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.