Josh Ryan-Collins is a researcher in the Business, Finance and Economics team at nef.
After the storm: what will replace the neoliberal consensus?
The financial crisis which erupted almost two years ago has led to the biggest shake up in economic policy since the Oil Crisis of the 1970s. Neoliberal economics lies in tatters, with the UK Conservative party dismissing the notion of the ‘utility-maximising rational actor’ as a fantasy and Martin Wolf of the FT pronouncing the end of the dream of global free market capitalism. The question is what will come next.
Sadly, there are few signs of a new approach which takes seriously the ‘triple crunch’ of the financial, environmental and energy crises. Rather, governments are turning back to tried and tested state-led growth strategies to reflate national economies, pumping liquidity into credit markets and creating new or bringing forward existing public spending plans. In other words, there has been a return to post-war Keynesianism – the doctrine that the state could and should regulate the market and step in to boost demand whenever required. This thinking lies at the heart of Obama’s $787 billion fiscal stimulus package, as well of those of Europe and China. China is embarking on what is possibly the biggest Keynesian experiment in history, with the government attempting to create a welfare state virtually overnight so as to maintain demand as well as pumping billions of yuan into mainly state owned industries, as Newsnight’s Paul Mason recently revealed.
Aside from the fact that the proportion of this new funding that will be spent upon green investment is rather small (very small in the case of the UK), there are bigger questions about whether this whole approach will prevent another, bigger financial crisis and help us move towards to the low carbon, low throughput ‘steady-state’ economy required to prevent catastrophic climate change.
As Walden Bellow, the Phillipino intellectual and activist, points out in a recent article, today’s crisis requires us to move beyond Keynesian demand management at the national level to address global problems of inequality, overproduction and over-consumption. For Bellow:
“The challenge to economics at this point is raising the consumption levels of the global poor with minimal disruption of the environment, while radically cutting back on environmentally damaging consumption or overconsumption in the North. All the talk of replcaing the bankrupt American consumer with a Chinese peasant engaged in American-style consumption as the engine of global demand is both foolish and irresponsible.”
These are issues nef has addressed in our interdependence reports but currently they are not even on the ‘any other business’ agendas of the finance ministries of the world’s great powers. Rather, we are seeing a return to a ‘Growth as Usual’ policy which flies in the face of global inequalities and serious attempts at a transformation to a low carbon economy. It is about time that economists began to look at some of Keynes’ less well known policies, such as that economies should be primarily concerned to consume only what they are able to produce, outlined in his essay on “National Self-Sufficiency“. Globalisation, in particular the globalisation of capital flows, is a major part of the reason we are in this mess – a bit of de-globalisation will be required to get us out of it.
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23 July, 2009 at 8:37 am
greendealmanchester
This is fine so far as it goes. However it is essential to address two issues.
1) It is capital accumulation that drives economic growth. Capitalism always produces contradictions and hence crises – up to now it has been infinitely flexible and overcome them, but now it is hitting the limits of hte ‘earth economy’ on which its production economy is based.
Is this the final contradiction?
2) Who is the protagonist here – obviously it isn’t the industrial proletariat as suggested by Marx and Engels – although they are still an element – especially where the Capital in the core countries has outsourced its production to China etc. But there is a need to identify the new and effective collective protagonist and indeed its leadership.
So the NEF’s rather Fabian ‘tell and hope’ strategy for change is just insufficient to the task involved.
See my “Sustainability: utopian and scientific‘ for a more detailed argument on these lines.
Mark Burton