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Jose Luis Coraggio: Another Economy is Happening |
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Page 21 of 27
The United Nations has duly noted the demise of historically existing paragons of development for poor countries to emulate, and of the Rostovian ideal of economic growth, and has endorsed sustainable human development, defined more as a set of ethical ideals than as the imitation of any particular concrete reality. (48) Coraggio’s proposals for strengthening the people’s economy can be read as proposals for taking concrete steps to achieve sustainable human development. He advocates frankly acknowledging that continuing old-style development policies, far from being the only alternative, is no alternative at all. Promoting the growth of the entrepreneurial economy, even under the most optimistic projections of savings rates and investment rates, will not provide good jobs for the existing backlogs of the unemployed and the precariously employed, much less provide good jobs for the younger generations joining the labor force each year. (49)
Neoliberals, in contrast, continue to speak as though solving the problems of poverty through the sustained growth of the entrepreneurial economy, (accompanied to be sure by increased governmental attention to health, education, and social safety nets) were a live option. They make a number of arguments to prove their case, including citing the East Asian tigers as evidence in their favor. (50)
Radicals and mavericks read the East Asia data differently. They underscore the contributions of planning, comparatively low levels of income inequality, land reform, and public education to achieving high levels of prosperity They are also likely to ask embarrassing questions like whether anybody really wants to live in a highly authoritarian state like Singapore, and whether prosperity in all four cases has been bought at the price of liberty, and why South Korea still has no social safety net, and whether prosperity will last, or whether today’s prosperity will appear in a longer historical perspective to have been a boom that was followed by a bust. (51). They sometimes cite African cases where neoliberal free market fundamentalism has accompanied abysmal levels of poverty as a counter-empirical proof, one that proves that free market growth oriented policies lead to failure. (52)
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