberal policies have a tendency to promote long-term growth, then we may presume that their net effect on
IMR is even stronger than measured by coefficients on key “neoliberal” variables in Tables 1 and 2, given that economic development
is, itself, a major factor in the reduction of infant mortality. We do not attempt to model the precise nature of this indirect causal
relationship because this would require strong assumptions about neoliberalism’s causal effect on growth performance, a contentions
topic that lies beyond the scope of this study.
Living conditions (poverty, inequality, mortality, etc.) in Latin America are
improving, but the neg oversimplifies and conflates correlation and causation on
this issue – neoliberalism, not leftism, has solved the region, and more engagement is
key. Additionally, the perm solves – combining globalization, neoliberal rhetoric,
and leftist politics solves the worst effects of a free market.
Miroff 12 – contributor to NPR, writer for the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, collective winner of a Pulitzer prize (Nick, “Latin
American Equality: Free Markets or a Left Wing Success?”, 12/1/12; < http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/121130/latinamerica-middle-class-equality-poverty-left-wing-success-story>)//Beddow
HAVANA, Cuba — Latin America has long been a case study in the social ills brought by sharp economic inequality, its class-stratified societies
marked by too few haves and too many have-nots. But even as income divisions widen across the United States and much of the developing
world, they are narrowing in Latin America. Poverty in the region is at its lowest point in decades, according to several new reports, and millions
are moving upward into the middle class. A World Bank survey released this month said Latin America’s broadening middle grew by 50 percent
between 2003 and 2009. It was followed by a new United Nations regional economic study showing the percentage of Latin Americans living in
poverty at the lowest level in 30 years. Now the question is: Who gets credit for these trends? The region’s improved economic outlook has
coincided with the rule of left-wing governments in some of Latin America’s biggest economies: Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela. They have
devoted a greater share of their national resources to anti-poverty programs and development projects, boosting social spending. Yet
the
drop in poverty has also come as Latin governments adopt many of the market-driven
policy prescriptions long vilified by the left as “neoliberalism .” Foreign investment has poured into countries
like Peru, Colombia, and Chile as they’ve opened their economies and embraced globalization. Foreign direct investment into Latin America
topped $150 billion last year, UN data shows, up from around $25 billion in 1990. Regardless of political orientation, Latin American
governments have also benefited from soaring demand for raw materials, much of it fueled by China. High global commodity prices have
allowed countries to reap billions in tax revenues and direct income from sales of copper, gold, soybeans, oil, beef and other exports. In its report,
the World Bank credited regional governments for improved economic stability and the delivery of social programs, saying upward mobility has
been driven by higher levels of formal employment, urbanization, reduced family size and greater numbers of women in the workforce. It defined
the middle class broadly, as anyone earning between $10 and $50 a day, and said about half the population of Latin America now falls into that
range. “The recent experience of Latin America and the Caribbean shows the world that policies balancing economic growth while still
expanding opportunities for the most vulnerable can spread prosperity to millions of people,” World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said of the
findings. “Governments in Latin America and the Caribbean still need to do much more — one-third of the population is still in poverty — but
we should celebrate this achievement of growing the middle class and learn from it,” Kim said. Learning from the trend is now a matter of
defining what’s really driving it. Left-populist leaders such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa
have won at the polls in the past decade by railing against their country’s economic elites and promising to re-slice the pie in favor of the masses.
By directing more of their nations’ resource wealth to social spending, they have eased poverty and invested billions into health care,
education and other services. But their state-driven development models are heavily dependent on high commodity prices, and often
contrasted with the so-called “Brazilian model” made fashionable by former President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva. His leftist government
remained friendly to foreign investors and maintained pro-business policies even as it lifted tens of millions out of poverty with greater
social spending. Geoff Thale, program director at the DC-based Washington Office on Latin America, said splitting the region into those two
models is an oversimplification. “While there's a lot of discussion about the differences between left-populists like Chavez and social democrats
as in Brazil, I don't think that the lines are drawn that clearly or that either camp has a single, well-defined approach,” he said. “In reality, it's
more an era of experimentation than of ideological lines.” Thale said he views the region today as dominated by “post neoliberal” governments,
“whose leaders believe that the state can and should play an active role in the economy and the market, and that social spending targeted at the
poorest sectors (even when it's wrapped in neoliberal language about conditionality) is an important government function.” “I think
those left-of-center beliefs, shared by a wide range of governments, have had an impact on both poverty and inequality,” Thale added.
Neolib Good – Hegemony
Neoliberalism is key to hegemony
Cafruny 8 – Alan, Professor of IR
(“The ‘Imperial Turn’ and the Future of US Hegemony: ‘Terminal’ Decline or Retrenchment?,” All Academic)//BB
The role played by U.S. structural financial power in the construction of Europe’s neoliberal project has been analyzed by many scholars
(Helleiner, 1994; Gowan, 1999; Seabrooke, 2001; Baker, 2003); Panitch and Gindin, 2005; Cafruny and Ryner, 2007a; Ryner, 2007).
However, the
relationship between neoliberalism and geopolitics has received less attention. In the
first part of this chapter I discuss the role of U.S. military power as it has served, in tandem with U.S. structural financial power, to
consolidate the turn to neoliberalism in Europe. Beginning in the mid-1990s the United States transformed
NATO from a containment-oriented and defensive alliance to an instrument designed to promote
the forward expansion of American power across the European continent and into central Asia. This reinforced
Europe’s geopolitical dependence on the United States and buttressed neoliberal social forces across the continent. In the
second part of the chapter I consider the long-range possibilities for the United States and Europe in view of growing challenges to U.S.
power in both its geoeconomic and geopolitical dimensions. The uncertain status of the dollar is the natural accompaniment to relative
industrial decline and the transnationalization of production even as U.S.
hegemony has been prolonged through
financial deregulation and a resultant series of bubbles. In this context the Bush administration’s policy of geopolitical
advance and militarization, designed in part to maintain its hold over global energy resources, is a compensatory strategy (Harvey, 2003)
that has, however, encountered substantial costs and risks. Notwithstanding the deepening crisis of the U.S. imperium, the
possibilities for a European challenge are sharply circumscribed by its subordinate participation
within a U.S.-led neoliberal transnational financial order and its related inability to develop an autonomous regional
security structure. U.S. power in both its structural financial and military dimensions has been central to the
construction and consolidation of a European neoliberalism. It has not, however, led to transnational class formation
or the suppression of inter-imperialist rivalry either at the Atlantic level or within the European
Union. Neoliberal ideology cements national capitalist classes together in an organic alliance
under a declining but still minimally hegemonic U.S. superpower . From within the framework of this
intersubjective agreement the United States continues to provide collective goods in the form of
liquidity, trade openness, and military security, albeit very much on its own terms as it externalizes its own problems
and social contradictions into the international system. In the eurozone mercantilist rivalry has been displaced from the sphere of
national monetary policy to “structural labor reform” and, intermittently, fiscal policy.
Neoliberalism is the key lynchpin of American hegemony.
Dumenil and Levy 07 – EconomiX-CNRS and PSE-CNRS (Gerard and Dominique, “Neoliberal Dynamics – Imperial Dynamics”,
5/25/7; http://www.raumplanung.tudortmund.de/irpud/presom/fileadmin/docs/presom/external/WS_Paris_June_2007/Dumenil_Levy.pdf)//Beddow
The financial hegemony, as in neoliberalism, corresponds to the new functionings of capitalism both domestically and internationally, with
somewhat specific contents. Therefore, a distinction must be maintained between neoliberalism and globalization. Domestically, the neoliberal
order is manifest in the discipline imposed to labor and management, and the new flows of income toward finance. The same is true
internationally, though, as recalled above, free trade and the free movements of capital are crucial in the present functionings and transformation
of the world economy. The main issue, from the 1990s onward, became the globalization of neoliberalism toward the periphery, i.e. , the
extension of the hunting ground of international capital. By imperialism , we do not mean a stage of capitalism, as in Lenin's analysis 6 , but the
relationship of subordination and exploitation which relates the countries of the periphery to the most advanced countries. (Imperialism itself
undergoes successive stages in relation to the economical, social, and political features of the countries of the center and the periphery in each
epoch of capitalism.) This domination and exploitation | whose eld is the international economy, and in which the interests of the ruling classes of
each country are expressed by what remains \their" states, with potential rivalry | interacts with domestic patterns of exploitation in various
controls and regulations that we cannot address here. Violence is always at issue within imperialist relations. Beyond the direct exercise of
violence, the “simple" establishment of economic relationships between countries of very unequal development conveys, in itself, domination and
exploitation. \Free trade" is already a vector of potential devastation. \Fair trade" among such countries would require a whole set of limitations
and controls, at odd with the logic of capitalism. The system of imperialism also underwent important transformations. The major advanced
capitalist countries are all engaged, under U.S. hegemony, in the preservation of their privileges in the World Economy. Since World War II, this
imperial rule found its expression in constant and multifaceted actions, marked by two specific features: (1) the preservation and then unravelling
of the traditional colonial patterns of domination and (2) the cold war. The disappearance of these two elements considerably modified and, in a
sense, clarified the fundamental nature of imperialism. We give to hegemony a more speci c meaning (which echoes the historical antecedent of
the league of Delos in ancient Greece) than that of domination. Imperialism is not the fact of a single country (the United States) but collective
and hierarchical, in its relationship to other less developed countries and given the contradictions within the group of imperialist countries. This is
what we precisely mean by hegemony. The leadership is ensured by the United States and its grasp over the periphery is combined with a
form of inter- imperialist domination within the group of imperialist countries. (Obviously, the two levels of dominations are distinct in
degrees and forms.) This is a simple framework of analysis, but crucial in the understanding of contemporary international power relationships.
Incidentally, note that, referring to financial \hegemony", we give the same content to the notion, that of a two-tier domination process: the
domination of finance over all capitalist classes and the collective rule over other classes. There are obviously political and military aspects to
imperialism and hegemony, and this issue relates to the autonomy of the various states around the planet. Within international institutions, such as
the United Nations, or military structures such as NATO, the hierarchy of powers is very strict. The United States control to a large extent the
military power of Europe, and make constants e orts to secure such a coordinated military efficient order in various regions of the world.
Although the definitions are distinct, there are obvious links between neoliberalism, globalization, and imperialism: 1. A first illustration of this
statement is that globalization, under its present forms, is a central aspect of neoliberalism and U.S. hegemony. Besides the fall of the
Soviet block, the assertion of neoliberalism was a major factor in the strengthening of U.S. supremacy and, therefore, hegemony within
imperialism, not their weakening. Within the triad, both Europe and Japan were more a affected than the United States by the new course of
capitalism. (This is due to structural reasons, notably the existence in Europe and Japan of models of development more at odds with neoliberal
patterns: state intervention, importance of loans in the financing of investment, etc.) 2. It is analytically important to separate the configurations
of power: (1) within class patterns and (2) between countries. For example, within neoliberalism, the former relates to financial hegemony and
compromises; the latter, to the hierarchy among states. But these distinctions are not absolute. A first aspect of such overlapping patterns is that
the state of the hegemonic power is obviously that of its ruling classes. A second aspect is that the world system of imperialism is also based on a
class compromise among ruling classes of the United States, of other imperialist countries and Japan), and of countries of the periphery. For
example, the ruling classes of countries of the periphery sold their public sector to transnational corporations; they freed the movements of their
capitals to be able of exporting their capitals to the countries of the center, etc.
Rhetoric that questions hegemony weakens its resolve - we must embrace the mantle
of the Neoliberal Empire to check every existential and systemic impact.
Stokes 05
- Profess or International Security and Strategy at the Department of Politics at the University of Exeter, former member of the
Department of International Politics, University of Wales, Penglai Vol. 26, No. 2, < http://kar.kent.ac.uk/964/1/yp99bj5nkhqn01la.pdf>)//Beddow
Moreover, the USA is invariably portrayed as a reluctant empire that has almost accidentally inherited the capacity for global power projection
thanks to the preponderance of power left over from the superpower confrontation. America’s Empire was thus not desired nor sought, but was
established almost by default with the extension and consolidation of empire in the post- 11 September era allegedly driven by defensive
considerations to bring order to the zone of war within the Third World. Condoleezza Rice, President Bush’s National Security Adviser, boldly
declared that ‘the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11’ signified a major shift in ‘international politics’ with the post-11 September era
providing the USA with the opportunity to ‘expand the number of democratic states’ in the Third World. 7 Robert Kaplan explained that there is
‘a positive side to Empire...It’s in some ways the most benign form of order’, as a globally hegemonic USA provides the best hope there is for
peace and stability. 8 Sebastian Mallaby echoed Kaplan’s themes and argued that, in the post-11 September era, ‘anti-imperialist restraint’ on
the part of the USA, which has allegedly characterised its foreign policy since ‘World War II’, is increasingly becoming ‘harder to sustain’. He
continues that to protect itself against ‘terrorists, drug smugglers and other international criminals’ that find refuge in ‘failed states’,
the
USA must now acknowledge its ‘reluctantly’ imperial role in world order, and selfconsciously adopt a ‘logic of neo-imperialism’ when dealing with Third World failed states. 9 Some analysts have
even suggested that the lack of US Empire was the reason for the 11 September attacks. The Wall Street Journal ’s features editor, Max Boot,
argued that ‘the Sept 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition; the solution is to be more expansive in our goals
and more assertive in their implementation...US imperialism—a liberal and humanitarian imperialism, to be sure, but imperialism all the
same—appears to have paid off in the Balkans’. He continued that the solution for ‘troubled lands’ in the developing world is a ‘sort of
enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets’. 10 According to Stratfor,
one of the USA’s leading corporate intelligence firms, ‘Sept 11 created an unintended momentum in US foreign policy that has led directly to
empire- building...The United States...is an imperial power, not in the simplistic Leninist sense of seeking markets, but in the classical sense of
being unable to secure its safety without controlling others. ’ 11 The US state is thus seen as an imperial state overseeing a global empire which
brings benefits to both other Western states and also the inhabitants of war-torn states and regions via the US Empire’s core mission of forcible
humanitarian interventions, democracy promotion, and the elimination of global terrorism. These themes have been echoed by US planners
themselves. The pre- 9/11 draft 1992 Defense Planning Guidance ( DFG ) paper drawn up by then Under Secretary for Policy Paul Wolfowitz
and US Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney was sent to military leaders and Defense Department heads to provide them with a geopolitical
framework for interpreting the US role in the post-cold war era. The DFG argued that the USA’s ‘first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of
a new rival’ in the post-cold war era. In so doing the USA should ‘endeavour to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose
resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the
territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia’. 12 Under the office of the current US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, private
studies of past great empires have been conducted so as to ascertain ‘how they maintained their dominance’ and what the USA could learn from
the ‘successes and failures of ancient powers’. 13 Richard Haass, the director of policy planning at the US Department of State, and the USA’s
lead co- ordinator for post-Taliban Afghanistan, openly called for the re-conceptua- lisation of the USA as an imperial power within world order:
‘building and maintaining such an order would require sustained effort by the world’s most powerful actor, the United States. For it to be
successful would in turn require that Americans re-conceive their role from one of a traditional nation-state to an imperial power.’ 14 Perhaps the
clearest indication of this new imperial discourse, however, was the Bush administration’s 2002 National Security Strategy, which echoed the
earlier 1992 DFG paper. In it the Bush administration committed itself to building up its military forces to deter any potential rival for world
supremacy: ‘Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build up in the hopes of
surpassing, or equalling, the power of the United States’. 15
Decline makes every impact inevitable and multipolarity fails.
Kakutani 12 – Pullitzer-Prize winning critic for NYT; citing Zbigniew Brzezinski, Polish American political scientist, geostrategist, and
US National Security Adviser to Jimmy Carter (Michiko, “Surveying a Global Power Shift”, 1/29/12;
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/books/strategic-vision-by-zbigniew-brzezinski.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)//Beddow
What Mr. Brzezinski does do here — lucidly, and for the most part with great persuasiveness — is explore the consequences that a steady slide
by America into impotence and irrelevance might have on the rest of the world. Such a development, he argues, would probably not result in the
“ ‘coronation’ of an effective global successor” like China, but would likely lead to a “protracted phase of rather inconclusive and somewhat
chaotic realignments of both global and regional power, with no grand winners and many more losers.” An America “in serious decline for
domestic and/or external reasons,” he says, would lead to a breakdown in the ability of the international system to prevent conflict once it
became evident that “America is unwilling or unable to protect states it once considered, for national interest and/ or doctrinal reasons, worthy of
its engagement.” As he sees it, a more Darwinian world of tumbling dominoes would most likely result: there would be little to prohibit regional
powers (like Russia) from exerting claims on neighbors falling within traditional or claimed spheres of influence (like Georgia, Belarus and
Ukraine). Taiwan would become increasingly vulnerable, and so too would Israel. In the case of Afghanistan, Mr. Brzezinski says, a failure to
sustain United States-sponsored international involvement in the region could turn that country into a haven again for international terrorism,
while a decline in American power and aid could lead to a worst-case outcome in which Pakistan devolved into “some variation of nuclear
warlordism” or became “a militant-Islamic and anti-Western government similar to Iran.” For that matter, Mr. Brzezinski suggests, a weakened
America would increase the dangers of nuclear proliferation around the world. Were doubts to be raised about the United States’ nuclear
umbrella, he says, countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Turkey and Israel would have to seek security elsewhere — that elsewhere
meaning “nuclear weapons of one’s own or from the extended deterrence of another power — most likely Russia, China or India.” Global
environmental issues — including climate change and growing water shortages — would be similarly affected. In a gloomy conclusion to
this insightful book Mr. Brzezinski writes that without
a revitalized America helping to manage the international commons,
“progress on the issues of central importance to social well-being and ultimately to
human survival
would stall.”
The decline of American hegemony and economic growth make conflict inevitable.
There will be no liberal order – the global nature of the crisis and desperate
diversionary tactics ensure nuclear war.
Heinberg 12 – Senior Fellow-in-Residence of Post Carbon Institute, the world’s foremost Peak Oil Educator, author on international
relations (Richard, “Conflict and Change in the Era of Economic Decline: Part 2: War and peace in a shrinking economy”, 12/12/12; <
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2012-12-12/conflict-and-change-in-the-era-of-economic-decline-part-2-war-and-peace-in-a-shrinkingeconomy#>)//Beddow
Will increasing conflict lead to expanding violence? Not if neuropsychologist Stephen Pinker is right. In his expansive and widely praised book
The Better Angels of Our Nature: the Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes, Pinker claims that, in general, violence has waned during the
past few decades. He argues that this tendency has ancient roots in our shift from peripatetic hunting and gathering to settled farming; moreover,
during the past couple of centuries the trend has greatly intensified. With the emergence of Enlightenment philosophy and its respect for the
individual came what Pinker calls the Humanitarian Revolution. Much more recently, after World War II, violence was suppressed first by the
“mutually assured destruction” policies of the two opposed nuclear-armed sides in the Cold War, and then by American global hegemony. Pinker
calls this the Long Peace. Wars have become less frequent and less violent, and most societies have seen what might be called a decline of
tolerance for intolerance—whether manifested in schoolyard fights, bullying, or picking on gays and minorities. But there is a problem with
Pinker’s implied conclusion that global violence will continue to decline. The Long Peace we have known since World War II may well turn
out to be shorter than hoped as world economic growth stalls and as American hegemony falters—in John Michael Greer’s words, as “the
costs of maintaining a global imperial presence soar and the profits of the imperial wealth pump slump.” Books and articles predicting the end of
the American empire are legion; while some merely point to the rise of China as a global rival, others describe the looming failure of the essential
basis of the U.S. imperial system—the global system of oil production and trade (with its petro-dollar recycling program) centered in the Middle
East. There are any number of scenarios describing how the end of empire might come, but few credible narratives explaining why it won’t.
When empires crumble, as they always do, the result is often a free-for-all among previous subject nations and potential rivals as they
sort out power relations. The British Empire was a seeming exception to this rule: in that instance, the locus of military, political, and economic
power simply migrated to an ally across the Atlantic. A similar graceful transfer seems unlikely in the case of the U.S., as economic decline
during the 21st century will be global in scope. A better analogy to the current case might be the fall of Rome, which led to centuries of
incursions by barbarians as well as uprisings in client states. Disaster per se need not lead to violence, as Rebecca Solnit argues in her book A
Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. She documents five disasters—the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina;
earthquakes in San Francisco and Mexico City; a giant ship explosion in Halifax, Canada; and 9/11—and shows that rioting, looting, rape, and
murder were not automatic results. Instead, for the most part, people pulled together, shared what resources they had, cared for the victims, and in
many instances found new sources of joy in everyday life. However, the kinds of social stresses we are discussing now may differ from the
disasters Solnit surveys, in that they comprise a “long emergency,” to borrow James Kunstler’s durable phrase. For every heartwarming anecdote
about the convergence of rescuers and caregivers on a disaster site, there is a grim historic tale of resource competition turning normal people into
monsters. In the current context, a continuing source of concern must be the large number of nuclear weapons now scattered among nine nations.
While these weapons primarily exist as a deterrent to military aggression, and while the end of the Cold War has arguably reduced the likelihood
of a massive release of these weapons in an apocalyptic fury, it is still possible to imagine several scenarios in which a nuclear detonation
could occur as a result of accident, aggression, pre-emption, or retaliation. We are in a race—but it’s not just an arms race; indeed, it may
end up being an arms race in reverse. In many nations around the globe the means to pay for armaments and war are starting to disappear;
meanwhile, however, there is increasing incentive to engage in international conflict as a way of re-channeling the energies of jobless
young males and of distracting the general populace, which might otherwise be in a revolutionary mood. We can only hope that historical
momentum can maintain The Great Peace until industrial nations are sufficiently bankrupt that they cannot afford to mount foreign wars on any
substantial scale.
Heg sustainable but declining – it must be renewed to stop war.
Brzezinski 12 – former National Security Adviser (Zbigniew, “Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power”, 2012;
<http://books.google.com/books?id=rx6KUegdcvoC>)//Beddow
In answering these questions this book will argue that America’s role in the world will continue to be essential in the years to come. Indeed, the
ongoing changes in the distribution of global power and mounting global strife make it all the more imperative that America not retreat into an
ignorant garrison-state mentality or wallow in self-righteous cultural hedonism. Such an America could cause the geopolitical prospects of the
evolving world – in which the center of gravity is shifting from West to East – to become increasingly grave. The world needs an America that
is economically vital, socially appealing, responsibly powerful, strategically deliberate, internationally respected, and historically
enlightened in its global engagement with the new East. How likely is such a globally purposeful America? Today, America’s historical mood
is uneasy, and notions of America’s decline as historically inevitable are intellectually fashionable. However, this kind of periodic
pessimism is neither novel nor self-fulfilling. Even the belief that the twentieth century was “America’s century,” which became widespread in
the wake of World War II, did not preclude the phases of anxiety regarding America’s long-range future. When the Soviet Union launched
Sputnik, its first orbital satellite, during the Eisenhower administration, Americans became concerned about their prospects in both peaceful
competition and strategic warfare. And again, when the United States failed to achieve a meaningful victory in Vietnam during the Nixon years,
Soviet leaders confidently predicted America’s demise while historically pessimistic American policy makers sought détente in exchange for the
status quo in the divided Europe. But America proved to be more resilient and the Soviet system eventually imploded. By 1991, following the
disintegration both of the Soviet bloc and then the Soviet Union itself, the United States was left standing as the only global superpower. Not only
the twentieth but even the twenty-first century then seemed destined to be American centuries. Both President Bill Clinton and President George
W. Bush confidently asserted as much. And academic circles echoed them with bold prognoses that the end of the Cold War meant in effect “the
end of history” insofar as doctrinal debates regarding the relative superiority of competing social systems was concerned. The victory of liberal
democracy was proclaimed not only as decisive but also final. Given that liberal democracy had flowered first in the West, the implied
assumption was that henceforth the West would be the defining standard for the world. However, such super-optimism did not last long. The
culture of self-gratification and deregulation that began during the Clinton years and continued under President George W. Bush led to the
bursting of one stock market bubble at the turn of the century and a full-scale financial crash less than a decade later. The costly unilateralism of
the younger Bush presidency led to a decade of war in the Middle East and the derailment of American foreign policy at large. The financial
catastrophe of 2008 nearly precipitated a calamitous economic depression, jolting America and much of the West into a sudden recognition of
their systemic vulnerability to unregulated greed. Moreover, in China and other Asian states a perplexing amalgam of economic liberalism and
state capitalism demonstrated the surprising capacity for economic growth and technological innovation. This in turn prompted new anxiety about
the future of America’s status as the leading world power. Indeed, there are several alarming similarities between the Soviet Union in the years
just prior to its fall and the America of the early twenty-first century. The Soviet Union, with an increasingly gridlocked governmental system
incapable of enacting serious policy revisions, in effect bankrupted itself by committing an inordinate percentage of its GNP to a decades-long
military rivalry with the United States and exacerbated this problem by not taking on the additional costs of a decade-long attempt to conquer
Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, it could not afford to sustain its competition with America in cutting-edge technological sectors and thus fell
further behind: its economy stumbled and the society’s quality of life further deteriorated in comparison to the West: its ruling Communist class
became cynically insensitive to widening social disparities while hypocritically masking its own privileged life-style; and finally, in foreign
affairs it became increasingly self-isolated, while precipitating a geopolitically damaging hostility with its once-prime Eurasian ally, Communist
China.
These parallels, even if overdrawn, fortify the case that America must renew itself
and
pursue a comprehensive and long-term geopolitical vision, one that is responsive to the challenges of the changing historical context. Only a
dynamic and strategically minded America, together with a unifying Europe, can jointly promote a larger and more vital West, one
capable of acting as a responsible partner to the rising and increasingly assertive East. Otherwise, a geopolitically divided and self-centered
West could slide into a historical decline reminiscent of the humiliating impotence of the nineteenth-century China, while the East might be
tempted to replicate the self-destructive power rivalries of twentieth-century Europe. In brief, the crisis of global power is the cumulative
consequence of the dynamic shift in the world’s center of gravity from the West to the East, of the accelerating surfacing of the restless
phenomenon of global political awakening, and of America’s deficient domestic and international performance since its emergence by 1990 as
the world’s only superpower. The foregoing poses serious long-term risks to the survival of some endangered states, to the security of the
global commons, and to global stability at large. This book seeks to outline the needed strategic vision, looking beyond 2025.
Hegemony is sustainable and decline turns every impact
Brooks et al 13 – Former Fellow at the International Security Program 2003-2004 / Ikenberry / Editorial Board Member Quarterly
Journal: International Security (Stephen, “Why America Should Not Retrench”, March 2013;
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/22910/why_america_should_not_retrench.html)//Beddow
The United States has pursued a grand strategy of "deep engagement" since the end of World War II. At the core of this grand strategy is a series
of security commitments to partners in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East. Growing fiscal pressures, the difficulties associated with the
interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the rise of China have added fuel to the argument championed by most international relations scholars
who write on U.S. grand strategy: that America should pursue retrenchment by curtailing or eliminating its overseas military presence and
eliminating or dramatically reducing its global security commitments. A comprehensive assessment of the strategy's costs and benefits reveals
that these scholars are wrong: America's choice to retain a grand strategy of deep engagement after the Cold War is just what the preponderance
of international relations scholarship would expect a rational, self-interested, leading power in the United States' position to do. THE
AFFORDABILITY OF DEEP ENGAGEMENT Post–September 11 levels of defense spending are unnecessary to maintain the deep engagement
strategy. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, defense spending increased dramatically, owing in large part to the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan as well as to an augmented effort to wield and to use military tools in the wider war on terrorism. Both of these drivers of increased
spending during the past decade have already begun to be reversed as the United States winds down the two costly wars and begins to trim
nonwar "base" spending. The United States currently spends 4.5 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on defense, but this figure is slated
to drop by 50 percent within a few years: based on current Defense Department planning, defense cuts are expected to bring defense expenditures
as a share of GDP just below 3 percent by 2017, even though spending in real terms will be roughly $100 billion higher than it was in the late
1990s. Importantly, this does not represent the floor for spending to sustain the strategy over the long term: the Pentagon could save more with no
ill effects by reforming its procurement practices and compensation policies. It is therefore clear that the United States can sustain the
budgetary cost of deep engagement. Spending roughly 3 percent of GDP on defense is less than half the Cold War average (from 1950 to 1990,
that figure averaged 7.6 percent). In the contemporary era, this represents a spending level comparable both to the world average of 2.5 percent
and to that of U.S. allies such as Britain (2.5 percent) and South Korea (2.7 percent), while only marginally above China (2.0 percent). A metaanalysis of economic studies of the relationship between military spending and economic performance confirms that there is no reason to expect
adverse effects on U.S. growth from this spending. There is thus no economic-growth rational for retrenchment. Revoking security guarantees
would make the world and the United States less secure. In Asia, Japan and South Korea would likely expand their military capabilities if
the United States were to leave, which could provoke a dangerous reaction from China. Security dilemmas in the Middle East would
likely become more intense absent a U.S. presence. In addition, there are dangers even in Europe, which may become more unstable if
current U.S. allies do not develop the capabilities to deal with security problems on their periphery following a U.S. withdrawal. A U.S.
withdrawal, moreover, could spark a cascade of nuclear proliferation if states such as Egypt, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia
were to build nuclear forces. This could prompt other states in each region to seek nuclear arsenals as well. A dramatic increase in the number of
nuclear powers would be a great concern, because most of these states would not have the kinds of nuclear forces that are needed to
generate stable nuclear deterrence such as existed between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And the more nuclear
powers there are, the higher the probability of "leakage" to nonstate actors. Retrenchment would vitiate the leverage that Washington now uses to
restrain its partners from acting provocatively and from transferring weapons to potential adversaries, which in turn helps to deter other states in
each region from undertaking destabilizing actions. Ultimately, by decreasing global security, retrenchment would likely generate greater military
efforts worldwide, prompting a more rapid diffusion of power away from the United States. Far from the solution its proponents advertise,
retrenchment would likely exacerbate the problem of American decline.
Neolib Good – Democracy
Neoliberalism is key to democracy
Liverman and Vilas 6 – *Diana, Professor of Environmental Science at Oxford University, **Oxford
(“Neoliberalism and the Environment in Latin America,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources, vol. 31, Web of Sciences)//BB
In Latin America, contemporary neoliberal processes include the dismantling of protectionist tariff and trade
barriers established during the import substitution period when government sought to substitute expensive manufactured imports with
domestic industrial goods. Neoliberalism also brings (a) the signing of regional and hemispheric free trade
agreements; (b) cuts in public expenditure that include the elimination of subsidies, the sale of public utilities, and job layoffs in the
public sector; (c) the titling and privatization of property rights in land, water, forests, fisheries, and
other resources that had previously been commonly or state owned; and (d) the rolling back of environmental
and labor regulations. In some cases, Latin American neoliberalization has coincided with the emergence of
more democratic political systems out of long-standing authoritarian or one party
governments and with the decentralization of responsibility from national to state and municipal
levels.
Best empirical analysis proves – economic freedom is the cause of democracy and
stability in Latin America.
CIPE 13 – Development blog managed by the Center for International Private Enterprise, citing the Democracy Index from the Economic
Intelligence Unit, a measurement from The Economist (Center for International Private Enterprise, “The Quality of Democracy and Economic
Freedom in Latin America and the Caribbean”, 6/28/13; < http://www.cipe.org/blog/2013/06/28/the-quality-of-democracy-and-economicfreedom-in-latin-america-and-the-caribbean/#.UdxM-G12nNs>)//Beddow
According to the latest Democracy Index from the Economist Intelligence Unit, only two countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are
considered full democracies. More than half of them (58 percent or 14 countries) fall under the category of flawed democracies, while 7 countries
live under hybrid regimes, and one still lives under an authoritarian regime. On the other hand, according to the latest edition of the Heritage
Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, only one country in the region is considered mostly free (none is considered completely free), almost
half of them (11 countries out of 24) can be considered living under a moderately free economy, 6 economies fall under the category of mostly
unfree, and 6 countries are considered repressed economies. What is the relationship between the quality of democracy and the level of economic
freedom in the Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC) countries? There is a positive correlation between quality of democracy and
economic freedom. Far from showing causality, the assumption here is that countries that now enjoy high quality of democracy are the ones that
embark on political reforms. In a similar way, the countries that enjoy higher economic freedom are the ones that tend to liberalize their
economies, are more likely to implement market-oriented policies, and therefore are able to achieve greater levels of economic prosperity. I am
assuming what CIPE’s Anna Nadgrodkiewicz stated in a blog posted on June 2008 as true, — “political and economic reforms are intertwined
and mutually dependent rather than contrary to each other”. As shown in the chart below, the countries in LAC with better quality of
democracy tend to score higher in terms of economic freedom, and vice versa. As can be expected, Uruguay, Costa Rica, and Chile are the
countries where the quality of democracy tends to be higher than in the others LAC countries, and also in these countries the level of economic
freedom is relatively high. On the contrary, in Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela the quality of democracy is low (or nonexistent) and their economic
freedom is absent. The rest of the countries lay in between these two extreme cases. The reason why countries that enjoy high quality of
democracy tend to also enjoy relatively high levels of economic freedom is straightforward. In full democracies countries, such as in Uruguay
and Costa Rica, political freedoms and civil liberties are respected, but these will also tend to be underpinned by a political culture conducive to
flourishing a democracy. The functioning government is satisfactory. Media is independent and diverse. There is an effective system of checks
and balances. The judiciary is independent and judicial decisions are enforced, and there are only limited problems in the functioning of
democracies. Therefore, the reason for why the countries in this category also tend to have higher economic freedom is because rule of law
governs the decisions of politicians. The perception of corruption tends to be relatively low, and given the fact that the judiciary is
independent, property rights are often respected. These are all part of the pillars that constitute the foundations of economic freedom in
every country. Policymakers in LAC can do more good by embarking in serious political and economic reforms that lead their countries
to better democracies and freer economies. If done properly, reforms can help lead the way for nations to build prosperity.
Radical leftism undermines democracy in Latin America – a moderate approach is
key to strengthen it.
Weyland et al 10 – Lozano Long Professor of Latin American Politics (Kurt, “Leftist Governments in Latin America: Successes and
Shortcomings”, Cambridge University Press 2010, p.14-15; Print.)//Beddow
Contestatory left efforts have also reduced the space for political pluralism and put pressure on liberal safeguards by strengthening the
majoritarian aspects of democracy. Thus, they have run the risk of undermining rather than deepening democracy. This danger is
particularly acute because the inclusionary, participatory initiatives of the contestatory left often face political opposition from actors that benefit
from the status quo and that worry about the hegemonic repercussions of mobilizational efforts. By incorporating new mass sectors into the
political system, more radical leftists seem to use the power and resources of the government to attain and cement a degree of electoral support
that may unbalance democratic competition and threaten pluralism. Concern about these tendencies has triggered a great deal of political
polarization in Venezuela and Bolivia, which has done further damage to democracy and weakened economic and social development prospects
as well. Seeing these risks and the distrust and opposition that participatory initiatives and institutional reform efforts therefore elicit, the
moderate left prefers caution. It concentrates its attempts to stimulate citizen participation at the local level, where decision making operates at
the proper scale for effective popular involvement, for instance via participatory budgeting (Baiocchi 2005). At the national level, by contrast, the
moderate left is content with the predominance of representative principles and procedures, which avoid the risk of populist mass manipulation.
Therefore, it merely tempers representation through regular consultation with interest associations and other corporatist mechanisms.
Furthermore, the moderate left seeks to democratize the established institutional framework by eliminating distortions inherited from the
authoritarian past (Such as designated senators in Chile). Yet rather than imposing these reforms, for instance by fomenting mass
demonstrations, it prefers to negotiate them with the opposition. This cautious approach fully respects and further strengthens democratic
principles and institutions, but it also has a downside. It fails to combat the disappointment with the operation of democracy prevalent in presentday Latin America. Although citizens in many countries maintain a fairly high level of principled commitment to democracy, they are
discontented with the way decisions are made and hold crucial mechanisms of representative democracy, especially political parties and
parliaments, in dangerously low esteem (Corporacion Latinobarometro 2008: 85-88, 104-9). Whereas the mobilizational efforts and participatory
reforms of the contestatory left promise to combat this malaise and reinvigorate democracy, the moderate left chooses to forgo the chance to
make such progress for the sake of preserving the political accomplishments that the democratization wave of the 1980s achieved. On balance,
however, the case studies show that the moderate left has attained greater political success in tending to the fragile flower of democracy.
Although the citizen malaise is problematic, the increasing strangulation of political pluralism and growing infringement on liberal rights
and safeguards in the countries governed by the contestatory left are much more problematic. They
the quality of democracy, but to its very survival.
constitute threats not just to
The moderate left’s sins of political omission do not prevent the
correction of these problems in the future, yet the contestatory left’s sins of political commission are threatening to lock in an imbalance of power
and hegemonic predominance that make an eventual change of course very difficult and costly. Because democracy recognizes human fallibility
and therefore seeks to institutionalize openness, it abhors the closure that the mobilizational tactics and hegemonic tendencies of the contestatory
left threaten to produce.
Hardline leftism breaks down political pluralism – neuters democracy.
Weyland et al 10 – Lozano Long Professor of Latin American Politics (Kurt, “Leftist Governments in Latin America: Successes and
Shortcomings”, Cambridge University Press 2010, p.148; Print.)//Beddow
Bold reform efforts tend to provoke resistance. The moderate left accepts the need to safeguard political space for such opposition, but the
contestatory left seeks to overpower is and push it aside. Accordingly, Chavez, Morales and their movements have behaved quite aggressively
toward the political opposition, although the opposition has engaged in numerous aggressive and, sometimes, undemocratic practices as well.
They have regularly denounced opposition leaders harshly and have pursued controversial criminal charges against some of them, driving a few
of them into exile. Even rank-and-file supporters of the opposition at times have been subject to harassment, including the loss of government
jobs and state social benefits, especially in Venezuela. The Chavez and Morales administrations also have regularly denounced the media. Both
governments have been accused of using regulatory measures, advertising budgets, and tax audits to punish media outlets that are critical of the
government, and the Chavez administration has steadily expanded state ownership of the media industry (Human Rights Watch 2008). In
addition, social movements allied with and, in some cases, controlled by the governments have used demonstrations to intimidate the political
opposition and other critics of the government. The Morales administration, for example, has used protests, particularly be indigenous groups, to
put pressure on the opposition to pass legislation, including the new constitution. Similarly, the Chavez administration has used the mass-based
organizations it created, like the Bolivarian Circles, to bully the opposition. The contestatory left governments thus have undermined some of
the fundamental principles of liberal democracy. While they have upheld the formal core institutions of representative democracy, such as free
and more or less fair elections, they have squeezed the political pluralism that gives them substance. For democracy to thrive, there need to be
ample opportunities for open, undisturbed public debate, including criticism of government officials and their performance. In its quest for
political hegemony, the contestatory left has frequently infringed on this maxim. Civil society has become less civil as debate and deliberation
have increasingly been replaced by mass mobilization, extrainstitutional pressure, and the occasional recourse to intimidation and even violence.
The willingness to compromise has given way to polarization and mutual recrimination.
Neoliberalism solves human rights – democracy spread
Mandelbaum, 7 (Michael, PhD in Political Science from Harvard, Professor and Director of the American Foreign Policy program at the
Johns Hopkins University, September-October 2007, Foreign Affairs journal (accessed through Jstor), “Democracy Without America: The
Spontaneous Spread of Freedom”)
The worldwide demand for democratic government in the modern era arose due to the success of
the countries practicing it. The United Kingdom in the nineteenth century and the United States in
the twentieth became militarily the most powerful and economically the most prosperous sovereign
states. The two belonged to the winning coalition in each of the three global conflicts of the
twentieth century: the two world wars and the Cold War. Their success made an impression on
others. Countries, like individuals, learn from what they observe.¶ For countries as for individuals, success inspires
imitation. The course of modern history made democracy seem well worth emulating. The desire for a democratic political system
does not by itself create the capacity for establishing one. The key to establishing a working democracy, and in
particular the institutions of liberty, has been the free-market economy. The institutions, skills, and
values needed to operate a free-market economy are those that, in the political sphere constituted
democracy. Democracy spreads through the workings of the market when people apply the habits and procedures they are already
carrying out in one sector of social life (the economy) to another one (the political arena). The market is to democracy what
a grain of sand is to an oyster's pearl: the core around which it forms. The free market fosters
democracy because private property, which is central to any market economy, is itself a form of
liberty. Moreover, a successfully functioning market economy makes the citizens of the society in
which it is established wealthier, and wealth implants democracy by, among other things,
subsidizing the kind of political participation that genuine democracy requires. Many studies have
found that the higher a country's per capita output, the more likely that country is to protect liberty
and choose its government through free and fair elections.
Neolib Good – Environment
Foreign corporate ownership is BETTER for environmental sustainability
Liverman and Vilas 6 – *Diana, Professor of Environmental Science at Oxford University, **Oxford
(“Neoliberalism and the Environment in Latin America,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources, vol. 31, Web of Sciences)//BB
Neoliberal processes alter the impacts of industrial activities on the environment mainly through changes
in trade, investment, and environmental regulation. The
majority of studies on industry and environment under neoliberalism in
Latin America focus on the impacts of NAFTA in Mexico, especially on the manufacturing enterprises known as “maquiladoras.”
Maquiladoras (or maquilas) predate NAFTA, originating in the 1958 Border Industrialization Program that promoted in-bond export
manufacturing zones along the U.S.-Mexican border where companies could take advantage of cheap Mexican labor to assemble
products without paying high tariffs to reimport them back into the United States. NAFTA opened up foreign investment to the whole
country, and maquila-type operations have now spread to remote areas of Mexico, such as the Yucatan where labor is even cheaper.
Many other countries, such as Guatemala and Costa Rica, have also established low-tariff export manufacturing
zones. Advocates of free trade argued that economic growth would result in environmental improvements and that the NAFTA
environmental side agreement would further support environmental quality. ¶ In the case of Mexico, authors such as Cooney (33) and
Roberts & Thanos (34) assert that predictions of environmental improvement in Mexico due to NAFTA have not come true and that
maquiladoras have led to greater environmental degradation and health risks in the U.S.-Mexico border region. They argue that a lack of
legislation and enforcement, together with a weak institutional framework, have allowed foreign-owned manufacturing companies to
continuously violate environment (and labor) laws. Together with lower environmental standards than on the U.S. side of the border,
maquilas in Mexico have caused serious environmental damage in the border cities, evidenced through increased air pollution, water
pollution and depletion, and inadequate waste management.¶ In contrast, a
number of studies find no evidence of
pollution havens nor a race to the bottom in Mexico (26). A survey conducted by Husted & Rodriguezmaquiladoras tend to be cleaner and more sensitive to local
regulation than local industry. This is attributed to several factors, including compliance with international
corporate requirements and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development standards; the need to have
more efficient technology to compete in the international market; external pressures from investors’ export
markets demanding environmentally sensitive production; increased enforcement of environmental
regulation in the manufacturing sector; and higher costs of energy and water.
Oreggia (35) showed that foreign-owned
Post-NAFTA mining proves
Liverman and Vilas 6 – *Diana, Professor of Environmental Science at Oxford University, **Oxford
(“Neoliberalism and the Environment in Latin America,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources, vol. 31, Web of Sciences)//BB
The mining sector has been the focus of several analyses of neoliberalism, especially in Chile and Peru
where the mineral sector is economically important. As
Chile and other countries opened the doors to foreign
direct investment in what had been a heavily protected or state-owned mining sector, there was a boom in the
mining and extractive industry. By the end of the 1990s, mining represented over 40% of total export earnings in countries
such as Chile, Bolivia, and Peru (51). Total exploration investment in Latin America grew from US$100 million at the end of the 1980s
(representing 10% of global investment) to US$1170 million by the end of 1990s (29% of global investment)—a 10-fold growth, with
Chile receiving 51% of this investment.¶ The mining industry worldwide has been blamed for environmental
problems such as land and soil degradation, depletion and pollution of rivers and aquifers, air pollution, high-energy use, inadequate
disposal and cleanup of liquid and solid residue, impacts on flora and fauna, and workers health (51). The substantial restructuring of the
mining industry in Latin America in recent years provides an important test of theories about the globalization of trade and investment
and impacts on environmental management (52).¶ Several authors (53, 54) suggest that neoliberal policies, especially
privatization, foreign investment, and export orientation, have brought improvements in
environmental policies and practices to the mining industry in most developed countries. They
argue that private
mining firms are more efficient in extracting minerals and thus better at protecting
the environment because they have better production methods, technologies, and environmental
practices (in essence that there are scale, technique, and composition effects) and because they wish to avoid liability
risks, comply with home country regulations, and conform to export market expectations. As a result,
companies that remained state or locally owned had to adapt to higher production and environmental standards to remain competitive in
the international market.¶ Borregaard et al. (53) studied the Chilean copper mining industry following
privatization and found that foreign mining companies adopted environmental policies that go far
beyond national regulations while introducing environmental measures between 5 and 10
years earlier than their national counterparts (both private and public). The authors cite studies that show that
environmental impact assessments conducted by foreign mining companies were instrumental in defining the environmental impact
assessment framework for the Chilean Environmental Law and that foreign environmental technology and management
systems have enabled
the transfer and diffusion of technology within the country. Improvements in
Chilean mining practices occurred in the context of the transition to more democratic government from the military regime
that had repressed public, including environmental, protest. Additional pressure came from several law suits filed and processed against
mining companies during the late 1980s and from lobbying by U.S. copper producers to raise import tariffs of Chilean copper on
environmental grounds during the early 1990s (53).
Neoliberal forest management solves
Liverman and Vilas 6 – *Diana, Professor of Environmental Science at Oxford University, **Oxford
(“Neoliberalism and the Environment in Latin America,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources, vol. 31, Web of Sciences)//BB
Costa Rica is internationally renowned for protecting more than 25% of its forest areas from
exploitation and for the income that the country generates from ecotourism. Each foreign tourist pays $6 a day to enter national
parks and about double this for private forest parks.¶ Costa Rica's forests are also the cornerstone for creating new
markets associated with payment for environmental services, such as watershed protection, carbon
trading, and biodiversity (12). This market-based approach to conservation has been identified as a
neoliberal strategy. A World Bank study identified potential values ranging from $10 ha/year for watershed protection for
hydroelectric development to $120 ha/year for carbon sequestration (12). A 1996 Forest Law (funded through a sales tax on fossil
fuels, private companies, and the Kyoto Clean Development Mechanism for carbon sequestration) introduced payments for
environmental services to owners of forests and forest plantations who maintained forests for
carbon mitigation, water resources, and biodiversity. Only those with a registered land title can benefit,
discriminating against many small farmers and peasants who have insecure or common property titles (97). Several important services
are not included in these new markets, including flood protection, soil erosion control, nutrient provision, or pest control. Almost
$50 million in grants and loans (including $32.6 million from World Bank) was made available for services
that included forest protection around national parks, the MesoAmerican Biological
Corridor , and major rivers , as well as for rehabilitating degraded forests
(98).
Neolib has led to environmental regulation
Plastow 10 (Robert Plastow, University of Exeter, “Neoliberalism in environmental governance: a paradoxical double movement?”,
http://academia.edu/2703516/Neoliberalism_in_environmental_governance_a_paradoxical_double_movement)//lm
Neoliberalism has developed into an extremely strong and dynamic ideology within Western capitalist societies and as a result has
permeated nearly all areas of life. It has had an increasing influence on policy development, particularly
environmental governance, heralding a restructuring and rescaling of state and use of regulation.
Previously, environmental conservation has been seen as a key opponent to the neoliberal agenda as
the change in social relations to nature it brings has often been destructive to the earth and demanding of natural resources. However,
market based instruments and other neoliberal policy tools have been of increasing importance to
environmental governance and conservation , reflecting the power and pervasiveness of its
rationality and adoption worldwide .
Market based reforms lead to better environmental regulation
Plastow 10 (Robert Plastow, University of Exeter, “Neoliberalism in environmental governance: a paradoxical double movement?”,
http://academia.edu/2703516/Neoliberalism_in_environmental_governance_a_paradoxical_double_movement)//lm
For proponents of neoliberalism, the market is seen not only as the governing mechanism for allocating all goods and services but also
as a way of understanding the organisation and evaluation of institutional performance, necessitating the commodification of everything,
(McCarthy and Prudham, 2004). However, Benton sees a clash between economic and ecological rationalities in that it makes good
commercial sense for firms to externalise production costs, which is ecologically irrational, (Benton, 1991; Castree, 2008). The
externalities created by production, pass the environmental costs onto society and the biophysical world, creating an ecological
contradiction that sees neoliberal capitalism gnawing away at the resource base that supports it, (O'Connor, 1998; Pepper, 1993). Hence,
it is argued, that without sufficient self-regulation by firms or states, capitalist societies will continue to create ecological crises,
(Castree, 2008; O'Connor, 1998).However, by making firms internalise externalities, in other words making
the
polluter pay, market- based instruments provide an incentive for innovation of new technologies
and are therefore more cost-effective than traditional regulation, (Jordan et al, 2003). It is hoped that
“through efficiency gains and better management, private companies will be able to lower prices,
improve performance, and increase cost recovery, enabling systems to be upgraded and expanded”,
(Bakker, 2007: 437).By encoding the natural world as a form of the economic world, cost-benefit
analysis and market criteria can be applied to decision-making processes, (Lemke, 2001), within the
dominant, hegemonic discourse of neoliberal capitalism. This commodification of nature, or its neoliberalisation (Castree, 2008),
requires the creation of new marketable property rights, “employing markets as allocation mechanisms, and incorporating environmental
externalities through pricing”, then, as a result of the economic-rationality of neoliberalism: “environmental goods will be
more efficiently allocated if treated as economic goods—thereby simultaneously addressing
concerns over environmental degradation and inefficient use of resources”, (Bakker,2007: 434).
Neolib Good – Economy
Neoliberalism is key to the economy
Huber 04 (Evelyne Huber , Morehead Alumni Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Department of Political Science at the
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “SUCCESSES AND FAILURES OF NEOLIBERALISM”, lasa2.univ.pitt.edu/larr/prot/fulltext/vol39no3/huber.pdf, T.C.)
We can look at five indicators to assess progress towards such a development model: growth,
economic stability/ predictability/ absence of volatility, poverty, inequality, and quality of
democracy . Since all Latin American and Caribbean countries embarked on some kind of
neoliberal reform course in the 1980s and/or 1990s, we can begin by looking at the overall trajectory of
our indicators in Latin America, assuming that overall performance was shaped by the thrust of the
reforms. Growth performance has been mixed; after the lost decade of the 1980s, we saw good
average growth rates in the first half of the 1990s, but lower ones in the second half. Arguably,
lower average rates in the second half were due to the effects of various financial crises, starting with
the Tequila crisis in the mid-1990s, continuing with the repercussions of the Asian crisis in 1997 and 1998, and culminating in the
Argentine collapse in 2001 and 2002. With regard to stability versus volatility, it is clear that stability has
increased in one respect, in that Latin American countries had clearly lower rates of inflation in the
1990s than before. However, in other respects volatility dominated. As a result, a whole issue of the
InterAmerican Development Bank’s annual report on Economic and Social Progress in Latin America was devoted to the topic of
“Overcoming 152 Latin American Research Review Volatility” (1995). The periodic financial crises generated the
need for economic stabilization and resulted in a decline in growth rates in the short run. This
volatility also kept investment rates low and thus reduced the growth potential in the longer run. If
we look at poverty, we see an improvement in the 1990s; poverty fell from 48.3 percent of the
population in 1990 to 43.8 percent in 1999, but still remained above the level of 40.5 percent in
1980 (estimate for nineteen countries; ECLAC 2002, 14). Arguably, this is a result of a combination of the changing
class structure in Latin America and the failure of governments to include in their reforms the
construction of solid social safety nets. The growing informalization and decline of formal sector employment, together
with other reforms, have led to growing income concentration, as outlined by Portes and Hoffman (2003). Finally, the quality of
democracy in Latin America has not improved since roughly the mid-1980s, as Larry Diamond et
al. (1999, 62) have shown. According to the Freedom House scores, there were seven liberal
democracies among twenty-two Latin American and Caribbean countries in 1980, as indicated by a
score of 2–5 for political rights and civil liberties; by 1987 the number had increased to thirteen,
but dropped again to eleven by 1997. The number of outright authoritarian regimes decreased from
eight to one over this period, and the number of electoral or pseudodemocracies increased from
seven to ten. Overall, the picture of progress in the areas of growth, stability, poverty, and democracy is not particularly
encouraging. Proponents of neoliberal reforms are quick to argue that the problem has been insufficient commitment to reforms. If
governments had been less cautious, less intimidated by political opposition, and instead more aggressive in pushing through a broad
reform program, the outcomes would have been better. In their view, bold actions by politically insulated technocrats, including shock
therapies, are indicated to overcome resistance. In order to subject these claims to empirical scrutiny, we perform some simple
comparisons. We compare countries that ranked higher on neoliberal reforms in the mid-1990s to those
that ranked lower, and we compare more radical to more cautious reformers over the period of
1982 to 1995. We are using the best available data on neoliberal reform in Latin America, the
General Reform Index (GRI) constructed by Morley et al. (1999). Unfortunately, the data for this index that are
in the public domain only cover the years up to 1995. The GRI has five components: commercial, financial,
capital account, privatization, and tax reform. The index confirms that all of the countries underwent
neoliberal reforms in the years after the onset of the debt crisis; in fact the 1995 GRI scores for all
countries, except Jamaica (.767) and Venezuela (.667), exceeded that of the most neoliberal country of 1982, Uruguay
(.776). We first divide the countries into two groups, those above the median value of the GRI in 1995, and those below. In order to
better gauge the successes and failures of radical, that is, fast and extensive, neoliberal reform
processes, we then classify the countries on the basis of the extent of these reforms from 1982 to
1995, measured as the change in GRI scores. We further include a measure of the magnitude of any drastic reform episodes their
governments may have imposed during that period. We calculated the magnitude of drastic Table 1 Neoliberal Reforms in Seventeen
Latin American Countries Countries Above Median Countries Below Median General Reform Index, 1995 Uruguay Venezuela
Argentina Jamaica El Salvador Honduras Dominican Republic Colombia Costa Rica Ecuador Peru Brazil Chile Mexico Guatemala
Bolivia Paraguay Change in GRI, 1982–1995 Dominican Republic Chile Peru Uruguay El Salvador Honduras Paraguay Colombia
Jamaica Argentina Guatemala Venezuela Costa Rica Ecuador Brazil Bolivia Mexico Drastic Reform Episodes, 1982–1995 Peru
Uruguay Brazil Chile Costa Rica Venezuela Paraguay Argentina Ecuador Honduras Dominican Republic Colombia Bolivia Mexico El
Salvador Jamaica Guatemala Source: Morley, Machado, and Pettinato (1999). 154 Latin American Research Review reform episodes for
each country as its largest one-year change on the GRI. Again, both classifications are simple dichotomies, above and below the median
of the measure in question. The three classifications overlap considerably. Costa Rica, the Dominican
Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, and Paraguay are above the median in all three
classifications; Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, and Venezuela are consistently below the median.
Despite these similarities, the three classifications yield different results that are useful for evaluating the
claims made on behalf of neoliberal reform against its actual record in Latin America. Results for
our first two indicators, growth and volatility, are shown in table 2. We divide the period into two
sub-periods, 1982–89 and 1990– 98. We do this in order to deal with the argument that an analysis of the whole period
would lump together the economic crises that preceded the reforms with the reform period itself and its aftermath. It could be the case
that the countries that suffered the worst crises then engaged in the most radical reforms, and a bad
economic performance over the entire period could be interpreted as a cause rather than an effect of
radical neoliberal reforms. Table 2 shows that countries that had more liberalized economies in
1995 suffered a somewhat bigger decline in GDP per capita between 1982 and 1989 but
experienced clearly higher average annual growth in GDP per capita between 1990 and 1998 (in
constant dollars, adjusted for purchasing power parity). However, just as clearly, countries that pursued more radical
reform approaches suffered actually a somewhat lower decline between 1982 and 1989 but then
experienced six times lower average annual growth rates between 1990 and 1998 than countries
that proceeded more cautiously. Countries that imposed drastic reform episodes suffered a steeper decline in between 1982
and 1989, and between 1990 and 1998 grew by less than a quarter of the rate of countries that avoided them. This last result could
potentially be interpreted as lending some support to the alternative interpretation that deeper economic crises were the causes of more
radical reforms. However, one can just as well argue that the drastic reform episodes aggravated the economic recessions. An
examination of growth rates in the period between 1973 and 1981 does not support the argument that economies with historically lower
growth rates were forced into more radical reforms in the 1980s. Radical reformers grew at an average of 1.15
percent in the period between 1973 and 1981, whereas the more moderate reformers grew at an
average annual rate of 1.51 percent—not a difference that would lead to risky experiments.
Moreover, between 1973 and 1981 countries that imposed radical reform episodes in the 1980s
grew at 1.77 percent per year, whereas countries that avoided such episodes grew at 0.86 percent
per year. These results suggest very strongly that more liberalized economies did provide better
conditions for economic growth between 1990 and 1998, but that radical SUCCESSES AND FAILURES OF
NEOLIBERALISM 155 approaches to liberalization have substantial costs in the form of depressed growth rates. When we turn to
volatility, the picture is very consistent; more liberalization is associated with greater volatility. Following the Inter-American
Development Bank (1995), we measure volatility in per capita income using the standard deviation of annual growth . In countries
with more liberalized economies as of 1995, the average standard deviation in annual growth was
5.7 percent in the period between 1990 and 1998, compared to 3.6 percent for countries with less
liberalized economies. 1 The more radical reformers had the same degree of volatility, 5.7 percent, and the more cautious
reformers, the lower rate of 4.1 percent. Finally, countries that imposed radical reform episodes in the period between 1982 and 1998
had a volatility of 5.5 percent between 1990 and 1998, and countries that avoided drastic reform episodes, 4.2 percent. Our results, then,
indicate that both the speed of neoliberal reforms and a higher achieved level of reforms have costs in the form of higher volatility.
Arguably, this is a result of the combination of the liberalization of capital markets and trade, an argument we will come back to below.
Table 2 Economic Growth and Stability Gross Domestic Product Per Capita (1995 PPP U.S. Dollars) Standard Average Average
Deviation Annual Annual of Annual Growth, Growth, Growth, 1982–1989 1990–1998 1990–1998 (%) (%) (%) General Reform Index,
1995 Above Median -0.74 1.35 5.7 Below Median -0.43 -0.37 3.6 Change in GRI, 1982–1995 Above Median -0.42 0.14 5.7 Below
Median -0.76 0.88 4.1 Drastic Reform Episodes, 1982–1995 Above Median -0.74 0.21 5.5 Below Median -0.43 0.90 4.2 Source: World
Bank (2000). 1. For this analysis, we had to correct two data points for Colombia (drawn from the World Bank’s World Development
Indicator’s CD-ROM) that clearly lacked face validity. We thank Kurt Weyland for pointing out this deficiency in a previous draft. 156
Latin American Research Review Our attempt to gauge the performance of more and less liberalized economies and of more and less
radical reformers in the areas of poverty and inequality is somewhat hampered by the availability of data that are comparable over time
and across countries. Income inequality data for Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Uruguay are unavailable; for the remaining
countries, data for the closest available year was used.
The far left undermines economic growth, generates inflation, gets Dutch Disease,
and hurts the poor – moderate liberalism is key to solve.
Weyland et al 10 – Lozano Long Professor of Latin American Politics (Kurt, “Leftist Governments in Latin America: Successes and
Shortcomings”, Cambridge University Press 2010, p.58-159; Print.)//Beddow
The divergence between the moderate and contestatory left in macroeconomic and development policy has led to different patterns of economic
performance. Although the moderate left has preserved economic stability and achieved steady growth at solid but unspectacular rates, the
contestatory left – at least in Venezuela – has had a much more checkered record as stretched of deterioration have been followed by
striking growth spurts. Due to these fluctuations, the contestatory left’s economic policies shave yielded mixed results to date. Economic
growth was negative during the first years of the Chavez administration owing in part to domestic political instability, especially in the 2002-03
oil industry strike and the capital flight triggered by ideological polarization. Between 1999 and 2003, the Venezuelan economy shrank by an
annual average rate of 3.1 percent (Weisbrot and Sandoval 2006: 9).In late 2003, however, a recovery began, thanks in part to high oil prices,
which contributed to a phenomenal average growth rate of 11. Percent between 2004-07. The Morales administration, meanwhile, has only been
in office since the beginning of 2006, but economic growth has been relatively strong so far. The Bolivian economy grew by 4.5 percent in 2006,
4.2 percent in 007, and 6.0 percent in 2008, due largely to high energy prices and the renegotiation of natural gas contracts, which boosted
Bolivia’s revenues considerably. High growth has come at a cost, however. Inflationary pressures have been strong in both countries. As
mentioned previously, prices rose by 11.9 percent in Bolivia in 2008, and by 30.9 percent in Venezuela, with a continuing upward trend.
Inflation tends to disproportionately
hurt poorer sectors, the contestatory left’s core constituencies and
proclaimed beneficiaries.
Moreover, as we have seen, it is unclear whether Bolivia’s and Venezuela’s recent growth spurts are
sustainable, given that this economic expansion has been fueled to a large extent by sky-high oil and gas prices. Indeed, the dramatic decline in
renewed glut on international energy markets also lowered the bargaining leverage of state-owned companies in Bolivia and Venezeula and
makes it harder to attract future foreign investment, given the recent nationalization measures and renegotiation contracts. Even more basically,
the analyses by Corrales and especially Gray Molina, question the mono-export strategy pursued by the Chavez and Morales administrations.
Under Chavez, Venezuela increased its dependence on oil, a product whose price is highly volatile. At the same time, “Dutch disease” has
ravaged other economic sectors. As Gray Molina argues, the Morales government seems to be heading in exactly the same direction, betting on
the gas industry, and inadvertently weakening alternative lines of production and export. Bolivia’s acrimonious relationship with the United
States, for example, has threatened trade preferences for Bolivian small industry, artisan production and natural products. As both Venezuela’s
and Bolivia’s painful experiences with boom and bust cycles suggest, a mono-export strategy does not constitute a promising development
model. Despite its economic, social, and political innovations, the contestatory left is, paradoxically, returning to an economic
development model that has repeatedly failed. By contrast, efforts of the moderate left to further diversify the Brazilian and Chilean
economies through intensified engagement with economic globalization look more promising. Based on this prudent, noncontroversial
strategy, the Concertacion and the Lula de Silva administration have achieved a good economic performance. Both countries have enjoyed fairly
strong growth in recent years. The Chilean economy has expanded at an average annual rate of 5.4 percent under the Concertacion (1990-2007),
an impressively long stretch; and it has a growth rate of 4.4 percent during the Lagos and Bachelet years (200-07). By contrast, Latin America as
a whole grew at an annual average rate of only 1.5 percent from 1990-2007. As Kingstone and Ponce stress, Brazil has also performed reasonably
well in recent years, growing at an average annual rate of 3.8 percent during the Lula de Silva administration (2003-07), as opposed to 2.3 percent
during the Cardoso years (all figures from IDB 2008). At the same time, inflation has remained very low in Chile and in Brazil. Moreover,
economic growth under the moderate left appears to be more sustainable than the recent spurts achieved by contestatory left
governments. The recent expansion of the Brazilian and Chilean economies is not as closely tied to a commodity price boom as it is in Bolivia
and Venezuela. Chile has sterilized a large share of exceptional copper revenues through the stabilization fund, and Brazil does not have a rentier
economy at all. Both the Brazilian and Chilean economies are more diversified than are the Bolivian and Venezuelan economies. The resumption
of industrial policies in Brazil provides additional incentives for the development of novel sectors, and Chile has for many years pursued the
upgrading of its export model, although with less success than anticipated. The economies of the moderate left governments are not without their
problems as the chapters in this volume discuss, but they nevertheless appear to be better positions for long-term growth and stability than to their
counterparts in Bolivia and Venezuela. Indeed, under the Concertacion, Chile has had the most stable and fasted growing economy in Latin
America.
Globalization Good – Laundry List
Globalization spreads prosperity, peace and environmental sustainability
Kilgour 2k – JD @ Toronto Law, crown attorney in northern Alberta to Canadian Cabinet minister, Kilgour ended his 27-year tenure in the
Canadian House of Commons as an Independent MP
(David, “Globalization For the Benefit of All,” http://www.david-kilgour.com/secstate/globali2.htm)//BB
When your Secretary General asked me to participate in this session of entrepreneurs from approximately 100 countries, I was delighted.
Let me be candid from the outset: I’m reasonably confident that many of your fellow citizens, like Canadians aplenty, fear
globalization. Many say it brings the decay of social values, cultures and the environment; I would argue that
the main challenge is not to decide whether globalization is good or bad, but rather to ensure that a "walled-down
world" provides more fulfilled lives for all. Globalization can be an agent for good , a force to
create unprecedented growth and opportunity for those who embrace it.¶ Economists have talked
about globalization for many decades even if the term itself emerged only recently. Many speak of a borderless world, but that is a far
from today’s reality where boundaries are still very real. Too often the term is thought of as synonymous with unbridled capitalism
where any entrepreneur can raise money anywhere in the world, make anything and sell it anywhere. But globalization is also about the
free flow of ideas, the exchange of culture and values, the greater attention now being given to issues such as human rights,
environmental protection and technological advances which have brought people closer together than ever. ¶ Benefits of Globalization¶
Virtually all economists agree that the large majority of residents of our shrunken planet are
considerably better off through the growth of markets and the efforts of the GATT and its successor,
the WTO, to keep them open. With ever expanding technology comes new markets, increased demand
for products but also greater competition. There are now more people with computers connected to the world who are investing than
ever before. As Klaus Schwab of the Davos World Economic Forum observed: "We have moved from a world where the big eat the
small to a world where the fast eat the slow." More than $1.5 trillion is now exchanged in the world’s currency markets each day, and
nearly a fifth of the goods and services produced each year are traded. ¶ Consumers of goods and services in all countries are one huge
community who benefit from trade for reasons which include increased competition, comparative advantage, economies of scale and
access to a greater range of products and services. There are also those likely to gain less than others from globalization.¶ Lower inflation
is often cited as a favourable consequence of globalization because increased competition makes businesses more reluctant to boost
prices/wages unless warranted by productivity increases. Another possible benefit is faster technological and productivity growth
because increased international competition has obliged business generally to innovate more rapidly since the ’70s. ¶ Social Tensions¶
Dani Rodrik of Harvard has singled out three sources of tension between global markets and social stability:¶ 1) Globalization makes the
services of large segments of working populations more easily substitutable across boundaries, ¶ 2) Trade can unleash forces that
undermine norms in national practices, for example when child labour in Honduras replaces workers in South Carolina or cuts in
pension benefits in France are called for in response to the requirements of the Maastricht treaty, ¶ 3) Globalization and its competitive
pressures make it more difficult for governments to carry out the important functions of providing the social programs which since
World War II helped to maintain social cohesion and domestic support for liberalization. ¶ Successful Globalizers¶ Rodrik concludes
from the experience of both Europe and Asia that successful globalizers have had "market-friendly but pro-active governments, adequate
social insurance and have integrated into the world economy on their own terms. This lesson contradicts much of today’s conventional
wisdom that globalization requires small government, that welfare states have to be cut down to size, and that there is a single (read
Anglo-American) model on which all countries will reasonably converge." He asserts that it is the overall quality of a society’s domestic
institutions - respect for the rule of law, human rights, good governance, social and political stability, adequate infrastructure and a
skilled labour force- rather than labour costs or taxes that determines where most investments go. ¶ Few question that unprecedented
freedom in many markets has resulted in spectacular economic growth ; international trade since 1988
alone has doubled to almost US$7 trillion. Quite a number of countries around the world are experiencing rapid overall growth, and
some currently enjoy record low unemployment rates. In the case of a uniquely export dependent country like Canada, where about 43
per cent of our gross domestic output now is exports, I believe virtually all of us have benefitted from more open economies worldwide.¶
NAFTA¶ When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) began in 1994 for Canada the United States and Mexico, there
were more than few skeptics. Six years later, the figures speak for themselves: total merchandise trade across North America surpassed
$752 billion in 1998. Canada’s merchandise trade with Mexico doubled over the same period, reaching $9 billion a year. In the last four
years an estimated 1.5 million new jobs have been created in Mexico alone. Since NAFTA there were 15,883 new Mexican export firms
created.¶ There was also fear that NAFTA would lead to environmental degradation in Mexico; environmental
regulations would be relaxed in an attempt to woo investors. Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo put some of those fears to rest in
comments earlier this year. Since 1994, he explained, Mexico’s enforcement of environmental standards has
become stricter ; he added that new employment opportunities offered by international trade have
made it possible for highly polluting activities to be replaced by environmentally friendly
ones .¶ Developing World¶ Many are concerned about the impact globalization is having on developing
countries. Consider these statistics from the 1999 UN Human Development Report:¶ The income gap between the fifth of the world’s
people living in the richest countries and the fifth living in the poorest was 74 to 1 in 1997, up from 60 to 1 in 1990. ¶ By the late 1990s
the fifth of the world’s people living in the highest income counties had:¶ 86% of world GDP, while the bottom fifth, just 1%,¶ 68% of
foreign direct investment, and the bottom fifth, just 1%¶ and,74% of world telephone lines, the bottom fifth, just 1.5%¶ And most striking
of all, the assets of the top three billionaires are more than the combined GNP of all least developed countries and their 600 million
people. This has contributed to the perception that globalization benefits only the rich, leaving the poor behind. ¶ Recently, countries
in Sub-Saharan Africa have begun to experience the benefits of globalization, and some have led the world in
percentage economic growth. Angola, Uganda and Botswana already stand among the ten fastest growing economies globally. The IMF
forecasts that Africa’s overall GDP should grow by 5% in 2000, a significant improvement from 3.1% in 1999. ¶ Botswana and Mauritius
are shining examples of the positive effects of globalization. Both experienced exponential growth as they embraced foreign investment
on their own terms and married their economic success with good governance and generous budget allocations for education and health
care. Botswana, often cited as a major African success story, was one of the poorest countries in the world at independence, but has
evidently been the fastest growing economy on earth since 1965. While such successes may continue to be the exception rather than the
rule in Africa, other economies can do well too.¶ Much of what separates the developed and developing worlds today is the knowledge
gap. In many developing countries, resources and people are abundant; it is the relative lack of experience in good economic, social and
political structures that hurts their ability to compete. In 1998, the Internet had more than 140 million users and that number is expected
to surpass 700 million by 2001. However South Asia, home to 23% of the world’s population, has less than 1% of Internet users.¶
Dissemination of ideas through the Information Highway, television or satellites introduces ideas about
the environment, democracy, human rights and even wealth creation. I would suggest that one of the best
effects of globalization is that information technology has brought attention to the need for more
democratic development worldwide and the protection of human rights everywhere . The
BBC World Service, TV-5, CNN and other television broadcasters are the principal vehicles of instant communication, which has
revolutionized our understanding of the world. At the same time, many worry about the growing exports of American films, music and
commercial television programs.¶ Whither Globalization?¶ The European financial problems of the early 90s, the Latin American crisis,
beginning in Mexico in the mid 90s, and the East Asian flu which also hit Russia and Brazil in 1998-99, were highly destructive of many
livelihoods. If the sudden removal of capital from these countries caused financial instability, it should be added that their access to
global investments helped them to prosper earlier and for most of them to recover much faster then expected. Could not these crises have
been avoided through better regulation of financial markets by international organizations and national governments?¶ In the case of the
WTO, critics should note that its dispute settlement mechanism is much better than the one in the GATT, which curiously required the
unanimous agreement of all members, including the offending member country itself. The WTO requires a unanimous decision to block
a dispute panel report. Even large countries have thus stopped dealing with important trade complaints outside the GATT/WTO, which
should benefit smaller economies.¶ Labour Standards/Environment¶ The WTO also promises to phase out over 10 years the Multi-Fibre
Agreement, which limited exports of textiles and apparels from developing countries to developed ones. Some initial steps have been
taken to include agriculture by converting market barriers to tariffs as a first stage in negotiating them downwards. A parallel agreement
on services (GATS) hopes to do for services what the GATT has done for goods. ¶ Three areas where the WTO has not extended its
authority in a significant way is labour standards, human rights and the environment. I understand that the WTO does permit some uses
of trade policies, including economic sanctions, for human rights abuses. The issue is more complicated for labour standards. Prohibiting
slave labour and exploitive child labour is obvious, but what of issues such as minimum wage levels? If it is mostly better paid
employees in OECD countries who lose from the WTO’s present exclusion of labour standards from trade policy, is it not
understandable that developing countries see the issue as protecting job-holders in highly developed countries?¶ The Future¶ The way
ahead is certainly unclear judging from the fairly recent protests at the IMF and World Bank meeting in Washington DC. The next US
President will probably have to obtain fast track legislation from the new Congress before any new trade negotiations can make
substantive progress. Greater participation by NGO’s in trade negotiations might help win public support. Developing countries should
be represented formally in WTO decision-making, perhaps through a steering committee having permanent members from developed
economies and rotating reps from small/developing countries.¶ The alternative to managed globalization could be
painful
if we recall what happened to the pre-1914 short-lived victory of free markets and liberal democracy over mercantilism and
nationalism. Globalization today must be complemented by social programs, safety nets and more investments in education/ training.
We ignore at our peril the challenge to build genuine legitimacy in each of our countries for more open economies. ¶ Many people I talk
to in Canada and elsewhere think the momentum today is with the anti-globalization forces. If Fred Bergsten of the Institute for
International Economics is correct that on trade matters you either move forward or fall over - the bicycle theory - there is real work to
be done by all of us. It is clear that globalization is a force of great change and not simply a spectre on the horizon.
Through technology, communications and economics, globalization and our increasing interconnection with each other are inevitable.
Time and distance are shrinking: globalization is a reflection of that reality. That is why I question those who wholly
condemn the phenomenon. Countries cannot succeed in isolation today . A poor country that
closes its borders to investment is likely to stay poor . Globalization can champion stability,
democracy and greater sharing around the world.
Globalization is key to peace and human welfare
Chen 2k – Professor of Law @ U Minnesota
(Jim, “Pax Mercatoria: Globalization as a Second Chance at “Peace for Our Time”,” Fordham International Law Journal)//BB
The antiglobalization movement, to put it bluntly, is wrong .¶ Even modest sensitivity to human
welfare over time and across contemporary space exposes the remarkable nature of the antiglobalization protests in Prague. In the heart of a country and a region that paid dearly when an isolationist West chose "to go
home and sleep quietly in [its] beds, '"16 a group of self-appointed activists quite seriously tried to portray the rules and
institutions of international economic relations as the greatest contempo- rary threat to human
welfare and security. But multinational corporations do not belong in the same category as
Adolf Hitler. Nor do the core institutions of international economic law, re- gardless of the extent
to which they have facilitated the rise of the global economy, deserve the opprobrium that has
hounded Neville Chamberlain since the failure of appeasement. A cir- cumspect world, in the
interest of peace, progress, and prosper- ity, should reject the normative 'claims of the
antiglobalization movement .¶ This Essay completes a scholarly cycle in which I have de- fended free trade and
international economic cooperation against charges that globalization will harm the environment17 and drain jobs from the high-wage
economies of western Eu- rope, Japan, and the United States. i" The demolition of geographic and social barriers
since the end of the Cold War has delivered not only material wealth but also physical tranquility,
political stability, and personal freedom to vast portions of the world's population. The path to
peace lies today, as it did in 1938, not in a retreat to obsolete notions of local sovereignty, but in a
commitment to lawmaking on a global scale.
Globalization Good – Environment
Globalization creates political will for GLOBAL environmental regulations –
national approaches fail
Chen 2k – Professor of Law @ U Minnesota
(Jim, “Pax Mercatoria: Globalization as a Second Chance at “Peace for Our Time”,” Fordham International Law Journal)//BB
"[A] cross-the-board globalism" ° is the best way of coordi-¶ nating free trade and environmental
protection as "complemen- tary" policies.1 10 Admittedly, simultaneously advocating free trade and environmental integrity
typically earns a deluxe suite at the "very small hotel" that will be hosting the next "global con- vention of rabid free trade
environmentalists." ' Yet this jarring juxtaposition is unavoidable in a world of falling frontiers. The creation of
"transboundary communities" causes "environmental interconnection" and in turn the "inevitabl
[e]" abandonment of "localism in all spheres."'1 2 Strictly localist solutions will not suf- fice ;
"haphazard
local encouragement" cannot replace coordi- nated responses to "diffuse, cross-
jurisdictional" problems such as mobile source emissions and nonpoint-source runoff."3¶
Environmental integrity as a human right, so central in the localist critique of globalization, is more effectively
advanced by free trade than by protectionism. In the absence of clearly de- fined, consistently enforced trade rules,
"environmental stan- dards" rapidly become "especially attractive candidates for dis- guised protectionism.""' 4 Standards as vague as
multifunctional- ity or sustainability are "far more susceptible to political capture" than specific and transparent environmental
measures.115 Per- haps no controversy depicts this dynamic as vividly as the transat- lantic tussle over beef from hormone-fed cattle.1
16 One attrac tive alternative to parochial, intrinsically protectionist measures lies in the adoption of
uniform global standards.1 7 That pro-ject, however, presumes a continued commitment to
integration rather than isolation in matters affecting the global economy and the global
environment.
Causes race to the top
Wolf, 04 (Martin, Honorary doctor of Economics from the University of London and winner of the Wincott Foundation senior prize for
excellence in financial journalism in 1989 and 1997, 2004, Why Globalization Works, pg 191-192)//DH
Now consider the next argument, that globalization triggers a 'race to the¶ bottom' in environmental
regulation. This argument has three elements. The¶ first is that trade encourages the relocation of environmentally damaging¶
processes. The second is that the differences in regulations which promote¶ such relocation are illegitimate. The last is that, as a result,
the race to the¶ bottom has in fact occurred. In assessing these arguments, we need to¶ remember that we are dealing with local or
national, not global, environmental¶ spillovers.¶ These dangers are again exaggerated, if not plain wrong. First,
there is strong¶ evidence that rich countries are not exporting polluting industry to developing¶
countries. Polluting industries are complex and capital intensive. The¶ benefits from putting such
activities in developing countries would be very¶ small, even if regulations were laxer. Moreover,
multinational companies¶ would not dare to operate plants in very different ways in different
countries.¶ It would save very little, if any, money and could expose them to catastrophically¶
adverse publicity. For all these reasons, developing countries have not¶ increased their share in
pollution-intensive exports.32¶ It should be stressed, however, that if industry were to migrate from one¶ country, or part of a
country, to another, in response to differences in environmental¶ regulation, that could be entirely appropriate. One of the themes of¶
radical critics of market -led globalization is that it undermines local autonomy. 33¶ Differences in environmental standards are,
however, a natural expression of¶ such autonomy. Differences in incomes, preferences and geography could quite¶ reasonably give
different localities, or countries, entirely different environmental¶ standards for local environmental spillovers. If polluting industries
were then to¶ migrate from high-standard regions or countries to low-standard regions or¶ countries, the world would be unambiguously
better off. The high-standard¶ regions or countries would be able to consume the products of polluting¶ activities without having to host
them, and the low-standard regions or¶ countries would have more economic activity, in return for pollution to which ¶ they are, relatively
speaking, indifferent.¶ The counter-argument to this position is that industry may use the possibility¶ of such 'regulatory arbitrage' to
undermine regulation in the highstandard¶ region or country. Evidently, there is such a risk. But the proper are Wrong¶ response is also
the correct one: regions are not in a zero-sum competition¶ with one another. A region that has a comparative disadvantage in polluting¶
industry, because of local preferences, will generate a comparative advantage¶ in non-polluting activities.¶ In practice, however, the
evidence for such a race to the bottom in environmental¶ regulation is lacking. Research shows that
environmental regulations¶ have tended to tighten in developing countries, partly in response to
political¶ pressures.34 It is evident, in fact, that a polluted atmosphere and poisonous¶ water are a
rather substantial disadvantage if one wishes to attract multinational¶ companies, since these
strongly discourage foreign professionals from¶ living in the country. Evidently, many countries do find it
difficult to enforce¶ environmental regulations, because of the weakness, or corruption, of their¶ administrations. But two points are quite
clear: first, virtually all the environmental¶ degradation in developing countries has nothing to do with
trade -¶ just experience the air pollution from the burning of fuel in Delhi in winter;¶ second, the
spread of democracy in the developing world, which has been one¶ of the most attractive features
of the despised age of ‘neoliberal' or 'corporate'¶ globalization, as I have noted in Part II above, has
greatly strengthened the¶ power of environmental lobbies.¶ In the high-income countries, too, there
is no doubt that environmental¶ standards have been racing to the top, not the bottom, over the last
two or¶ three decades. Local air and water quality have improved enormously, in¶ response to
tighter regulation. To the extent that they have not done so, it is¶ often as a result of protectionist policies towards agriculture that
have¶ promoted heavy use of chemical inputs. In his book The Sceptical Environmentalist, ¶ Bjorn Lomborg provides a host of examples
of the improvement in¶ the local environment in high-income countries over recent decades.35 Critics¶ may believe that the tightening of
standards has not been fast enough. But they¶ cannot doubt the direction of change.¶
Globalization Good – Democracy
Globalization is key to democracy
Chen 2k – Professor of Law @ U Minnesota
(Jim, “Pax Mercatoria: Globalization as a Second Chance at “Peace for Our Time”,” Fordham International Law Journal)//BB
Globalization advances democracy not only by raising over- all wealth, but also by improving the
political climate within na-¶ tions. The ability of multinational corporations and skilled workers to
adopt "fight or flight" strategies encourages govern- ments to adopt transparent policies and to
broaden political participation ."4 o Businesses and nongovernmental organizations respond by
cooperating with the government to form "transna- tional epistemic communities. ' Even where they
are despised as scourges against local businesses, multinational corporations introduce moral values in
countries that have yet to realize globalization's full benefits. 4 2 At the opposite end of the
ideological spectrum, even as unstable governments plunge into kleptocracy and anti-Western
terrorists flourish,'43 nongovernmental organizations have stepped into the resulting power vacuum in order to help police the morals of globalized society.144¶ , Global markets for capital and
labor can discipline rogue governments swiftly and effectively. 4 They do so by carrot and¶ by stick.
First, the carrot: "states keep their promises" because "they receive payoffs" within the community of nations "when ¶ other states
successfully rely on their actions."'46 Because global markets ostracize states that fail to secure and maintain
"civi-¶ lized" status, national governments still tend to pay "lip service"¶ to international law in order
if only "to avoid the inference that¶ they are rogue states."1'47 Only "serious intent" to comply with¶ the rules of
international monetary cooperation and free trade¶ can secure "good standing in the international economic com-¶ 14¶ munity."" The
global capital markets measure compliance with¶ these norms quite precisely through the "interest-rate premium" that investors "demand
for buying developing-country bonds in- stead of U.S. Treasurys."149 In the long run, compliance with globalization's
underlying legal structure fosters an " across-the- board , indivisible obligation to heed the
rule of law."15 "[R] epeated compliance gradually becomes habitual obedience" as international law "penetrates ... [local] legal
system [s]."151 Pax mercatoria, in short, becomes domesticated as part of na- tional law.15 2
Globalization reverses historical inequalities
Chen 2k – Professor of Law @ U Minnesota
(Jim, “Pax Mercatoria: Globalization as a Second Chance at “Peace for Our Time”,” Fordham International Law Journal)//BB
Alas, a proposition as broad as pax mercatoria eludes easy proof. "Some truths are so basic that, like the air around us, they are easily
overlooked."48 As Bill Clinton told an admiring crowd in Hanoi, globalization "is the economic equivalent of a force of nature" that
Vietnam and other developing nations must learn to harness "like wind or.water."49 Globalization thus represents, to borrow a
phrase from the elder George Bush, a "new world order. '50 The ,balance of this Essay will marshal evidence from diverse corners
in support of the pax mercatoriahypothesis. First, the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank were consciously de- signed to keep the peace
and remain quite effective in this role. Second, the experience of the United States, the nation that has most
aggressively promoted globalization, demonstrates that ec- onomic integration affirmatively
enhances political well-being across the board, but most of all for the historically
downtrodden . Finally, globalization promises to stabilize the least devel- oped countries and
countries undergoing the transition from central planning to capitalism.
Globalization Good – War
Globalization solves war and economic collapse – REVERSAL leads to crony-ism
which turns their impact
Mishkin 6 – PhD in Economics, Professor of Economics @ Columbia
(Frederic, “The Next Great Globalization: How Disadvantaged Nations Can Harness Their Financial Systems to Get Rich,” Ch 1)//BB
As we have seen, the second Age of Globalization, in which we currently find ourselves, has many similarities with the first age, which
occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Could there be another Great Reversal, in which
globalization again retreats and the world suffers great political, social, and economic upheaval and
destruction? Could we experience déja vu all over again?44¶ Unfortunately the answer is yes . The backlash against
globalization in Latin America is currently very strong. Much of the public in Latin America has turned against
globalization because they have been disappointed in the amount of economic growth since 1990, when they opened up their economies,
particularly to foreign capital flows. Some countries (such as Mexico, Ecuador, and Argentina) have also experienced disastrous crises
that have led to depressions. In the immediate aftermath of its economic crisis in 2001–02, for example, Argentina experienced an
unemployment rate of nearly 20% and an income per person that was 18% below the level it had reached in 1998.45¶ Given its
depression, Argentina has been pursuing policies that make it harder for it to participate in the global
system. This is exactly what happened in the aftermath of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Before this period Argentina was a fullfledged participant in globalization and was one of the richest countries in the world, with income per person that was actually higher
than the average for countries in Europe.46 Indeed, Argentina was one of the most desirable destinations for immigrants. At the turn of
the century, when poor Italians were choosing whether to get on a boat for Buenos Aires or New York, it was a coin toss as to which
destination was better. The success of Argentina before the Great Depression is reflected in the fact that, of twenty-seven countries for
which data are available, it had the highest growth rate from 1870 to 1930.47 In the aftermath of the Depression and World War II,
however, the country turned its back on globalization and closed off its economy to the rest of the world. Over the next fifty years,
Argentina had low economic growth, and it has since fallen into genteel poverty, with its income per person falling to only one-half that
of the average for European countries. The same study of twenty-seven countries that found that Argentina had the highest growth rate
from 1870 to 1930 ranked it last in terms of growth for the period 1930–92.¶ Argentina seems to be going down the same path again.
The 2001–02 crisis discredited the policy in the 1990s of opening up the Argentinean economy. Given the backlash against
globalization, it is not surprising that the Peronist government of Nestor Kirschner, harking back to the disastrous policies after World
War II of the founder of its political party, Juan Perón, has been pursuing anti–free market policies that increase the likelihood that
Argentina will turn its back on the global economic system. One of the most egregious examples is a measure implemented by the
Argentine government in March 2006 to restrict exports of beef for six months in order to increase the domestic supply and lower the
price, thereby halting most beef shipments abroad for the world’s fifth largest beef producer.48 The country is poised to lose another
fifty years of economic growth.¶ The backlash against globalization has also manifested itself in countries
such as Bolivia and Venezuela. Demonstrations against further opening up of the economy led to the ouster of the Bolivian
president in 2003 and again in 2005, while Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, has advocated policies that turn it away from global
markets (as well as democracy).¶ Only one Latin American country, Chile, has completely embraced globalization. Since 1990 Chile has
opened up its economy completely, to both international trade and capital flows, and it has experienced rapid growth. From 1990 to 2003
it has had an average growth rate of 5.6% per year, by far the highest in Latin America. Indeed, Chile has been given the nickname the
“Latin Tiger” to compare it to successful Asian countries dubbed the “Asian Tigers.”¶ However, Chile is a small country, with a
population of only 16 million, less than one-thirtieth the total population of over 500 million in Latin America. Which way will the
remaining countries of Latin America go? Will they follow Venezuela and Argentina and retreat from globalization, or will they emulate
the successes of Chile and embrace it? Recent elections in Latin America have seen a further shift to the left with the success of
candidates espousing anti-globalization rhetoric. Evo Morales, a former coca grower and opponent of globalization, was elected
president of Bolivia in December 2005, while Ollanta Humala, a left-wing candidate for Peru’s presidency who opposes free trade, won
the first round of the presidential election in April 2006.¶ Similarly, the public in many of the transition countries, former communist
countries that are a subcategory of emerging market economies, also has doubts about the benefits of globalization. This is less of a
problem for the transition countries in Eastern Europe that are entering or are likely to enter the European Union soon; by doing so they
will automatically become a part of a globalized economy. However, there is a danger that Russia and many of the other
countries that were part of the former Soviet Union may turn inward and reject globalization and economic freedom in
general.¶ The Asian public seems to be far more supportive of globalization because they have experienced rapid growth, but the
backlash against globalization might reach them too. It would be premature to assume that they will continue down the globalization
path.¶ The backlash against globalization manifests itself in rich countries as well as poor. Protectionist measures to restrict the flow of
goods from developing countries, especially China, have been proposed regularly in the U.S. Congress. Protectionist sympathies are also
strong in Europe. One French protester described his fears of globalization by saying that he was worried that French workers would get
“eaten with a Chinese sauce.”49 Most extraordinary have been recent government efforts in France, Italy, and Spain to block corporate
takeovers when the acquiring firm is foreign, even if the acquiring country is a member of the European Union. (Protectionist concerns
might also have been behind congressional pressure that blocked the takeover of six U.S. ports by Dubai Ports World in March
2006.)50¶ The possibility of another Great Reversal is very real. This book argues that turning their backs on
globalization would be disastrous for both emerging market and rich countries. Developing
countries, in particular, must embrace globalization so that they can reach their full potential and get
rich.¶ How Can Poor Countries Get Rich?¶ Most people think that the way for poor countries to get rich is to make
sure their citizens get a good education and are healthy, and it is not surprising that so much charitable aid goes into
improving health care and education. Public health and education are important to economic growth, but increasing public spending in
these areas does not always produce higher growth.51 Throughout this book, I argue that the only way for poor countries to get rich is
for them to provide incentives for capital (including capital devoted to health care and education) to be supplied to its most productive
uses.¶ If allocating capital to productive uses is necessary to promote economic growth and development, how do you get it to happen?
The short answer is, “Develop good institutions that allocate capital efficiently.”52 But what are these institutions?¶ The most basic
set of growth-promoting institutions are those that promote property rights (such as the rule of law,
constraints on government expropriation, and the absence of corruption, all of which are discussed in the next chapter). If
you live in a country where it is easy for others to take your property away, either at gunpoint or through a
corrupt government, you would be crazy to make investments there. Without these investments, workers in your country will be unable
to earn high wages because there won’t be sufficient capital to provide the machines, buildings, and computers to make them highly
productive.
Poverty will be severe .¶ Even if investments are made, if they go to the wrong place they will be useless. Thus
the second, related set of institutions are ones that make sure that those offering the best investment opportunities can actually get
external funds to make investments. This is the crucial role of the financial system. These institutions promote an efficient financial
system through financial regulation and strong enforcement of financial contracts. ¶ The problem for many poor countries is not that they
can’t get money for investment but that the investment is counterproductive. In the 1970s, for example, the World Bank provided
lending to finance a huge shoe factory in Tanzania that was to produce four million pairs of shoes a year, three-quarters of which were to
be exported to Europe. However, the factory, with its aluminum walls and no ventilation system, was ill suited for Tanzania’s climate,
with the result that it never produced more than 4% of its installed capacity and never exported a single shoe.53 ¶ Nations are poor
because they are disadvantaged in many important areas: their institutions are weak; they are “institutionally challenged.” We can
classify poor countries into two types. The poorest group includes countries that do not even have basic property rights,
either because they are subject to civil strife or because they are run by rapacious governments. Many countries in sub-Saharan Africa,
where average income per person is less than one-twentieth of what the average American earns, are in this group.54 The second group
of poor countries has basic property rights and they are far better off and far less poor than countries in the first group. These emerging
market countries are opening up their markets to the flows of goods, services, and capital from other nations, but they do not yet have
institutions that support a well-functioning financial system.¶ The terms “less-developed,” “developing,” “poor,” and “emerging market”
are often used interchangeably to describe disadvantaged nations, but there are subtle differences. Because this book outlines how
disadvantaged nations can improve their financial system, it applies more to emerging market countries. They are the ones at a stage of
development where it becomes possible to create a well-functioning financial system. Many of the policy prescriptions offered here,
however, also apply to a wider group of countries that includes not only the emerging market countries but also those at the lowest level
of development who do not have even basic property rights. When I refer to “less-developed,” “developing,” or “poor” countries, I am
referring to the entire set of disadvantaged countries, including the poorest. When I use the term “emerging market,” I am referring to
those countries that are ready to develop financial systems that can move them up to rich-country status.¶ Institutional development
(more precisely defined here as measures that promote effective property rights and an efficient financial system) is the key to economic
development.55 Since good institutions exist in rich countries, you might think that these institutions could just be exported to
disadvantaged nations to enable them to get rich. Good institutions, however, need to be home grown; institutional frameworks that have
been developed in the rich countries frequently do not translate well to poorer countries. This is a lesson that many in the advanced
countries of the world have yet to learn. The development of good institutions in the advanced countries took hundreds of years as they
grew and adapted to local conditions. Poor countries must ultimately develop their own institutions, and the citizens of these nations
must feel they have ownership of those institutions or else the institutions will be ineffective and short-lived.¶ It is also important to
recognize that the impediments to developing good institutions reside in the less-developed countries themselves. Developing good
institutions is hard: it takes time and effort for a country to plan, establish, experiment with, evolve, and adapt its institutions to its
historical, cultural, and political circumstances. It takes a long time for any nation to achieve strong property rights and an effective
financial system.¶ It is even harder to develop good institutions in less-developed countries because of the political environment. Rich
elites and special interests often have considerable political clout; they have much to lose from institutional development that encourages
an efficient financial system and promotes competition. Globalization, however, can be an important force in
promoting the development of better institutions: it weakens the profits and power of the
rich elites and special interests who oppose institutional development, and it can even
encourage them to support institutional reforms to restore their profits. Globalization can therefore
help generate the political will for institutional reform. We have seen this happen in emerging market economies
like Chile, China, India, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan that have experienced rapid growth.
Trade stops conflict escalation
Kleinberg et al 12 - professors at Binghamton University and Saginaw Valley State University
(Katja “Trade Concentration and Interstate Conflict”, Journal of Politics, Wiley)//BB
In the most commonly cited formulation of the liberal peace, the argument begins with the notion that trade between states is (mutually)
beneficial. In general, specialization due to trade is thought to allow for greater consumption and to
facilitate economic growth at the national level. Within states, firms and individuals involved in
international trade realize welfare gains. These actors in turn develop a stake in the continuation
and expansion of trade. To the extent that armed conflict with a particular trading partner would
jeopardize welfare gains , governments and societal actors have incentives to avoid conflict. In part
through concerns about welfare losses and, depending on regime type, through concerns about the
political repercussions associated with such losses, trade thus pacifies interstate relations. Arguments
derived from this general proposition often center on the salience of the particular dyadic trade relation, suggesting that more
intensive trade is associated with greater prospective losses from conflict. Larger opportunity costs
in turn generate greater constraints on the foreign policy of trading states. Opportunity costs arise
not simply because conflict may result in the loss of dyadic trade but also from the difficulty of
replacing lost trade with alternative suppliers and markets (Hirschman [1945] 1980; Keohane and Nye 1989). In
principle, a potential belligerent can avoid the costs of trade interruption by diverting its dyadic trade to third states. If a state is able to
shift quickly and cheaply from one trading partner to equally beneficial trade with another partner, the opportunity costs of dyadic
conflict will be low and the associated constraints on belligerent actions will be small. Trade diversion will be more difficult (or
impossible) and significantly more costly when suitable alternative trading partners are few in
number (or nonexistent) than when they are numerous. The availability of substitutes for dyadic trade will affect
the size of the prospective opportunity costs of belligerence toward a trading partner and with it the
likelihood of interstate conflict.
Integration solves escalation
Kinne 12 - Assistant Professor at UT Dallas with a PhD in Political Science from Yale
(Brandon, “Multilateral Trade and Militarized Conflict: Centrality, Openness, and Asymmetry in the Global Trade Network”, Journal of Politics,
74.1, Wiley)//BB
The pacific effect of trade is most often explained in terms of opportunity costs (Levy 2003). Trade provides valuable
economic and other benefits to governments and populations.4 In turn, militarized conflict endangers
trade, either by provoking retaliatory policies (e.g., sanctions, embargoes, seizure) or by encouraging riskaverse firms to divert trade elsewhere (Glick and Taylor 2010; Hegre, Oneal, and Russett 2010; Long 2008; Stein 2003).
Dyadic trade thus deters conflict by increasing the opportunity costs associated with uses of force
(Polachek and Xiang 2010). This dyadic logic is directly extensible to multilateral trade. Increased integration
corresponds to increased trade partners, strengthened trade ties, and shorter commercial distances
to nonpartners. Each of these aspects of trade increases a state’s sensitivity to market dynamics and
its vulnerability to disruptions in the global trade network. As Dorussen and Ward observe, dyadic conflict
‘‘generates external effects on the system of states,’’ including reductions in trade (2008: 195). An extensive array of trade
partners (breadth) creates potential disruption points in a state’s trade relations, and stronger trade ties
(depth) increase the costs of those disruptions. Commercial proximity to nonpartners (closeness) also increases costs for
conflict. Referencing Angell (1933), Gartzke asserts that ‘‘interdependence ensures that damage inflicted on one economy travels
through the global system, afflicting even aggressors’’ (2007, 170). Similarly, Maoz argues that states avoid conflict even against
enemies they do not trade with, as the ‘‘uncertainty and instability associated with conflict may cause their trading partners to look for
other markets’’ (2009, 225). These indirect costs may disrupt global value-added chains or intrafirm trade by, for example, affecting
availability and costs of intermediate goods and other productive inputs. When states use force, even toward nonpartners, they risk
disrupting the complex economic linkages that feed their domestic industries and drive demand for their own products (cf. Brooks
1999). Thus, by ex ante increasing opportunity costs, multilateral trade unilaterally inhibits uses of force. An
alternative explanation is that trade
enables costly signaling.5 In bargaining, states lack information about
one another’s resolve. Costly actions, such as sanctions, convey a willingness to fight and thus introduce
important ex post information into the bargaining game (Fearon 1995). This logic is essentially dyadic, but it too
is extensible to multilateral trade. In fact, the signaling capacity of trade depends upon underlying
opportunity costs; if signals were costless, they would not convey credibility (Polachek and Xiang 2010).
Thus, the connections between multilateral trade and opportunity costs discussed above also extend
to costly signaling, with the important caveat that, in the case of signaling, these costs do not
themselves deter conflict; rather, when incurred or threatened, they credibly signal a state’s
willingness to fight. In short, trade integration provides additional means for states to send costly
signals . Economic actors are risk averse and can reallocate trade to less risky markets;6 and political actors possess punitive
mechanisms like embargoes, expropriation of assets, and confiscation of tradable goods (cf. Long 2008). Multiple
external
actors stand ready to punish aggressors, and high levels of integration provide those actors with the
means to exact costs. Actions that convey a willingness to absorb such costs are, thus, credible signals of
resolve (cf. Gartzke and Li 2003b, 570–71). Precisely because integrated states face greater costs for bellicosity,
their actual threats of violence are more credible. Integration promotes peace by broadening the
range of signaling mechanisms available to states. I do not attempt to adjudicate the debate between opportunity costs
and costly signaling. The observed negative correlation between trade and conflict is consistent with both
accounts (Gartzke 2003, 96). Further, both agree that integration leads to less conflict, either directly or through signaling. Thus: H1:
Trade integration reduces a state’s probability of initiating militarized disputes
Globalization Good – Economic Growth – NAFTA Specific
Globalization is key to growth
Obhof 3 (Graduate of Yale Law School, 2003 “WHY GLOBALIZATION? A LOOK AT GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND ITS EFFECTS”.
University of Florida Journal of Law & Public Policy. Fall 2003,//HK)
The effects of globalization have largely been positive for both developed and developing
countries. Consider, for example, the effects of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations, which lasted from 1986 to 1994 and
resulted in agreements to reduce tariffs and other non-tariff barriers. Advanced countries agreed to lower their
tariffs by an average of 40%, and [*99] the signatories agreed to liberalize trade in the important areas of
agriculture and clothing. n32 The effects of the Uruguay Round have been both positive and large. Reducing tariffs and
non-tariff barriers has produced annual increases in global GDP of $ 100-300 billion. n33 This figure is
five times larger than the total worldwide aid to developing countries. n34 More importantly, a significant
share of this increase has gone to the poorest people. The percentage of the population in developing countries living
under $ 1 per day has fallen from 30% to 24% in the past decade. n35 The recent experience of Mexico offers an excellent example of
global capitalism in action. The extent of poverty in Mexico is shocking; 20 million people live on less than $ 2 per day. n36 This is so
for a number of reasons, including government intervention in the market in the form of protectionist measures intended to help ailing or
failing industries. Using government interventions to shape the allocation of resources traditionally led to gross inefficiencies and a low
pace of innovation and adoption of new technologies. n37 Trade liberalization has helped curb such interventions - indeed, the opening
of its markets has become one of the most important and far-reaching reforms in Mexico. The effects of trade liberalization on the
Mexican economy have been significant. Exports in Mexico have increased sixfold since 1985, and the GDP of the country has
grown at an average rate of 5.4% per year since 1996. n38 Since NAFTA created a "free trade area" among the
United States, Canada, and Mexico in 1994, Mexican labor productivity has grown fast in its tradable sectors. n39 Not surprisingly,
however, productivity has remained stagnant in nontradable sectors. n40 NAFTA has also improved Mexico's aggregate trade balance
and helped to ameliorate the effect of the [*100] peso crisis on capital flows. n41 As most economists predicted during the NAFTA
debate, the effects of the agreement have been positive and large for Mexico. n42 The effects have also been positive, although smaller,
for the United States. This is also consistent with the pre-NAFTA analyses of most economists. n43 The positive effects of globalization
have been consistent throughout the developing world. Dramatic increases in per capita income have accompanied the expansion of
trade in countries that have become more globalized. Korea, for example, has seen average incomes increase eightfold since 1960. n44
China has experienced an average growth of 5.1% during the same period, and other countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin
America have experienced faster growth than that in advanced countries. n45 The evidence is
incredibly one-sided. "[P]romoting openness, and supporting it with sound domestic policies, leads to faster growth."
NAFTA boosted the Mexican economy – not co-opted by elites
Teslik 9 –
MBA from European Institute of Business Administration
(Lee, “NAFTA's Economic Impact”, http://www.cfr.org/world/naftas-economic-impact/p15790)//lm
Analysts cite economic growth in Mexico since NAFTA was implemented. Attributing this growth directly
to the deal is a fuzzy process, however, and some experts say Mexican growth has underperformed expectations. Since 1994,
Mexico's GDP has increased at an average annual rate of 2.7 percent, below the average growth rates of 3.3
percent and 3.6 percent in the United States and Canada, respectively. Mexican exports to the United States have
quadrupled since NAFTA's implementation, from $60 billion to $280 billion per year. American
exports to Mexico have also increased sharply, more than tripling as Mexico's economy has grown.
In addition, experts say trade liberalization between Mexico and the United States has brought broad
positive consequences for regular Mexicans , not just Mexican business interests . For
instance, the
deal has led to a dramatic reduction in prices for Mexican consumers. GEA, a Mexico Citycost of basic household goods in Mexico has halved since
NAFTA's implementation.
based economic consulting firm, estimates that the
NAFTA saved Mexico’s economy from collapse
Hufbauer and Schott 5 (Gary Clyde Hufbauer, senior researcher at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former
Maurice Greenberg Chair and Director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations Economics, and Jeffrey J. Schott, senior researcher at the
Peterson Institute for International Economics and member of the Advisory Committee on International Economic policy of the U.S. Dept. of
State, NAFTA Revisited: Achievements and Challenges, Institute for International Economics, p. 3)//lm
Mexican purchases from US firms. For Mexico, NAFTA
represented a way to lock in the reforms of the
apertura, or “market opening,” that President Miguel de la Madrid inaugurated in the mid-1980s to
transform Mexico’s formerly statist economy in the wake of the devastating debt crisis of the
1980s. Mexico needed more rapid growth to provide new opportunities for its young, expanding
population. Given the legacy of the debt crisis of 1982, low domestic savings, and an increasingly overvalued peso, the most
practical way to propel growth was to import goods and capital, creating more competition in the
Mexican market. An FTA with the United States was crucial to maintain secure access to
Mexico’s largest market and to blunt efforts to roll back Mexican reforms . 5 NAFTA
obligations sharply raised the political cost of reversing economic reforms and made
it easier to deflect
protectionist demands
special interest groups. The trade pact thus was an integral part of the plan to
create a more stable policy environment so that Mexico could attract greater FDI inflows— with its
embedded technology and management skills— to build and finance growth.
of industrial and
Globalization Good – Impact Filter
Their impacts are exaggerated
Chen 2k – Professor of Law @ U Minnesota
(Jim, “Pax Mercatoria: Globalization as a Second Chance at “Peace for Our Time”,” Fordham International Law Journal)//BB
The antiglobalization movement has made some extraordiary claims. Let us transplant a precept of natural
science into this social realm: extraordinary
claims demand extraordinary proof.178 From Seattle to Prague,
protesters have argued that the organs of international economic law conspire with multina- tional
corporations to sap national and local governments of le- gitimate power, to destabilize global security, and
to poison workplaces as well as ecosystems.1 79 That case has not met even the most
generous standard of proof . The antiglobalization movement has failed to refute the
following:
Dramatic improvements in welfare at every wealth and income level.18 Since 1820 global
wealth has expanded tenfold, thanks largely to technological advances and the erosion of barriers to trade.18 ' The world
economic order, simply put, is lifting people out of poverty. According to the World Bank, the percentage of the world's population
living in extreme poverty fell from 28.3 to 23.4% between 1987 and 1998.182 (The World Bank defines ex- treme and absolute poverty
according to "reference lines set at $1 and $2 per day" in 1993 terms, adjusted for "the relative purchasing power of currencies across
countries.") 8 3 A more optimistic study has concluded that "the share of the world's population earning less than US$2 per day shrank
by more than half" between 1980 and 1990, "from 34 to 16.6 percent."184 In concrete terms, "economic growth associated with
globalization" over the course of that decade helped lift 1.4 billion people out of absolute poverty.185 Whatever its precise magnitude,
this im- provement in global welfare has taken place because of , not in spite of, flourishing
world trade. 8 6
The meaning of American victory in the Cold War. The liberal democracies of the north Atlantic alliance
decisively defeatetheir primary political rivals in the Eastern bloc. Capitalism cou- pled with generous civil
liberties crushed, central planning cou- pled with dictatorship of the proletariat. "America, so the world
supposes, won the Cold War.' 8 7 And the world is right.
The true nature of the environmental crisis. The most serious environmental problems involve "the
depletion and destruction of the global commons."' 8 Climate change, ozone depletion, and the loss of
species, habitats, and biodiversity are today's top environmental priorities."'s None can be solved
without substantial economic development and intense international coop- eration . The
systematic degradation of the biosphere respects no political boundaries. Worse, it is exacerbated
by poverty. Of the myriad environmental problems in this mutually dependent world, "persistent
poverty may turn out to be the most aggravating and destructive."190 We must remember "above all
else" that "human degradation and deprivation.., constitute the greatest threat not only to national,
regional, and world security, but to essential life-supporting ecological systems."1" 1
The enhancement of individual liberty through globalization. By dislodging local tyrants and
ideologies, globalization has mini- mized the sort of personal abuse that too often seems endemic
to one place, one population. 192 The twenty-first century will wit- ness "people voting with their feet to escape from some
village elder's idea of how to live, or some London School of Econom- ics graduate's idea of protecting Indian folkways." ' This
chang- ing social reality will undermine the conventional assumption that capital is mobile but
labor is immobile. Generations of scholarship on trade and international relations hang in the ba ance. At the very least we will
have to recalibrate existing race-to- the-bottom models and their sensitivity to "giant sucking sounds."
Nor has localism propounded plausible solutions to chal- lenges such as food security,194 AIDS and
other epidemiological crises, and barriers to full equality for women and children.'95 The localist
package of autarky, retaliatory protectionism, and isolationism would be catastrophic . It really is a shame
that Ralph Nader will probably not be named "the first U.S. ambassa- dor to North Korea," where he could "get a real taste of what a
country that actually follows [his] insane economic philosophy- high protectionism, economic autarky, anti-markets, antiglobal- ization,
anti-multinationals-is like for the people. who live there."'9 6 The policies preferred by the protesters at Seattle and
penury for most, security for some, and power for an unjustly privileged few.
That way runs anew the road to serfdom. 19 7
Prague guarantee
Globalization Good – AT: Income Inequality
Trade solves income inequality
Hillebrand 10 - professor at the University of Kentucky
(Evan, “Deglobalization Scenarios: Who Wins? Who Loses?,” Global Economy Journal, 10.2, Business Source Complete)//BB
Economists have used the Stolper-Samuelson (1941) theorem to show that trade is likely to have distributional
effects
on society, especially that the scarce factor of production (in the US case, labor) might be disadvantaged in favor of capital, and vice
versa in a labor abundant country such as China. The IFs model captures distributional effects by tracing the impact of trade on
economic output by sector, each sector employing differing sets of labor skills and capital intensity (Hughes and Hossain, 2003). In
general, relative returns increase for skilled labor as the overall level of development increases and
as
manufacturing increases its share in total value added relative to agriculture. In these trade-restricting
simulations, which tend to increase the relative size of the manufacturing sector in many of the non-OECD countries, we would expect
the share of the work force engaged in manufacturing to increase, resulting in more highly paid workers and thus reducing poverty and
income inequality. Reducing imports of manufactured goods and FDI, however, reduces technological advance
especially in the poorer countries. Slower technological advance results in slower productivity
gains and smaller wage gains in all sectors. How these conflicting forces affect incomes, poverty headcounts, and
inequality depends on the interaction of many institutional and historical factors for each country represented in the model. ¶ The overall
results, however, are quite clear: while deglobalization may encourage poor countries to increase the relative
size of the domestic manufacturing industry and this may shift the relative wage structure in a way
that increases overall equality (in 61 out of 155 non-OECD7 countries the Gini8 coefficient fell), the slower growth in
productivity resulting from a slowing of international trade results in lower GDP growth, lower
average income growth and higher poverty headcounts in all but a very few countries (Table 3). ¶ The
results for Guatemala are typical. Imports of manufactured goods in the forecast period fall dramatically between scenarios, both in
absolute terms and as a share of total imports. Domestic value added in the manufacturing sector rises very slightly in absolute terms, but
productivity growth for the economy as a whole and in the manufacturing sector slows by about a half percentage point a year due to
reduced competition and reduced capital flows. Overall GDP and wage growth slows, but wages fall relatively more in the high-skilled
jobs because the slowdown in productivity growth is greater in sectors that are skillintensive. In addition, returns to capital are lowered
in this low-productivity environment. These three forces result in a shift in the income distribution in favor of the poor. The estimated
Gini coefficient in 2035 is .573 vs. .584 in the globalization scenario. But this gain in equality comes at the expense of lower incomes for
both the rich and the poor. Real GDP per capita in 2035 is 23 percent less than in the globalization scenario and the number of people
living in extreme poverty is 340,000 more.¶ The results are worse for China, a country whose growth has been dependent on exports of
manufactured goods. In China, exports of manufactured goods are down 70 percent by 2035 and value-added by the manufacturing
sector falls by 40 percent. Overall GDP growth averages 1.1 percent a year less than in the globalization scenario and average GDP per
capita in 2035 is 37 percent less. This huge fall in income is not compensated by a rise in equality: the decline in manufacturing pushes
more workers back into agriculture and the service sector which have more unskilled, low-wage jobs. The estimated Gini coefficient in
2035 is .489 vs. .483 in the globalization scenario. ¶ The policy changes in the deglobalization scenario tend to increase the relative size
of the manufacturing sector in the non-OECD countries that were not already deeply integrated into the globalized trading system. One
hundred and five of the 155 non-OECD countries increase the relative size of their manufacturing
sectors in the deglobalization scenario, but this rarely has positive national benefits. Only 33 countries
increase the absolute size of their manufacturing sector and only 9 countries are able to raise their average GDP per capita. These nine
are among the smallest, poorest, and least globalized countries in the world.9 Only one country—Eritrea—is able to increase average
GDP per capita, reduce inequality, and reduce its poverty headcount. For all the rest, the decrease in imports of
manufactured goods and capital tends to reduce equality or average incomes or increase poverty,
or, in most cases, all three because the growth-inhibiting aspects of trade and capital slowdowns
overwhelm any positive distribution affects that may result from structural changes in the economy.
Alt Fails – Rejection Insufficient
***These can also work well as permutation evidence
Mere opposition fails
Ferguson 10 – Professor of Anthropology @ Stanford
(James, “The Uses of Neoliberalism,” Antipode, 41.1, 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00721.x)//BB
This problem in recent progressive scholarship strikes me as related to
a parallel problem in
progressive politics more broadly. For over the last couple of decades, what we call “the Left” has come to be
organized, in large part, around a project of resisting and refusing harmful new developments
in the world. This is understandable, since so many new developments have indeed been highly objectionable. But it has left us
with a politics largely defined by negation and disdain, and centered on what I will call “the antis.”
Anti-globalization, anti- neoliberalism, anti-privatization, anti-imperialism, anti-Bush, perhaps even anticapitalism—but always “anti”, not “pro”. This is good enough, perhaps, if one’s political goal is simply
to denounce “the system” and to decry its current tendencies. And, indeed, some seem satisfied with such a politics. In my own
disciplines of anthropology and African Studies, for instance, studies of state and development tend, with depressing predictability, to
conclude (in tones of righteous indignation) that the rich are benefiting and the poor are getting screwed. The powerless, it seems, are
getting the short end of the stick. This is not exactly a surprising finding, of course (isn’t it precisely because they are on the losing end
of things that we call them “powerless” in the first place?). Yet this sort of work styles itself as “critique”, and
imagines itself to be very “political”.¶ But what if politics is really not about expressing indignation or
denouncing the powerful? What if it is, instead, about getting what you want? Then we progressives must ask: what do
we want? This is a quite different question (and a far more difficult question) than: what are
we against? What do we want? Such a question brings us very quickly to the question of government .
Denunciatory analyses often treat government as the simple expression of power or domination—
the implication apparently being that it is politically objectionable that people should be governed
at all. But any realistic sort of progressive politics that would seek a serious answer to
the question “ what do we want?” will have to involve
developing genuinely
an exploration of the contemporary possibilities for
progressive arts of government .
Absolute rejection is unnecessary – we can use the market to promote equality
--this is particularly useful when the link is generic and the aff has a good angle at promoting social welfare
Ferguson 10 – Professor of Anthropology @ Stanford
(James, “The Uses of Neoliberalism,” Antipode, 41.1, 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00721.x)//BB
Let me emphasize that to say that certain political initiatives and programs borrow
from the neoliberal bag of
tricks doesn’t mean that these political projects are in league with the ideological project
of neoliberalism (in David Harvey’s sense)—only that they appropriate certain characteristic neoliberal
“moves” (and I think of these discursive and programmatic moves as analogous to the moves one might make in a game). These
moves are recognizable enough to look “neoliberal”, but they can, I suggest, be used for quite
different purposes than that term usually implies. In this connection, one might think of statistical
techniques for calculating the probabilities of workplace injuries. These were originally developed in the nineteenth century by
large employers to control costs (Ewald 1986), but they eventually became the technical basis for social insurance,
and ultimately for the welfare state (which brought unprecedented gains to the working class across much of the world).
Techniques, that is to say, can “migrate” across strategic camps, and devices of government that were
invented to serve one purpose have often enough ended up, though history’s irony, being harnessed
to another. Might we see a similar re-appropriation of “market” techniques of government (which were, like
workplace statistics, undoubtedly conservative in their original uses) for different, and more progressive sorts of ends? Maybe not—
one should remain genuinely open-minded about this—but it is perhaps worth at least considering. Let me
present two empirical examples from southern Africa as a way of making this proposition perhaps a bit more plausible.
Alt Fails – Governments Won’t Rollback Policies
Governments won’t roll-back neoliberal policies
Ferguson 10 – Professor of Anthropology @ Stanford
(James, “The Uses of Neoliberalism,” Antipode, 41.1, 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00721.x)//BB
One response here—understandable in the wake of the neoliberal restructuring of recent decades—is
to call for
developmental states, effectively undoing the neoliberal transformations of the
1980s and 1990s and going back to the 1970s. I am skeptical that this is an adequate response—partly because
the supposedly developmental states I know from the 1970s in Africa were pretty awful, and partly because I
doubt that you can run history backward (as if you could just hit the rewind button and try again). The world has
changed, and simply re-asserting Third World sovereignty will not get us very far in dealing
with a fundamentally reconfigured politico-spatial world order. Imperialism is undoubtedly alive and well. But I
the reinstating of old-style
don’t think we have a good analysis of, say, the Gates Foundation, or the Soros Foundation, if we see them simply as the imperial tools
of the global rich, undermining the sovereignty of African governments. It is much more complicated than that—and
perhaps also more hopeful. Can we find ways of thinking creatively about the progressive possibilities (and
not only the reactionary dangers) of this new terrain of transnational organization of funds, energies, and affect? Can we imagine new
“arts of government” that might take advantage of (rather than simply denouncing or resisting) recent transformations in the
spatial organization of government
and social assistance?
There is no alternative to neoliberalism and increased globalization is key to fighting
poverty in Latin America.
Idler 06
- writer for The American, published by the American Enterprise Institute, communications specialist (Jose Enrique, “Seaching for
Free Markets in Latin America”, 12/13/06; < http://www.american.com/archive/2006/december/searching-for-free-markets-in-latinamerica>)//Beddow
An anti-globalization wave has been blazing across Latin America. Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, whose headline-grabbing rhetoric only
became fierier after his recent re-election, hasn't missed an opportunity to highlight the alleged evils of capitalism. Bolivian president Evo
Morales has voiced a similar script, and so have a score of other presidential candidates in the region. Some have lost—Ollanta Humala in Peru
and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico—and others have somehow managed to come back from the shadows—Daniel Ortega in
Nicaragua. But despite the fiery rhetoric, often used to boost popularity among the poor, the economic realities of the region indicate that
trade across borders remains both desirable and necessary. It is clear that Latin American economies are intertwined with foreign
markets, and particularly the U.S. In 2005, for example, the U.S. received nearly 15 percent of Chilean exports. More conspicuously, the U.S.
accounted for roughly 63 percent of Venezuela's total market abroad. Based on forecasts, some of the largest Latin American economies
combined—Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Venezuela—are expected to attract foreign investments worth $47.5 billion this year, increasing
investments by 11.5 percent in comparison with last year. There is a major gap between the political rhetoric of some leaders and the world
they are forced to inhabit. Latin American economies have to live in the inescapable reality of an intertwined world in which economic
and commercial relations are a given. Ignoring this reality will not bring about revolutions from thin air. It will simply hurt the country's
performance and ultimately diminish the conditions for growing and generating wealth. Leaders in the region will have to make choices on
whether to work with the realities of globalized economies or try to turn their backs on it. With the recent renewal of Andean trade preferences
for only six months, it is crucial to think of long-term trade relations with the U.S—and other countries. Colombia and Peru have already been
moving forward with free trade agreements. Those who remain in the anti-globalization bloc, however, may soon see their economies
plummeting even further. The real question for Latin America isn't whether trade and open markets are good or even necessary. It is rather
whether the dividends derived from trade will be available for the poor, who can only benefit if they gain access to the market. Former IMF
expert Agustin Carstens believes that the economic challenges in Latin America are well known. Succinctly put, the region needs to "bring about
greater reductions in poverty and inequality than have happened in the past." Nonetheless, combating poverty by attacking cross-border trade
and investment itself is like fighting heart disease by campaigning against exercise. The script of rabid nationalism and anti-globalization
hasn't been exhausted yet. But sooner or later reality will rear its head. Bolivia is currently in the midst of demonstrations, with the wealthiest
provinces seeking greater autonomy from the central government, and oil windfalls are bound to decline at some point. After the rhetoric,
massive public debts, escalating inflation, and bloated governments will likely lead to financial and social crises, which countries like Argentina
have been through already. Those Latin American leaders who decide to ignore the inescapable dynamics of growth only do so at their own peril.
And most unfortunately, at their country's as well.
Alt Fails – Unsustainable
Centralized economies are unsustainable
Edwards 10 (Sebastian Edwards, an international economist, professor, speaker, and consultant, he is currently the Henry Ford II
Professor of International Business Economics at the UCLA Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles
(UCLA), Left Behind: Latin America and the False Promise of Populism, pp 165-166)lm
Populism is not a new phenomenon in Latin America. Historical examples ¶ of populist regimes include the presidencies of Getulio
Vargas and Joao Goulart¶ in Brazil, Juan Domingo Peron in Argentina, Salvador Allende in Chile, ¶ Luis Echeverria and Jose Lopez
Portillo in Mexico, Daniel Ortega and the¶ Sandinistas in Nicaragua during the 1980s, and Juan Velasco Alvarado and ¶ Alan Garcia in
Peru. In all these episodes policies based on unsustainable¶ fiscal expansion, monetary largesse,
protectionism, and government intervention¶ were put in place as a way of redistributing income
and wealth. And in all¶ of them the experiment ended in runaway inflation, higher unemployment,¶
lower wages, and massive currency crises. For example, according to UN¶ data, during the first
Alan García administration in Peru (1985–90), inflation adjusted¶ wages declined by more than 60
percent. And during Sandinista¶ rule, wages in Nicaragua collapsed by an astonishing 80 percent.
Current episodes¶ of neopopulism in countries as diverse as Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador,¶ Nicaragua, Paraguay, and Venezuela differ
from historical manifestations in several respects, including the ways through which the populist leaders got to ¶ power—the current crop
has won democratically held elections.¶ Before I proceed, three points of clarification are in order. First, there is ¶ nothing wrong with
focusing on social conditions when designing economic¶ policies. On the contrary, given the region’s dismal social history, the
reduction¶ of inequality and poverty are legitimate—one could even say, required—¶ goals of any comprehensive blueprint or program
for economic development.¶ The problem is not the emphasis on social objectives and goals. The problem¶
is relying on policies that are unsustainable in the long run and that after a¶ short period of euphoria
generate stagnation, inflation, unemployment, and¶ lower wages—policies that instead of
improving the lives of the poor, make¶ them more painful and frustrating.
Economic calculation problem makes socialism impossible – only the market
economy can rationally allocate resources.
Salerno 11 – Austrian School Economist, professor at Pace University, New York City, PhD from Rutgers University, senior fellow at the
Ludwig von Mises Institute, editor of the Institute’s Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics (Joseph T., “Calculation and Socialism”, 8/15/11,
Lecture Presented at Mises University; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alqUqdbfxhk)//Beddow
Now let’s look at what Mises’ argument was. It’s actually pretty straightforward. There were some earlier economists that got glimpses of what
Mises’ argument was, but it was really Mises that put the whole thing together. So, here is what Mises basically said: First of all, he defined
socialism as “that system under which all the material means of production (the non-human means of production) are owned by one agency – the
central planning agency (or the socialist state).” All means of production are collectively owned – there can be private property in your own
clothing, even your own houses and gardens and so on, but all things we use in production (outside of labor) are owned collectively by the state.
And, therefore, the state has to make decisions about how to allocate resources – what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, how many
of various kinds of goods to produce, and so on. And, by the way, there is a book by a German economist named Albert Schaffle written in the
mid-19th century called “The Quintessence of Socialism”, and he went through all socialist plans till that point, and found that the one feature
they all had in common was to abolish private property, so Mises was right in taking that as the hallmark of socialism – the abolition of private
property in the means of production). So, here’s Mises’ argument: His thesis is that the rational allocation of resources is impossible without
economic calculation using actual market prices. Socialism abolishes private property in capital goods and resources (they are all owned by the
state), yet, if one group owns all resources, then the next thing follows: if the socialist state is the sole owner of the material factors of production,
they can no longer be exchanged. There are no markets for them – it is a monopoly owner. But, if there is only one owner, and there is no
exchange, then there can never be any prices. And, without prices, the socialist state can never figure out what the cost of production is. Even if
they pay the workers with money, and the workers buy the consumers goods with money, and the consumers goods have prices, the steel, the
iron, the agricultural products, the raw materials and so on will not have prices. Which means you can never compare prices and costs. Socialism
will never know the costs – they will never know if they are giving up something of greater value when they produce and extra automobile.
Should they have used those materials to have produced five more bicycles, or two more motorcycles, or used the steel in the building of a silo to
hold grain? They don’t know how to determine the best and most valued uses of all resources. So, socialism is doomed to be chaos – a socialist
economy is literally impossible, in the sense that “economy” means economizing resources, using them (as resources are scarce) for only the
most valuable uses, and renouncing those uses which are much less valuable. So, socialism could never determine what is the most valuable use
of steel, gasoline, the various parts of it, and so on. Let me point out one thing: Mises points out that socialism, then, as the collective ownership
of the means of production, abolishes the preconditions of economic calculation. You need private property in all stages of production (not just
consumer goods – including capital goods), so that everything can be exchanged between private owners and, therefore, have prices.
Absent the price mechanism of a free market, no central planning can allocate
resources efficiently.
Englund 12
- MBA from Boise State University, surety bond underwriter, contributor to the Ludwig von Mises Institute, citing the work
of esteemed economist and guardian of freedom, Ludwig von Mises (Eric, “The Economic Irrationality of the State”, 9/4/12;
http://mises.org/daily/6177/The-Economic-Irrationality-of-the-State)//Beddow
In 1912, Ludwig von Mises's masterwork The Theory of Money and Credit was published; and to this day, this book is underappreciated. How
can this be? After all, in this book, Mises unveiled his regression theorem demonstrating commodity money, such as gold, can have its purchasing
power traced back in time to the point where gold was not a medium of exchange. Mises, accordingly, eliminated the conundrum in which the
marginal-utility explanation of money demand would merely be a case of circular reasoning; money emerged out of barter and his logic is
irrefutable. Mises also laid the foundation for the Austrian theory of the trade cycle, which correctly deduces that economic boom-bust cycles are
caused by inflationary bank-credit expansion as enabled by central banks and their governments. While writing The Theory of Money and Credit,
Mises was pondering the issue of economic calculation in a socialist state. Per Murray Rothbard, Mises writes that he was led to consider the
socialist calculation problem by his work on The Theory of Money and Credit. Here Mises realized for the first time with keen clarity that the
money economy does not and cannot calculate or measure values directly: that it only calculates with money prices, the resultants of such
individual valuations. Hence, Mises realized that only a market with money prices based on the evaluations and exchanges of private owners can
rationally allocate resources, since there is no way by which a government could calculate values directly. Hence, for Mises his article and book
on socialism was part and parcel of the development of his expanded integration of micro and macro, of direct monetary exchange, that he had
begun but not completed in The Theory of Money and Credit.[1] Without private ownership in the means of production, economic calculation is
impossible. Per Joseph T. Salerno, "a single human mind … would be utterly incapable of determining the optimal pattern of resource allocation
or even if a particular plan were ludicrously and destructively uneconomic."[2] To be sure, the collapse of the USSR demonstrated the harmful,
resource-misallocating, and uneconomic nature of the socialist state. Ludwig von Mises, indisputably, was correct about the inherent irrationality
of the socialist state. Because Mises, however, grudgingly believed in the necessity of the state, he did not extend his critique to the irrational
essence of the state itself — after all, he believed that government was necessary for providing national defense, courts, prisons, and police
protection/security.[3] He did not see free-market solutions emerging in lieu of these state-provided services. Given the nature of all states, is it
not true that government entities are incapable of rationally allocating resources? In a socialist state, an economy cannot emerge due to the
impossibility of economic calculation under collective ownership of the means of production, as prices for production goods cannot materialize.
Owing to the character of all states, however, it is impossible for bureaucratic operatives to rationally allocate resources, which is due to the
impossibility of applying a profit-and-loss test to the operations of the state. Such impossibility arises as a state's revenues are based not on
voluntary market exchanges but are based on coercion mostly via taxation. In a world of scarcity, it stands to reason that entities which
misallocate resources and destroy capital are fundamentally irrational and undesirable. Any entity that comes into existence based on coercion
and theft and then is incapable of rationally allocating resources under its control is criminal in nature and harmful to mankind. This entity is the
state.
Alt Fails – No Revolution
The Radical Left project is unsustainable, doesn’t prevent poverty, damages the
economy, undermines democracy, and gives rise to exclusionary authoritarian
regimes – moderate politics are critical.
Weyland et al 10 – Lozano Long Professor of Latin American Politics (Kurt, “Leftist Governments in Latin America: Successes and
Shortcomings”, Cambridge University Press 2010, p.177-179; Print.)//Beddow
Despite its push to expand the state’s role in the economy, including direct involvement in production, the contestatory left has not designed
and enacted a systematic, promising strategy for state guidance of socioeconomic development either. Chavez’s disparate activities do not
constitute a clear, coherent plan. In particular, a public investment program that would successfully diversify the economy is conspicuous by its
absence. Venezuela has become even more dependent on oil, turning almost literally into a monoexport economy. The practice of milking the
government’s cash cow PDVSA for social purposes raises further questions about the sustainability and promise of the Bolivarian
approach to development. Indeed, Corrales argues convincingly that Venezuela is repeating another cycle of its traditional, rather unsuccessful
oil rentierism. As Gray Molina warns, President Morales is at risk of falling prey to the same temptation and foregoing chances for economic
diversification. The underdevelopment of the gas industry and the institutional weakness of the Bolivian state create additional barriers to
economic success. Thus, in comparison to the impressive economic accomplishments of the moderate leftist government of Felipe
Gonzales in Spain (1982-96; see Boix 1998), Latin America’s contemporary left has performed rather poorly in designing and
implementing a state-guided development strategy that could yield significantly higher economic and social payoffs than the globalized
market model currently in place, as Barros Silva, Braga, and Costa highlight. Given its ambition to restructure the market system profoundly,
this deficit is especially debilitating for the contestatory left. Although also missing opportunities for fomenting economic development through
state initiatives, the moderate left – with its greater reliance on the private sector – is less affected. Despite the partial disappointment on the
economic front, all left-wing governments have attained progress on the social front, especially in reducing poverty and improving educational
skills and health, that is, “human capital.” These accomplishments clearly arise from the concern for social equity, a defining characteristic of the
left. Nevertheless, none of the four countries has made a significant dent in persistently high social inequality. Even “twenty-first century
socialism” has found it difficult to affect real redistribution, given the economic and political constraints prevailing in the era of market
reform and democracy. Moreover, recent social progress has rested on the global economic boom of the mid-2000s, as the contrast with the
deterioration of the social indicators in the economically troubled early years of Chavez’s presidency suggests. This observation, corroborated by
a recent statistical study (Lustig 2009: 13), of course raises the question of sustainability, which is especially acute for the contestatory left
governments given their heavy reliance on commodity rents. Although the moderate left has also been helped by the international
bonanza, its social achievements are more solid (Lustig 2009: 13), as suggested by Chile’s steady progress in greatly reducing poverty
over the last twenty years, despite various international financial crises and a domestic recession at the turn of the millennium. This noteworthy
accomplishment shows that Latin American societies can attains social advances despite economic problems. Significant improvements in the
well-being of the poorest sectors are not costly and therefore do not run up against stringent fiscal constraints. And democratic competition
provides an incentive for this preferential option for the poor, who control a large share of votes. In shifting to a propoor strategy, rather
than channeling most benefits to its core constituencies among the formal working class, the Latin American left has absorbed and
productively modified (Huber 2009: 73-80) a claim initially advanced by neoliberalism (Castaneda 1990), which has long advocated that the
state privilege the destitute with public resources (while requiring better-off sectors to buy social protection in the market). In sum, the Latin
American left has produced substantial improvements in social indicators, albeit not in a very distinctive fashion. Centrist and even right-wing
governments have undertaken similar initiatives, as is particularly obvious in the Brazilian case, where the administration of Fernando
Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002) enacted more important social policy reforms than its leftist successor. As the moderate left has shown stronger
performance on the economic and social front, it has also attained better outcomes in politics, especially by living up to democratic principles.
More clearly, even, than in the area of economic development, the activism and ambition of the contestatory left have proven
counterproductive in politics, leading to creeping threats to full democracy. The efforts to promote political inclusion and mass participation
have opened the door for plebiscitarian majoritarianism and increasingly infringed on pluralism and liberal safeguards, especially in Venezuela.
The hegemonic tendencies of governing leftists in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua are worrisome as well. Arguably, the contestatory left has
ended up undermining democracy more than deepening it. The moderate left, especially the Concertacion and Lula de Silva, has not enacted
many high-profile programs to eliminate barriers of discrimination and create novel mechanisms of political participation. Except for the removal
of authoritarian residues from the Chilean constitution, it has not pushed for an overhaul of the institutional framework either. But its lack of
ambition in political reform and its limited transformatory zeal in economy and society have prevented the emergence of risks to the
checks and balances, pluralism, and competitiveness that the constitutive of democracy. Rather than putting pressure on the opposition and
restricting public deliberation through attacks on the media (a common occurrence in contemporary Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador), moderate
left governments have submitted fairly to the judgment of public opinion and the electorate. This democratic posture has benefited accountability
and responsiveness, and has reduced the danger of policy mistakes and failures. Respecting the institutional confines of pluralist democracy,
the moderate left cannot produce magical solutions to national problems, but it can avoid disasters and catastrophes. The contestatory left
has rejected this prudence and boldly pushed for a refoundation of the political and institutional system, yet at the price of threats to democracy
itself. Bolivia’s Morales and the MAS have concentrated on incorporating the indigenous and poor mestizo sector that had been political
marginalized. Venezuela’s Bolivarian constitution of 1999 introduced several plebiscitary institutions and softened the principle of representation
through recall elections. Moreover, both leaders, as well as Ecuador’s Correa, have promoted a mobilizational style of politics, calling for one
electoral contest after the other and using mass demonstrations to intimidate established “liberal” institutions. As mentioned previously, this
movement strategy has helped to boost popular satisfaction with democracy and thus improve the quality of the political regime in the eyes of a
good part of the citizenry. But as a serious downside, the majoritarian push of the contestatory left has put strong pressure on the institutional
framework of pluralist democracy. Claiming to advance the interests, needs, and demands of previously neglected, poorer, and ethnically
discriminated sectors, Chavez and Morales have attacked the opposition and concentrated political power, dismantled checks and balances, and
undermined horizontal accountability. Although contestatory leftists regard majoritarianism as the necessary instrument or unavoidable price for
advancing the cause of the “subaltern”, there is a real risk that power concentration could become consolidated and assume an ever more
autocratic nature. This danger is especially acute in Venezuela, where Chavez’s leadership has a pronounced top-down character. Earlier
experiences in Latin America, as under the populism of Lazaro Cardenas and Juan Peron, suggest that plebiscitarian mass incorporation can
turn undemocratic – and, as the Mexican case shows, mass incorporation can gradually give way to mass control, and, eventually, mass
exclusion. Because power is ultimately decisive in politics, a reasonable degree of dispersal and a guarantee of pluralism and respect for
opposition are part of the nonnegotiable core of democracy. Therefore, checks and balances and other liberal safeguards cannot be sacrificed on
the alter of mass inclusion and popular participation. Although the contestatory left has made some accomplishments on the political front, they
do not seem to be worth the risks.
No revolution – political constraints and timid left.
Weyland et al 10 – Lozano Long Professor of Latin American Politics (Kurt, “Leftist Governments in Latin America: Successes and
Shortcomings”, Cambridge University Press 2010, p.8; Print.)//Beddow
But of course, times have changed. The range of options available to all of the region’s leftists has narrowed greatly in recent decades. Both
extremes, especially the revolutionary pole, have lost appeal and run into serious feasibility problems.
The collapse of
communism has deprived the radical left of an alternative to global capitalism and a source of
economic and political support for its own efforts. Who still believes that socialism as a truly new mode of production is an attainable and
desirable goal? The dysfunctionalities of import-substitution industrialization also raised doubts about the capacity and rationality of Latin
American states. And determined market reform and integration into the global economy have created powerful stakeholders that make
any frontal attack on the capitalist system prohibitively costly. The failed and counterproductive attempts of the 1960s and 1970s to start
revolutions in Latin America also fueled a profound rethinking among the Latin American left (Castaneda 1993). For these reasons, the basic
outline of the socioeconomic order does not face radical challenges anymore. The left now also places much greater value on political
democracy, an additional reason to forswear extra-constitutional assaults on power. The experience of brutal authoritarian rule demonstrated the
importance of liberal safeguards, which radical leftists used to denounce as bourgeois formalities or obstacles to revolution. The international
regime for protecting democracy, especially its electoral rules, has raised another obstacle to revolutionary efforts. For all of these reasons, no
significant force in contemporary Latin America advocates a full-scale revolution. The hope to remove constraints and realize ambitious goals in
one fell swoop has evaporated. By historical standards, even the advocates of twenty-first-century socialism are much less radical than their
forefathers from the second millennium, such as the Chilean socialists of the 1960s and early 1970s. But given the tighter constraints and the
reduced room for activism, they are still significantly more radical than their moderate contemporaries.
Demand for growth is irreversible
Wolf, 04 (Martin, Honorary doctor of Economics from the University of London and winner of the Wincott Foundation senior prize for
excellence in financial journalism in 1989 and 1997, 2004, Why Globalization Works, pg 188-190)//DH
It is widely accepted among critics of market-driven globalization that it is inherently inimical to protection of the environment. To the
extent that it is not inherently inimical, they argue, it is so de facto, because of the way the World Trade Organization operates. These
propositions, though frequently repeated, suffer from a simple drawback: they are, where not altogether wrong, at least greatly
exaggerated. While it is impossible to deal with this complex subject at length, here are some of the most important charges:
globalization promotes growth, which is inherently inimical to environmental sustainability; globalization favors transport-intensive and
so energy-intensive systems of production and distribution, also inherently inimical to sustainability; globalization encourages an
environmental 'race to the bottom'; and the World Trade Organization prevents countries from taking the steps they wish, individually or
collectively, to protect themselves from these various environmental harms.23 ¶ Consider, first, the relationship between globalization
and economic growth. On this, Thomas Bode, executive director of Greenpeace International, wrote that 'The modern economy is a firebreathing vampire of petroleum which is slowly cooking our planet. To claim that a massive increase in global production and
consumption will be good for the environment is preposterous.'24 The objection here, however, is not to trade as such, but to economic
growth. One reaction to Bode's view, which is widely shared in the environmental community, is that the chances of
persuading the bulk of humanity to forgo economic growth, in order to protect a global
environment ravaged by the citizens of the wealthy countries while leaving the latter to enjoy
vastly higher living standards, in perpetuity are rightly zero. Yet the chances of persuading the
wealthy citizens of high-income countries to reduce their living standards to the global average as a
step towards an egalitarian, global, no-growth economy are also zero. 25 Stopping growth is not an
option. The challenge is managing it. If this is to be done, one must understand the link between
growth and the environment rather better than Bode seems to do.¶ That link is complex. As people become richer,
for example, they insist upon a clean-up of local environmental damage. Alan Krueger and Gene
Grossman of Princeton University argued, for example, in 1994 that this happened when a
country's GDP per head reached $5,000, roughly where the Czech Republic was then.26 After
about $8,000, they argue, local pollution starts to improve substantially. At the same time, emission of C02
increases with levels of GDP per head (though at different rates, since some countries' economies- the US's, for example- are far more
C02-intensive, at given levels of GDP per head, than others).27 So the challenge of global warming does increase with GDP. It would be
fair, therefore, to conclude that local environmental harms tend to fall after a while, but global harms to rise continuously, as real
incomes grow.¶ In addition, we know from experience that market economies have been far¶ less
environmentally damaging than the socialist ones. The former Soviet¶ Union was responsible for
some of the world's greatest environmental catastrophes,¶ including the draining of the Aral Sea.28
China, too, has a poor environmental¶ record. This is so for three reasons: the indifference of
dictatorships¶ to political pressure; the indifference of state-owned enterprises to the need to¶ use
resources efficiently; and their technological backwardness and desire for self-sufficiency, which led,
to take an egregious example, to the use of highly¶ polluting brown coal, instead of petroleum, by the former East Germany. ¶ The
fundamental point, however, is this. Economic activities create environmental¶ spillovers. The rational policy to deal with those
spillovers is through¶ cost-internalization- policies that confront decision-makers with the costs of¶ what they do. The market must
be used to remedy the harms the market would¶ otherwise do. Such internalization needs to be domestic or local,
where harms¶ are domestic or local, and global, where harms are global. Whether such ¶ policies can be agreed, or implemented, at the
global level is, to put it mildly,¶ an open question. But an agreement to global carbon taxes, for example, is¶ certainly less implausible
than an agreement to freeze global economic growth.¶ Even before achieving this ambitious goal, it would be a good idea at least to¶
eliminate environmentally harmful subsidies. Among salient examples are¶ subsidies to the use of pesticides and fertilizers in
agriculture, to commercial¶ energy production and consumption, and to deep-sea fishing. 29
Alt Fails – Nationalized Economies Bad
Socialized economies always fail
Perry 95 (Mark J. Perry is Professor of economics and finance in the School of Management at the Flint campus of the University of
Michigan. “ Why Socialism Failed- Collectivism is based on faulty principles.”http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/why-socialismfailed#axzz2YfzJbyWW//HK)
Socialism is the Big Lie of the twentieth century. While it promised prosperity, equality, and security, it
delivered poverty, misery, and tyranny. Equality was achieved only in the sense that everyone was equal in his
or her misery.¶ In the same way that a Ponzi scheme or chain letter initially succeeds but eventually collapses, socialism may show
early signs of success. But any accomplishments quickly fade as the fundamental deficiencies of central planning
emerge. It is the initial illusion of success that gives government intervention its pernicious, seductive appeal.
In the long run, socialism has always proven to be a formula for tyranny and misery. ¶ A pyramid scheme is ultimately unsustainable
is unsustainable in the long run because it is a
flawed theory. Socialism does not work because it is not consistent with fundamental principles of human
behavior. The failure of socialism in countries around the world can be traced to one critical defect: it is a system that ignores
incentives.¶ In a capitalist economy, incentives are of the utmost importance. Market prices, the profit-and-loss system of accounting,
because it is based on faulty principles. Likewise, collectivism
and private property rights provide an efficient, interrelated system of incentives to guide and direct economic behavior. Capitalism is
based on the theory that incentives matter!¶ Under socialism, incentives either play a minimal role or are ignored totally. A
centrally planned economy without market prices or profits, where property is owned by the state, is a system without an effective
incentive mechanism to direct economic activity. By failing to emphasize incentives, socialism is a theory inconsistent with human
nature and is therefore doomed to fail. Socialism is based on the theory that incentives don’t matter!
Centrally planned alternatives to neoliberalism fail
Wolf, 04 (Martin, Honorary doctor of Economics from the University of London and winner of the Wincott Foundation senior prize for
excellence in financial journalism in 1989 and 1997, 2004, Why Globalization Works, pg 58-60)//DH
Not so very long ago, economic planning and public ownership of the means¶
of production were the
wave of the future. Even a man as wise as George¶ Orwell believed in both these bad ideas. That faith did not end with the
1940s.¶ When I worked at the World Bank during the 1970s every developing country,¶ however
limited its intellectual resources, was expected to produce a five-year¶ economic plan in pale
imitation of the Stalinist model. Sophisticated developing¶ countries, such as India, produced sophisticated plans. Less
sophisticated¶ countries produced less sophisticated plans. All these plans had one¶ thing in common, however:
they were fictions. But they were not harmless¶ fictions. They inflicted grave damage on the
economies and people of these¶ supposedly 'planned' societies.2 Anti-capitalists of today talk as if
these experiments¶ with planning had never happened or, if they did, have no significance¶ now that
state-socialism has collapsed. They are wrong. The experience with¶ national economic planning
has important lessons. It helps us understand¶ what a state can usefully do- and is obliged not do - if it is to see a rise in the¶
living standards of the people for whom it has responsibility.¶ What the state cannot do: the death of central planning¶ In the twentiethcentury heyday of the anti-liberal counter-revolution, an¶ extraordinary belief grew up.3 This faith held that the entire national economy¶
not only could - but should - be brought under central control and direction.¶ This was the faith that failed. It was an example of what the
late Friedrich¶ Hayek called the 'fatal conceit' - the belief in our ability to plan and control¶ human destiny.¶ The belief that central
planning was possible emerged partly from the success¶ of the modern business corporation, partly from a realization that it would be¶
easier to manage an industry with a few large players than one with many¶ smaller ones, and partly from the experience of economic
mobilization for war.¶ People found it increasingly natural to think of a country as a large company. ¶ Even today, the notion lives on in
metaphorical discussions of 'UK plc' or¶ 'America Inc'. But for the better part of a century people who considered ¶ themselves
progressive did not think of this as a metaphor. They considered the¶ planned economy logical, necessary and desirable. They were
wrong.¶ First, planners cannot find out what needs to be done to co-ordinate the¶ production of a
modern economy. As Professor McMillan points out, there are¶ 20,000 different job categories in the United States. A central plan
cannot¶ begin to cope with such complexity! Worse, the information planners need¶ about the possibilities of
production is locked away in their underlings' heads.¶ The planned will want to tell planners not the
truth, but what they find¶ personally convenient. It is in the interests of factory managers to tell planners¶ the levels of
production that would be easy for them to achieve, since they are¶ far more likely to be penalized for failure to achieve targets than for
overachieving¶ them.¶ Second, even if a technically feasible plan could be drawn up, there is no¶ reason to
believe it will be implemented. It is in the interests of factory bosses¶ to produce what they find personally beneficial and,
wherever desirable and¶ feasible, deceive their superiors. Maybe factory managers will meet the purely¶ quantitative targets, but they can
easily evade targets for quality, even where¶ such targets can be specified. Planners can only inspect part of the production. ¶ Only users
in markets automatically inspect all of the production.¶ Third, it is impossible for planners to know what hundreds
of millions of¶ different people desire. So the technically feasible plan, even if implemented,¶ will bear no relation to what
people actually want. Think, for a moment, of¶ cosmetics. How could a central planner know better than the consumers what¶ the
individual woman wants? Planners can only provide users with what they¶ believe they should want, which is quite another matter.5 ¶
Fourth, because prices bear no relation to costs, there is no way to calculate¶ what production needs
to increase and what production needs to be reduced.¶ ¶ A technically feasible plan can, quite easily,
be wealth-destroying. Without¶ prices generated in a market, rational calculation of what needs to be¶ produced is impossible.¶
Fifth, the comparison with a war effort is completely misguided. The salient¶ feature of war is that the state defines the goals. The salient
feature of peace is¶ that individual consumers define them. In peacetime, production's function ¶ is to satisfy consumers. The objectives of
production in war and peace are¶ opposites.¶ Sixth, even if all such problems can be resolved, planners do not
know the¶ possibilities for production of new things or of old things in new ways. Worse,¶ they find
such novelties - the fruits of innovation - inconvenient. Any¶ innovation disrupts the plan
automatically. It also brings additional uncertainties,¶ since nobody can know with reasonable confidence how to produce¶
completely new products or how successful a new technique may turn out to¶ be. In practice, therefore, the planned
economy is as innovation-resistant as¶ the market economy is innovation-prone.¶ Finally, foreign
trade cannot be integrated successfully into the plan since,¶ by definition, foreigners cannot be
planned, unless the planners control those¶ foreigners. Planning is hierarchical by its nature,
because it turns a country¶ into a single company. It can be stretched across borders only if there is a¶ clear hierarchy
among countries. For this reason, independent planned ¶ countries pursue autarky, so far as they can. At the same time, they always ¶ need
trade since there are some things they cannot make. But planners do not ¶ know what it makes sense for them to trade, since they do not
know what¶ anything costs.¶ The idea of comprehensive national planning is not just mistaken. It is¶
ludicrous. It ignores everything we know about the role of incentives and¶ information in
economics. Output per worker in the Soviet Union and eastern¶ Europe was about a third below
that in the west even when they had the same¶ equipment. The productivity of Chinese peasants
doubled once the¶ communes were abolished.6 Planning would fail even if the planners were¶
benevolent and competent. Alas, there is every reason to expect the people¶ who reach the top of a bureaucratic hierarchy to
possess neither of these¶ virtues. Central planning could not have succeeded in a long-run race against¶ market economies. Yet
developing countries were cajoled into doing it.¶ Sometimes they desperately wanted to. That was, if anything, more ludicrous,¶ since
these governments did not possess the powers of coercion over factory¶ managers possessed by a Soviet planner.¶
Socialism in Latin America fails
Edwards 10 (Sebastian Edwards, Henry Ford II Professor of International Business Economics at the Anderson Graduate School of
Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, Chief Economist for the Latin America and Caribbean Region of the World Bank,
“Left Behind: Latin America and the False Promise of Populism”, pg. 102-3)//lm
Allende’s economic program had several objectives, including nationalization¶ of the large copper
mines, the banking sector, and a number of large¶ monopolistic companies and implementation of a
deep agrarian reform under¶ which large land holdings (latifundia) would be replaced by a combination
of small holdings, cooperatives, and state-owned farms. In addition, a system¶ based on socialist-style
planning was to replace the market system at¶ least partially as the main mechanism for making
economic decisions. In the¶ short run, the Unidad Popular sought to increase production and incomes—¶ particularly the incomes
of the poor—by stimulating demand. This was to be¶ achieved through a massive increase in government spending, higher salaries¶ (in
the first year alone minimum wages were raised by over 50 percent), and ¶ liberal credit creation by the central bank.¶ At first the
new approach to economic policy appeared to work. A year after¶ Allende took office average wages (adjusted for
inflation) had increased by¶ 25 percent, the overall rate of economic growth had shot up to an impressive¶ annual rate of 8 percent, and
inflation was contained at 22 percent. However, ¶ behind these rosy figures, major imbalances were mounting;
investment in¶ equipment and machinery had all but disappeared, a substantial trade deficit¶
developed, and prices began to increase at a ferocious pace. In 1972 overall¶ economic growth stagnated,
official inflation was 260 percent—this greatly¶ underestimated true inflation, as many goods were
unavailable at the officially controlled prices—and wages (adjusted for inflation) fell below their¶
1970 levels. In addition, shortages of all sort of products became pervasive,¶ and a generalized black
market for goods and foreign exchange developed. An¶ important factor behind the decline in overall production was
an increase in¶ labor unrest accompanied by a succession of national strikes called by the opposition ¶ parties. Particularly serious was a
national work stoppage organized¶ by the trucking industry in October of 1972. Government officials were shocked by the economic
developments of 1972.¶ With a mixture of naïveté and stubbornness they insisted that theirs was a ¶ recipe for income expansion,
redistribution, growth, and success. Right-wing¶ politicians and the United States were blamed for the explosion in inflation ¶ and for the
massive shortages. Even
in the face of a dismal economic picture¶ no corrections were made to economic
policy, and the government ploughed¶ ahead with great determination. In 1973—partially as a result of even greater¶
political instability—the economic conditions worsened significantly. During¶ the first three quarters of that
year—that is, until the time of the coup d’état—¶ inflation-adjusted wages experienced significant
declines, ranging from 33 to¶ 50 percent; inflation for the year was over 600 percent, and overall
income¶ contracted by more than 4 percent.
Soviet Union proves
Dilorenzo 92 (Thomas J., 3/1/92, “Why Socialism Causes Pollution”, The Freeman: Ideas On Freedom,
http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/why-socialism-causes-pollution#axzz2YfrD8D8I)
But if
the profit motive is the primary cause of pollution, one would not expect to find much
pollution in socialist countries, such as the former Soviet Union, China, and in the former
Communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe. That is, in theory. In reality exactly the opposite
is true: The socialist world suffers from the worst pollution on earth. Could it be that free enterprise is not
so incompatible with environmental protection after all? I. Socialist Pollution- The Soviet Union¶ In the Soviet Union there
was a vast body of environmental law and regulation that purportedly protected the public interest, but these constraints have had no perceivable benefit.
The Soviet Union, like all socialist countries, suffered from a massive "tragedy of the commons", to
borrow the term used by biologist Garrett Hardin in his classic 1968 article. Where property is communally or governmentally owned and treated as a free
resource, resources will inevitably be overused with little regard for future consequences.¶ The Soviet
government’s imperatives for economic growth, combined with communal ownership of virtually all property and resources, caused tremendous
environmental damage. According to economist Marshall Goldman, who studied and traveled extensively in the Soviet Union, "The
attitude that
nature is there to be exploited by man is the very essence of the Soviet production ethic."¶ A typical
example of the environmental damage caused by the Soviet economic system is the exploitation of the Black Sea. To comply with five-year plans for
housing and building construction, gravel, sand, and trees around the beaches were used for decades as construction materials. Because
there is
no private property, "no value is attached to the gravel along the seashore.
Rational assessment goes affirmative- LA socialism is the worst
Wagner and Redfern 9 [Daniel Wagner and CJ Redfern are staff writers for the Huffington Post. “21st Century Socialism's Impact
on Latin American Economic Performance.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-wagner/21st-century-socialisms-i_b_375277.html//HK)
GRAPHS OMMITTED*
Hugo Chavez came to power in 1998 promising a change in the way government was run, with the plight of the poor and
a war against corruption as the centerpiece of his campaign platform. More
than 10 years and $200 billion in oil
revenue later, there is little perceptible change in the effectiveness of social spending in Venezuela, and
corruption is arguably as bad, or worse, than it was prior to his election. Yet Chavez remains in power, with
ambition to stay there indefinitely, and his brand of 21st century socialism has been exported throughout Latin America. This article
examines whether positive economic change has occurred in the Latin American countries that have embraced Chavez's political model.¶
Real GDP growth has traditionally gyrated - sometimes wildly - in Latin America. Since Chavez was
first elected, real GDP has mostly declined in Venezuela, apart from a short period in 2004. Since Morales was elected in 2005 in
Bolivia, real GDP has remained steady. Since Correa took office in 2007, Ecuador's real GDP briefly rose, before getting caught up in
the global recession. Nicaragua's real GDP has mostly consistently under-performed against the region and the world average, was
below zero from 1984-1994, and has been in steady decline since 2004. Non-socialist countries in Latin America have
generally performed better. Although Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia's real GDP growth all gyrated - sometimes
wildly - between 1980 and 2008, in general, their rates of growth were higher than the 21st century socialist
countries. Like Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia are all resource rich. The primary difference
is how they transitioned from military to democratic governments, and how each government managed or mismanaged its fiscal
resources.¶ ¶ The level of direct investment in the economy in Bolivia, El Salvador, Honduras, and Venezuela from 1980 to 2008 is
mixed. The worst performer, by far, is Venezuela, which declined from nearly $6 billion in 1998 to less than $1 billion by 2008. Part of
this is due to the anti-foreign investment laws that were passed since Chavez came to power, nationalizations in key sectors, and a
reliance on more indigenous forms of investment. In Bolivia, the initial decline in FDI leveled off since Morales modified his
nationalization program in the power sector, but investment levels remain depressed compared with levels in the late 1990s. Although
investment levels have slowly risen in Honduras since 2002, this trend is likely to be reversed based on the political change that occurred
in the country earlier this year. Investment levels in Ecuador have been declining since 2004, and like Nicaragua and Bolivia, have
always been under $1 billion per annum.¶ By contrast, average direct investment levels have risen considerably since the mid-1990s in
Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia. Brazil's investment levels has been at least 10 percent since 1996, and even at their low points
since that time, the other countries' investment levels has not dropped below $1 billion. ¶ Inflation rates gyrated wildly in
Venezuela and Ecuador in the 1980s and 1990s, reaching as high as 100% in Venezuela in 1996
and Ecuador in 2000. It is on the rise again in Venezuela, and is projected by the IMF to approach 50% next year. After reaching
incredible highs of more than 11,000 percent in Bolivia and more than 12,000 percent in Nicaragua in the 1980s, inflation has been at
more manageable levels since the 1990s, and remains under control in Honduras. ¶ ¶ Although Argentina and Brazil experienced periods
of hyper-inflation, inflation has been under control in Argentina since 1992 and in Brazil since 1996, and in Chile and Colombia
throughout the reporting period.¶ Unemployment remains a persistent problem in most of Latin America ,
with a contributing factor being high birth rates. As is the case with so many other statistics for the referenced countries, the
unemployment rates have tended to lack consistency. Since Chavez came to power, the unemployment rate has been cut in half, from
15% to 7.5%, due, largely, to the swelling ranks of public employees. Ecuador's unemployment rate has been roughly halved, as well,
from a high of 14% in 1999 to roughly 7% in 2008. IMF statistics for Bolivia and Nicaragua are incomplete, but the trend lines were
rising in both countries in the middle of this decade. Unemployment remains an issue in Argentina, Brazil, Chile,
and Colombia. The unemployment rate in Argentina reached as high as 18% in the early part of this decade, and was reduced to
7.5% in 2008. The worst affected of the four non-socialist countries has been Colombia, whose unemployment rate reached 20% in
2000, but had been reduced to 11% by 2008. Brazil's rate was as high as 10% and Chile's 8% earlier this decade, but were both 7.5% in
2008. Of all of the statistics measured in this study, unemployed poses the most persistent challenge. ¶ In terms of exports, it is no
surprise that Venezuela's statistics are quite favorable, given Chavez's emphasis on revitalization of the oil sector. Export income has
more than tripled since Chavez came to power. A similar story in Ecuador, where the maturation of the oil sector has resulted in a
doubling of export income since 2001. Bolivia's statistics might have been even more favorable if it were not for the nationalizations
since 2005. Both Bolivia's and Nicaragua's export statistics are unimpressive, being nearly flat from 1980 to 2003. ¶ The non-socialist
countries being used in this study were certainly not flat since 1986. In the case of Brazil, export income has risen ten-fold, to
approximately $200 billion since that time. Argentina's, Chile's, and Colombia's export income all rose dramatically during the period.
This coincided with a generally more liberalized trade regime, along with enlightened policy decisions on the part of the region's
governments.¶ Venezuela's jump in exports has been matched by a concurrent rise in imports due to a corresponding rise in foreign
exchange levels and domestic demand. The same is true in Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua. That is sustainable as long as export income
and consumption levels rise. What countries like Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela must address is how rising import levels can be
sustained when oil export revenue falls, as has been the case in the past year. In Venezuela's case, expectation levels among the general
populace have risen in accordance with oil revenue generation. Chavez has his hands full in managing those expectations since the price
of oil was halved a year ago.¶ Although the cost of a barrel of oil rose nearly 15-fold between 1998 and 2008, Latin America's socialist
petro states generally tended not to benefit from a meaningful rise in foreign exchange reserves until well into the current decade. The
additional revenue generated for national budgets in the interim years appears to have evaporated, as the region's petro states squandered
much of the wealth that was created. Venezuela's propensity for wild reserve fluctuations persisted for the entire 20-year period being
observed - throughout Hugo Chavez's reign as President. For those Latin American countries that do not have petro-based economies,
such as Nicaragua, the chronic foreign exchange deficit has continued unabated. ¶ Brazil enjoyed a tremendous rise in its reserve asset
position since 2005, largely the result of the spike in oil prices between 2005 and 2008. Its skillful management of its fiscal resources is
in stark contrast to Venezuela. The significant new oil discoveries that have been made in the past two years imply that eventually, it
will become the dominant hydrocarbon supplier in the region, and may become the new model for social development in the region. ¶ In
spite of the avalanche of oil wealth over the past 10 years, the region's petro states have generally failed to invest adequately in local
infrastructure or keep pace with the rising levels of expectation among their populations. Chronic mismanagement of indigenous
infrastructure, poor planning, and endemic corruption have also contributed to the problem, as has frozen tariff levels for water and
power, providing a disincentive to conserve resources, and exacerbating the problem. This has exacerbated the level of frustration among
voters and raised question about whether 21st Century Socialism is ultimately any different than any other political movement in terms
of rhetoric and deliverables.¶ In Venezuela, less than a quarter of the $643 million budgeted for electricity
infrastructure projects between 2001 and 2005 was actually spent, and less than 10 percent of the
additional electricity generating capacity deemed necessary for the country's growing population 10
years ago has been realized. Chavez responded in October 2009 by implementing power and water rationing, and blaming El
Nino for the problem. The bottom line is that in spite of all his rhetoric and promises, Chavez has failed to deliver what he promised to
his people.¶ Even when times have been good, Latin America's socialist countries have still failed to deliver
meaningful political and economic reforms or effective public spending programs. From an
economic perspective, 21st Century Socialism has failed to deliver a meaningfully improved
standard of living for most of the people who have embraced Chavez's credo. The global recession has only
served to highlight many of the inherent contradictions in Chavez's 'revolution'.¶
Permutation Ev
Moderate approach key – embracing globalization while tempering its affects with
welfare liberalism solves.
Weyland et al 10 – Lozano Long Professor of Latin American Politics (Kurt, “Leftist Governments in Latin America: Successes and
Shortcomings”, Cambridge University Press 2010, p.12-13; Print.)//Beddow
The promotion of social equity has always been a core goal of the left. In fact, tightening constraints in the economic sphere have given
determined efforts to enhance social justice even greater importance as distinguishing planks of the left (Maravall 1995: 183-84). However, the
limitations exacerbated by domestic market reform and economic globalization have created further obstacles to social progress. Radical rhetoric
and efforts at redistribution raise concern among investors and thus carry risks for economic development. Also the need for a responsible
economic policy that guarantees budget balance and other macroeconomic equilibria limits the resources available for new social programs. How,
then, can Latin America’s contemporary left best seek to attain social improvments for the less well-to-do majority of the citizenry? Once again,
the moderate and contestadory lefts have pursued distinct strategies. One main reason why the moderate left has acquiesced in the
fundamental framework of the market system and has sought economic reforms inside these confines has been the hope to stimulate
lasting economic development and thereby lay a sustainable foundation for social progress – directly by boosting employment and
income growth among poorer sectors, and indirectly by increasing tax revenues. The growth in fiscal resources can fund upgrades in existing
social programs and new initiatives to increase human capital and provide some degree of income security to poorer segments. In these ways, the
moderate left has hoped to alleviate one of the major gulfs in Latin American societies, namely to allow more and more people to move from the
informal sector of precarious, often low-paying work to the formal sector of study, well-remunerated employment coupled with social benefits.
As the experience of Brazil and Chile show, the gradualist strategy has indeed produced substantial reductions in poverty (especially impressive
in Chile), important equity-enhancing extensions in the coverage of social transfers and services, and a slight diminution in inequality (especially
in Brazil). It is important to highlight that the expansion and reform of social programs has had a solid fiscal foundation, fairly efficient
administration, and the necessary level of institutionalization to make progress sustainable. Specific social measures have not just been ad-hoc
expedients (driven for instance by narrow electoral goals) but have added up to a systematic approach to overhaul the framework of social
protection, especially in Chile, where the moderate left has held government power for almost two decades and thus has had time to unfold its
programs.
Perm –the alt lacks resources and support and will be overturned; moderate
liberalism is key to solve the K.
Weyland et al 10 – Lozano Long Professor of Latin American Politics (Kurt, “Leftist Governments in Latin America: Successes and
Shortcomings”, Cambridge University Press 2010, p.13; Print.)//Beddow
As in the economic sphere, the contestatory left discards this gradualism as painfully slow, criticizes its dependence on economic growth –
including the autonomous investment decisions of business – and doubts that it can make a significant dent in social inequality. It therefore traces
a bolder strategy that combines some redistribution of assets with major new social programs. Accordingly, it advocates a reallocation of rural
property to help the long-neglected rural poor. It also seeks to benefit destitute citizens in general through the creation of generous social
programs that provide cheap access to food, income support, and a range of social services Because even contemporary radicals shy away from
the confiscatory taxation or massive expropriation of domestic business they finance these massive new initiatives with revenues produced by
resource booms and extracted from foreign investors. This funding mechanism raises serious questions about the financial sustainable of the new
social programs. Moreover, the perceived urgency that drives these novel initiatives has also hindered their rational organization, efficient
administration, immunization against corruption, and firm institutionalization. Therefore, it is doubtful whether the ambitious programs
created by the contestatory left will achieve their social goals effectively and to what extent the greatly increased resource investment will
yield actual social progress. Moreover, given their funding mechanism and rushed implementation, these programs do not seem to be well
protected against shifting economic conjunctures and political alignments. Thus, as in the economic sphere, the social achievements that the
contestatory left has attained so far seem to rest on quicksand. By contrast, the accomplishments of the moderate left stand on a more solid
foundation and therefore accumulate over time – producing substantial, lasting social progress.
It’s not all-or-nothing – privatization can be coupled with pro-poor policies
Walton 04 (Michael Walton,
Lecturer in International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School, Senior Visiting Fellow at the Centre
for Policy Research, Delhi, “Neoliberalism in Latin America: Good, Bad, or Incomplete?”, Latin American Research Review, Muse)//lm
Where does this leave an assessment of neoliberalism? If this is interpreted in its broad sense, of a wholesale retreat of the state and
reliance on markets, neoliberalism is clearly undesirable, and hopelessly incomplete as a development strategy. If the concern is
rather over the value of macroeconomic prudence and a set of market- oriented policies, then these
are an essential part of the development process in Latin America, on grounds of growth, stability,
and inequality. However, the particular mix and sequencing needs to take account of, and be
complemented by, public action in a range of areas, from social provisioning and infrastructure
expansion, to greater accountability and the social incorporation of excluded groups. Only with a
combination of market-policies, equalizing expansion of assets and influence, and political and
social institutional development will Latin American countries get onto robust paths of rapid and
equalizing social and economic advance.
One neoliberal policy doesn’t NECESSITATE a total hollowing out of the state
Edwards 10 (Sebastian Edwards, Henry Ford II Professor of International Business Economics at the Anderson Graduate School of
Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, Chief Economist for the Latin America and Caribbean Region of the World Bank,
“Left Behind: Latin America and the False Promise of Populism”, pg. 113-4)//lm
While pursuing additional rounds of reforms, Chile’s democratically¶ elected governments have
maintained an important element of pragmatism:¶ not every state-owned enterprise has been
privatized—in particular the state¶ has retained ownership of some important copper mines—and for a number¶ of years
the country has relied on market-based controls on capital inflows as¶ a way of keeping
international speculation at bay (as discussed below). One¶ could of course question the wisdom of maintaining 100 percent
state ownership¶ of large mining companies, but that is beside the point. What is clear is that Chile has followed a flexible
approach to reform and hasn’t rushed to mechanically¶ implement every single policy prescribed by
the so-called Washington¶ Consensus. Chile’s policy makers have understood that this decalogue—or¶ similar lists, for that
matter—provides general guidelines on a development¶ strategy and is not a rigid “to-do” list.
AT: Historically Terrible for LA
Strong-state economies are WORSE for Latin America
Sumner 10 (Scott, professor of economics at Bentley University, PhD in economics at University of Chicago, 7/5/10, “The Unacknowledged Success of
Neoliberalism”, Library of Economics and Liberty, http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2010/Sumnerneoliberalism.html#footnote1//SJ)
It's certainly true that neoliberal reforms have not worked miracles in Latin America. But a major part
of the reason is that despite reforms such as trade liberalization, most economies in that region
remain strikingly statist. Among Latin American nations, Chile has by far the best record of
neoliberal reforms. It ranks tenth on the Heritage Index of Economic Freedom and is the only Latin
American country, other than St. Lucia, to make the top 30. In contrast, Argentina ranks 135th. Chilean
incomes were barely half those of Argentineans in 1980, but by 2008, Chile had actually
become
slightly
richer . Argentina did some neoliberal reforms in the early 1990s and grew rapidly between 1991 and 1998. But Argentina
slipped into a highly deflationary monetary policy in the late 1990s. The resulting depression led to a backlash against neoliberalism, and a more left-wing
government moved Argentina back toward statism after 2002. One lesson of both Argentina after 1998 and the United States after 1929 is that even
a
fairly efficient free-market economy cannot easily adapt to deflationary monetary policies. Other critics
of neoliberalism point to the discouraging economic situation in the former Soviet bloc. While the performance has been disappointing, the critics often
overlook two important considerations. First, the entire Soviet bloc experienced a severe depression in the late 1980s and early 1990s, even before economic
reforms had begun in most areas. (The reforms began in 1992 in Russia.) Second, economic
growth tended to be higher in areas
that reformed most rapidly and lowest in areas that remained unreformed . Estonia did better than
Russia, which did better than the Ukraine. The one communist country that adopted no reforms (North Korea) saw an almost-complete collapse of its
economy during the 1990s.¶ The preceding examples suggest one aspect of the neoliberal revolution that is often overlooked. By the 1970s, growth was
slowing sharply almost everywhere, which led Margaret Thatcher to proclaim: "There is no alternative." Britain did not grow significantly faster
after the Thatcher reforms, but did overtake Western European countries that reformed their economies less aggressively. Interestingly,
academics were often the last to understand what was going on. In 1981, 364 British economists signed a petition warning that
Thatcher's polices would fail. But, by the 1990s, there was a sort of tacit understanding among policy-oriented economists that when
countries get into trouble, market reforms are the only real option. Indeed, the term "economic reform" became almost synonymous with
"market reforms." Although the dispute over neoliberalism is often characterized in left/right terms, that characterization is misleading.
Neoliberal reforms occurred in nearly every country during the 1980s and 1990s, regardless of whether a leftor right-wing government was in office. A few years ago, I researched the relationship between cultural attitudes and neoliberal
reforms among the developed countries. It turns out that, between 1980 and 2005, those countries with more idealistic or civic-minded cultures (as indicated
by surveys on attitudes toward the common good and by indices of corruption) tended to reform their economies much more rapidly than countries with less
civic-minded attitudes. Interestingly, Denmark has by far the most civic-minded culture in the group of 32 developed countries, and, as noted above, ended
up with the least statist economic system in the Heritage's 2008 rankings (excluding the two size-of-government categories). Greece has the least civicminded attitudes and ended up with the most statist economy in 2008. Far from being a right-wing plot to enrich corporations, the neoliberal revolution was
liberal in the truest sense of the term: a rational response by idealistic policymakers to the increasingly obvious failure of statist economic models in the
1970s and 1980s.¶ So far, I have focused on the move away from statism and haven't addressed the long-term viability of the welfare state. Here, the
evidence is mixed. It is true that governments
in rich countries tend to spend a higher share of GDP than
governments of poorer countries. On the one hand, fans of the welfare state point to the relatively high living standards in places like
Sweden and Denmark, which have extensive income transfers and low income inequality. On the other hand, both of those countries have been aggressive
neoliberal reformers, and so part of their success is despite their high tax burdens.
AT: Root Cause – Rhetorical Slippage
Their attempt to link “everything bad” to neoliberalism is futile and self-defeating –
nuance and specificity should be preferred
Ferguson 10 – Professor of Anthropology @ Stanford
(James, “The Uses of Neoliberalism,” Antipode, 41.1, 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00721.x)//BB
But the policies of neoliberal states have often diverged from neoliberal
doctrine for other reasons as
which have¶ less to do with straightforward power grabs by the rich than with the contingencies of
democratic politics. This no doubt helps to account for the otherwise paradoxical fact that a number of regimes pursuing
undoubtedly neoliberal macroeconomic policies have also seen substantial recent rises in
well—reasons
social spending
(examples include India, Brazil, and South Africa, among others). Neoliberal
policy is thus much
more complicated than a reading of neoliberal doctrine might suggest.¶ Finally, it is perhaps worth mentioning,
if only schematically, some other common uses of the term. One is as a sloppy synonym for capitalism
itself, or as a kind of shorthand for the world economy and its inequalities. In much current anthropological
usage, “neoliberalism” appears in this way, as a kind of abstract causal force that comes in from outside (much
as “the world system” was reckoned to do at an earlier theoretical moment) to decimate local livelihoods. Another, more interesting,
usage sees “neoliberalism” as the name of a broad, global cultural formation characteristic of a new era of “millennial capitalism”—a
kind of global meta-culture, characteristic of our newly de-regulated, insecure, and speculative times (eg Comaroff and Comaroff 2000).
And finally, “neoliberalism” can be indexed to a sort of “rationality” in the Foucauldian sense, linked less to
economic dogmas or class projects than to specific mechanisms of government, and recognizable modes of
creating subjects. (I will have more to say about this last usage shortly.)¶ It is, then, possible to identify many quite distinct referents for
has some obvious dangers, of course. There is plainly a danger of simple
confusion, since the meaning of the term can slip in the course of an argument being passed from author to
reader (or, indeed, even in the course of an argument made by a single author). There is also another danger, only slightly less
obvious, which is that such an all-encompassing entity can easily come to appear as a kind of
gigantic, all-powerful first cause (as categories like “Modernity” or “Capitalism” have done before it)—that
malevolent force that causes everything else to happen . This yields empty analysis (since
the same widely used term. This
to say that all our problems are caused by “neoliberalism” is really not to say much), and may also
lead to an ineffectual
politics —since all one can do with such a gigantic, malevolent “thing” as “neoliberalism”
conceived in this way is to denounce it. (And that, the evidence suggests, doesn’t seem to do much good).¶
One response would be to stop using the word altogether. This is indeed very tempting. If the word is so ambiguous, perhaps we should
just be careful to be more specific, and use less all-encompassing terms. When the term “neoliberalism” is used as imprecisely as it is in
many texts, one is tempted to pencil one’s objections in the margins as one might in reading a student essay: “What do you mean by
‘neoliberalism’ here? Do you mean the liberalization of trade policies? Then say so! Do you mean techniques of government that work
through the creation of responsibilized citizen-subjects? Then say that! The two don’t necessarily go together. Say what you mean, and
don’t presume that they are all united in some giant package called ‘neoliberalism’.” Such insistence
on specificity and precision would undoubtedly improve the analytical clarity of many of our
discussions.
Treat their root cause claims and sweeping epistemology indicts as conspiracy
theories – they FORECLOSE anti-neoliberal becomings
Gibson-Graham 8 – the pen name of Katherine Gibson, Senior Fellow of Human Geography at Australian National University, and
Julie Graham, professor of Geography at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst
(JK, “Diverse economies: performative practices for ‘other worlds’,” Progress in Human Geography, doi:10.1177/0309132508090821,
SAGE)//BB
We are arguing that the diverse economy ¶ framing opens up opportunities for elaborating a radically heterogeneous economy ¶ and
theorizing economic dynamics that ¶ foster and strengthen different economies. It ¶ also provides a representation of an existing ¶
economic world waiting to be selectively ¶ (re)performed. But a problem remains – it ¶ seems that we need to become new academic
subjects to be able to perform it. At ¶ present we are trained to be discerning, ¶ detached and critical so that we can
penetrate the veil of common understanding and ¶ expose the root
causes and bottom lines that ¶ govern the phenomenal
world. This
academic stance means that most theorizing is ¶ tinged with skepticism and
negativity , not a ¶ particularly nurturing environment for hopeful, inchoate experiments.¶ Bruno Latour
expresses a similar disquiet ¶ when he likens
the practice of critical theory to ¶ the thinking of popular conspiracy
theorists:¶ In both cases … it is the same appeal to powerful agents hidden in the dark acting always ¶
consistently, continuously, relentlessly. Of ¶ course, we in the academy like to use more ¶ elevated
causes – society, discourse, knowledge-slash-power, fields of forces, empires, ¶ capitalism – while conspiracists
like to portray ¶ a miserable bunch of greedy people with ¶ dark intents, but I find something troublingly ¶
similar in the structure of explanation, in the ¶ fi rst movement of disbelief and, then, in the¶
wheeling of causal explanations coming out of ¶ the deep dark below. (Latour, 2004: 229)¶ In more
psychoanalytic language, Eve ¶ Sedgwick identifies this as the paranoid ¶ motive in social theorizing. She tells the ¶ story of Freud, who
observed a distressing ¶ affi nity between his own theorizing and the ¶ thinking of his paranoid patients. Paranoia ¶ marshals
every site and event into the same ¶ fearful order, with the goal of minimizing surprise (Sedgwick, 2003). Everything comes ¶
to mean the same thing, usually something ¶ large and threatening (like neoliberalism, or ¶ globalization,
or capitalism, or empire).¶ The paranoid stance yields a particular ¶ kind of theory, ‘strong’ theory with an ¶ embracing reach and a
reductive field of ¶ meaning (Sedgwick, 2003). This means that ¶ experimental forays into building new economies
are likely to be dismissed as capitalism in another guise or as always already ¶ coopted ;
they are often judged as inadequate ¶ before they are explored in all their complexity and incoherence.
While such a reaction may be valid as the appropriate critical ¶ response to new information, it affirms an ¶ ultimately
essentialist, usually structural, ¶ vision of what is and reinforces what is perceived as dominant.¶ If our
goal as thinkers is the proliferation of ¶ different economies, we may need to adopt ¶ a different orientation
toward theory . But ¶ the question becomes how do we disinvest ¶ in our paranoid practices of critique and ¶ mastery and
undertake thinking that can ¶ energize and support ‘other economies’? ¶ Here we have turned to what Nietzsche ¶ called self-artistry, and
Foucault called selfcultivation, addressing them to our own ¶ thinking. The co-implicated processes of ¶ changing ourselves/changing our
thinking/¶ changing the world are what we identify as ¶ an ethical practice. If politics involves taking ¶ transformative decisions in an
undecideable ¶ terrain,5¶ ethics is the continual exercising of ¶ a choice to be/act/or think in certain ways ¶ (Varela, 1992).¶ How might
those of us interested in diverse ¶ economies choose to think and theorize in a ¶ way that makes us a condition of possibility ¶ of new
economic becomings, rather than a ¶ condition of their impossibility? Once again ¶ Eve Sedgwick shows us the way. What if ¶ we were to
accept that the goal of theory is ¶ not to extend knowledge by confi rming what ¶ we already know, that the world is a place ¶ of
domination and oppression? What if we ¶ asked theory instead to help us see openings, ¶ to provide a space of freedom and possibility? ¶
As a means of getting theory to yield something new, Sedgwick suggests reducing its ¶ reach, localizing its purview, practicing a ¶
‘weak’ form of theory.6¶ The practice of weak ¶ theorizing involves refusing to extend explanation too widely or deeply, refusing to ¶
know too much. Weak theory could not ¶ know that social experiments are doomed ¶ to fail or destined to reinforce dominance; it ¶ could
not tell us that the world economy will ¶ never be transformed by the disorganized ¶ proliferation of local projects.¶ Strong theory has
produced our powerlessness by positing unfolding logics and ¶ structures that limit politics. Weak theory ¶ could
de-exoticize power and help us accept ¶ it as our pervasive, uneven milieu. We could ¶ begin to explore the many mundane forms of ¶
power. A differentiated landscape of force, ¶ constraint, energy, and freedom would open ¶ up (Allen, 2003) and we could open ourselves
¶ to the positive energies that are suddenly ¶ available.¶ Weak theory could be undertaken with ¶ a reparative motive that welcomes
surprise, ¶ tolerates coexistence, and cares for the new, ¶ providing a welcoming environment for the ¶ objects of our thought. It could
foster a ‘love ¶ of the world’, as Hannah Arendt suggests,7¶ rather than masterful knowing or moralistic ¶ detachment. It could draw on
the pleasures ¶ of friendliness, trust, and companionable ¶ connection. There could be a greater scope ¶ for invention and playfulness,
enchantment ¶ and exuberance (Bennett, 2001).8¶ The diverse economies diagram in Figure ¶ 1 provides an example of weak theory. It ¶
offers little more than description, just the ¶ proliferation of categories and concepts. ¶ As a listing of heterogeneous economic ¶ practices,
it contains minimal critical content; ¶ it is simply a technology that reconstitutes ¶ the ground upon which we can perform a ¶ different
economy, which is how we have ¶ used it in our action research.¶ The choice to create weak theory about ¶ diverse economies is a
political/ethical ¶ decision that infl uences what kind of worlds ¶ we can imagine and create, ones in which ¶ we enact and construct rather
than resist (or ¶ succumb to) economic realities. Many other ¶ social scientists understand their research ¶ choices as ordained by the
world itself, by ¶ the stark realities that impose themselves ¶ on consciousness and demand investigation. ¶ In economic geography, for
example, the ¶ dominant topic of research over the past ¶ decade or more has been neoliberalism and ¶ neoliberal capitalist globalization.
This has ¶ been represented as needing study for the ¶ apparently self-evident reason that ‘it is the ¶ most important process of our age,
transforming geographies worldwide’. Some ¶ leading proponents of neoliberalism studies ¶ have begun to express concern about where
¶ this line of research is headed (Larner, 2003; ¶ Castree, 2006a), but few see themselves as ¶ making an ethical choice to participate in
constituting neoliberalism. Law and Urry point ¶ to the ultimately destructive ‘innocence’ of ¶ this position:¶ to the extent social science
conceals its performativity from itself it is pretending to an ¶ innocence that it cannot have. And to the ¶ extent that it enacts methods that
look for or ¶ assume certain structural stabilities, it enacts ¶ those stabilities while interfering with other ¶ realities … (Law and Urry,
2004: 404, our ¶ emphasis)¶ Taking Law and Urry’s point to heart, we ¶ can identify a problem with strong theories of ¶
neoliberal globalization – their performative ¶ effect is to interfere with, to make noncredible (Santos, 2004), to deny
legitimacy to ¶ the diverse economies that are already here, ¶ and to close down
¶ waiting to be performatively enacted.
the
open futures that are
AT: Military Industrial Complex
Claims of a pervasive MIC are false
Crock 3 – Specialist @ Washington Post
(Stan, “An All-powerful U.S. Military-industrial Complex Is Simply An Enduring Myth,” Orlando Sentinel, Lexis)//BB
While hardly anyone was watching, the American military-industrial complex died.¶ Sure, defense spending is soaring,
and GIs are camping out in globe-girdling operations. But most of the surge in spending is aimed at operations and maintenance -- not at
purchasing planes, ships and tanks. America's arms merchants are in a long-term downward spiral.¶ Aerospacedefense employment is at its lowest level in 50 years. The number of major weapons programs has shriveled to a handful. Though
the nuclear threat from North Korea and Iran may be rising, weapons procurement budgets, adjusting for inflation, are half
their Reagan-era highs.¶ And the collapse of the Soviet Union, technological advances and what passes for fiscal
responsibility in Washington conspire against an industry revival.¶ The industry's swoon can't be reconciled with the
conventional wisdom that the military-industrial complex -- the Iron Triangle of Pentagon brass, defense
contractors and key congressional committees -- can pursue its interests impervious to external forces.¶ To be sure,
Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics won't disappear. But the notion of an all-powerful military-industrial
complex is a vestige of the Cold War.¶ As defense concerns consolidated in the 1990s, the aerospace-defense industry
work force shriveled from 1.3 million in 1989 to 689,000 at the end of 2002 -- roughly the number employed in 1953, according to the
Aerospace Industries Association.¶ The industry has handed pink slips to 10 percent of its workers since the
Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and more shrinkage is likely. Between 2002 and 2008, nearly half of the industry's work force -- what
remains of the Apollo program generation -- will be eligible for retirement. That could mean the loss of unparalleled skill and experience
-- and potentially America's technological edge.¶ The budget picture is similarly bleak. When Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld unveiled a $38 billion jump in the 2002 Pentagon budget in mid-2001, it looked like salvation, but none of that increase went
to buy big weapons. Procurement, which had shrunk 30 percent since the end of the Cold War, dropped another $1 billion. ¶ In 2003,
spending on new weaponry managed to bounce back a bit, rising by about $9 billion to $70 billion. A chunk of that, however, merely
reflects more realistic costs for existing programs. The 2004 budget calls for just a 4 percent rise in weapons procurement.¶ To cope with
a growing cash crunch for the Defense Department, a broad swath of programs is under fire. The Pentagon has killed the
Army's Crusader howitzer and a Navy sea-based missile-defense system that Star Warriors had high hopes for.¶ Cuts in high-profile
programs such as the Air Force's F-22 Raptor and the Army's Stryker armored vehicle are likely. ¶ Slashing these programs might be
wise, as the projected numbers of these weapons are excessive, but it's a sign of the dollars dilemma that the decisions are driven
more by budgetary constraints than strategic requirements. Most startling, beginning with the first Bush
administration, more than 100 big programs have stopped production, says Gordon Adams, a George Washington
University professor who oversaw national security accounts at the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton administration.¶
Now, the Air Force has just one major weapon system on the drawing board: the Joint Strike Fighter. The Army also has only one: the
Future Combat System.¶ Meanwhile, advances in technology suggest that future U.S. military spending can afford to take a nosedive.
When a $25,000 kit can turn a dumb bomb into a smart bomb, generals ask how many targets one sortie can hit, not how many sorties it
takes to hit one target. With precision munitions, we don't need as many $80 million fighters or $2 billion bombers to achieve a given
goal.¶ All of this suggests that the
conventional wisdom about the clout of the defense industry is no
longer valid , if it ever was. Adams now argues (in an unpublished paper for the Ford Foundation) that defense policy
is explained by a complex combination of factors: policy and strategy (an assessment of the threats the nation
faces); bureaucratic imperatives (the military services care more about their assignments than buying weapons), macro
politics (as Republicans and Democrats vie over who is more patriotic); and micro politics (as lawmakers try to serve their
constituents' needs).¶ The formulation of national security strategy, thus, is far more complicated than
the conventional view that defense contractors simply call the shots.
Military industrial complex is key to hegemony - we’ve put checks on all of the bad
parts of it but failure to facilitate it leads to wars
--also makes a public key argument that may be useful against Ks
--Shaw style argument about adversaries
Dunlap 11 – Professor of Law @ Duke
(Charles Jr., Daedalus, MIT Press Journals)//BB
What do all the developments of the¶ past half-century mean after the ½ftieth¶ anniversary of Eisenhower’s exhortation?¶ Ledbetter
claims that the warning¶ “is as urgent today as ever.” He points not¶ only to the “mounting long-term costs”¶ of defense but also–
somewhat disconnectedly–¶ to the alleged “use of martial¶ power” for the detention of terrorism¶ suspects at Guantánamo Bay and
wiretaps¶ of Americans.45 While Eisenhower¶ might have been disturbed by such events,¶ Ledbetter seems to conflate these
contemporary¶ issues with the gravamen of¶ Eisenhower’s concern: that is, the emergence¶ of a near-conspiratorial alignment¶ of military
leaders and their analogues in¶ the arms industry.¶ That combination does not exist. Indeed,¶ one might say that Eisenhower’s¶ warning
was heard and heeded–with¶ unintended consequences. The fading of¶ the American military-industrial complex¶
impacts U.S. military capability; the¶ effect on America’s Air Force is but one¶ illustration. Whatever influence the Air¶
Force may have enjoyed in Eisenhower’s¶ day is long gone . Consider Air Force Lieutenant¶ General David Deptula’s
dismal¶ assessment from Fall 2010: “[W]e have a¶ geriatric bomber force,” Deptula concludes,¶ and “a geriatric ½ghter force. We¶ have a
geriatric Air Force, quite frankly.”46¶ Aircraft age is not the only issue; numbers¶ and sophistication are also a concern.¶ For example,
Defense News surmised¶ that America’s current bomber fleet constitutes¶ a “puny force against any serious¶ adversary.”47 Even so,
historian Michael¶ Auslin of the American Enterprise Institute¶ says that today’s budget restrictions¶ are hitting airpower especially hard;
consequently,¶ he says, “[S]ome of the stunning¶ joint creations of the Air Force and¶ America’s defense
industrial base . . . will¶ likely never be repeated.” If budgetary¶ trends are not reversed , he warns, the
Air¶ Force’s “future will look even grimmer¶ than it does now.”48¶ The deterioration of America’s defense¶ infrastructure has
captured the attention¶ of Congress. During hearings on the defense¶ industrial base in Fall 2010, Congress¶ acknowledged “the security
challenges¶ posed by a shrinking defense¶ industrial base and domestic supply¶ chain.”49 Furthermore, Congress recognized¶ that U.S.
arms makers face the¶ “proliferation of foreign-made and counterfeit¶ parts, outdated technology, and a¶ depleted manufacturing
“an alert and knowledgeable ¶ citizenry ”
will compel the necessary¶ steps to ensure the appropriate level of¶ military-industrial muscle is
met and¶ maintained .¶ Meanwhile, we must not ignore the¶ fact that other nations–including potential¶
adversaries–are strengthening their¶ industrial base. The Pentagon’s 2010 report¶ reveals that China’s defense
workforce.”50¶ But there are still too few tangible indications¶ that
industries¶ have undergone a “broad-based¶ transformation” since the 1990s. In fact,¶ “[a]ugmented by direct acquisition of¶ foreign
weapons and technology, these¶ reforms have enabled China to develop¶ and produce advanced weapon systems¶ that incorporate mid1990s technology¶ in many areas, and some systems–particularly¶ ballistic missiles–that rival¶ any in the world today.”51 Ominously,¶
China’s industry is developing air capabilities¶ to a degree that suggests China’s¶ intention to challenge “U.S. air power in¶ the
region.”52¶ In other developments that show the¶ internationalization of the arms industry,¶ Russia and India have signed a deal to¶ build
hundreds of new “½fth generation”¶ warplanes designed to best America’s¶ most advanced ½ghters.53 In light of such¶ reports, many
experts are concerned that¶ any additional cuts in U.S. defense spending¶ “will dangerously erode the technological¶ edge that America’s
armed forces¶ depend upon, and deserve.”54 As Ilan¶ Berman puts it, “Stagnation [in the defense¶ industry] threatens
U.S. arms superiority.”¶ 55 Some analysts go further. According¶ to political commentator Zbigniew¶ Mazurak, “[T]he U.S.
is no longer¶ unrivalled in terms of conventional¶ weapons. Conventional threats are real¶ and
growing.”56¶ The problem, however, may run deeper.¶ Some analysts observe an “anti-modern¶ warfare prejudice” within the U.S.
military¶ itself.57 Perhaps an outgrowth of the¶ manpower-intensive counterinsurgency¶ strategy in vogue today, this trend runs¶ counter
to the “high-technology” emphasis¶ that strategist Colin Gray calls “the¶ American way in warfare.” Indeed, Gray¶ contends,
American society “cannot possibly¶ prepare for, or attempt to fight, its¶ wars in any other than a
technology-led¶ manner.”58 But the ability to maintain¶ such an approach depends on the existence¶
of a vigorous , innovative , and¶ profitable military-industrial enterprise.¶ Eisenhower’s dictum will
always serve¶ as a useful bellwether for the disquieting¶ prospect of an unchecked confederation¶ of military and industrial power. Still,
in¶ twenty-first-century America, the importance¶ of context is becoming ever more¶ evident. During Eisenhower’s presidency,¶ a
robust industrial base working effectively¶ (if not always ef½ciently) with its¶ military counterparts
addressed the imperatives¶ of the Cold War confrontation¶ with the Soviet Union. That the perils of¶
“misplaced power” were largely avoided¶ is a critically important lesson. That is,¶ inevitability need not be part of the lexicon¶ of this
issue.¶ Were he alive today, Eisenhower undoubtedly¶ would have recognized that¶ dismissing the military-industrial
complex¶ as the inveterate enemy of democracy¶ is wrong and dangerous . Thanks largely¶ to
Eisenhower’s eloquent expression¶ of caution, the
United States has shown¶ that it can effectively limit the
reach of¶ the military-industrial establishment.¶ Now the question may be whether controlling¶
influences–“sought or unsought”¶ –have taken us too far.¶ Writing in The Wall Street Journal in late¶ 2010, novelist
Mark Helprin warns:¶ [History] tells us that, entirely independent¶ of economic considerations, although¶ not a dime should be
appropriated to the¶ military if it is not necessary, not a dime¶ should be withheld if it is. The proof of¶ this, so often and so tragically
forgotten, is¶ that the costs of providing an undauntable¶ defense, whatever they may be, pale before¶
blood and defeat.59¶ Even the most ardent advocate of Eisenhower’s¶ farewell address would be¶ wise to ponder that sentiment.
Their authors overstate the influence of the MIC
Gholz 2k – PhD @ MIT, Professor of Political Science @ UT-Austin
(Eugene, “The Curtiss-Wright Corporation and Cold War–Era Defense Procurement,” Journal of Cold War Studies, 2.1, EBSCOHost)//BB
Scholars and journalists have long asserted that the U.S. government¶ does not permit big defense firms to go bankrupt.
Conventional wisdom has it¶ that the powerful military-industrial complex (MIC) takes care of its own¶ through
the politics of defense procurement. It is true that very few of the major¶ companies that contracted with the U.S. military have ever
gone out of business,¶ even in times of major cuts in the defense budget. Nevertheless, those who seek¶ to prove the importance
of the MIC focus only on the companies that have continued to receive military contracts . On this
basis they conclude that all firms¶ receive follow-on help from the government, and they ignore the cases of¶ major defense
suppliers that cease to be prime contractors for the U.S. military.¶ The most important of these cases is the Curtiss-Wright
Corporation.¶ Curtiss-Wright was once the second-largest manufacturer in the United States,¶ but it is now just a small subcontractor
with turnover of only 206 million dollars for the twelve months before September 1997.¶ 1 Originally an integrated¶ producer of
airframes, engines, and propellers, Curtiss-Wright now manufactures actuators for the wings of Boeing commercial transports and
various¶ fighter aircraft. At one time, Curtiss-Wright was a corporate name known to¶ nearly every American for its role as a leading
producer in World War II; now,¶ even historians ignore it. Nonetheless, the history of the fall of Curtiss-Wright¶ teaches valuable lessons
about Cold War defense procurement politics.¶ In essence, if the MIC functioned as a permanent, government-
underwritten club, Curtiss-Wright should have been able to use its size and influence to arrange for
follow-on contracts, high revenues, and comfortable¶ profits. The firm collapsed in the 1950s, at a time of high defense
procurement budgets, when the MIC was well situated to prevent the demise of a ¶ company such as Curtiss-Wright. Given the
companyÕs size and ability to produce a variety of goods, Curtiss-Wright should be an ÒeasyÓ test case for MIC¶
theory. In that sense, the firm’s history is a hoop test for the military-industrial complex schoolÑa test that the theory turns out
to flunk .¶ 2 ¶ Three divisions of Curtiss-WrightÑairframes, engines, and propellersÑeach collapsed¶ independently. Hence, the
single firm offers three somewhat overlapping¶ case studies to evaluate business-government relations in the defense sector.¶ This article
discusses the history of Curtiss-Wright in the context of four¶ competing theories of defense procurement: the MIC, a technology-based¶
framework, a bureaucratic-strategic framework, and a market-based framework. The cases offer a strongÑalmost critical Ñ test of the
MIC theory, a¶ strong test of the technology-based and market-based theories, and a plausibility probe of the bureaucratic-strategic
framework. The bureaucratic-strategic framework best predicts the downfall of Curtiss-Wright. Senior¶ members of Curtiss-Wright
management themselves believed in the power¶ and stability of the MIC, which led them to ignore the companyÕs worsening¶
relationships with its customers in the military services. Because the service¶ bureaucracies had institutional memories and because the
high level of strategic threat during the Cold War made the services influential in procurement¶ decisions, Curtiss-Wright’s lack of
responsiveness to customers Õ demands¶ ended the company’s role as a prime contractor and nearly proved fatal to¶ the firm.
Regression proves
Gholz 2k – PhD @ MIT, Professor of Political Science @ UT-Austin
(Eugene, “The Curtiss-Wright Corporation and Cold War–Era Defense Procurement,” Journal of Cold War Studies, 2.1)//BB
The other congressional version of the military-industrial complex¶ theory shares the assumption that
bringing defense dollars to a district is an¶ important reelection concern for a legislator. However,
instead of focusing¶ on defense committees, this theory suggests that all representatives vote on¶ defense bills
based on district employment concerns. Prime defense contractors distribute subcontracts on their projects to nearly all
congressional districts, giving the representatives an interest in supporting the programs. The¶ defense procurement budget,
in theory, becomes an unstoppable political¶ juggernaut.¶ 15¶ Again, however, regression analysis of
congressional voting¶ patterns
does not reveal a correlation between in-district defense spending¶ and a
propensity to vote for defense procurement programs or budgets. As¶ Kenneth Mayer points out, the spending
pattern for most defense programs¶ is concentrated in only a few districts, even taking into account the efforts to¶ spread subcontracts. In
most districts, subcontracts are insignificant compared to the size of the local economy, and it is
therefore not surprising that¶ they have little influence on a representative’s vote.¶ 16
AT: Ethics
Anti-globalization is worse for the poor
Mishkin 6 – PhD in Economics, Professor of Economics @ Columbia
(Frederic, “The Next Great Globalization: How Disadvantaged Nations Can Harness Their Financial Systems to Get Rich,” Ch 1)//BB
Anti-globalizers have it completely backwards: globalization is not the enemy. Particularly
disturbing to me are elements of the left that are against globalization. They say they care about
poor people, and I believe they do. They are correct in saying that the globalization process has often been perverted by rich elites
and that simplistic solutions like privatization and the establishment of free markets often do not work. They are also right that
globalization will not cure all the ills of poor nations. By itself globalization, in both finance and trade, is not enough to ensure economic
be against globalization is most assuredly to be against poor people in the
rest of the world, and this is a morally indefensible position. Less-developed countries cannot get rich
unless they globalize, and, in particular, they must globalize their financial sectors. Financial globalization is not a choice: it needs
to be the focus of the next great globalization.¶ Those in rich countries who protest against free trade in the name
of helping poor people also misunderstand what it takes to promote economic development. As I have
already argued and will argue later in the book, opening up rich-country markets to goods and services from less-developed
countries is far more important than financial aid in alleviating world poverty, and such openness also
development. But to
promotes financial stability
in emerging market countries. Those
who are against opening up our
markets—although they often don’t realize it—are also against reducing poverty abroad and even at home. True,
closing off our markets in rich countries may help some workers in the short run (although in the long run
it will make the average worker worse off because it will lower productivity growth). But this help comes at the expense
of the far poorer worker in the less-developed world. Protesting in advanced countries against
free trade is the result of ignorance or narrowly defined self-interest .¶ This book is meant to
challenge those who oppose globalization to rethink their objections. As Kofi Annan, the secretary-general of the United Nations, has
put it, “The main losers in today’s very unequal world are not those who are too much exposed to
globalization. They are those who have been left out.” 60 Rather than opposing or limiting
globalization, we in the rich countries and those in the less-developed countries must, as a moral
imperative , work together to make globalization work for the general good of people all over the
world.
AT: Corporations Evil
Corporate enlightenment proves capitalism is self-correcting
-consumer demand shapes corporate response
-NGOs are forcing companies to form a socially positive role
-Katrina proves – corporations can serve as first-responders in catastrophe
Hollender and Breen 10 – * Founder of the American Sustainable Business Council, a progressive alternative to the Chamber of
Commerce, **Editorial Director of the Fast Company
(Jeffrey Hollender, Bill Breen, “The Responsibility Revolution: How the Next Generation of Businesses will Win,” pg. 5-6)//BB
Why is this different from the drumbeat for corporate accountability that started at the beginning of the decade, after the
Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco debacles? • Companies, in the wake of such scandals, must now work harder to protect their
reputations. • Global brands, which are battling to crack markets all over the world, are now expected to perform a
social role. Customers, thanks to the Internet, now have more power than ever before—the power to
scrutinize companies’ activities and to organize boycotts at the slightest sign of misbehavior . • The
body politic, seared by Ponzi schemes and the meltdown in financial markets, is punishing ‘‘bad companies’’ and
demanding that all companies ‘‘do good. ’’ • Employees now expect companies to adopt a purpose that’s bigger than
profit—a key factor in the competition for A+ talent. • Nongovernmental organizations ( NGOs) are growing exponentially
and are relentlessly pushing companies to contribute to society. • Stakeholders are pressuring
institutional investors to adopt strong principles of governance and a responsible investing strategy. People across
the political spectrum are concluding that despite the U.S.’s government bailouts of Wall Street and the U.S. car industry, business is
still fast enough and nimble enough to innovate solutions to some of the world’s thorniest problems. Two proof points among thousands:
Unilever’s pledge to certify as sustainable all of its Lipton tea bags sold globally, which promises to lift one million African tea growers
out of poverty.11 Or recall the U.S. federal government’s feeble response to the devastation caused by Hurricane
Katrina. Wal-Mart, with its world- class logistical operation—along with the help of countless individual volunteers and nonprofits—proved to be the real first responder . More than anything, climate change is forcing business
and society itself to rethink everything, from transportation to energy sources to geo-politics to cities. When the oil baron
T. Boone Pickens attacked the United States’ petroleum-based economy as a risk to national security, it was clear that
minds
have changed . Formerly fringe notions that business should be environmentally and socially
sustainable have moved to the mainstream —and the business landscape has been
fundamentally transformed .
Capitalism creates the conditions for corporate reflexivity – no risk of runaway
consumerism
Cudd 10 – Dean of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy @ The University of Kansas
(Anne Cudd, “Capitalism for and Against: A Feminist Debate,” pg. 124)//BB
Finally, capitalism promotes innovation, and as a path to
technical innovation, science. Science offers
a means for critical analysis of beliefs , and hence a way to uncover and debunk false
consciousness .15 In the quest for a creative, innovative workforce, ideal firms seek out highly
educated individuals and individuals from widely varying backgrounds. If a society is to support
such innovation, it will need to support the education of individuals from all walks of life in order to
maximize the potential for finding the uniquely creative individuals who will invent new technologies and new forms of life. But a
necessary byproduct of such broadly distributed education will be the creation of critical thinking
individuals who question the fetishes of the current generation. In this way, capitalism creates the
conditions for trenchant critiques of capitalist fetishes.
Industry is self-correcting – consumer-induced responsibility effectively limit
plundering
Hollender and Breen 10 – * Founder of the American Sustainable Business Council, a progressive alternative to the Chamber of
Commerce, **Editorial Director of the Fast Company
(Jeffrey Hollender, Bill Breen, “The Responsibility Revolution: How the Next Generation of Businesses will Win,” pg. xix)//BB
The responsibility revolution is about more than cutting carbon, reducing energy use, monitoring
factories, or donating to charities. It’s about reimagining companies from within: innovating new ways of working,
instilling a new logic of competing, identifying new possibilities for leading, and redefining the very purpose of business. Consequently,
we’ve drawn on the best thinking not only from the corporate responsibility arena, but also from the realms of strategy, leadership, and
management. Others, to whom we are indebted, have developed some of this book’s core principles. (We will acknowledge them as we
present their ideas.) Our intent is to show how an emerging breed of business revolutionaries is turning theory
into practice and building organizations that grow revenue by contributing to the greater
good . This is a book about change, but it seeks to help companies change on the inside—change their priorities, the way they
organize, how they compete, and the way they interact with the world. We fully concede that many companies, perhaps even most
companies, won’t willingly alter their behavior. But they will change nonetheless, and it won’t be because they’ve suddenly
seen the light. It will be because
massive numbers of consumers, a spreading swarm of competitors,
values-driven employees, and even that laggard indicator, the federal government, makes them change.
Change is under way . The responsibility revolution spreads. Perhaps you’ve seen the insurrection
begin to roil your industry, and you’re determined to get out in front of it. If so, welcome to the cause.
Corporations are revolutionizing towards socially conscious innovation – solves
their impact
Hollender and Breen 10 – * Founder of the American Sustainable Business Council, a progressive alternative to the Chamber of
Commerce, **Editorial Director of the Fast Company
(Jeffrey Hollender, Bill Breen, “The Responsibility Revolution: How the Next Generation of Businesses will Win,” pg. 2-3)//BB
To the conventional-minded, putting values before profit is an upside-down way to build strategy—and
an all-downside way to spur sales. It sounds extreme, even anarchic. Perhaps Triodos Bank’s resilience and results might give skeptics
cause to reset their think- ing. For this Dutch bank signals that ‘‘corporate responsibility’’3 (CR) may well be undergoing a period of
unprecedented ‘‘punctuated equilibrium’’—the controversial theory promulgated by the renowned paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould.4
He posited that evolution proceeds mostly slowly, but not always steadily—that it is sometimes inter- rupted by sudden, rapid
transitions, in which species decline and are supplanted by entirely new forms. Triodos Bank’s consistently positive performance, which
grows out of its mission-first approach to investing, is but one more prominent piece of evidence that corporate responsibility is entering
a period of dramatic, accelerated change in its own evolution. What new shapes CR is about to take on, we are just now beginning to
understand. But we know this much—corporate responsibility is undergoing a change that’s as revolutionary as
it is evolutionary. Consider the evidence: An
emerging breed of values-driven companies—some new, some well
established—is building a better form of capitalism . A new generation of values-driven leaders
has kicked over the alpha capitalists’ argument that ‘‘the only business of business is business.’ ’
Old-guard notions about ‘‘culpability’’ and ‘‘accountability’’ are being subsumed by the vanguard’s requirement to act authentically and
transparently. Bloodless buzzwords like ‘‘corporate responsibility’’ and ‘‘eco- efficiency’’ are being supplanted by
a new vocabulary—‘‘corporate
consciousness,’’ ‘‘resource intelligence,’’ ‘‘social innovation’’ — that aspires
bellwether organizations are moving beyond the
moralist’s dictum to be less polluting, less wasteful, ‘‘less bad.’’ They are striving to meet the innovator’s
imposing imperative to be all nourishing, all replenishing, ‘‘all good.’’ This moment of
punctuated, accelerated change affects all of us in business. It will determine how tomorrow’s companies organize, strategize, and
compete. It will reveal new leaders and expose the phonies and purveyors of greenwash. It will redefine
business’s obligations to society and reconfigure the sources of growth and competitive advantage. And it will
to capture our real-world experiences. Above all, tomorrow’s
require us not only to anticipate the end of corporate responsibility as we’ve known it, but also to imagine the whole new models that
will replace it.
Corporations can’t commit mass injustice – they are held at bay by consumer choice
and competition*
Lingle 2k – Scholar @ CIS
(Christopher, “Economic insecurity: Are we the enemy?,” Ideas on Liberty, 50.6)//BB
In some eyes the global capital market is a pernicious threat to global stability. Each new round of populist
rhetoric implies that we are faced with a fundamental peril. Radical or revolutionary change is promoted to rid us of the malevolence of
the market and its driving force, competition. Arguments
that blame markets for our woes fail to see that we
are the targets . This is because markets are merely a summation of the results of actions arising from the myriad of decisions
Some
commentators describe markets as if they were the outcome of a conspiracy concocted on Wall Street.
However, it is more accurate to describe markets as the outcome of choices made on Main Street.
Certainly the choices of mutual fund managers and bond dealers are more prominent and better chronicled. Yet these self
important movers and shakers cannot match the power of the faceless masses . Power in competitive
markets is always limited ultimately by the refusal of consumers to pay higher prices for what they
perceive as lower quality products or when preferences shift without warning. It is useful to understand what the market is
made by each of us every day. A full understanding of market processes indicates that if there is an enemy, it is us.
and what it is not. Unfortunately it is difficult to make sense of the market in the context of an ongoing political debate that demonizes it.
Despite having weathered withering criticisms and surviving real-world experiments with communism, the market economy remains
under assault. Flimsy Critiques Many critiques of the market are deemed credible even though beginning
university students could debunk most anti-market hype after a few weeks in an introductory economics course. It
is understandable that non-economists like Robert Reich or Pat Buchanan can muddy the intellectual waters.
This confusion is worsened by the apostasy of reputed economists with the prominence of Lester Thurow or John Kenneth Galbraith,
who repeat ill-formed utterances about the workings of the market. Similarly, pronouncements by renowned financiers like George
Soros or Felix Rohatyn or Robert Rubin reveal an expertise based on economic opportunism mixed up with their own political
orientation. It is little wonder the general public becomes confused when stock market mavens are ignorant of how their own success
depends on the forces behind all market activities. If the market reflects human choice, then competition is at its heart. Competition is
the logical outcome of choices that drive economic behavior. Contempt and condemnation for market outcomes
reflect an elitist view of the choices of the unwashed and ill-tutored. Those who accept such nonsense have taken the notion of "fallen
man" a bit too far while being equipped with too little knowledge. It might be said that the market, like democracy, is the worst economic system available except for all the others. In the first instance, economics is best
understood to be a study of exchange arising out of choices guided by the life purposes of individuals. Second, it is these choices made in the face of competition that constitute the market. Finally, exchanges generate
mutual advantage for trading partners and leads to a "positive-sum game" where all trading partners gain. Too often, anti-market forces portray international trade as a "zero-sum game," where gains to one country come
at the expense of some others. Although prices and markets can be temporarily distorted by government decree, they can never be eliminated. Markets operate whenever and wherever human beings act out their lives
and whenever the setting is more complicated than Robinson Crusoe's. Several aspects of economic life are inescapable; as in other aspects of life, exceptions tend to prove the rule. These can be combined in a single
Self serving actions taken by individuals in a
competitive market setting provide benefits that spill over to the entire community. It is also true that
simple sentence that appears as banal to professional economists as it is considered evil by others.
there are spillovers of costs to other groups, but the fact that individuals have continued to rely on markets suggests that the spillover benefits dominate. Markets require a set of
certain supporting institutions such as property rights and extensive individual freedoms protected by an independent judiciary under a rule of law. Under these arrangements, free
people can pursue their life purposes within the context of the market. In many ways, markets serve as a civilizing agent. Development of Trust Once accustomed to the interactions
of the market, people tend to develop a greater regard for and sense of trust in strangers, which itself represents a form of investment in personal and corporate reputation.
Transactions based on trust are more inclusive than purely personal relationships. Markets inspire the development of a contract culture where the spirit of compromise becomes part
of human interaction. In such a setting, equals are treated as equals just as unequals must also be treated as equals before the law. Governments or large corporations should not
markets are a
necessary underpinning for democracy's success rather than a sufficient one. It is through the individualist-based
receive special treatment in the courts over individual citizens, and domestic interests should not override those of foreign claimants. In this sense,
institutions associated with and arising from the market that people can exercise true self ownership to pursue their own chosen goals.
Condemning markets ignores the human content that lies behind them. Experiments with communism show that
legislating against self interest can have disastrous results. Instead, it is better to provide
institutions that reward entrepreneurial actions so the overall community can benefit through the
wealth and opportunities created by the market.
Corporate exploitation is impossible by definition – competition restricts cartels
Mathews 96 - Professor of Economics @ Brunswick
(Don, Does Big Mean Bad? The Economic Power of Corporations, The Freeman, Proquest)//BB
The rivalry between firms can be extraordinary. The Wall Street Journal recently ran a story about how big oil
corporations—that’s right, oil
corporations—each spend millions of dollars testing the products of their
competitors to determine whether the claims made by competitors in their advertising are accurate.
When Chevron discovered that Texaco was making a false statement about its CleanSystem3 gasoline, Chevron made it public, and
Texaco withdrew its $40 million ad campaign. The point is not that large companies are pure, innocent babes in the economic woods.
They are not. But the economic power of big corporations cannot be accurately gauged without
considering the generally fierce competition between firms. Businesses compete with each other for
consumer dollars and skilled workers. A corporation cannot force customers to buy its product; when it
attempts to “exploit” consumers by bringing a shoddy product to the market at a high price, it soon
loses customers to a competitor who offers a better deal. Nor can a company force people to
work for it. When it attempts to “exploit” workers by paying them little, the workers leave for
employers who pay workers more. Competition between corporations (and entrepreneurs)
constrains the power firms have over consumers and workers by punishing businesses that exploit
consumers and workers. Some critics of capitalism believe that being “big” makes a corporation
impervious to market competition. But alongside the trail of American economic history you will
find plenty of fallen corporate giants , emaciated or wasted entirely by market competition.
Where are American Motors, Continental Bank, Eastern Airlines, and Kaiser Steel today? They don’t exist. They were among the largest
companies in the country not long ago. In his A History of American Business, C. Joseph Pusateri, presents the lists of the 25 largest
U.S. corporations in 1917, 1957, and 1986. If being “big” shielded firms from market competition, the three lists would be about the
same. The 25 big corporations of 1917 could charge high prices for mediocre products without losing customers and revenues, pay poor
wages without losing workers and increasing costs, ignore the marketing strategies of their smaller competitors and the innovations of
entrepreneurs, and grow and remain at the top of the economic pecking order year after year. But the lists are not the same. Of the 25
corporations in the 1917 list, 13 made it onto the 1957 list. Only seven—if we treat U.S. Steel and USX as the same firm—made it onto
the 1986 list. Only 12 firms on the 1957 list made it to the 1986 list. Competition
between corporations exists and is
effective . At the top of the 1917 list is U.S. Steel. When formed through the merger of eight large steel firms in 1901, U.S. Steel
became the world’s largest private business: it had a total capitalization of $1.4 billion and accounted for 65.7 percent of all steel sales in
the United States. By 1917, U.S. Steel had assets valued at over $2.4 billion, more than four times the assets of Standard Oil of New
Jersey (Exxon), the next largest corporation. But U.S. Steel’s market share was down to 45 percent. Forty years later, U.S. Steel was
only the third largest company and its market share was less than 30 percent. Today U.S. Steel is no longer U.S. Steel but USX, and has
a market share in steel of less than ten percent, receives more revenue from petroleum than steel, and is number 121 in the list of the
largest U.S. corporations, ranked by assets. The moral of the U.S. Steel story applies to all corporations: no firm is
impervious to market competition. Those who worry about the economic power of big corporations
would do well to think about how it was those corporations got big. GM and the other members of
the Fortune 500 did not achieve their status by exploiting consumers and workers . In
1994, GM earned $155 billion in revenues and employed 692,800 workers. A corporation does not collect $155 billion in revenues by
persistently ripping off consumers and does not retain 692,800 workers by abusing them. How powerful are big
corporations? Not nearly so powerful as the competition that keeps them in check .
AT: Root Cause
Neoliberalism doesn’t taint the positive benefits of the plan
--also answers “neolib collapses environment”
McKendry 8 – PhD, Professor of environmental politics and political economy @ Colorado College
(“Competing for Green: Neoliberalism and the rise of sustainable cities,” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the ISA's 49th ANNUAL
CONVENTION, All Academic)//BB
One of the weaknesses in much of the scholarship on neoliberalism is to see neoliberalism as not only
ubiquitous, but also monolithic. In critiquing neoliberalism’s very real and problematic implications for social justice, distribution of
resources and wealth, democracy, etc. many
scholars implicitly reject all policies tainted with
neoliberalism’s dirty fingers . Unfortunately, this can lead to an unsatisfactory analysis of
politics and policies that, though they are operating within the constraints of a neoliberal
framework, may have important benefits to people or the planet. ¶ In this essay I have attempted to offer a
more nuanced understanding of the importance of neoliberalism, especially in its relationship to environmental policy in the United
States. In particular, I have argued that the changes in environmental policy and discourse that have
accompanied neoliberalism have encouraged the rise and rapid proliferation of urban sustainability
initiatives. These policies are important and have the potential to transform the relationship of the city to the natural world and
reduce the ecological footprint of major urban areas. However, because these policies have been formulated within
the context of neoliberalism, they are constrained by limitations of the market-oriented, urban entrepreneurial policy alternatives that are
acceptable within the neoliberal global economy. As such the questions of social justice and equity that neoliberalism fails to answer
remain equally problematic within green urban entrepreneurialism.
Neolib doesn’t explain all war
Roberts and Sparke 3 (Susan, Professor of Geography at University of Kentucky, and Matthew, Professor of Geography at University of
Washington, “Neoliberal Geopolitics,” Antipode, 35(5), p. 886-897//SJ)
Barnett’s work is our main example in this paper of a more widespread form of neoliberal geopolitics implicated in the war-making.
This geopolitical world vision, we argue, is closely connected to neoliberal idealism about the virtues of free
markets, openness, and global economic integration. Yet, linked as it was to an extreme form of American unilateralism, we further want
to highlight how the neoliberal geopolitics of the war planners illustrated the contradictory dependency of multilateral neoliberal
deregulation on enforced re-regulation and, in particular, on the deadly and far from multilateral re-regulation represented by the
“regime change” that has now been enforced on Iraq. Such re-regulation underlines the intellectual importance of studying how
neoliberal marketization dynamics are hybridized and supplemented by various extra-economic forces.2 Rather than making
neoliberalism into a totalizing economic master narrative, we therefore suggest that it is vital to examine its interarticulation with certain dangerous supplements, including, not least of all, the violence of American military force. We are not
arguing that the war is completely explainable in terms of neoliberalism, nor that neoliberalism is
reducible to American imperialism. Instead, the point is to explore how a certain globalist and economistic view of the
world, one associated with neoliberalism, did service in legitimating the war while simultaneously finessing America’s all too obvious
departure from the “end of the nation-state” storyline. [Continues] As we said at the start, we do not want to claim too much for
neoliberalism. It cannot explain everything, least of all the diverse brutalities of what happened in
Iraq. Moreover, in connecting neoliberal norms to the vagaries of geopolitics, we risk corrupting the
analytical purchase of neoliberalism on more clearly socioeconomic developments. By the same token, we also risk
obscuring the emergence of certain nonmilitarist geoeconomic visions of global and local space that have gone hand in hand with
neoliberal globalization (see Sparke 1998, 2002; Sparke and Lawson 2003). But insofar as the specific vision of neoliberal geopolitics
brought many neoliberals to support the war (including, perhaps, Britain’s Tony Blair as well as Americans such as Friedman), insofar
as it helped thereby also to facilitate the planning and overarching coordination of the violence, and insofar as the war showed how the
extension of neoliberal practices on a global scale has come to depend on violent interventions by the US, it seems vital to reflect on the
inter-articulations
No root cause to war – deterrence and discourse of threats key to solve.
Sowell 7 – economist, social theorist, political philosopher, Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover
Institution of Stanford University, leading representative of the Chicago School of Economics, former faculty member of UCLA, Urban Institute,
Brandeis University, Cornell University, Bachelors from Harvard, Masters from Columbia, PhD in economics from University of Chicago
(Thomas, “A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles”, 6/5/7, page 159-160)//Beddow
Given the horrors of war, and the frequent outcome in which there are no real winners, those with the unconstrained vision tend to explain the
existence and recurrence of this man-made catastrophe in terms of either misunderstandings, in an intellectual sense, or of hostile or paranoid
emotions raised to such a pitch as to override rationality. In short, war results from the failure of understanding, whether caused by lack of
forethought, lack of communication, or emotions overriding judgment. Steps for a peace-seeking nation to take to reduce the probability of war
therefore include (1) more influence for the intellectually or morally more advanced portions of the population, (2) better communications
between potential enemies, (3) a muting of militant rhetoric, (4) a restraint on armament production or military alliances, either of which might
produce escalating counter-measures, (5) a de-emphasis of nationalism or patriotism, and (6) negotiating outstanding differences with potential
adversaries as a means of reducing possible causes of war. Those with the constrained vision see war in entirely different terms. According to this
vision, wars are a perfectly rational activity from the standpoint of those who anticipate gain to themselves, their class, or their nation,
whether or not these anticipations are mistaken, as all human calculations may be. That their calculations disregard the agonies of others is no
surprise to those with the constrained vision of human nature. From this perspective, the steps for a peace-seeking nation to take to reduce the
probability of war would be the direct opposite of those proposed by people with the alternative vision: (1) raising the cost of war to potential
aggressors by military preparedness and military alliances, (2) arousal of the public to awareness of dangers, in times of threat, (3)
promotion of patriotism and willingness to fight, as the cost of deterring attack, (4) relying on your adversaries’ awareness of your military
power more so than on verbal communication, (5) negotiating only within the context of deterrent strength and avoiding concession to
blackmail that would encourage further blackmail, and (6) relying more on the good sense and fortitude of the public at large (reflecting
culturally validated experience) than on moralists and intellectuals, more readily swayed by words and fashions. Like other evils, war was seen
by those with the constrained vision as originating in human nature and as being constrained by institutions.
AT: US Influence Link
The US isn’t the devil and this link is a conspiracy theory
Edwards 10 – Professor of International Economics @ UCLA
(Sebastian, “Left Behind: Latin America and the False Promise of Populism,” p. 46)//BB
In the end, however, what really matters is that Latin Americans' griev-ances
with their neighbors to the north
the fact that the complaints about
neglect and lack of interest may have some validity does not mean that Latin America's
have existed for decades and that they are at least partially if not fully justified. But
underdevelopment has been caused by the North ; nor does it mean that being "so close to the United
States" is a curse. The idea that Latin Americas long-term decline is the result of a vast
capitalistic Anglo-Saxon conspiracy from the North simply doesn't hold water . The
causes of the regions mediocre economic performance should be looked for inside Latin
America .
AT: Technology Link
Tech is inevitable – can’t turn it off, and not solely related to capitalism
Andersen 13
(Ross, “We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction,” Interview w/ Nick Bostrom,
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/were-underestimating-the-risk-of-human-extinction/253821/)//BB
One possible strategic response to human-created risks is the slowing or halting of our
technological evolution, but you have been a critic of that view, arguing that the permanent failure to develop advanced
technology would itself constitute an existential risk. Why is that?¶ Bostrom: Well, again I think the definition of an existential risk goes
beyond just extinction, in that it also includes the permanent destruction of our potential for desirable future development. Our
permanent failure
to develop the sort of technologies that would fundamentally improve the quality of
human life would count as an existential catastrophe . I think there are vastly better ways of being than we
humans can currently reach and experience. We have fundamental biological limitations, which limit the kinds of values that we can
instantiate in our life---our lifespans are limited, our cognitive abilities are limited, our emotional constitution is such that even under
very good conditions we might not be completely happy. And even at the more mundane level, the world today contains a lot of
avoidable misery and suffering and poverty and disease, and I think the world could be a lot better, both in the transhuman way, but also
in this more economic way. The failure to ever realize those much better modes of being would count as an existential risk if it were
permanent.¶ Another reason I haven't emphasized or advocated the retardation of technological progress as a means of mitigating
existential risk is that it's a very hard lever to pull. There
are so many strong forces pushing for scientific and
technological progress in so many different domains---there are economic pressures, there is curiosity, there are
all kinds of institutions and individuals that are invested in technology , so shutting it
down is a very hard thing to do.
All technology is not the same – new innovations repair previous harms
John H. Matthews 12, and Frederick Boltz, Center for Conservation and Government, Conservation International, June 2012, “The
Shifting Boundaries of Sustainability Science: Are We Doomed Yet?,” PLOS Biology,
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001344
Humans have long caused irreparable harm to ecosystems, driven species to extinction, and have in turn
endured major shifts in biogeochemical cycling. We agree that such incidents are avoidable and unacceptable and that the magnitude of
current trends must not be dismissed. Humans have also developed ingenious and novel ways of making
resource use far more efficient or exploiting new types of resources. Obvious developments here include the
invention of agriculture and the domestication of wild plant and animal species, of course, but humans have also been
innovative in energy development (wood, wind, coal, petroleum, hydropower, biofuels, geothermal, biogen, nuclear, solar,
and wave power), the development of synthetic chemical fertilizers in the 19th century, and the discovery of
modern antibiotics in the 20th century. Other innovations have been organizational, such as the development of
cities in the Levant and east and south Asia, the birth of modern experimental science, and the transition from family-tribal-moeity
structures to multiple scales of governance (including corporate, national, international, and global government structures and
institutions). ¶ Some responses
to economic and environmental change defy the longstanding
predictions of overpopulation concerns , such as the widespread trend towards declining
birthrates as living standards increase [32], though the relationship between per capita energy consumption and population
growth is complex [33]. While Burger and colleagues point to increasing energy consumption over the past few centuries, they
disregard important shifts in the sources of energy in progressive economies [1]; the expansion of
low-carbon energy sources in China, Brazil, the European Union, and other regions in recent
decades
marks a critical transition , and a shift from coal-fired sources of power to hydropower
or wind mark very significant transformations, with important implications for ecological
footprints. For example, over 98% of Norway's electricity is derived from hydropower [34], about 20% of Brazil's transport fuels
consumption is derived from renewable biofuels [35], while China has installed to date about 61 GW of windpower, or roughly three
times the generation potential of the Three Gorges Dam [36]. The
development of a global environmental
movement is also notable in this context, as signified by both the 1992 Rio Earth Summit (attended by over 100 heads
of state and 172 governments) as well as its planned 2012 successor conference, the Rio+20 Summit, in addition to important milestones
achieved under the UN biodiversity and climate conventions (i.e., the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity [UNCBD] and
the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNFCCC]). ¶ While these and other innovations in
organization, efficiency, and technology have had unintended side effects, they also resulted
in major transitions in human
survivorship, resource extraction efficiency, and social and cultural organization. They were also
largely unanticipated or very difficult to predict for most observers prior to their invention. Taken
together, humans have demonstrated great creativity in how we use technological, social, and cultural
“tools” to solve resource limitations .¶ Not Doomed (Yet) Top¶ Our “adjustments” to the view of sustainability
science presented by Brown and colleagues [1] are not meant to obscure or downplay absolute declines in
resources such as economically valuable metals and agriculturally productive land, our heedless approach to anticipated tipping
points in greenhouse gas accumulation, and ecosystem transformation and species extinction. The availability of natural resources is less
of a problem than absolute limits in the Earth's ability to absorb the different outputs of economic activities, while maintaining
conditions necessary for human productivity, much less the survival of humans and other species. Anthropogenic climate change
is perhaps the most prominent example of these new scarcities and emerging “limits to growth.” Indeed,
we attribute great merit to these cautionary appeals and to the evidence of Earth system thresholds. We argue for positive
responses in behavior, technological progress, and economic realignments commensurate with
the challenge of fulfilling human needs while maintaining an Earth system suitable for the
long-term survival of humans and other species. ¶ The authors ask, Can the Earth support even
current levels of human resource use and waste production, let alone provide for projected population growth
and economic development? They answer their question with little doubt: “There is increasing evidence that modern humans
have already exceeded global limits on population and socioeconomic development, because essential resources are being consumed at
unsustainable rates” [1]. We agree that our present consumptive trajectory risks surpassing perceived
planetary boundaries in the safe operating space for humanity (c.f. [11]). We argue that these risks
merit a paradigm shift, a global transformation—and that this paradigm shift is underway. We
believe that the transition from relatively static approaches to sustainability to flexible green
economies embedded in dynamic, variable ecosystems will prove to be a critical intellectual
shift for humans this century. ¶ There are reasons for cautious optimism . It is no accident that the
modern synthesis of payments for ecosystem services crystallized in the developing world in Costa
Rica when the scarcity of ecosystem goods and services from forest conversion was recognized as a social and economic threat [37].
Revolutionary approaches to water management such as dynamic environmental flows have evolved to address both climate variability
and absolute shifts in Tanzania's precipitation regime (http://www.iucn.org/about/union/secretar
iat/offices/esaro/what_we_do/water_and_wetlands/prbmp_esaro/). A global policy and economic transformation attributing value to
standing forest has emerged with the development of “REDD+” incentives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation,
particularly in tropical forests (c.f. [38]). Many developing countries understand that Western models of
development are inappropriate if not impossible to achieve. We believe that these and other positive trends are
both accelerating and permeating local, national, and global economies quickly and permanently.
AT: Corruption Impact
Globalization REVERSES crony-ism
Mishkin 6 – PhD in Economics, Professor of Economics @ Columbia
(Frederic, “The Next Great Globalization: How Disadvantaged Nations Can Harness Their Financial Systems to Get Rich,” Ch 1)//BB
It is also important to recognize that the impediments to developing good institutions reside in the less-developed countries themselves.
Developing good institutions is hard: it takes time and effort for a country to plan, establish, experiment with, evolve, and
adapt its institutions to its historical, cultural, and political circumstances. It takes a long time for any nation to achieve strong property
rights and an effective financial system.¶ It is even harder to develop good institutions in less-developed
countries because of the political environment. Rich elites and special interests often have
considerable political clout; they have much to lose from institutional development that encourages an
efficient financial system and promotes competition. Globalization, however, can be an important force in
promoting the development of better institutions: it weakens the profits and power of the
rich elites and special interests who oppose institutional development, and it can even encourage them to
support institutional reforms to restore their profits. Globalization can therefore help generate the political
will for institutional reform. We have seen this happen in emerging market economies like Chile,
China, India, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan that have experienced rapid growth.
Economic liberalization is the key factor in fighting corruption – best statistical
analysis proves.
Saha and Gounder 11 – School of Accounting Finance and Economics, Faculty of Business and Law at Edith Cowan
University/Department of Economics and Finance Massey University (Shrabani and Rukmani, “Does Higher Levels of Democra cy and
Economic Freedom Reduce Corruption: Some Cross-Nation al and Regional Evidence”, 6/9/11; <
http://www.uwa.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/1655400/Saha.pdf>)//Beddow
This paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of why corruption is low in the absence of democratic freedom in some countries or high
even after achieving a high level of democracy in others. The results suggest that democracy and economic freedom have some opposite effects at
the low level of political and economic liberalization. In other words, in the absence of economic freedom democracy increases corruption,
whereas, if economic freedom already exists in a country democratisation helps in combating corruption. However, both democracy and
economic freedom have a substantial and significant impact on controlling corruption at the higher levels of political and democratic freedom.
The results remain robust under various alternative panel estimations. Overall, the results show that economic freedom accelerates the
process of combating corruption in the presence of democracy. Hence, it is concluded that an anticorruption policy of purely encouraging
democratic freedoms, without encouraging economic freedoms, may be ineffective. The results are vital given the findings, which emphasise the
importance of economic freedom and thus it is consistent as seen in the case of Singapore which enjoys not only the highest levels of economic
freedom but also a low level of corruption even in a low level democratic environment.
Absent democracy, economic liberalism is still the most important factor in fighting
corruption.
Saha and Gounder 11 – School of Accounting Finance and Economics, Faculty of Business and Law at Edith Cowan
University/Department of Economics and Finance Massey University (Shrabani and Rukmani, “Does Higher Levels of Democra cy and
Economic Freedom Reduce Corruption: Some Cross-Nation al and Regional Evidence”, 6/9/11; <
http://www.uwa.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/1655400/Saha.pdf>)//Beddow
This paper examines the joint effect of economic and political liberalization in combating corruption. It attempts to construct a simple demandsupply model of competition and corruption. The level of corruption is determined jointly with an interaction of the level of political and
economic competition. On the one hand, corrupt agents who are in charge of licensing and regulation in the industrial sector restrict the number
of firms for their own interest. On the other hand, corruption flourishes in the absence of efficient monitoring and a more democratic government,
and the citizens’ involvement in governance leads to more careful monitoring of agents which in turn can reduce the level of rent-seeking
behavior of the bureaucrats. The empirical section tests whet her the combined effects of political and economic liberalization reduce corruption
and it s subsequent implications on the economy. The political and economic liberalizations ar e captured by democracy and economic freedom
indices. The results find that democracy and economic freedom have some opposite effects on corruption at the low level of political and
economic liberalization however, at the higher level both economic and political freedom reduce corruption substantially. In other words, in the
absence of economic freedom greater democracy increases corruption, whereas, if economic freedom already exists in a country then
democratization helps in combating corruption. The result suggests that economic freedom is crucial in combating corruption.
AT: Income Inequality
Neolib didn’t increase income inequality – complex analysis proves
Walton 04 (Michael Walton,
Lecturer in International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School, Senior Visiting Fellow at the Centre
for Policy Research, Delhi, “Neoliberalism in Latin America: Good, Bad, or Incomplete?”, Latin American Research Review, Muse)//lm
The region's high and persistent income inequality is of direct concern to citizens (Latinobarómetro 2002), increases poverty, and is
probably a source of lower aggregate development (for a review, see De Ferranti et al. 2004). The most striking fact is the
resilience of high inequality, through many different policy regimes over the past few decades. As
table 2 shows, the 1970s saw some tendency for mild reductions in inequality, and the 1980s a more marked tendency for increased
inequality in the context of macroeconomic difficulties. The 1990s has seen a more mixed picture: more countries experienced
increases than declines in inequality, but there is no overall pattern. Most striking has been
Argentina's very large rise before and during the crisis; though Mexico actually experienced a
slight decline in inequality in its crisis, and Brazil a modest but significant distributional
improvement over the decade.¶ Did market-oriented reforms have an impact? In terms
of the big picture it is hard to find dramatic influences.
This was the conclusion of an extensive study
by Morley (2001) for United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in the 1990s. As figure 3
there is no simple bivariate relationship between changes in inequality and
aggregate indices of the level or change in reform in the past decade. Attempts to separate out the effects of
illustrates, for the 1990s
particular reform dimensions reveal a more complex picture. Table 3 summarizes results from three studies that essentially use the
differential timing of reform changes to try and identify apparent effects on inequality. These suggest that trade liberalization, financial
liberalization, capital account opening, and tax reform were associated with increases in either wage or household income inequality;
different results were found for privatization in the two studies that included this variable.
AT: Poverty
Neoliberalism doesn’t lead to poverty – LA specific
Edwards 10 (Sebastian Edwards, an international economist, professor, speaker, and consultant, he is currently the Henry Ford II
Professor of International Business Economics at the UCLA Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles
(UCLA), Left Behind: Latin America and the False Promise of Populism, pp175-177)
A popular belief among antiglobalization activists is that the opening of international¶ trade
throughout Latin America in the 1990s increased poverty¶ and inequality. This idea has been echoed in the
media and has become a¶ fundamental component of neopopulist rhetoric. However, it is more a myth¶ than a fact. Indeed,
economic research has failed to find hard and robust evidence¶ relating trade openness to the systematic worsening of living standards
for the poor as a group. This, of course, does not mean that all the poor gain¶ from globalization or that trade liberalization in every
country has been associated¶ with improved social conditions. Existing evidence indicates that, in¶ general, some
among the poor win with trade liberalization and some lose;¶ the evidence also indicates that under
certain conditions the vast majority of¶ people may benefit from increased trade openness.¶ A detailed
review of the evidence on the relationship between globalization ¶ and social conditions is well beyond the scope of this book. My
interpretation¶ of the data, stemming from my own research on the subject, as well as ¶ from reading scores of technical academic papers,
articles, and books, may be¶ summarized by the following eight points.¶ First, a greater degree of trade openness has a
positive effect on economic¶ growth. Some authors have argued that this effect is strong and lasts for a¶ substantial period
of time, while others have noted that this acceleration in ¶ growth is a temporary phenomenon. Be that as it may, the important
finding¶ is that, at least for some years, countries with a greater degree of trade openness¶ will tend
to grow at a faster rate than they would if they had retreated¶ from global markets. In that regard,
most scholars who have looked at Chile¶ over the last thirty years have argued that the opening of
the economy in the¶ mid-1970s is one of the most important factors behind the country’s stellar¶
performance, rapid economic growth, reduced poverty incidence, and improved¶ social conditions.¶
Second, individuals who work in the export sector tend to experience increases¶ in wages and
income aft er trade liberalization reform. On the other¶ hand, those employed in industries formerly protected by import
barriers¶ tend to experience income reductions once trade is liberalized. Thus, facilitating¶ the reallocation of workers
from formerly protected importing industries¶ to exporting industries is important for countries to
reap the full benefits of¶ increased globalization. Easier reallocation of workers requires, in turn,
flexible¶ labor markets, where there are no major restrictions to hiring or dismissing¶ workers. This,
however, is an area where the vast majority of the Latin ¶ American countries have made very little progress. According to the Doing¶
Business data set, the Latin American countries are ranked 122nd on average¶ in the category of ease of employing workers. In contrast,
on average the Asian¶ Tigers are ranked 78th, and the advanced commodity exporter countries referred ¶ to in chapter 4 are ranked 13th
on average. Third, income inequality and poverty tend to decline in regions, states, and¶ provinces that
receive significant volumes of foreign direct investment. In turn, ¶ higher investment by foreign firms
is generally a consequence of greater trade¶ openness. This result comes out very clearly in research
on social conditions¶ in Mexico’s thirty-one states. Economists Fernando Borraz and Jose Ernesto¶
Lopez-Cordova found that poverty and inequality declined significantly in¶ those states that have
received a larger volume of foreign direct investment. Fourth, trade reform and export expansion
have given low-income women¶ greater opportunities to find formal, stable, and relatively wellremunerated¶ jobs. This is a particularly important finding for Latin America, since in¶ many
countries—including Chile—the percentage of women who participate¶ actively in the formal labor
market is significantly lower than in countries¶ in other parts of the world that have a comparable
level of economic¶ development. Fifth, by forcing companies to become more efficient, trade
liberalization¶ induces firms to adopt sophisticated production techniques. As a consequence, ¶
wages of skilled workers who can operate complex machinery tend¶ to increase relative to those of
unskilled workers. This in turn tends to increase¶ inequality. This suggests that trade liberalization
reforms need to be accompanied¶ by improvements in the educational system, particularly in training¶
programs for displaced workers. However, this is more easily said than done. ¶ As discussed below, the quality of education in
Latin America is extremely low¶ and has not improved in the last few decades.
AT: Giroux
Giroux is over-simplistic, ahistorical and politically useless
Franks 7 – Glasgow political philosophy lecturer
(Benjamin, “Who Are You to tell me to Question Authority,” 29, http://www.variant.org.uk/29texts/Franks29.html)//BB
Potentially stronger criticisms of Giroux’s text lie precisely in his underlying hypothesis concerning
the
totalising power of neo-conservatism. Giroux shares with the members of the Frankfurt School, who he approvingly cites, a
pessimistic and almost wholly determined account of future social developments, in which the
prognosis for alternatives to dominant powers looks bleak. Giroux, like Adorno and Marcuse, fears that we
are approaching a one-dimensional future composed of intellectually stunted individuals, who are
manipulated by the cultural industries, endorse militarised social hierarchies and engage in
relationships conceived of only in terms of market-values. This grim dystopia is subject to continual monitoring by an
evermore technologically-equipped police and legitimised by an increasingly subservient, partisan and trivial media. However, whilst Giroux’s
account of growing authoritarianism is convincingly expressed, it is potentially disempowering , as it would suggest
little space for opposition . It is not simply wishful thinking to suggest that the existing power
structures are neither as complete nor as impervious as Giroux’s account would suggest . Whilst the old
media of radio, film and television are increasingly dominated by a few giant corporations (p.46), new technologies have opened
access to dissident voices and created new forms of communication and organisation. Whilst the military
are extending their reach into greater areas of social and political life, and intervening in greater force throughout the globe, resistance to
military discipline is also arising, with fewer willing to join the army in both the US and UK.7 Bush’s
long term military objectives look increasingly unfeasible as Peter Schoomaker, the former US Chief of Staff, told Congress on December 15, 2006 that
even the existing deployment policy is looking increasingly ‘untenable’.8 The ‘overstretch’ of military resources is matched by an economy incapable of
fulfilling its primary neo-conservative goals of low taxation, sound national finances and extensive military interventions. Whilst this is not to suggest that
the US is on the point of financial implosion, the transition to a fully proto-fascist state is unlikely to be seamless or certain. Giroux’s preferred form of
resistance is radical education. The photographs from Abu Ghraib were iconic not just in their encapsulation of proto-fascism, but in their public pedagogic
role. Their prominence highlighted the many different sites of interpretation, as Giroux rightly stresses, there is no single way to interpret a photograph,
however potent the depiction. The ability to interpret an image requires an ongoing process by a critical citizenry capable of identifying the methods by
which a picture’s meanings are constructed (p. 135). Giroux’s critical pedagogy overtly borrows from Adorno’s essay ‘Education After Auschwitz’, and
proposes “modes of education that produce critical, engaging and free minds” (p. 141). But herein lies one of the flaws with the text: Giroux
never
spells out what sorts of existing institutions and social practices are practical models of this critical
pedagogy. Thus, he does not indicate what methods he finds appropriate in resisting the protofascist onslaught nor how merely interpreting images critically would fundamentally contest
hierarchical power-relationships.
AT: Chile Example
Their Chile example is wrong – it’s proof neoliberalism works
Goldberg 6 – syndicated American conservative columnist and author, former employee of the American Enterprise Institute, former
member of the Board of Trustees at Groucher College (Jonah, “Iraq needs a Pinochet”, 12/14/06; < http://www.latimes.com/news/la-oegoldberg14dec14,0,5445101.column>)//Beddow
I THINK ALL intelligent, patriotic and informed people can agree: It would be great if the U.S. could find an Iraqi Augusto Pinochet. In fact, an
Iraqi Pinochet would be even better than an Iraqi Castro. Both propositions strike me as so self-evident as to require no explanation. But as I have
discovered in recent days, many otherwise rational people can't think straight when the names Fidel Castro and Augusto Pinochet come up. Let's
put aside, at least for a moment, the question of which man was (or is) "worse." Suffice it to say, both have more blood on their hands than a
decent conscience should be able to bear. Still, if all you want to do is keep score, then Castro almost surely has many more bodies on his rap
sheet. The Cuba Archive estimates that Castro is responsible for the deaths of at least 9,240 people, though the real number could be many times
that, particularly if you include the estimate of nearly 77,000 men, women and children who have died trying to flee the "socialist paradise." But
there are measures besides body counts. Castro took Cuba, once among the most prosperous nations in Latin America and destined for First
World status, and rendered it poorer than nearby Jamaica and heading Haiti-ward. The island is a prison, and trying to leave can be a capital
crime. Civil liberties are a sham, freedom of speech and freedom of the press are nonexistent, and dissidents are routinely thrown in prison. Civil
society has become deeply politicized and, hence, corrupted. In the 1990s, Castro dabbled with liberalizing the economy after welfare from the
Soviet Union dried up, but he soon realized that free markets bring other freedoms, so he cast the Cuban people back into poverty rather than risk
any threat to his rule. Now Castro, rudely taking a long time to die, is transferring all power to his brother, Raul. Not exactly an open primary. On
the plus side, we are told, Cuba has very impressive literacy, longevity and infant mortality rates — and lavish hotels for hard-currency-carrying
Westerners. Now consider Chile. Gen. Pinochet seized a country coming apart at the seams. He too clamped down on civil liberties and the press.
He too dispatched souls. Chile's official commission investigating his dictatorship found that Pinochet had 3,197 bodies in his column; 87% of
them died in the two-week mini-civil war that attended his coup. Many more were tortured or forced to flee the country. But on the plus side,
Pinochet's abuses helped create a civil society. Once the initial bloodshed subsided, Chile was no prison. Pinochet built up democratic institutions
and infrastructure. And by implementing free-market reforms, he lifted the Chilean people out of poverty. In 1988, he held a referendum and
stepped down when the people voted him out. Yes, he feathered his nest from the treasury and took measures to protect himself from his enemies.
His list of sins — both venal and moral — is long. But today Chile is a thriving, healthy democracy. Its economy is the envy of Latin
America, and its literacy and infant mortality rates are impressive. I ask you: Which model do you think the average Iraqi would prefer?
Which model, if implemented, would result in future generations calling Iraq a success? An Iraqi Pinochet would provide order and put the
country on the path toward liberalism, democracy and the rule of law. (If only Ahmad Chalabi had been such a man.) Now, you might say:
"This is unfair. This is a choice between two bad options." OK, true enough. But that's all we face in Iraq: bad options. When presented with such
a predicament, the wise man chooses the more moral, or less immoral, path. The conservative defense of Pinochet was that he was the least-bad
option; better the path of Pinochet than the path toward Castroism, which is where Chile was heading before the general seized power. Better, that
is, for the United States and for Chileans. I bring all this up because in the wake of Pinochet's death (and Jeane Kirkpatrick's), the old debate over
conservative indulgence of Pinochet has elicited shrieking from many on the left claiming that any toleration of Pinochet was inherently immoral
— their own tolerance of Castro notwithstanding. But these days, there's a newfound love for precisely this sort of realpolitik. Consider Jonathan
Chait, who recently floated a Swiftian proposal that we put Saddam Hussein back in power in Iraq because, given his track record of maintaining
stability and recognizing how terrible things could get in Iraq, Hussein might actually represent the least-bad option. Even discounting his
sarcasm, this was morally myopic. But it seems to me, if you can contemplate reinstalling a Hussein, you'd count yourself lucky to have a
Pinochet.
Market-oriented policies work in Latin America – Chile proves
Edwards 10 (Sebastian Edwards, Henry Ford II Professor of International Business Economics at the Anderson Graduate School of
Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, Chief Economist for the Latin America and Caribbean Region of the World Bank,
“Left Behind: Latin America and the False Promise of Populism”, pg. 106)//lm
The administrations of presidents Ricardo Lagos and Michelle Bachelet ¶ furthered modernization and market orientation not because of
a deep conservative¶ ideological bias, nor because they were bewitched by Milton Friedman¶ and his followers. Market
orientation has been a hallmark of Chile’s return¶ to democratic rule because it has worked;
economic growth has been¶ impressive—indeed the highest in Latin America—inflation has
virtually¶ disappeared, poverty has been massively reduced, and a solid middle class¶ has emerged.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that everything in Chile is perfect; ¶ it does mean, however, that Chile’s policies since the mid1970s have transformed¶ a backward country plagued by runaway inflation, stagnation, and¶
widespread poverty into a modern nation solidly moving toward prosperity.¶ It is tempting to argue
that the new democratic governments of the 1990s¶ maintained market-oriented policies because
they had no alternative. According¶ to this view, before the return to democracy the military put in place¶ institutional reforms
that made policy changes very difficult. These included ¶ the creation of an independent central bank whose board members serve for¶
ten-year periods, a senate with appointed senators (after stepping down, Pinochet ¶ served briefly in the senate), and budget rules that
made it difficult¶ for members of congress to add programs that were not fully funded. The¶ problem with this view,
however, is that over time these political and institutional¶ constraints ceased to be binding. For some
years now the board of the¶ central bank has been dominated by economists who support the Concertación ¶ coalition, appointed senators
have been eliminated, and by controlling¶ the presidency, the government has been able to pass, every year, the¶ budget it has deemed
appropriate. And yet, under these circumstances, the¶ left -of-center, democratically
elected governments of Chile
decided to¶ expand the market-oriented policies that many associate with the Chicago¶ Boys and the Washington
Consensus. These policies have not been furthered¶ because the center-left had no alternative but because, as I have
noted, they¶ have succeeded.
have
Neolib solves the economy, competitiveness, and poverty
Edwards 10 (Sebastian Edwards, Henry Ford II Professor of International Business Economics at the Anderson Graduate School of
Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, Chief Economist for the Latin America and Caribbean Region of the World Bank,
“Left Behind: Latin America and the False Promise of Populism”, pg. 112-3)//lm
By 1990 there was little doubt that Chile’s new approach to economic¶ policy—at a time when market
orientation was new in Latin America—had¶ produced an export boom, an acceleration in
productivity gains, rapid overall¶ growth, and a reduction in poverty. That year, after seventeen years of¶
dictatorship, Chile returned to democratic rule. The majority of the senior¶ members of the new democratic government had
been severe critics of the¶ military regime and its pro–free market economic policies. In spite of this¶ the new government of President
Patricio Aylwin decided to deepen both¶ the economic and institutional reforms pu
¶ 1990 and 2007
import duties were reduced further, to an average of 3 percent;¶ a new round of privatization was implemented;
free trade agreements¶ were signed with the United States, the European Union, and other
advanced¶ countries; modern procompetition regulatory bodies were created; a “fiscal¶ rule” that
assured public-sector solvency over the long run was implemented;¶ and far-reaching judiciary
reform was put in place. In addition, an ambitious¶ infrastructure program based on concessions, under which the
private sector¶ built roads and ports and charged users’ fees, was put into action. This private¶ sector–led infrastructure program
resulted in a significant improvement¶ in exports’ international competitiveness and helped the
country sustain a rapid rate of growth. In a 1990 Newsweek interview, newly appointed finance¶ minister Alejandro
Foxley was asked whether the new administration would ¶ introduce changes to the military’s economic policy. His answer was
straightforward:¶ “[We will] maintain an open economy fully integrated into world¶ markets, dynamic
exports’ growth, and a private sector fully committed to the¶ task of economic development.
Neoliberal reforms improve social conditions and reduce poverty
Edwards 10 (Sebastian Edwards, Henry Ford II Professor of International Business Economics at the Anderson Graduate School of
Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, Chief Economist for the Latin America and Caribbean Region of the World Bank,
“Left Behind: Latin America and the False Promise of Populism”, pg. 114)//lm
The overall results of Chile’s reforms are impressive: for more than two decades¶ Chile’s exports grew at
double¶ markedly during this period. The number of people
living below the¶ World Bank’s poverty line declined from 24 percent of the population in 1989¶ to
5 percent in 2003. There was also some progress in reducing income inequality,¶ although the pace at which
this took place was rather slow: the Gini¶ coefficient—which, as explained in chapter 2, measures inequality on a scale¶ from 0 to 1—
declined from 0.59 in 1989 to 0.55 in 2003. The safety net was¶ widened, and transfers to the poor and the
elderly increased substantially.¶ In the second half of the past decade efforts were made to provide preschool¶
education to the poor and to increase the number of university scholarships¶ to low-income
students.
Market-oriented policies key
Edwards 10 (Sebastian Edwards, Henry Ford II Professor of International Business Economics at the Anderson Graduate School of
Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, Chief Economist for the Latin America and Caribbean Region of the World Bank,
“Left Behind: Latin America and the False Promise of Populism”, pg. 115)//lm
The fact that the Chilean reforms were pragmatic has been misinterpreted¶ by some authors, who
have attempted to minimize the role played by market¶ orientation and have claimed that Chile’s success is
largely the result of public¶ policies aimed at promoting specific sectors and industries through subsidies, ¶ tax holidays, and other forms
¶ is true is that, like every modern market-oriented nation, Chile
established a¶ network of commercial offices around the world that help advertise Chilean¶ products
and assist exporters in penetrating new markets. The government¶ also helped develop a modern
food safety system that assures foreign buyers¶ that Chilean products comply with international cleanliness, safety, and¶ health
-oriented nation, the government¶ supported applied research—through
universities and other institutions—that¶ helped launch new export products and improve international
competitiveness¶ of existing goods. But none of this amounts to an active industrial policy¶ by which
government officials “pick winners,” make key decisions on what to¶ produce and export, or favor
one industry over another one.¶ Fundación Chile, a nonprofit organization partially funded by the government,¶
has¶ encouraged research and provided seed capital
that has helped develop some¶ successful nontraditional exports, including salmon and berries. But providing¶
this type of technological support is a far cry from subsidizing specific ¶ industries or “picking winners” in the tradition of old-fashioned
industrial¶
Fundación Chile has been successful precisely because it¶ is not a public
institution and operates under a clear and transparent budget¶ constraint; its total budget in 2007 was merely
US$30 million, a miniscule¶ amount in a country with total production in excess of $140 billion and exports¶ of more than $40 billion.
AT: VTL
Nationalized economies are MILITARIZED – turns VTL
Sassoon, 07 (Donald, Professor of Comparative European History at Queen Mary, University of London, July/August issue of Foreign
Affairs, “Seeing Red: Why Communism Really Failed”,)//DH
One of the broad questions Service fails to address is how the movement managed to survive as long as it did. Service does briefly list
some of its achievements: the narrowed gap between managers' and workers' wages, free universal schooling, and the beginnings of a
welfare state. "Communists," he writes, "shared a commitment to reforms with the other left-of-centre political parties. But no one
implemented them with the same determination." Even if true, this hardly explains how, given the terrible costs of that determination,
the Communists managed to last.¶ Part of the answer, surely, lies in the connection between communism's
expansion and armed conflict--a link Service should have examined in some detail. Communists came to power in
countries as varied as Cuba, Hungary, Mongolia, and Poland. Remarkably, in all these instances,
political success followed military victory. The consequence of this was the profound militarization
of political and economic life. To paraphrase Clausewitz, the Communists saw economic development as
the continuation of war by other means. Their drive to modernize was aimed not at improving
individual lives so much as at prolonging the fight against the West. "We are 50 to 100 years behind advanced
countries," Stalin said in 1931. "We must cover this distance in ten years... or they will crush us." Ten years later, World War II was on,
and the Communists militarized further.¶ Such a pace was hard to maintain for very long, however. By the
1960s, the Soviet Union remained a deeply repressive society (although it never again saw the appalling human
losses of the Stalinist era), but it had reached an adequate level of economic development. The militarized aspects of
political and economic life were toned down and replaced by a lackadaisical attitude toward work.
With employment guaranteed, absenteeism and inefficiencies spread. There was no natural
mechanism to force transitions from some industries to others in order to keep up with
technological changes. There was no reason for unprofitable enterprises to close down, since
targets for their outputs had been set by technocrats. Moreover, the Soviet Union and, to a lesser
extent, the countries of Eastern Europe-were overindustrialized. They had failed to develop a powerful service
sector or the network of small- and medium-sized risk-taking enterprises that fueled growth in the West. These features were the
hallmarks of the stagnation period under Leonid Brezhnev. Communism may have succeeded in constructing an industrial society, but it
had failed to transform workers into consumers. It had little to offer in a postindustrial era.