鈥榠f God the Father had created things by naming them, Elstir recreated them by removing their names, or by giving them another name鈥�.

Marcel Proust (II, 566)

An emerging consensus originated in the US has declared 2022 as the year of the , with a view to marking the beginning of an era of turbulence and unrest in the global economy.  Under this conceptualisation, recent events including the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change catastrophes, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the rise in energy and food prices are generally postulated as separate crises, which can have an effect on each other but nevertheless have separate origins.  This centrifugal analysis of events predicates on the decline of the uni-polar world order, as well as acknowledging the emergent structural weaknesses in the traditional western powers; all of which can be loosely interpreted as occurring in a period during which power is dispersing and perhaps as a consequence of this dispersion, the current drivers of crisis have multiplied, leading to a multitude of crises, in contrast to preceding historical instances.

In spite of the current use of the term, the origins of the Polycrisis date further and can be more contextualised. However, there is no doubt that it has now become an important neologism for conventional western media and policy institutes, especially adopted by Bretton Woods Institutions, as well as other leading investors.

Civil society has also used this term as a neat summary, however, theirs is a critical response and is not interchangeable with how powerful International Financial Institutions (IFIs), policy think-tanks and investors use the term.  In this sense, the instrumentalisation of this neologism, seems to have more value than its meaning, with the discernible possibility that any perceived political mileage of the Polycrisis, is a complete transformation away from its intellectual roots. Nonetheless, as an artefact, the intellectual roots and the political role of the Polycrisis merits an integrated analysis beyond its instrumentalisation. 

A remarkable feature of liberal thought is the tendency towards identification of social phenomena through the selective elevation of their key distinguishing features, which are abstract enough to form 鈥榮ystems鈥� and neutral enough to subsume the inherent contradictions of capitalist development. Pandemics, climate breakdown, wars and global deflationary pressures are not mere externalities of the capitalist system but intrinsic to its operations- long predicted by a diverse group of thinkers. That these events converge in time is a political outcome, subject to planetary limits, not abstract systemisation, as the Polycrisis seems to imply.  

Critical responses to the Polycrisis have pointed towards its disregard in accounting for the long and sustained crisis of the capitalist world order and a resort towards 鈥樷�� to conceptualise things as they appear to be,  rather than questioning what is occurring beneath mere appearances. Prima-facie accounts often seek to capture the zeitgeist in the endeavour to simplify things. However, there is a need to differentiate between simplification and reductionism. As a concept, the Polycrisis is simultaneously all-encompassing as well as abstract.

In an attempt to grasp both these aspects, this short blog starts with a focus on three messages of the Polycrisis: a) the qualitative nature of change, b) the drivers or causes of crises and c) the role of Bretton Woods Institutions in adopting the concept. In addition, the blog proposes an alternative way of understanding the contemporary crisis, which hinges on the decline of the western capitalist model, followed by some thoughts on multipolarity and geopolitics. 

a) Understanding what has changed

The multifaceted 鈥楶辞濒测肠谤颈蝉颈蝉鈥� and its disparate manifestations convince us of something, which is qualitatively different, compared to previous crises. The nature of the disruption is hard to understand; on the one hand, Polycrisis is about disparate crises haunting the world, whilst on the other, it remains inexplicable why a single European war should trigger a global disruption of such magnitude.  After all, if we are talking scale, since 2001 to date, the extremely expensive War on Terror ravaged entire countries, without any degree of comparable or even suggested global turbulence. For an Afghan, Yemeni or Haitian child aged 10 or so, the world has always been a continuum of so-called Polycrisis. Any turbulence in global capital and stock markets and commodity prices, would be a minor and irrelevant addendum to the ongoing dearth of access to life, in the majority of the non-Western world. 

b) Poly perpetrators?

A key feature of the current crisis, which remains unaddressed by the Polycrisis concept are the substantive drivers of the crisis. While the Polycrisis is keen to explore the multiplicity and complexity of the current global order, the implicit causes of the seemingly conjectural crises appear as nebulous, automated and self-perpetuating. For example, the discussion paper by ., describes a global Polycrisis as a situation when 鈥榗rises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity鈥檚 prospects.鈥�

This methodology is reminiscent of modelling, as in the natural sciences, such as in the discipline of physics. In fact, all definitions of the Polycrisis although focusing on systems, are seemingly bereft of any identifiable agency.

Citing causal entanglements in political decision making is a strange analysis, diminishing the role of the powerful and the hierarchy of geopolitics. In describing a situation, which is no longer under any implicit control, we remain not quite sure about any obvious poly-perpetrators.

Who are they and what is their precise role in all of this?  

c) The Bretton Woods hijacking the crisis?

The Bretton Woods Institutions have effectively adopted the Polycrisis as an explanatory lens for the contemporary situation. The labelling of the crisis as too complex and multifaceted aligns with their on-going gospel of ad-hoc solutionism to political problems, and the linear mantra of debt-ridden liquidity for vulnerable countries.

The unwavering acceleration of private-sector led solutionism, may well be described as the availing of . The coinage of the term Polycrisis unto itself had no substantial impact on the Bretton Woods Institutions鈥� conventional operations but rather, the term went solely to the further substantiation of their ongoing technocratic approach to poverty. The metanarrative of all official reports by these institutions builds on themes of complexity, multiple and uncontrollable drivers of impoverishments. This is also similar to a host of used by financial investors, facing this seemingly unsolvable Polycrisis.

Alternative hypothesis

An alternative hypothesis of the current crises is the possibility that declining uni-polar world order does not necessarily equate to an elimination of imperial power and that the drivers of the current crisis are an essential outcome thereof. This hypothesis would suggest that we start our analysis from the crisis of the Western capitalist order and understand the recent implications of its global export.

1. Dynamics of declining uni-polar world order 鈥揺ntrenching extraction.

The pandemic was revelationary in highlighting the structural weaknesses of key developed economies in the West; stimulus packages to ameliorate the domestic impact of the pandemic were either inadequate and/ or profiteering at the expense of populations. In the run-up to the emergence of the Polycrisis narrative, in nearly every instance, the domestic private sector of most developed economies has consistently been bailed out disproportionately, as opposed to their citizenries.  To remedy this decline, Western economies have attempted to crudely pastiche China鈥檚 Belt Road Initiative (BRI) and sought to bandwagon on the drive towards external infrastructure connectivity, as a solution to their economic woes; a remedy which was both too little and too late (See Table 1).

   Table 1: Stimulating the Private Sector Domestically and Globally- US, UK, EU.

While these various infrastructure projects seek to further subsidise opportunities for the Western domestic private-sector, they remain fully oblivious to the unwillingness or inability of Western developed economies to decisively address the monopolistic and monopsonistic mutations in the OECD rent-seeking banks and merchantry, which represent a structural malaise and economic malignance that very much has global consequences.

To summarise: in addition to the implementation of global connectivity projects, which subsidise the western private sector, the role of the corporate and financial sector also needs attention in driving of global inflation.

Two obvious examples on food and energy prices:

• On food prices and global hunger: The trend of rising food prices, precedes the Ukraine invasion and in fact remains unhinged from the basics of demand and supply, raising the simple question of what is driving prices?

As investigated by through freedom of information requests, and detailed by journalists at , the transformation of food into an asset-class is led by the concerted speculative practices of international banks. As countries in the South are slowly being engulfed by hunger, the profiteering investors originating in the Global North remain without accountability.

• On energy prices: The logical inference to be drawn from the Polycrisis is a case against poly-opportunists, where the vacuum resultant of the decline of traditional hegemons, is rapidly capacitated by the emergence of previously impassive, globally competitive, private-sector actors.

When the outcome of the prompt of a global energy crisis, is solely rampant profiteering and market abuses perpetrated a few energy companies, as identified even by the liberal bastion of President Biden in his vocal complaints about , the case for regulatory and particularly fiscal intervention very certainly crystallises, yet remains very far from forthcoming.

How does the Polycrisis account for this crisis of western capitalism which accelerates both domestic and global extraction?

2. The world in the making: On multipolarity and geopolitics  

From a global perspective we must also ponder why the emergence of multipolarity- (progressive or regressive) should equate to a Polycrisis?

An interesting development in the current US-China-Russia analysis, is the now compulsive suggestion that 鈥榞eopolitics鈥� is an all-encompassing and defining feature of contemporary politics. That the Global South has been the site of proxy-war throughout stands peripheral to this and so the Polycrisis posits war and peace, as an exclusively Western binary, which fails to acknowledge the states of perpetual crisis and war in many developing countries. This is important because wars entail sustaining the process of existing capitalist order as well as reorder.

Consider the selectivity and uni-polarity of the consensus on contemporary sanctions, which are immiserating ordinary people鈥檚 lives. The militarisation of finance may have taken a seemingly new and unique route with Biden鈥檚 misadventures in Ukraine but as the gross and perverse inequity of the attests, this militarisation  is , and even now remains an intrinsic part of US strategy in different regions such as and is in fact  

The rise in contemporary attempts to circumvent the dollar in different iterations 听including and the implementation of long debated proposals for a is not simply a moment of crisis for many countries- but an opportunity. The recent discussion on the contours of a New International Economic Order (NIEO), beyond a mere and one which would inevitably be marked by a state of 听speaks of a new world order which will remain in flux but also contains the possibility of monetary relief for developing countries through a . Whether we like it or not, a dispersal of power is not equivalent to chaos if it leads to opportunities for more levelling between states.

3. Roads which don鈥檛 lead to Davos

Janet Roitman鈥檚 book the , speculates on the multiplicities of crisis in a different way.  Importantly, it outlines the role of the problematization of what is described as a crisis, particularly in order to pre-empt intervention. This is a helpful approach in mapping the alignment of the Polycrisis with the Western multilateral response 鈥� a lending bonanza fuelled by high interest rates and the paucity of aid coupled with the ascendency of as an exclusive corporate hub for the policy making of poverty amelioration.  In a non-executive, non-treaty based Davos, as both the developed and non-developed world struggles to put food on the table, the , seems to posit it as a vacuous catchall to describe all that impeding the elite鈥檚 vociferous demand for further financialisation.

Undoubtedly the current crisis is caused by the transformational role of financial and digital capitalism and the imminence of climate-change led human extinction. However, these are not anomalies to capitalism but part of its design, of which the consequences and spill-overs are unevenly distributed across the World. For example, even with its global permeation, as financial capitalism bereaves the working classes in the developed North, it continues to deepen extraction in the Global South, both and passively. Moreover, the global is not devoid of the footprint of .听 The consistency in the commodification of nature leading to the breaking-point of extinction, cannot rationally be separated from the general extractive activities of capital.

Unless the Polycrisis, seriously questions the drivers of power and finds ways of challenging them, it risks becoming yet another neoliberal policy buzzword.

 is a Research Fellow at the University of Manchester in the UK. Her research focuses on comparative development, Industrial policy, corporations, economic geography and the changing landscape of development assistance. She tweets at .

Photo: Capitalism IS the Crisis May 25, 2013 March from Union Square to Washington Square New York, NY (Photo: Ed/Flickr)

Since the 2008 financial crisis and the end of the Millennium Development Goals, academics and practitioners working in 鈥榙evelopment鈥� have been groping for a new development paradigm. Yearning for the end of neoliberalism and stumped by the rise of China, hopped on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) bandwagon to call social scientists to think 鈥榞lobally鈥� beyond national-centric analyses. This was, of course, a noble goal 鈥� no different from the . New 鈥楪lobal Development鈥� proponents argued that we must think globally and relationally, surprising some within development studies that this had not been happening already (think ).

As Development Studies departments found themselves new names and new networks were established, some academics took the opportunity to stake claim over the meaning of Global Development. argued that a new Global Development paradigm would rescue us from development studies鈥� oppressive past, which obsessed over distinguishing between a backward developing world and a utopian 鈥榙eveloped鈥� heaven. They reasoned that this was necessary because the 鈥楽outh鈥� was actually rising in comparison to the 鈥楴orth鈥� on the basis of growth and human development indicators. But in presenting this trend as a these scholars misdiagnosed the problem. They presented the entire 鈥楽outh鈥� as rising, failing to isolate China鈥檚 rise and obscuring the fact that countries may have experienced very different trajectories.

In a section that appeared in Development and Change, the case for Global Development was subjected to open debate. The case for Global Development is based on 鈥榗onverging divergence鈥�, which suggest that there is increasing convergence between the North and South while there is increased evidence of sustained within-country inequalities (divergence). of 鈥楪lobal Development鈥� selected 1990-2015 as the time series within which convergence was identified in terms of growth, health and education. The paper was roundly for its sloppy use of indicators. For example, generalisations of wellbeing were based on (in every intro to development studies course) Human Development Indicators. In selecting the time period 1990-2015, the paper implies that convergence resulted from the implementation of market-led policies, implicitly condoning neoliberalism, as Andrew Fischer argued. Of course, such claims stand directly opposed to the experiences of most countries in 鈥榯he South鈥� where structural adjustment and the legacy of market-led reforms has limited prospects for structural transformation.

The paper was also criticised within the Forum on several other counts (see 鈥檚 contribution for example). For their part, Global Development proponents most criticisms. However, they refuse to nuance their claims of converging divergence. They replied that the study was a purely empirical exercise and converging divergence was . It is as if selecting which data you use, as well as the time period, is not a choice.

Global Development Rising

 After a was published debating the appropriateness of this framing of 鈥楪lobal Development鈥�, it seemed that Global Development proponents were on a hiatus. There was reason to assume that Global Development proponents had listened to their critics. Soon, it was clear that this was not the case. The Covid-19 pandemic appeared to offer the perfect opportunity for the proponents of Global Development .

So the same scholars made a new case for Global Development, arguing that it rested on the old case of 鈥榗onverging divergence鈥�. But the choice to make the case for Global Development, as several countries around the world were locking down in March 2020, was odd. That was the moment when borders and nationalism had become more salient than they had been for years. Reality seemed to matter so little to making cases in times of crisis.

The rise of Global Development seems unstoppable, as institutional power structures appear locked in. The evil international development seems beaten. But was international development actually ever a paradigm at all? Development paradigms have usually been presented as being associated with certain schools of economic thought, which contributed to certain policy directions: Import Substitution Industrialisation, Neoliberalism, Good Governance etc. Global Development, instead, was all things to everyone. And it called for no policies or any form of politics apart from thinking globally.

Global Development has all the bells and whistles of progressive thinking. Scholars project it to be a a new paradigm, presenting it as an alternative to traditional development studies, which has long been chided for its colonial origins. Since 鈥楪lobal Development鈥� aims to re-centre our study of development, proponents opportunistically align it with existing movements to Decolonise Development. However, such claims are hardly persuasive given that its proponents barely acknowledge (let alone analyse) colonialism (in the initial framing of Global Development or subsequent iterations). Global Development鈥檚 most grandstanding claim is to call for a global collective solution to climate change. But a failure to centre analysis of historical inequalities blinds them to possibilities for just solutions, which require analysis of the historical rests.

A (reluctant) case for Development Studies

For all its troubling foundations, the field of development studies retains some strengths. At the field鈥檚 birth, development studies space dedicated to studying the non-Western world. There are few fields like it. Name the discipline and you have a strain of decolonising literature that begins by arguing for more space in the canon to study non-Western countries. Of course, there were clearly challenges with how non-Western countries have been imagined, born as development studies was within the colonial project. However, surely, the correct response is to understand how colonialism has shaped contemporary development challenges rather than ignore it.

Troublingly, inter-disciplinary development studies is now waning in favour of a more multi-disciplinary field (). As argues, this leaves little space for classical (and heterodox) political economy, which is the original foundation of development studies.  A multi-disciplinary development studies inevitably bows to the of neoclassical economics. Troublingly, development studies is then open to capture by increasingly narrow social science fields, which are themselves striving to mimick the formalised mathematical abstraction of neoclassical economics. Global Development proponents say nothing about how they aim to reinvent the broader field of development studies, suggesting their appreciation of these generalised trends. Instead, Global Development proponents simply paint International Development and North-South binaries as strawmen (that we can all collectively hate).

In fact, the Covid-19 pandemic has actually reminded us of the salience of North-South inequalities (or at least, between the industrialised or de- or non-industrialised). This is true, of course, in the underway globally. There is also a clear picture emerging that the United Kingdom and the United States of America are soon returning to normal while even other emerging powers like India and Brazil are reeling from increasing variants, infections and deaths. The foundational logic of Global Development 鈥� 鈥榗onverging divergence鈥� 鈥� jars with reality. The perpetuation of such a framing will increasingly reveal knowledge divides in development studies, with both the voices and experiences of those outside the West permanently obscured.

Pritish Behuria is a Lecturer in Politics, Governance and Development at The University of Manchester鈥檚 Global Development Institute. He is a political economist, researching the politics of economic transformation. He is also the Co-Convenor of the Politics and Political Economy Study Group at The Development Studies Association.

Photo by  on 

“Without community there is no liberation, no future, only the armistice most vulnerable and temporary between me and my oppression.” Audre Lorde to Tony Morrison

The 黑料社区

Toni Morrison is one of the writers who wrote the most about 鈥榯he home and racial justice鈥�. In her emblematic novel , set in the post-Civil War South, she tells the story of a young girl murdered by her formerly-enslaved mother, Sethe. Sethe is importantly surrounded by the unheimlich (Freud), the stranger, where the foundations of our ethical judgment on slavery are found. In the United States, in the period 1882 to 1895, approximately one-third to half of the average black mortality rate corresponded to children under the age of five (). We face the dilemma of judging these acts.

Sethe, in an act of love, kills her daughter Beloved to avoid her master’s appropriation of her daughter. Sethe was a pariah in the post-slavery society of the United States. She knew from when she was a slave what it meant for a woman to have her children taken when her breasts were full of milk; that she would have been beaten to exhaustion for others to take her milk. She was raped by her master, as was the case for many of the slaves of Sweet 黑料社区; that name itself being a mockery of a plantation that was held under a system of slave laws that collaborated on that tragic fate. If a female slave escapes, there is a double loss; the capacity for reproduction and for manual labor. The slave society must permanently produce new slaves for reproduction ().

Sethe insistently repeats:”It wasn’t a story to share. They forgot it like a nightmare (鈥�) What should be forgotten before it is shared; what should be hidden and silenced as to not interrupt our present?鈥�. I wondered in my Perturbando el texto colonial. Los estudios poscoloniales en Am茅rica Latina (2010): “This is not an easy story to transmit” but it needs to, as says Bhabha (2002), so that it may be engraved in our subconscious.

Morrison reflected on 鈥榟ome and race鈥� this way:

I prefer to think of a world in which race is not, in fact, important. I don’t think of a theme park, a failed dream that will always fail, or the paternal house with its many rooms. I conceive of it as a home. For three reasons. First, because making a radical distinction between the metaphor of the house and that of the home helps me clarify what I think about racial construction. Second, because it allows me to take the concept of the insignificance of race and turn it away from longing and desire, to turn it away from an impossible future or from an irrecoverable and probably non-existent past, to bring it closer to a manageable and feasible human activity. Third, because the job I can do is to eliminate the strength of racial construction in language. I can’t wait for the great theory of liberation to come in, define its operation and do its job. Likewise, both race and home issues are a priority in my work and have led, in one way or another, to my quest for sovereignty, as well as my abandonment of that quest I have barely recognized its disguise. (Lecture at Princeton University, 1994)

A similar approach is that of bell hooks鈥檚 () Yearning. Race, gender and cultural politics where 鈥満诹仙缜鴓lace鈥� is conceived as a site of resistance and a space to fight for liberation against white racism. In her words, “since sexism delegated women the task of creating and caring for a home, it was the primary responsibility of black women to build domestic homes as spaces for care against brutal racist oppression and sexist domination. Historically, African-Americans gave the construction of homeplace a radical political dimension” (p. 43).

In the context of the ongoing pandemic, the home has been transformed into the world. In the face of growing neo-apartheid racial injustices, the anti-racist feminist politics that ancestrally battled from the home is the source of inspiration for today’s resistance. Recently, they aroused global awareness of movements such as #BlackLivesMatter in the United States and the African Refugee Union鈥檚 “We Are Born Free!”, along with others from the European Network for the Peoples of Africa and the Afro-Diaphoretic Women from Latin America and the Caribbean.

Global Black power is reborn with Afrofuturism, “a way to unite the future with the past and help reinvent the experience of people of color,” said . Her intertextual and performing languages – science fiction; African cosmologies; music – condenses “the intersection between black culture, technology, liberation and imagination,” she says. For (2016), the idea is 鈥渢o free the racialized body from colonial and world trauma and from the weight of racism and revenge”, a project inspired by the “Gateway of No Return” (Gor茅e, Sen茅gal) and the “tout-monde” (Edouard Glissant) of the exiles of racial capitalism thrown into the 鈥渮one of non-being鈥� ().

The question of which experiences occur in our postcolonial collective body during the pandemic opens us to new reflections: How difficult is it to think outside the sphere of typical Western philosophy and aesthetics? How do we decolonize the aesthetic imaginary and dismantle the racist images that persist? Citing the performative writing of the African-American poet Audre Lorde: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”, so how do we then build a global power of minority brotherhoods and sisterhoods that can tear down the master’s house?

The Cry – Black Lives Matter!

“We Can’t Breathe”: the last words of George Floyd became a cry throughout the world. 鈥淟ook at the Black man! He was ‘a Black man’ and admitted it (…). But he also had to admit that this treatment was evil. It was necessary to plead it, to confess it: he was guilty of being Black; to tell before the world that this 鈥榝act鈥� was a curse, this ‘fact’ a destiny, this Blackness an essential 鈥榙efect鈥欌��, said (2009).

His death, captured on video, sparked widespread protests in the United States, which called for an end to police brutality against Black communities and people. At the sanctuary of North Central University, Minneapolis (Minnesota), a mural with the face of George Floyd was installed with the words “Now I Can Breathe” next to the names of other victims of racial violence in the United States. The world mobilizes behind these slogans against structural racism. 鈥淏lack Lives Matter!鈥�, they scream.

After mass demonstrations in the cities, monuments of slavers and racists were torn down: in Indianapolis, Indiana; Rocky Mountain, North Carolina; in Roanoke and Norfolk, Virginia, they are in the process of removal. In Richmond, the statue of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, was demolished. “Jefferson Davis was a racist and traitor who fled our city while his troops were carrying orders to burn it,” mayor Levar Stoney

Two years earlier, the statue of Dr. James Marion Sims had been lowered from his pedestal in Central Park in New York. Dr Sims is known in the United States as the father of modern gynecology and in a slave community in Alabama between 1835 and 1849, carrying out operations on dozens of slaves without anesthesia. He then moved to New York, where she founded the first women’s hospital in 1855. He pioneered fistula intervention and also invented the speculum and other medical instruments currently in use. Activists for years that his achievements were based on experiments with 鈥淎frican-American slaves鈥�.

The Cry can be traced back to even an earlier period: the New York State negotiating the abolition of slavery in 1799 and emancipating all slaves on July 4th, 1827. John Dumont, a slave master who rejected the emancipation of the enslaved, illegally sold Sojourner Truth鈥檚 5-year-old son Peter to an Alabama man. Truth, later known for the famous speech, took the matter to court and got Peter’s return. This case was one of the first in which a Black woman successfully challenged a white man in a U.S. court. Sojourner Truth her life to Methodism and the abolition of slavery, writing her in 1850 through dictation, as she could not read or write, and in the same year speaking at the first National Convention on Women’s Rights in Worcester, Massachusetts. She began traveling with the abolitionist George Thompson, and spoke to crowds about slavery and human rights.

The movement crossed the “Black Atlantic”, as Paul Gilroy put it. “Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol of 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston and rolled it through the streets before unceremoniously throwing it into the River Avon.” The same was seen with the Rhodes Must Fall movement, which started as early as 2015 in South Africa with the post-apartheid generation organizing the first student protest for the decolonization of knowledge at the University of Cape Town (UCT). The statue of Cecil Rhodes, one of the many remnants of the colonial and apartheid past, had stood since 1934 at UCT and was the center of a debate that encompassed the consequences of the neoliberal model. The movement coincided with the emergence of the cyber movement #PatriarchyMustFall, spearheaded by actions of feminists and people from the queer community who demanded the fall of patriarchy to carry out such a task. Hate crimes and homophobia in the lives of South African Black lesbians, notably the rise of so-called corrective rapes, are practices of extreme violence faced by the community. What they called a process of began.

COVID-19 and the Cry: Inequalities and Vulnerabilities for Afro-Descendant Populations

COVID-19 has a different impact among Afro-descendant and Latino/a/x populations in the United States, Brazil, and other Latin American and Caribbean countries. Afro-descendants are particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus.  See below the case for Brazil ()

In New York City, mortality rates were twice as high for Black populations as they are for white. In Brazil, 1 in 3 Afro-descendants admitted into a hospital die (compare with only 1 in 4.4 for white people) (). The spread of Coronavirus in Brazil was also much faster in Black neighborhoods.

In addition, there is the issue of statistical invisibility in official information when it comes to the impact of COVID-19 among Afro-descendants in Latin America. The Inter-American Network of High Authorities on Policies for Afro-Descendants (RIAFRO) has recently highlighted both how 鈥渢he information available on the impact of COVID-19 among Afro-descendants in Latin America is virtually nil鈥� and 鈥渢he importance of improving the quality of information differentiated by race and ethnicity to improve the responsiveness of governments.鈥�

With health systems collapsing, social distancing is simply not possible in places where the informal economy is a source of survival and is carried out in public space. The alternative is to go back 鈥榟ome鈥�

The 黑料社区: Communities of Care

Audre Lorde wrote in “Cancer Diaries” in 1980 remembering her home while in the hospital battling against breast cancer:

At home this year we are celebrating the Kwanzaa Festival, the African-American harvest festival that begins the day after Christmas and lasts seven days. There are seven Kwanzaa principles, one for each day. The first principle is Umoja, which means unity, the decision to work for and maintain unity of itself and the community. The principle from yesterday, the second day, was Kujichagulia: self-determination, the decision to define ourselves, give us a name ourselves, and speak for ourselves, rather than being defined and described by others. Today is the third day for Kwanzaa, and the beginning for today is Ujma: collective work and responsibility, the decision to build and keep us together ourselves and our communities, and to recognize and solve our problems together.

Today, Brazil’s favelas organize their own fight against coronavirus. The movement of the virus to South America showed that these neighborhoods could have been devastated. The virus has disproportionately affected Brazil’s poor favelas, mostly Black ones. In S茫o Paulo, people living in poorer areas and getting the virus are up to 10 times more likely to die than people in rich areas, according to data published by the city’s health department. Afro-descendant residents of S茫o Paulo are 62 percent more likely to die from the virus than white residents in general. However, favelas are a great source of activism and resistance. Abandoned by government services, the Washington Post notes that communities have created parallel institutions鈥攊ncluding mail, the Internet, and sanitation鈥攁nd are working on health and education systems.

One of the alternatives that women in the Parais贸polis neighborhood of S茫o Paulo developed was the 鈥淧residents of the Street鈥� program to monitor and curb the spread of the virus. 鈥淲e decided to create alternatives so that if the government did not do its job, we could mobilize to prevent suffering in the community,鈥�  a favela鈥檚 resident . In the Complexo do Alem谩o favela of Rio de Janeiro, a database was created to track the disease. The community residents’ association of Cantagalo in Rio joined a local non-governmental organization to spray disinfectant. Also, Julian Carmo, a twenty-year old resident, partnered with other youngsters to map and fight the fake news related to virus (that warm climates would curb the coronavirus and that donated masks were contaminated with the virus). They a video that addresses the most common misinformation and established a hotline to help people.

Community-based action is the key: 鈥淲ithout the community there is no liberation,鈥� explained Audre Lorde.

Karina Bidaseca is a Principal Researcher at CONICET/University of San Martin and Professor at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. 

A version of this text was published in 23/7/2020. Photo: Audre Lorde. By .

As the Artic sea ice rapidly melts and the communities across the world suffer dire consequences, we are experiencing the tragedies from emitting greenhouse gases from human activities into the atmosphere. Climate scientists warn humans are running out of time to bring down CO2 in the atmosphere to stay below even 2 degrees celsius, as the planet鈥檚 ecosystems become unstable and the earth becomes increasingly uninhabitable. Arguably, we already have the policies and the technology required to combat climate change. Climate scientists at COP 21 in Paris 2015 laid out roadmaps for how to transition to clean energy in time, and these clean energy roadmaps show how more jobs are created, consumers save money, and together save life on earth as we know it.

Public discussions about how to convince people and governments to stop using fossil fuel energy take two paths. One is to emphasize that people鈥檚 lifestyles don鈥檛 have to change, as long as they electrify cars and homes–putting their faith in technological progress. The other is to emphasize climate justice and point out that many middle-income and affluent families need to consume less and share their prosperity. Lifestyle changes include living in smaller homes closer to work, flying less, eating mostly plant-based diets, and not buying so much stuff that ends up in the landfill. More broadly, and creating a that replaces wasteful private consumption with essential public services can improve the well-being of people today and in the future.

Evaluating electrification versus consumption changes

What difference do these two approaches make? Certainly advocating for ditching our addiction to fossil fuels and creating a clean energy economy is easier to sell if people are reassured that they don鈥檛 have to change their lifestyle. But this approach ignores the other crisis in play鈥攊nequality. People in affluent countries need to reduce wasteful consumption so that people in low-income countries can increase their consumption without overtaxing the world鈥檚 natural resources. This holds even within affluent countries, people in the top half of the income distribution need to change their lifestyle and consume less so those in the bottom half can have adequate consumption. It is time to start sharing prosperity at home and globally while caring for the planet.

has shown that increasing consumption has been the largest historical driver of emissions and responsible for the greatest environmental impact. The increase in per capita-consumption has increased resource use and carbon emissions more rapidly than technological progress has reduced them. For too long, the conversation around climate change mitigation has focused on technology, while skirting around the problematic role of growing consumption. Even recently, an influential book on top 100 ways to reduce atmospheric CO2, Project Drawdown, does not directly address the impact of consumption. Instead, the only two consumption-related solutions on the list are transitioning to plant-based diets and reducing food waste, which are helpful but leave out critical  solutions that address affluent consumption and inequality. The insufficient impact of technological change over the past few decades is a direct result of people consuming more and more as national incomes grow, especially in the Global North.

Who is responsible?

The world鈥檚 richest top ten percent are of consumption-based CO2, while the world鈥檚 poorest ten percent are responsible for only three to five percent. Even though emissions are effectively from GDP growth in certain rich countries, this hides the fact that rich countries are effectively to poorer countries. Rich countries consistently have higher consumption emissions, the emissions associated with each country鈥檚 consumption, than poorer countries. Often, rich countries use these 鈥渙ffshored emissions鈥� to shift the burden of climate change mitigation on the poorer countries, who rely upon manufactured exports for survival and need help from affluent countries to transition to clean energy.

Despite being the ones who consume and emit the most, affluent countries suffer few consequences from their wasteful consumption compared to low-income countries. Affluent consumption  generates an incredible amount of waste–most of which end up in the Global South. Roughly of waste are traded annually. As rich countries ship their own waste, especially plastic waste, out of sight while poorer countries who import shiploads of waste receive the brunt of the toxic effects. Despite the Basel Convention banning the export of hazardous waste, they do not regulate plastics. The human and environmental effects are apparent. Developing countries often end up incinerating the plastic waste that they receive. This creates significant air pollution that harms the health of nearby communities. As more countries are starting to and landfills in urban areas are overflowing, rich countries now have to figure out what to do with their own waste.

While poorer countries suffer from a disproportionate share of climate catastrophes, they are also less equipped than rich countries to adapt. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates climate change will contribute from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress in 2030. Furthermore, political and inter-group violence is expected to as weather becomes more variable and causes droughts, floods, and starvation. 

How far can technology alone take us? Even if the rich countries have the political will to fight the power of Big Oil and manage to electrify everything tomorrow, what happens to the resource-constrained countries that can鈥檛? There are still close to one billion people who lack access to electricity, let alone clean electricity. The consumption inequality worldwide will still persist, and people in developing countries will still suffer. To achieve a truly just and sustainable society, we must face our affluent consumption problem head on. 

is an economics professor and  at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of .

Jun Wong is a research scientist at NYU Stern.

The current pandemic might temporarily slow down environmentally destructive economic growth. However, claiming that we are dying for sustainability is dangerous. The global sustainability crisis is not just driven by uneconomic growth but also increasing global inequality and social stratification.

Growthmania

Suggesting that  is tempting. Transnational oil corporations have halted production. Oil prices have tumbled. Plans for new oil explorations have been halted. Shale gas companies are folding up. Air travel has plummeted. So has road travel. Consequently, emission levels have dropped. Skies have cleared. Rare and remote species of animals appear to be back in sight. As recently demonstrated , some of this optimism is based on . Others can be questioned for comparing .

Still, humanity seems to have rediscovered its sacrosanct relationship with nature. The ramifications are wide-ranging. Some employers now recognise that work can be done from home. With so many virtual conferences now taking place, it appears that international travel is not so much needed. Maybe not so many people are needed either. Australian philosopher, Peter Singer,  of so many old people who are no longer productive. Perhaps the reduction in unsustainable population growth could also be welcome. A world that is small and serene has come.

Is this a plausible pathway to start the journey described in , first published in 1972?  suggests that whatever the pathway, we must have limits to growth. That is evidently the argument made by political economists such as Ezra Mishan who coined the name 鈥榞rowthmania鈥� in The Costs of Economic Growth, published about a decade before The Limits to Growth.

Growthmania has become even more problematic in recent times.From this perspective, , a major rapture like COVID-19, can disrupt the path of unsustainable growth. Humanity appears to be dying for sustainability.

Over the years, however, the critique of , suggests that . The current socioecological crises are . , as Herman Daly calls it, is only one of them.

Limits to Inequality

Inequality is, perhaps, even more fundamental to the sustainability crisis. For the Global South, addressing inequalities has been the central sustainability challenge. This point was echoed in the famous Brundtland Report which declared that 鈥淭his inequality is the planet鈥檚 main 鈥榚nvironmental鈥� problem鈥�. The report promoted 鈥榮ustainable development鈥� as an antidote. Yet, this idea was, in effect, sustainable economic growth. Such contradiction in ambitions can be seen in  as well.

Growthism has taken a strong resurgence. , consequently, blamed the pursuit of sustainable development as the primary reason. Not only has sustainable development come to erode, corrupt and dilute the lofty ideals of 鈥榣imits to growth鈥�; the argument goes, it has also expanded and justified more growthism. The catechists for growth have, accordingly, been enabled to hide behind the poorer world for their own gains. Consequently, 鈥榣imiting growth鈥� has become a major preoccupation of many environmentalists and activists.

Yet, the centrality of inequality  to socio-ecological crises needs to be .  ; not limitless growth. The rising movements around the world are, in fact, against the rise of the 1%, a shorthand for inequality. Thomas Piketty鈥檚 , which has had world-wide acclaim, is on inequality. The MeToo Movement and Black Lives Matter are both about addressing inequality. This demand is theoretically sound. Widely endorsed by , , and , considering the ramifications of Maintaining status is one way of fleshing it out. Analysing the tendencies for  Catch Up, and reflecting on the effects of monopolising Privilege (three crucial indicators of inequality) on the environment can offer even more clarity.

Consider Maintaining Status. Inequality fosters consumerism. The wealthy seek to maintain their status. Temptations to buy more and more set in. When the world is unequal, binge purchases and consumption sustain unsustainable volumes of production meant for the wealthy. At the national level, such processes are quite well-known, but similar comments apply to global inequalities too. Status shapes global consumerism. Among the wealthy countries of the world, there is a race to show position: whether it is spending more on arms, going to space, or building more transportation systems. This desire to succour the leisure class, as , is widespread. However, it is especially pronounced among the very rich countries and the middle-income ones. Yet, maintaining it is bad for the environment. When such a practice becomes rampant, it sets in motion problematic forces of mimicry.

That is one way to explain why catching up is related to maintaining status. So long as inequality persists, the concern among the middle-class and some poorer countries is to seek catching up as progress. Often though, this maintenance of privilege gives world development organisations, usually located in the same wealthy nations, the power to impose these standards on the poorer nations. Catching up becomes development. With this dynamic in place, opportunistic pressures to pollute to similar levels as the wealthy lend themselves. In this process, polluter pays arguments are transformed. They become Western payments for nature, carbon sinks drilled in the Global South apparently save the planet.

Yet, this transfer of land from the South to the North, disguised as a way to ensure 鈥榗atch up鈥�, is, in fact, another way of cementing the monopoly of privilege. Globally, absentee landlord states  and their transnational corporations continue to monopolise the land commons in the Global South. Not only do they control the global value chains and the global commodity chains, they also control the downstream transport and petroleum industries. They make decisions and influence world mineral pricing. They manipulate the demand, and supply of such resources. They transport fossil fuels over long distances. After refinement, they return the waste products to the South. Significant pollution and dispossession arise from this inequality of ownership and control. Increasing rentierism, absentee ownership, dispossession, and systemic environmental accidents arise. These processes attest to the environmental pandemic that arises from unequal property relations.

Within nations, the concentration of land in the hands of a few raises serious concerns. The resulting rent increases generates unsustainable national transformation. Rental increases . Land concentration also explains widespread insecurities. In turn, uncertainties drive . This trend is concerning. Not only does the building sector, dominated by a small powerful hierarchy of transnational corporations and absentee estate developers, generate 30 per cent of global annual emissions, it also consumes .

These inequalities have become more complex with time. So have the ecological crises. Both are . These socio-ecological problems, in turn, create . They tear communities apart. Broken, society cannot be sustainable. When farms are replaced with fences and fences with gates, where the desire for rent drives the pursuit of land, and when more and more land is concentrated in few hands, what is needed is not just sustainability; but a just sustainability.

Beyond Limits to Growth

 The emphasis on growthmania as the central and only problem of sustainability has brought us far, but it can take us no further. Continuing to insist on it prioritises environmental sustainability over social and economic sustainability. Growing inequality and social stratification undermine environmental sustainability. Ecological justice suffers. Placing limits on inequality and stratification is, therefore, . For holistic and fundamental transformation, what is needed is not just sustainability but a just sustainability.

If there is any useful analytical lesson from COVID-19, it is that our  need to be holistic and our analysis . Without these transdisciplinary approaches and transformation in , we risk overlooking just sustainabilities and reifying environmentalism.

Thus, if more research is needed on COVID-19, it should not only be on finding a vaccine and empirically ascertaining its effects on economic growth. Although important, what is urgent is research on sustainability and COVID-19 within the context of limits to inequality.

Franklin Obeng-Odoom leads  research theme. He teaches in , and he is the author of .

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Drs. Kaisa Korhonen-Kurki, Michiru Nagatsu, Jussi T. Eronen, and Andreas Exner for excellent feedback. Voices for Sustainability team deserve special thanks for their patience and constructive suggestions.

Photos by  from . This post was first published on the blog.

By Jacob Assa and Cecilia Calderon

Unlike other epidemics or pandemics 鈥� such as tuberculosis, SARS, MERS or HIV/AIDS 鈥� COVID-19 has hit hardest at the world鈥檚 wealthiest countries. As of early June 2020, the 37 industrialized countries of the OECD accounted for 59% of all cases and 78% of deaths, even though they constitute less than 18% of the total population affected.

Looking at the pandemic鈥檚 effects in another way 鈥� using cases and deaths per million population 鈥� paints an even starker picture. OECD countries have a prevalence ratio of 2,890 cases per million and a mortality rate of 225 per million, compared with 869 cases and 51 deaths per million in the rest of the world. Furthermore, the case fatality ratio (CFR) 鈥� the ratio of deaths to cases 鈥� is also higher in the OECD (7.8%) than in the rest of the world (5.9%).

What can explain this phenomenon, the world鈥檚 richest countries impacted more than middle-income and poor countries?听 One explanation is that COVID-19 spreads faster in countries that are more integrated to the globalized economy, as the OECD members certainly are. A recent found that globalized countries have indeed experienced more cases per population, but less mortality.

We find this explanation incomplete. First, the extent of a country鈥檚 globalization may be masking other factors. And second, some of the most globalized countries have lower COVID-19 prevalence and mortality than countries more integrated into the global economy. For example, Germany has a higher KOF globalization index than the United states, but the latter has more than double the prevalence and mortality rates. Likewise, the UK is more globalized than Spain, but Spain has fared worse in cases per one million people.

Clearly something else is at play. One possible reason for the virus鈥檚 differential impact on countries is the relative structure of their health systems. In fact, a 2015 of tuberculosis (TB) rates in 99 countries found that cuts in public spending on healthcare and the privatization of the health sector were related to higher prevalence of TB. This was set against decades of privatization of health-care systems in developing countries, often encouraged by the World Bank and IMF.

However, the TB sample only included developing countries, while COVID-19 has struck across the entire world. We set out to find whether a similar difference in the financing structure of health care 鈥� private vs. public 鈥� had something to do with COVID-19 prevalence and mortality rates in countries at all different stages of development. We used data for 147 countries accounting for 93% of the world鈥檚 population, and spanning the five continents and all income levels.听

We ran several regression models for both COVID-19 prevalence 鈥� cases per million people 鈥� and mortality 鈥� deaths per million, and in each case the extent of private expenditure on health care had a large and positive relationship with the impact of the pandemic (see our full paper ).听

The first chart shows that, even when controlling for the level of income, the extent of urbanization, globalization and democracy, a 10% increase in private health expenditure results in a 4.85% increase in COVID-19 cases.听

The second chart shows that, controlling for the same variables, a 10% increase in private health expenditure results in a 6.91% increase in COVID-19 deaths. This is an average, and some countries perform worse (e.g. the United States in the top right corner) while some fare a little better (e.g. New Zealand). But the relationship is clear and statistically significant.听

For COVID-19 mortality we also looked at the proportion of people over 65 in the population. Since this is a high-risk group, we were not surprised to find that, on average, 10% increase in the percentage of older people results in a 1.18% increase in COVID-19 deaths.

While policymakers cannot change the demographic structure of the population very quickly, they do have control of policies such as cost-cutting and privatization, which also affect hospital capacity. We found that a 10% increase in the percentage of hospital beds per 1,000 people results in a 1.67% decrease in COVID-19 deaths. Some of the highest mortality rates are in the US, Italy and Spain (which have around 3 hospital beds per 1,000 people), whereas less privatized systems have a much higher ratio of hospital beds per people, e.g. Germany (8.2), South Korea (10.9), and Japan (13.4).

These findings suggest that short-term gains from privatization of health-care systems (such as cost-cutting and in some cases shorter waiting times at clinics) have to be weighed against long-term risks of lower capacity (in both equipment and staffing), less equitable coverage, lower adherence to medical standards and often over-prescription of antibiotics. In the case of COVID-19, the equity element may have played a large role, as uninsured people feeling ill are more likely to avoid costly testing or treatment, as well as less likely to be able to work from home, thus facilitating the spread of the virus.

While the most urgent task is coping with the pandemic at hand, it is not likely to be the last or even worst. Recent has linked the emergence of zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19 to increased pressure from human economies on nature, leading to declines in wildlife populations and thus a higher risk of animal-to-human transmission of such diseases. With this in mind, policy-makers need to urgently re-evaluate neoliberal policies such as privatization and commercialization of healthcare systems, if these are to become sustainable in the long-run.

Dr.听Jacob Assa, The New School for Social Research. He Tweets at听.

Cecilia Calderon, statistics specialist, United Nations Development Program.

The eclipse of neoliberalism in 2000s coincided with the so-called

Resource Nationalism as a State-led Development Strategy

It is not a coincidence that resource nationalism returned in mainstream political debates at the same time as emerging powers designed new industrial policies aimed at recalibrating state-market relations in favour of the former. With extraordinary high prices and rising demands for natural resources from China, domestic political configurations in resource economies appear to move towards reforms aimed at (1) , (2) extending the role of state in commodity production through a renewed role for , and (3) with multinational mining capital.

These policies are emblematic of a wider trend: the growing for industrial transformation in an era of governed by global lead firms. Despite the rhetoric on economic globalization, the as observed in the number of state-owned enterprises, the significant expenditure on , and the array of government-business partnerships in . State interventions are reconfigured not simply to reinforce the residual statist tendencies, but to actively construct and build strong ties with economic elites who can compete in a globalized international economy. Perhaps, more importantly, political elites are forging new social contracts with ordinary citizens to enhance the legitimacy of the state, whether in terms of actively supporting social welfare programmes (as in the case of many conditional cash transfers in Latin America), or by creating new avenues to engage with marginalised groups (for example, through participatory institutions and FPIC process).

Amidst the resource bonanza, development plans were set in motion centred around the exploitation of natural resources. For example, Brazil launched a programme focussed on heavy investments in the capital goods sector, notably in oil, gas and ship-building industries.

Several Latin American countries also introduced aimed at capitalising on high prices. Table 1 details the increasing role of natural resource rents in state revenues over the past twenty years.

Table 1: Public Revenues from non-renewable natural resources in percentages of GDP

Alongside attempts at adding value in mining and hydrocarbons, Latin American governments faced redistributive pressures from their political base. justified their resource extraction strategy as a necessary step for further income distribution and revitalization of manufacturing. While political citizenship in post-neoliberal Latin America is increasingly defined by redistributive politics, it also emphasised as a central feature of a contentious state-society relationship.

The Limits of the Resource Bonanza

It is now a widely held view that the Left-of-Centre governments successfully reduced poverty and extreme poverty (see Table 2), and although slow, inequality has begun to taper off (Figure 1). However, the data also confirm the fragility of the social achievements of Latin American governments 鈥� as the bonanza ended, so did the gains from poverty reduction. This points to several important shortcomings of resource-based strategies.

Figure 1 Gini Inequality Index in Latin America, 2002-2018

Source:

Most conspicuously, poverty gains may have created a in the productive economy. Finite domestic revenues have been subject to immense political competition for rent-seeking, and without a coherent industrial strategy, an export-led growth model based on commodities are likely to be fragile and is vulnerable from price swings.

This, then, leads to a gloomy conclusion. Resource-rich states, without the institutional capacity to design a productivist strategy to diversify their export base and to set out an ambitious multi-year development plan to upgrade their industrial sectors, are likely to suffer from the vicissitudes of international commodity markets. At worst, those without political consensus over governance 鈥� Venezuela under Maduro being the emblematic case 鈥� are likely to waste the opportunities for development through their strategic mining sectors. The broader lesson, I suspect, is that and are central to the success of developing countries advancing new strategies in an increasingly globalized international economy. Crucially, whenever crisis and uncertainty appear, the state as a stabilizing force becomes more prescient than ever.

Table 2: Poverty and Extreme Poverty in 18 Latin American Countries, 2002-2019 (in percentages)

Jewellord (Jojo) Nem Singh is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Science, Leiden University working听on the听political economy of development and democracy in Latin America and East听Asia. He tweets at .

The spread of the coronavirus epidemic around the world in the past few weeks has exposed not only differences in the lack of preparedness of various public health systems, but also differences in reactions to the crisis. Some governments imposed an early lockdown in their attempt to 鈥榝latten the curve鈥� while others have taken a more gradual approach, proceeding from travel restrictions through limits on non-essential businesses to shelter-in-place regimes.听

As the epicenter of the pandemic shifts from Asia to Europe and the U.S, however, some reactions stand out among the rest in their utter disregard for human life. Federal and state officials in the U.S. have first downplayed the threat two months before it arrived in the country, as well as refused offers for help from the World Health Organization. Now, as the curve in the U.S. is about to get steeper (see the surgeon general鈥檚 , top levels of government are considering scaling back the moderate measures that have been taken so far, with a view to return to normal activity within a few weeks. While blaming China for not controlling the virus early enough, some officials are contemplating consciously allowing their own citizens to experience a much worse spread of infection and death than China has seen.听

One clear example of this misguided and dangerous ideology can be seen in the pressure put on the U.S. government by corporate lobbyists not to activate the – which enables the executive branch to order corporations to manufacture the direly-needed medical supplies for testing and treating the virus. Large swaths of the political elite, instead, are relying on the private sector鈥檚 voluntary offers to produce such goods. Worse, these same politicians are aching to get the economy back to normal, so as to boost the stock market and their own ratings at the same time. The听 lieutenant-governor of Texas even went as far as suggesting that older citizens – the group most prone to dying from the virus – would gladly themselves in the interest of getting the economy moving again.

How can this idolizing of the economy over the polity – and citizens鈥� very survival – be possible in a democracy? Those in听 power are clearly acting in their own self-interest rather than in that of the public. Most people are probably scratching their heads for an explanation of how this could be happening in a country previously considered the beacon of freedom. A straightforward explanation is that the U.S. has not been a real democracy for a while, if by that term one means enacting policies in the interest of the voting majority. While it had never topped the EIU Democracy Index, the U.S. has from 鈥榝ull democracy鈥� to 鈥榝lawed democracy鈥� in 2018.听

But this decline has been in the works since 1980. From that time, economic 鈥榝reedoms鈥� have increased in the U.S., as corporations, consumers, investors and wealthy individuals have benefitted more than ever from improvements in technology, healthcare, education and other aspects of living in a rich society. The majority of the population, however, has been doing worse, as evident by stagnating or declining real wages, increasing inequalities in various dimensions, and even a .听

In short, the U.S. is only a nominal democracy, in that anyone of voting age can select candidates for local, state and national office and also run for such office. However, the two-party system, coupled with the unparalleled impact of money in political campaigns (made worse by the Citizens United decision of the supreme court) have deflated the power of electoral democracy, since both major parties in the U.S. accept enormous donations from corporations, and are also lobbied much more by firms than by non-profit organisations or individuals (as the latter two groups do not have nearly the same financial resources as private firms). The expansion of economic freedom then – at least of this sort – has come at the expense of political freedom and representation of the public interest, which is now merely a pretense.听

While the US had both political and economic freedoms – at least immediately after WWII – it has since sacrificed its citizens鈥� political freedoms for more corporate freedom. The US case shows that what has long been known as Laissez-Faire – leaving the economy to its own devices – works to diminish political freedoms and make democracy a sham.听

To return to the virus, the U.S. may end up in a much worse place than other, poorer countries. Its extreme neoliberal policies of the past four decades have weakened its public health system, while also brainwashing millions of voters to see the government as the enemy. Thus, one of听 the richest countries on earth faces shortages of everything from masks, testing equipment, ventilators and even medical staff. Laissez-Faire, in the extreme, means Laissez-Mourir (let die): more people are left to die as public services have been savaged by years of austerity.听

As the chart below shows (using World Bank data), the U.S. was leading the world in 1960 with 9.2 beds per 1000 people (compared to 8.7 in the OECD, the group of industrialized countries). By the second decade of the 21st century, this ratio dropped to 3 (a decrease of two-thirds) in the U.S. while the OECD was averaging about 4. Meanwhile, poor and emerging countries have increased their hospital capacity from 1.4 in 1970 to 2.4 in 2011.

As data on the spread of the virus is still being collected, it is instructive to compare hospital capacity across countries. The chart below shows that more unequal countries have, ceteris paribus, less beds per 1,000 people. But the link is neither perfect nor deterministic. While the U.S and China had similar average levels of inequality of the period 2011-2018 (41.2 and 40.1, respectively), China has 4 beds per 1,000 while the U.S. has 2.9. Serbia and Russia are only slightly more equal (with Gini coefficients of around 39 for both), but have 5.7 and 8.4 beds per 1,000 people, respectively. Japan and Korea, which were earlier the epicenter of the pandemic, coped very effectively with the crisis, partly since they have 13.4 and 10.9 beds per 1,000 people, respectively. In other words, these two countries have 3-4 times more hospital capacity than the U.S., despite their per capita income being about third lower (even using PPPs).

Hospital beds are not the only factor in a country鈥檚 ability to respond to a pandemic, but they do play a role, especially when more people start getting infected. As of Friday, 27 March, the infection rate in the US was than many other countries which were affected earlier:

There is another sense in which Laissez-Faire is literally deadly. Leaving the fate of the environment and the planet in the hands of the market has produced a threshold-level catastrophe, and even now, with only a few years left – if any – to take action on climate change, the U.S. is in denial about its very existence. And it鈥檚 not just future generations who will suffer. Recent research has the spread of deadly viruses to humans鈥� ever increasing encroachment onto previously untouched natural environments. When species in those areas go extinct, disease vectors such as COVID-19 find new homes in the bodies of humans.听

This double-danger of Laissez-Faire – hurting people, destroying the environment and thus hurting even more people in the name of economic growth – is not new to many developing countries, where decades of Washington Consensus policies have ravaged social safety nets, commodified the environment, and emptied democracy of its content as elected government were powerless against (or alternatively, colluding with) multinational corporations. Ironically, global corporations appeared first as instruments of colonization (e.g. the British and Dutch East India companies), but during the industrial revolution came home to roost, 鈥榗olonizing鈥� working classes in the rich countries鈥�.

Maybe now, as the dangers of infectious disease, social breakdown, and even economic meltdown occur in rich countries, people there may finally take notice. Austerity – the latest form of Laissez-Faire in the North – has hollowed countries鈥� ability to not only support the vulnerable in normal times, but even to save their lives during a pandemic. And while it is true that the viral infections do not discriminate by income, the poorest are most vulnerable and least equipped to cope with them, also in rich countries.听

The virus may be blind to political beliefs, but not vice versa. It may be a coincidence that so-called 鈥榬ed-states鈥� in the U.S. have reacted more slowly and with less concern than 鈥榖lue states鈥� to the virus, and some are already contemplating going back to normal, or that republican senators seem to be more affected by it than their democratic colleagues.

However, the poor and middle-classes of both parties will likely suffer far more than their politicians. The same happens during wars, where the bulk of ordinary soldiers are drawn not from the top but from the bottom and middle of the social hierarchy. But World-War II showed not only the horrors of war, but also the enormous potential of collective action, including the boost it gave to the U.S. economy, the disappearance of unemployment, the demonstration of women鈥檚 equal ability to work, as well as the virtue of balancing political and economic freedoms, which is the only stable path to real democracy.听

The recent virus is a tragedy given the lives already lost and those who will die next, the economic hardship and rising unemployment, and the complete disruption of a way of life once taken for granted. But it is also an opportunity to remember that pushing private, economic freedoms to their limit is not without a cost. They come at the extent of political freedoms, public goods such as health and safety, and ironically – even at the cost of long-run economic well-being itself. Just as the stock-market crash of 1929 helped elect FDR and rebalance economic and political freedoms – even before the outbreak of WWII – we can only hope that the economic slowdown currently affecting the U.S. and other countries will shake voters of all political stripes out of their fairy-tale belief in the market as a guarantor of any freedoms – economic or political – in the long run.听

A pandemic, like fascism, cannot be priced in by markets. It is not an externality to be internalized by a tax. It cannot be traded between those with different 鈥榚ndowments鈥� of the disease. It takes a society to fight a war, and as several countries have already shown during this crisis, Maggie Thatcher was wrong: there is such as a thing as society. While we need to be cautious not to to curtail political freedoms, we cannot sacrifice ourselves to the short-term 鈥榚conomic freedoms鈥� of a minority. If we do, we are all dead, even before the long-run.

By Dr. Jacob Assa, The New School for Social Research. He Tweets at .

Photo: Emergency hospital during influenza epidemic, Camp Funston, Kansas in 1918.

In recent decades, market-based solutions such as financial inclusion have become more popular in developed countries to reduce inequalities and boost wealth and incomes of the poor. There is no better example of this than the recent thrust of low-income families, women, ethnic minorities, and the young into the subprime mortgage lending expansion in the USA since the early 2000s. Higher access to formal loans for these households was argued to enable them to climb the magical ladder of homeownership and achieve their American Dream. But as we know, the picture didn鈥檛 turn out to be quite so rosy.

10 years since the Great Recession, many families are not seeing recovery as the impact of the crisis was substantially harsher for the subprime borrowers (Young 2010; Henry, Reese, and Torres 2013). Financial inclusion in the subprime period turned out to be predatory. In this post, I explore how things went wrong when policy makers failed to account for the institutional conditions in the US economy, which led to dramatically different experiences of financial inclusion across social classes, gender, race, and generations.

Financial inclusion meets institutions

It is well known that the richer you are, the more access you have to different forms of wealth. Ownership of assets allows you to earn returns as their value appreciates over time, while access to mortgages provides a more effective help in building up wealth than unsecured types of debt [1] (as argued by Williams 2016 and shown by Wolff 2014).

But it is simplistic to say that just by providing access to certain types of wealth, low-income families can automatically improve their financial situation. The Great Recession has shown that while access to mortgages and homeownership is vital for improving one鈥檚 position in the income distribution, families whose wealth is dominated by housing are more volatile to economic shocks. This is because changes in house prices swing the value of household wealth beyond the control of individual families. Instead, house prices 鈥� and so household wealth 鈥� are largely determined by institutional conditions in the economy.

Economic institutions are reflected in what kind of incentives financial institutions have when extending loans to households, and what types of policy objectives are chosen by the government. Modern financial institutions are more often than not interested in profit 鈥� not altruism 鈥� and so have incentives to give credit to those who cannot afford it, knowing that they are guaranteed to recover part of their investment from loan collateral (through home foreclosures) or from government bailouts. And for decades, policies have favoured financial investors and capital owners at the expense of workers, as privatisation of public services and liberalisation of labour markets have led to real wage stagnation and rising costs of living.

One size doesn鈥檛 fit all

Given economic institutions, not all families will benefit to the same extent from increasing their ownership of wealth provided by profit-oriented markets. I explore these potential differences in my upcoming paper (whose draft is available as a working paper). In the paper, I look at how patterns of wealth ownership impact on households鈥� position in the income distribution, comparing different income, gender, racial, and generational groups [2]. I am also interested in whether the subprime lending expansion and the Great Recession changed these relationships in any substantial way.

I find that there are indeed significant differences across different households in the payoffs from increasing their ownership of certain types of wealth [3]. Households in the top 10% of the income distribution and those headed by baby boomers, Whites, and men, benefited significantly more than their counterparts from putting more wealth in profitable assets such as business equity, retirement wealth, real estate other than main residence, and high-yielding financial instruments. What鈥檚 more, households owning more of their wealth in these profitable types of assets experienced a faster rebound, or even increase, of the size of these positive spill-overs after the 2007 crisis.

Conversely, in the subprime period and after the Great Recession households who put more of their wealth in main residence and mortgages experienced declines in their position in the income distribution. In addition, Black and Latino households and millennials relied more on getting into excessive indebtedness to improve their position in the income distribution. In contrast, these households, as well as for those in the poorest 20% and households headed by women, were more dependent on unsecured debt, which is more expensive to repay compared to mortgages.

The results show that predatory inclusion of vulnerable households into the financial and housing market prior to the Great Recession did not generate equal improvements in their position in the income distribution. Different households experienced significantly different gains from owning certain types of wealth than others, which sheds critical light on the existing 鈥渙ne size fits all鈥� practices of financial inclusion.

Towards a better policy

The study of how economic institutions interact with financial outcomes for households is riddled with data problems. With the currently available data, it is nearly impossible to directly link these two levels of analysis. While data collected from household surveys are fairly representative of the population, they鈥檙e prone to participants mis-reporting their finances or refusing to respond at all. On the other hand, tax data provide less subjective information, but they only capture a limited picture of household finances because of tax avoidance and evasion and the fact that they exclude families who don鈥檛 have enough income to pay taxes. In both cases, data need to undergo substantial manipulation to provide meaningful information, which prevents researchers from detecting objective causal mechanisms.

But data problems are not an excuse to neglect the issue that institutional conditions matter for how different families experience financial inclusion. Policies aiming to improve financial wellbeing of families and individuals in a sustainable way need to go beyond universal prescriptions delivered through profit-oriented markets. One size doesn鈥檛 fit all. Even if some less well-off households were to increase their ownership of assets and debt provided by private markets and the formal financial sector, not all of them would see equal benefits. As evidenced by the subprime crisis, effective wealth-building policy cannot simply delegate distribution of economic resources to private markets without accounting for how access and stability of household wealth are shaped by broader economic institutions.

Notes

[1] Unsecured debt includes credit cards, student debt, car loans, and other consumer loans. Mortgages face lower repayment rates than unsecured debt, and contribute to building of housing equity.

[2] In the latest version of the paper, I compare households in the bottom 20% and the top 10% of income distribution (net of debt payments), households headed by single women and by single men, households headed by Blacks or Latinos and by Whites or other ethnicities, and households headed by baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) and millennials (born between 1980 and 1995).

[3] Feel free to get in touch to talk about these results in more detail. The published version of the paper will be available in the next few months.

References

Henry, B., Reese, J., and Torres, A. 2013. Wasted Wealth. How the Wall Street Crash Continues to Stall Economic Recovery and Deepen Racial Inequity in America, Alliance for a Just Society.

Williams, R.B. 2016. The Privileges of Wealth: Rising Inequality and the Growing Racial Divide, Abingdon, Routledge.

Wolff, E.N. 2014. 鈥淗ousehold wealth trends in the United States, 1983-2010鈥�, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 21-43.

Young, B. 2010. 鈥淭he Gendered Dimension of Money, Finance and the Subprime Crisis鈥�. In: Bauhardt, C. and Caglar, G., eds., Gender and Economics. Feministische Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, Wiesbaden, VS Verlag f眉r Sozialwissenschaften.

Hanna Szymborska is a Lecturer in Economics at the Open University, Milton Keynes. . Photo by .

This blog post is a part of the blog series听Inclusive听or Exclusive Global Development? Scrutinizing Financial Inclusion,听in which a new perspective on financial inclusion is published every听听of February, March and April 2019.

A decade has passed since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) which seems an apt time to begin talking about the event that has pushed the concept of financial education to the core of global policymaking debates. Despite its growing popularity today, financial education has existed in the premise of global policymaking for the past few decades. The benefits of financial education seem endless; poor national financial literacy levels have been blamed for adverse socioeconomic effects such as high national household debt and/or a general irrational exuberance in financial consumption behaviour (see e.g.

As in 2002:

鈥淔inancial education can equip consumers with the fundamental knowledge required to choose among the myriad of products and providers in the financial services industry. It can also help to inculcate individuals with the financial knowledge necessary to create household budgets, initiate savings plans, and make strategic investment decisions. Such financial planning can help families meet near-term obligations and maximize their longer-term well-being and is especially valuable for populations that have traditionally been under-served by our financial system.鈥�

Although the benefits of financial education have been celebrated, there are plenty of individuals who have not been so convinced by its rhetoric. Toni Williams () and Lauren Willis () for example, argued that financial education advocates tend to idealistically envision that having financially-literate citizens is the answer to every socio-economic issue that governments face. Financially literate citizens are assumed to be more knowledgeable in accessing finance, which can simultaneously resolve social issues such as poverty, high household debt, financial instability, and even the growth of nations! The question to be asked here is does it all work? Can providing financial education really assist in financial inclusion efforts and create the financial stability that governments so badly want?

The Case of Malaysia: Financial Education as Nation-building?

In my recent presentation at the (IGDC) at the University of York, I demonstrated empirical evidence that shed some light on these questions. Using a case study of Malaysia, I observed financial education efforts as an extension of what could be viewed as neoliberal inclusion, in which access to financial markets and activities are encouraged in an effort to make citizens more responsible, autonomous, and individualised over their own financial and personal security. In my research, I spoke to 13 high-ranking officials from Malaysia who are directly involved with financial education policymaking, to explore the issues surrounding the development and implementation of Malaysia鈥檚 national financial education strategy (including finance ministers and officials at the national central bank).

In Malaysia鈥檚 case, financial education policymaking has been shaped by explicit influences from transnational policymaking institutions. This includes the OECD鈥檚 International Network on Financial Education (INFE) through their development of practical tools and strategies for financial education and the Alliance of Financial Inclusion, in which Malaysia is a key member and a case study for best practice in using financial education for financial inclusion. It raises the question of whether developing countries are implementing certain types of policies in the pressure to legitimise their membership and diplomacy with transnational institutions; rather than with a meaningful consideration of what their society really needs. Additionally, in Malaysia鈥檚 case, financial education is seen as valuable in the achievement of nation-building goals. This has been identified in the Financial Sector Blueprint (2011-2020), a ten-year strategic document that outlines the means to expand the financial system in line with the goal of turning Malaysia into a developed economy by the year 2020. Through this document, financial education is seen as an important tool that would allow more citizens to become involved in the financial system in a way that would ensure its growth and stability. Furthermore, being financially educated is seen as an important drive for Malaysian citizens to have more economic and employment opportunities as well as to better-manage their money in a way that would ensure their financial security. This is supported by the message given by the former Governor of Malaysia鈥檚 central bank during the launch of Malaysia鈥檚 national financial education strategy:

鈥淔inancial education has never been more important than in today’s environment. Participating effectively in the financial system can improve the economic wellbeing of individuals and businesses. Financial education is therefore key so that members of our society will benefit from the financial system and from the new technologies that are transforming our financial landscape.鈥� (Aziz, 2015b)

The above quote demonstrates the manner in which financially educated citizens are seen as important to the transformation and development of the country鈥檚 financial system. However, the success of the Malaysian case of financial education can be problematized by the absence of evidence听to support听any correlation between citizens鈥� participation in the financial system with both households鈥� financial stability and national economic growth. The usage of financial education for financial inclusion to resolve multiple issues (financial market growth and financial stability for nation-building objectives and financial security of citizens) results in a lack of meaningful understanding of what financial education and financial inclusion mean to Malaysia. Critics argue, for example, that the government鈥檚 efforts are a misrecognition of what citizens need, as they do not address the issue that poor financial planning could be due to dynamic changes in the lives of the poor, conditioned by the government鈥檚 decisions such as pension reforms, subsidy reforms, and the introduction of new Goods-and-Services Taxes, and inflation.

Financial Education: Deepening Inequality in Malaysia?

My work in Malaysia sheds light on the disconnect and contradiction between the Malaysian government鈥檚 aims to disseminate financial education and the Malaysian society鈥檚 needs . The idea that providing knowledge alone might empower citizens financially, despite their differences in income levels, is an idealistic optimism that has yet to be supported by evidence. Even a former finance minister of Malaysia noted in an interview with me that democratic access to financial skills without a systematic and equitable income distribution strategy might further deepen the income inequality that is prevalent in a country, along class lines or urban-rural divisions. My interview with Muhammed Abdul Khalid, who wrote the best-selling , further sheds light on the issues faced by developing countries when legitimising policy recommendations by transnational policymaking institutions, some of which are listed above. When financial policies are implemented without localising and addressing a country鈥檚 entrenched socioeconomic issues, the benefits might serve financial markets more than citizens themselves.

References

Abdul Khalid, M. (2015). MPH Publications.

Greenspan, A. (2002). ‘,’ The Futurist听36(4), 37鈥�41.

Williams, T. (2007). ‘,’听Law & Policy 29(2), 226鈥�256.

Willis, L. E. (2008). ‘,’ Iowa Law Review, 94, 197鈥�285.

Syahirah Abdul Rahman is a PhD student at the Alliance Manchester Business School.听听Photo: by Naim Fadil.

This blog post is a part of the blog series听Inclusive or Exclusive Global Development? Scrutinizing Financial Inclusion,听in which a new perspective on financial inclusion is published every听听of February, March and April 2019.