Economic Peace: Some Thoughts from Barcelona

Posted: March 1st, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Economics, Ephemera, Foreign Policy | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | No Comments »

Returning from a brief (9 days) blogging hiatus with a post at Foreign Exchange. The subject: a panel I was asked to speak on at IESE’s sustainable business conference in Barcelona this weekend. My topic was ‘economic peace and the private sector’s role in fostering political stability.’ An excerpt:

Specifically, the reductive tendency leads us to place emphasis on macroeconomic growth as a cure-all, when as we’ve seen in Obasanjo’s Nigeria or Ben Ali’s Tunisia or Musharraf’s Pakistan, growth can correlate quite easily with increasing political instability and conflict. For one thing, there’s the question of distribution, of how much growth is trickling down the bottom of the economic ladder to those most likely to be embroiled in crime or violence.

But even if ‘economic growth’ is replaced by a genuine focus on job creation and the building of a stable middle class, a critical challenge remains. In a society which has chosen—and this is an ideological choice—to invest its resources in militarism or theocracy but not in education or health care, an angry young man with a steady income still can’t spend it providing for his family: the services he needs aren’t there to be purchased.

Instead, they’re available to him for free from the same crowd of ‘non-state actors’ responsible for his country’s turmoil. In other words, those actors—be they mobsters or terrorists or warlords—aren’t grafting an abstract ideology onto his poverty and rage; they are producing an alternative society, complete with the services the state does not provide. It’s an ideological battle, not an economic one, to transfer a whole society’s focus and collective, public, wealth into building the social structures that make an income valuable. Without those, a little money’s not worth the paper it’s printed on.

You can read the rest here.

One postscript: left to my own devices, I’d probably have parachuted into Barcelona for a day; attended the conference and jetted out. With encouragement and company from qwghlm, I took four whole days off work. I didn’t check Twitter and Google Reader every 5 minutes; I missed thousands of tweets and hundreds of news stories; and when we got back and I caught up, I found that nothing had fundamentally changed on the big stories I’d been following. Gaddafi? Still in power. Raymond Davis? Still in legal limbo. Me? Recharged and ready to report on both.


Gordon’s Day

Posted: April 2nd, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Britain, Economics, Foreign Policy, Journalism | Tags: , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Gotta hand it to Gordon today. Somehow, he’s pulled world leaders back from their insanity to agree to principles for that were, only a day ago, the butt of jokes among policy wonks. A triumph.

In the past week, much of the American media has referred to the IMF infusion in particular as though it were proposed by President Obama in the lead-up to this meeting. That’s wrong.

As readers of this blog will know, the whole combination of trade, aid, and regulation was the brainchild of Gordon Brown and the subject of his speech in Congress some weeks ago. At the time, the American media focused on his praise of the United States and on the symbolism of the moment, so American readers never processed the weight of his policy prescriptions.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration, realizing that a dramatic expansion of fiscal stimulus was not in the cards, began talking up the IMF infusion as though it were their plan, and journalists in the US political press have followed suit. World leaders were smart enough to let Gordon announce the comminque himself (he did superbly; video below), but the talking heads in the American press still spent the evening news discussing whether this as an achievement of the Obama team.

Obama and his celebrity charm get some credit for helping curmudgeonly Gordon get this done; surely Obama had some role in stopping Nicholas Sarkozy from throwing another tantrum. But the policies–using the IMF as a form of trade subsidization and trade as a form of development aid–don’t bear any signs of his input. That my colleagues in the political media insist on declaring otherwise only facilitates conservative critiques that they are in Obama’s tank.

Moreover, I find this strategy of taking credit for others’ ideas unnerving. There were two stories buried in the inside section of the NYT these past weeks about a Congressional effort–led by Ted Kennedy–to devise a health care bill, even before the administration has a Health Secretary. The emerging plan sounds a lot more like Hillary Clinton’s proposal from last spring than the Obama plan, but if it looks liable to get Congressional passage, you can bet it will get Obama branding.

Come on, Mr. President. Your popularity ratings are sky-high, where Gordon Brown is fighting for his political life. You are young with years ahead of you, where Ted Kennedy is singing his swan song. Take a back seat, for once, and give credit where it’s due.


I have drunk the Pimms

Posted: March 6th, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Britain, Economics, Foreign Policy | Tags: , , , , , | 5 Comments »

Larry Smith, one of my favorite political bloggers, has held my interest this year because he’s a liberal who has refused to drink the Obama Kool-Aid, and as a Brit, has risen above ideology by being able to critique his own Labour Party. But he has a ghastly post this week detailing all the reasons he’s ga-ga over President Obama’s first month in office, for which I took him to task in his comments section.

To be honest, I’m not in a great place to point fingers. Because while I am still pretty irked by President Obama, I have gone ga-ga for Gordon Brown. It’s been coming on for some time–for a while I was able to separate my admiration for his intelligence and his principles from his lack of political savvy and charisma. That division shattered when he addressed Congress on Wednesday–it was a personal, eloquent and yet forceful policy address the likes of which, as the British papers were quick to point out, Brown has never made in Westminister.

So in part, I just swooned to see Brown succeed on both political and policy fronts. But I was also bowled over by the content of his argument: Read the rest of this entry »


Friday Night Stimulation

Posted: February 6th, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Economics, Journalism, Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | No Comments »

The Senate finally reached a compromise on the stimulus package and we should see it passed by both houses at some point in the coming week. I can’t resist the urge to have an I-told-you-so moment about the politics here: the final bill will probably pass without any Republican support, and it will emerge from aggressive back and forth on the Senate floor today, NOT from the “postpartisan” charm offensive President Obama was so psyched about last week. Obama gets points for fast learning, though: his tone was full of red meat today.

Obama’s leadership style was a topic of discussion at a panel I attended last night about the economic challenges we face. Common criticisms were
–Obama does not yet recognize that the rest of his domestic agenda is never going to happen because all political (and real) capital for his first term will get spent on the stim
–Obama trumps the previous crowd in the quality of the experts he’s got BUT he has a problem actually making decisions that use their expertise effectively because the experts are all competing prima donnas. We should thus expect a lot of waffling on his economic policy.

The panel was overall pretty impressive:
BusinessWeek’s Steve Adler
CNBC’s Steve Liesman
NYTimes’ Floyd Norris
Credit Suisse’s Neil Soss
and author Bill Holstein
and they made some good points: Read the rest of this entry »