7th June 07 - Adam Parsons, Editor ~ STWR

The modern world is increasingly defined by its mistakes, its myths, and its tragic misconceptions.  Never before have we witnessed so many conferences and plans for a fairer and more just society, whilst at the same time paying witness to so much unimaginable misery on an international scale.  The statistics have turned from truisms into slogans into brands for product marketing; the 50,000 people who die each day from poverty, the deaths from hunger every three or four seconds, the 2.7 billion who live on less than two dollars a day.  In three decades we have moved from the famous admonition of Margaret Thatcher – “There is no alternative!” – to the rallying cry of campaigners who shout “Another world is possible!” but hesitate to pose another sentence.

For most of us in the developed world, those with the luxury of disregarding such ungainly terms as ‘neoliberalism’, ‘globalisation’ and ‘free market fundamentalism’, the emotive language of those who dare speak out has itself become a cliché; since Bob Geldof told us to “give us your ****ing money”, we are now only liable to empty our pockets for the Two-Thirds World if Bono, Madonna or Angelina Jolie are spelling out the reasons.  So used have we become to more news of environmental disaster, inconceivable inequalities and the abstract suffering of ‘failed’ and ‘fragile’ states that we are almost in danger of losing touch with our most basic human quality of empathetic concern.  The myths of the modern world, driven by media obfuscation and the remorseless rush to dominate resources, are arguably the greatest barriers we face in resolving the most critical issues of our time - the ending of poverty, flagrant inequality, and environmental degradation.  If we are at least able to agree on the myths, to see clearly and reasonably the defining questions, then perhaps together we will be capable of enacting the blueprints for the solutions.

Dire statistics

Only the most privileged can deny that the facts representing the world situation are dire in the extreme; according to the apparently ‘good news’ from the World Bank’s latest figures, absolute poverty levels have fallen beneath one billion people, even though almost half the world are still ‘officially’ living on less than two dollars a day[1].  UNICEF calculate that almost 30,000 children “die quietly each day due to poverty in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world,”[2] including a total, according to Oxfam, of 21 million children under five who died from preventable diseases in the past two years.[3] 

Each year 30 million people die of hunger and 800 million suffer from chronic malnutrition[4], even though penury in the developing world goes far beyond income poverty; “It means having to walk more than one mile every day simply to collect water and firewood,” says the U.N.; “it means suffering diseases that were eradicated from rich countries decades ago.”[5]  Poverty in the prosperous capitals of the world may well be incomparable to the slums of Nairobi or Dhaka, but even in the U.S., according to recent independent reports, severe poverty has reached a 32-year-high.[6]  In the UK it’s even official; government statistics show that poverty has increased for the first time since Tony Blair came to power[7], and child poverty in Britain is significantly on the rise.[8]

The case of Africa is, of course, the most depressing example; 40 percent of the population are unable to obtain sufficient food on a day-to-day basis[9], the continent is more ridden with ‘fragile states’ than anywhere else on earth, and what happened to make Sub Saharan Africa account for 11 percent of the world’s extreme poor in 1981, one might ask, exploding to 19 percent in 1990, and 30 percent today.[10]

The new rulers

Figures on income inequality are even more popularly quoted; while billionaires begin to dominate the new capitalist economies of China, Russia, India and Brazil, major uprisings are now becoming commonplace; the ‘new rulers’ in China, for example, have had to increase the number of armed special anti-riot militia a hundredfold.[11]  The numbers are just as stark for the developed world; the richest 50m people, huddled in Europe and North America, have the same income as 2.7bn poor people;[12] the top 1% income share has risen dramatically in recent decades to levels not seen since before World War II,[13] the pay of an average CEO has risen 821 times since 1978,[14] and even a few hundred millionaires own as much wealth as the world’s poorest 2.5 billion people.[15]  The most wealthy country in the world, the United States, is also the most unequal; between 1990 and 2000, worker pay and inflation remained approximately equal, while corporate profits rose 93% and CEO pay rose by 571%.[16]

The conclusions, however cursorily the figures are reviewed, are incontestably clear; all around the world, the inordinate gap between rich and poor is getting wider between and within countries, more poor people are sick and needlessly dying than we can even imagine, and despite the affluence enjoyed by the highest echelons of the richest countries, the vast majority are working longer hours with less pay, less creativity, less happiness and more debt. 

Future dystopia

If we look expectantly into the future, few newspaper reports can offer us anything close to succor.  On some unknown date this year, for example, the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural, a seldom published fact that constitutes a watershed in human history.[17]  In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with a population of more than one million, compared with 400 such megalopolises today.  By 2015, according to the conservative estimates, there will be at least 550.[18]  The global countryside has reached its maximum population and will begin to shrink after 2020, meaning that cities will account for nearly all future population growth, which is expected to peak at around 10bn in 2050.  This supernova growth will inevitably be absorbed amongst the “pariah edges” of the developing world; in India, slums are continuing to grow 250% faster than the overall population, and in Africa slums are already growing at twice the speed of the exploding cities.[19] 

These facts have long been anticipated by the strategists and thinkers behind the present world order.  As written in the Global Trends Report 2015 published by the CIA in the year 2000, globalisation is expected to create “an even wider gap between regional winners and losers than exists today.  (Globalisation’s) evolution will be rocky, marked by chronic volatility and a widening economic divide… deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation.  (It) will foster political, ethnic, ideological, and religious extremism, along with the violence that often accompanies it.”[20]  A more recent report by the British Ministry of Defense published earlier this year is equally alarming; by the year 2035, they warn, the disempowered middle classes are likely to become “revolutionary”, whilst political and religious fundamentalist groups are forecasted to form an “alliance of belief systems” that directly oppose the state, and “brain chips” are expected to become standard for all citizens of developed nations by 2037.[21] 

Doomsday predictions

Other prognostications from eminent commentators on the possibility of a future war, not least a global nuclear catastrophe, require no further introduction; U.S. military spending is at its highest inflation-adjusted level since 1946, surging by 25% over the past five years, with China proudly contending itself as a “major power” in the global arms race, not to mention Israel, North Korea, Pakistan or Iran.[22]  In January this year, the infamous Doomsday Clock moved its minute hand forward to indicate that the world has edged closer to Armageddon than at any time since the most precarious moments of the Cold War in the early 1980s.[23]

The Doomsday warnings naturally take into account the second greatest threat to mans continued existence; if the forecasts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change come anywhere close to fruition, then a “near apocalyptic vision of Earth’s future”[24] will be the inheritance of the coming generation - sea level rises, increased droughts and crop failures, more diseases and species extinctions, and a “great climate change divide” that ravages even further the poorest countries.  To add the consequences of an intensely-speculated stock market crash would paint such a terrible picture that we might be forgiven for placing all newspapers aside and never opening them again.  As Lao Tze once said in his oft-quoted apothegm; ‘If we do not change direction, we are likely to end up exactly where we are headed.’

Polarised perspectives

What is most confusing about the world situation is not the facts themselves, but the vastly differing interpretations of how to confront them, how to understand them, and whether it is possible to tackle them at all.  For every statistic that begets the imperative need for economic reform, dozens of others can be used to justify continuing on the present course.  “The protesters and do-gooders are just plain wrong,” writes Robyn Meredith in his new book on the boons of free market capitalism; “It turns out globalisation is good – and not just for the rich, but especially for the poor.”[25]  It seems that public opinion in the Occident is split into three opposing categories; the ‘for’, the ‘against’, and the ‘I do not care to know’.  As summed up by the Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto, one of the most celebrated proponents of the first group; “I am not a die-hard capitalist… But for the moment, to achieve those goals (of freedom, equal opportunity and compassion for the poor), capitalism is the only game in town.”[26]

The presumption that free trade through liberalization and privatization has “overwhelming benign effects” is taken as a marker in establishment thinking between those “who understand economics and those who don’t”[27]; to question the opposite is not just to challenge the dogmas of orthodox economics, but also to challenge the fundamental belief system that underpins the consciousness of democratic society; that to usurp is to be happy, to compete is to succeed, to succeed is to win, that to consume is to be free.  A rejection of unfettered, globalised market forces does not mean simply a rejection of certain systems and institutions like the IMF, World Bank and WTO, but of a whole centuries-old history of aborted ideologies and diametrically-opposed ‘isms’ and creeds; no wonder that “Another World is Possible!” is the current slogan of most campaigners, when defining the ‘other world’ requires a quantum leap of faith into the complete unknown.

That technology and progress has given us the possibility of ending all forms of poverty and sustaining the environment is the strongest commonality that economic progressives currently hold; that we share the same values is without question, that we stand for justice and freedom is beyond mentioning, but what we lack is an overarching principle that can unite us on the most basic level.  The category of thinkers that we are in need of most are not amongst the ‘for’, the ‘against’, the ‘I don’t know’, or any group that begins with ‘anti’, but amongst the newly emerging category that begins ‘How To’.

The ideology of common sense

In this undefined ‘better world’ the only ideology that we still require, in Jeremy Seabrook’s words, is the “ideology of common sense.”[28]  Before we can determine the structures and systems in the kind of world we want to live in, it is therefore imperative that we first make explicit the destructive, outmoded values that are currently shaping the international scene. 

Our familiar story begins in 18^th century Scotland with the pioneering writings of Adam Smith, the forefather of the modern academic discipline of economics.  Smith’s two revolutionary concepts – of industrial specialization to improve efficiency, and of the selfish interest of the individual to positively benefit society through the market mechanism, the so-called ‘invisible hand’ – are today the core driving factors behind the worlds of business and finance.  Economic globalisation, as we are often apt to forget, is an extremely new economic experiment with its latest manifestation - the neoliberal alliance of first-world governments since Reagan and Thatcher - as barely three decades old. 

The term globalisation is strictly a misnomer, as notably reasoned by Noam Chomsky; indeed the falsely-termed ‘anti-globalisation’ movements are themselves the perfect instances of globalisation-in-action.[29]  What the movement stands against is not ‘international integration’, but the economic process that puts the concerns of business and profit above the needs of poor nations, the average worker and the natural environment, resulting in a plutocratic world of oligopolies and elites that justify their escalating wage increases with the excuse of increased efficiency. 

Greed is (still) good

In the classic film Wall Street from 1987, Gordon Gekko personified the attitude that defines the corporate ethos of today more than ever before; “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right; greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”  Margaret Thatcher, the arch champion of unregulated market forces, was well known for her fervent endorsement of the economist James Buchanan’s model of human behavior that left no room for altruism, but functioned entirely upon the principle of selfishness.  According to Buchanan’s misanthropic philosophy, the only motivation for a worker is simply money; anyone motivated by other factors, such as job satisfaction or a sense of public duty, he disparagingly labeled as “zealots”.[30] 

Several decades later in 2003, when Thatcher’s dream of corporatisation had effectively reached its zenith, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme published the first truly global audit of urban poverty that posed a scathing criticism of globalisation, subtly acknowledging that it was the values underpinning the existing economic architecture that are driving this “chimera of competitiveness and wealth for the few.”  To a large extent, they wrote, “it is not globalisation per se that has caused countries to abandon redistributive policies that benefit the majority of their citizens, but the perception that they need to be competitive.”[31]

The consequences of an economy based upon the principles of selfish individualism and brute competitiveness have now been exported to almost every country of the world; the glorification of materialism, gross consumerism, a preference for figures and statistical measures over basic human needs, a growing lack of meaning and family breakdown, mental disorder, political alienation, and a massive rise in inequality.

Dogmas of the free market

The foremost dogma of free market theory is the blind belief in economic growth.  “Trickle-down” economics, or the textbook premise that increasing the size of the economic ‘cake’ will eventually lead to some falling ‘crumbs’ for the poorest of the poor, is not only supported by neither theory or evidence, but is dependent on the same model of human behavior that favours selfishness over the public good.  People respond only to incentives, argue the theorists, leading to inordinate tax breaks for the highest earners, and a decline in after-tax wages for the remaining majority.  In the U.S., chief executives of large companies earn more than 10 times what they did in 1980, with the justification from the White House that higher taxes on top earners would cause them to work less hours and take fewer risks, thereby stifling economic growth.  Besides, even if the average person feels poorer, they say, it will provide them with an incentive to recoup their income loss by working harder than before.[32]

Only with such a cut-throat and egoistic vision of life could the World Bank release its latest poverty statistics this year and not even defend a continuing rise in inequality among citizens in almost every country.[33]  As long as gross domestic product is still expanding, then a rise in inequality is quietly seen to be positive; income disparities, say the trickle-down theorists, strengthen the aggressive motivation to ‘get ahead’.

The one question they don’t answer is: when will the ‘growing’ be forced to stop?  Economic growth, which translates as a continual increase in the production and consumption of goods and services, is obviously predicated on increasing population and per capita consumption.[34]  As the public begin to recognize that economic growth is the root cause of climate change and environmental damage, the foundation stone of Western economic policy for the past two hundred years is gradually washing up on the shore.  It requires no theory or philosophy to realize that the lives of most people are governed by more than ‘income’ or ‘expenditure’ measures, even though such concerns as health, education, social cohesion, or food security are currently not even considered important when assessing the ‘development’ of any country.

The principle of sharing

The underlying values and presuppositions of neoliberal economic policy – that infinite growth is good despite any harm to the planet, that greater consumption equals greater happiness despite all evidence to the contrary,[35] that distrustful and competitive individualism is preferable to a collective responsibility for the world and our fellow citizens – have at least resulted in one overall effect that can be interpreted as resoundingly positive.  As the growing movement of mass awakening gathers pace, we are finally in a position to begin articulating the ethics, values and principles that can shape a world that we all want to live in.

A return to the human values beyond economic theory has never been such an intimidating but tremendous possibility.  We are left in no doubt that conventional economics is in crisis, that society is losing its grip on the “myth of economic progress”[36], that the way we view economic success has become a “fossil-fuelled fantasy”,[37] but the vision of a humane and cooperative system remains disparate, disempowered and disunited.  The global justice movement, the altermondialists, the new economists and the human rights activists all perceive the daunting need for a paradigm shift in thinking and priorities, but await an agreed articulation of the values that unite our cause; cooperation in place of competition, sharing in place of selfishness, community development in place of diffusion and delocalisation. 

The principle of sharing, so simple and vital as a word, requires more than the wishful enunciation of an abstract noun or verb; if we are serious about ending hunger in a world of plenty, of living sustainably and equitably without more wars and needless casualties, then we can expect a long and sorrowful road of resistance before the voice of reason is heard.

Adam W. Parsons is the editor of Share The World’s Resources (www.stwr.net), an NGO campaigning for global economic and social justice.  He can be reached at \n This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .

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[2] Unicef Statistics from The State of the World’s Children (Unicef Report, 2007)

[3] Oxfam Briefing Paper (The World is Still Waiting: Broken G8 promises are costing millions of lives, May 2007)

[4] Ignacio Ramonet. The politics of hunger (Le Monde Diplomatique, Nov 1998)

[5] Millennium Project. Fast Facts: The Faces of Poverty (United Nations 2006)

[6] Tony Pugh. U.S. economy leaving record numbers in severe poverty (McClatchy Newspapers, Feb 22nd 2007)

[7] Ashley Seager. Blow for Brown as poverty figures increase after years of decline (The Guardian, March 28, 2007)

[8] Matthew Tempest and agencies. Child poverty increases (The Guardian, March 27, 2007)

[9] Ignacio Ramonet. The politics of hunger (Le Monde Diplomatique, Nov 1998)

[10] World Bank. Global Monitoring Report 2007: Confronting the Challenges of Gender Equality and Fragile States (World Bank, 2007)

[11] James Petras. Global Ruling Class: Billionaires and How They ‘Made It’ (STWR, 20th March 2007)

[12] Larry Elliott. A cure worse than the disease (The Guardian, January 21, 2002)

[13] Professors Thomas Piketty & Emmanuel Saez. How the Income Share of Top 1% of Families Has Increased Dramatically (Wall Street Journal, 11th Jan 07)

[14] Bruce Nissen, Prevent a `race to the bottom' (Sun-Sentinel, 16th Jan 07)

[15] See http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Facts.asp#fact14  

[16] Paul Buchheit. The Income Gap: Profits Up 93%, CEO Pay Up 571% -- Worker Salaries Stagnant (CounterPunch.org, 28 Feb 2007)

[17] Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums (Verso 2006)

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] As quoted in John Cavanagh & Jerry Manders (ed). Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World is Possible (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004), p48. See the report at www.fas.org

[21] Richard Norton-Taylor. Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips. A grim vision of the future (The Guardian, 10th April 07)

[22] David R. Francis, It's Back: The Global Arms Race (Christian Science Monitor, 28th March 2007)

[23] Rupert Cornwell. The Doomsday Clock: Nuclear threat to world 'rising' (17th Jan 2007, The Independent UK)

[24] Michael McCarthy and Stephen Castle. How the worst effects of climate change will be felt by the poorest (The Independent, 07 April 2007)

[25] Robyn Meredith.  The Rise of India and China, and What It Means For Us (W.W. Norton & Co., 2007)

[26] Hernando De Soto. The Mystery of Capital (Black Swan; New Ed edition, 1 Nov 2001)

[27] Robert Wade. Globalisation: emancipating or reinforcing? (OpenDemocracy.org, 29th January 2007)

[28] Jeremy Seabrook. The Myth of the Market: Promises and Illusions (Green Books, 1990), p36.

[29] Noam Chomsky interviewed by Danilo Mandic. On Globalization, Iraq, and Middle East Studies (Princeton Progressive Review and Dollars & Sins, 11th March 2005)

[30] See - Adam Curtis. The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom – Episode One: F**k You Buddy (BBC documentary series, 11 March 2007)

[31] The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003, (United Nations Human Settlements Programme – UN Habitat, 2003) p. 53.

[32] In the Real World of Work and Wages, Trickle-Down Theories Don’t Hold Up, By ROBERT H. FRANK - Published: April 12, 2007

[33] United Press International. Fewer poor worldwide, but inequality rises (UPI, 16th April 2007)

[34] Neil K. Dawe. Economic Growth-Our Common Foe (Countercurrents.org, 3 April, 2006)

[35] David Boyle, Corrina Cordon and Ruth Potts. Are You Happy?  New Economics Past, Present and Future: Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth? (New Economics Foundation, November 2006)

[36] Nic Marks, as quoted in: Are You Happy? Ibid. (New Economics Foundation, November 2006)

[37] Ibid

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