Читать книгу The Case for a New Bretton Woods - Kevin P. Gallagher - Страница 8

Financial interests were noticeable by their absence from the Bretton Woods conference. That was no accident. Disciplining the behavior of finance capital was seen, by the architects of the conference, as key to the stability of the post-war system. But those interests resented the constraints on their activities and were quick to push back and sow seeds of discontent in the years immediately following the conference. New coalitions were established to finance political parties, candidates, and an apparatus of experts that pushed for a revival of classical liberalism, first in national capitals and then at the international institutions themselves (Blyth 2002; Gallagher 2015). The overarching philosophy is now referred to as “neoliberalism,” which pushes for unregulated markets and individual freedoms as primary ends, arguing that “free trade,” “free enterprise,” and the unbridled movement of capital are the only guarantees of a healthy economy and widespread prosperity.

These efforts achieved some early success, but not enough to reverse the ideological tide in support of social solidarity and interventionism that had emerged from the wartime experience and continued to animate policy discussions over the following three decades. They began to yield more bountiful returns from the early 1980s with the abandonment in advanced countries of full employment, the privatization of state-owned assets, and the deregulation of financial markets, with further gains as these measures were adopted and spread by the Bretton Woods institutions.

The resulting “liberal international order,” often lauded as “rules-based,” now serves gargantuan and increasingly footloose firms in their endless pursuit of higher rents in heavily concentrated markets across the globe. The result is a polarized world economy in which instability and insecurity have become the norm for more and more households in rich and poor countries alike.

There are three pictures of what the neoliberal economic order now looks like that we think will help illuminate the scale of the problem and the urgent action that is needed. The first is what has become known as the “Elephant Curve,” designed by the former World Bank economist Branko Milanovic. Figure 1.1 reproduces that figure, showing how the top 1 percent of the global income spectrum has captured 27 percent of total growth since 1980, while the bottom 50 percent captured just 12 percent over the same period – and the fact that the latter amount was gained by developing countries is largely explained by the rise of China and India. The middle classes in the United States and Europe, and the vast majority of the world’s poor, have felt their incomes squeezed.

Figure 1.1 The Elephant Curve: Global Income Distribution and Real Income Growth, 1980–2016

Source: World Inequality Report 2020

The second picture is a figure we created for an earlier report and dubbed “The Crocodile Graph.” Shaped like the jagged mouth of that rapacious reptile, this figure exhibits the top 2,000 multinational corporations’ profit in terms of percentage point change of GDP, versus the global labor share of income.

The World Inequality Lab estimates that since 1980 inequality has risen or remained extremely high nearly everywhere in the global economy, with some of the sharpest rates of increase occurring in India and China and among emerging-market and developing countries, showing that even in the places where larger aggregate growth has occurred it is not shared across the population (World Inequality 2020).

The third picture is the Weather, Climate, and Catastrophe Index. The twenty-first century has been marked by climate-related natural catastrophes that have posed great economic risks to the world economy, and the risks are rising each year. There has been an increased incidence of floods, droughts, heatwaves, and fires globally that has cost hundreds of billions of dollars on an annual basis. The price tag for these events has been upwards of $6 trillion in this century. Just one event in Dominica in 2017 caused over 200 percent of GDP in economic damage, while the cost for just the first half of 2021 was $298 billion, showing that the climate crisis is bringing major economic costs as we speak.

Figure 1.2 The Crocodile Graph: Top 2,000 Transnational Corporations’ Profit and Global Labor Income Share (Percentage Point Change of GDP)

Source: UNCTAD 2017

Figure 1.3 Economic Losses from Extreme Weather

Source: Climate, Weather, and Catastrophe Insight 2021