Surprise! Unsustainable ideals yield unsustainable realities

The delusion of perpetual growth is hard for neoliberalists to relinquish. Economic analysts often point to a season in time where everything was going according to plan, until one stiff breeze brought down the entire house of cards.

The Economist opens their article with a nod to the growth initiated by the Industrial Revolution in developed countries, a trend that only just ended in 1995 according to them. If you found the use of the word "delusion" too harsh, I'd offer this quote:

"Globalisation’s critics will tell you that capitalism’s excesses and the global financial crisis should define this era. They are wrong. It was defined by its miracles."

I surmise these "miracles" are due to the massive wealth transfers carried out under the guise of free trade and I think it is disingenuous to celebrate all the benefits of liberalism without addressing the shortcuts (e.g. human rights violations, unchecked pollution) taken to achieve such remarkable dividends. The fact that a lot of these shortcuts have been outlawed, or are at least frowned upon, in the present day says a lot about the true viability of classical development models. Furthermore, setting aside the utter hypocrisy of denouncing lucrative but obsolete practices on moral grounds, its genuinely nonsensical to ignore the cyclical pattern of economic crises. Mark Fisher describes the boom and bust cycle, and its consequential mental disorders, thusly, "With its ceaseless boom and bust cycles, capitalism is itself fundamentally and irreducibly bi-polar, periodically lurching between hyped-up mania (the irrational exuberance of 'bubble thinking') and depressive come-down. (The term 'economic depression' is no accident, of course)." Though the term irrational exuberance is typically applied to 1990s investors, I'd submit that all defenders of the market economy exhibit the trait.

"To judge what has gone wrong, first ask what previously went right."

Again, a tunnel vision approach to the free market does not preclude the harm done in pursuit of economic expansion. It is theorized that new countries entering the world economy will experience a catch-up effect where initial growth is explosive because they will experience higher returns from investment. However, the resultant cultural, ecological, and social disruptions remain unacknowledged. One of the biggest challenges to forming development theories is the failure to take nonmonetary factors into account.

The failure of catch-up theory is being disproven as growth in developing countries has begun to stall and reverse much more rapidly than in developed countries. Rather than digging more deeply into the specific causes for the breakdown, the author sticks to the common rhetoric that implies that poor countries choose poverty. "It should not be a surprise that development has stalled as governments have increasingly rejected the principles that powered a golden era. Nobody will suffer more as a result than the world’s poor." I can't agree more with the latter statement. As has historically been the case, the people at the margins of the global economy often contribute the most and receive the least in return. As long as development continues to overlook the human element as people, with their own individualized definitions of well-being and not variables to be analyzed, models will continue to fail.

Toward a New Normal

    According to this Foreign Affairs article by Political Science Professor Tanisha Fazal, norms need to be maintained to avoid "a world in which everyone is worse off." What are these norms you ask? Fazal writes, "International norms are guidelines that tell states which actions are and are not appropriate and provide metrics against which to judge others' conduct." In other words, social norms for countries are the only things regulating how states behave on the world stage. This can be considered a textbook example of idealism in action. Rather than cementing legal frameworks to regulate international cooperation and conflict resolution, states settle for the equivalent of playground rules.

This is Regina George observing the chaos she instigated as she prepares to claim victimhood herself. Sound like any countries you know?

    This week's reading on is Latin America. The region, like many other in the global south, is often at the mercy of more developed nations and are forced to contend with the fallout from their decisions. Even within the Latin America, larger nations like Venezuela are able to bully smaller nations Like Guyana. Despite these realities, the author argues that norms are not purely a function of power citing these conflicts as evidence of the need for reinforcement of post-Cold war norms. Latin American scholars have agreed, in a way, as they advocate for the revival of non-nonalignment policies. However, I would argue that their use of international courts suggests that norms are not enough to enforce responsible behavior or yield productive resolutions.

Doesn't it just give you pause?

    Fazal offers the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as "the foundation for today's human rights regime" and a powerful norm that remains in affect to this day. I would contend that this foundation, agreed to by a loose collection of prominent yet powerless people, perfectly illustrates again how useless such idealistic agreements are in the real world. The greatest benefit of these types of agreements is the specificity of the enumerated definitions which enables nations to tout other country's violations as more egregious than their own.

    Tradition is not a reason to remain stagnant and inflexible in a rapidly globalizing, overwhelmingly diverse world. The days of international superpowers, like the days of monarchies before them, are drawing to a close and the only question now is whether or not the transition will be peaceful and orderly. Rather than cling to norms, relics of a bygone age, nations would be better off leaning into developing new cooperative institutions that are fully equipped to enforce violations of international statutes.

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