A review of Robert Wade's new book, Economic Justice in an Unfair World. A lot of faults in the essay, including - among others - the assumption that academics who write on globalization and international development hardly ever do ethics. In many ways, whether explicitly or not, that is precisely what discussions of globalization and development are about. But my own world of this kind of work is comprised of plenty of academics who do explicitly ethical work. In fact, that starting assumption allows the reviewer at least - perhaps even Wade? - to overlook a long tradition of complex thinking about ethical issues - economic justice, etc. - at the level of globalization and international development. Political thought since 1971, for instance, has been dominated by at least some sort of dialogue if not direct confrontation with Rawls' hugely influential A Theory of Justice, which is precisely an argument about the just distribution of economic goods (based on a just distribution of "primary social goods"). The limitation of the starting assumption appears even in Wade's own view of liberal internationalism and of the view of states as ethical agents. Nothing new there.
As for more substantial matters, I'll leave this to you.
Thanks to SC@MD for the link via email.
2 comments:
How do you view the Millenium Goals process? An article in the new Dissent places it in an anti-World Bank framework, a neo-liberal response to the Banks failure. Is it a means to privitize the process even further, to make development lending even less transperant and democratic?
The MDGs, in my view, are important as big, overarching ideals. But they're so big that their practical content can be filled in all sorts of different ways, including those that simply reinforce neoliberal policies of privatization.
But the Bank works on this too, and one of the key notions coming out of the Johannesburg Summit on sustainability in 2002 was "Type II Agreements," which is essentially a call to develop even more ties with private business in achieving sustainability goals (and the MDGs).
I'm mixed on this. It's clear that private business has to be involved if any of the MDGs are going to be achieved (and what "success" looks like is also pretty vague). On the other hand, this very impulse may conflict with striving towards greater democracy and transparency.
I think this kind of tension is one of the most interesting areas for studying what to do about democratic development, environmental well-being, etc. The biggest obstacle, in my view, is the economic and rational choice logic underlying how policy-making is even conceived. And the MDG world is a world of that logic, from what I can tell.
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