The Landscape of Global Austerity by Robert Pollin talks about how living standards for everyone today are well above what any one ever seamed possible hundreds of years ago. In the 1900 the life span of some of the wealthiest people was only 60 years. From the 1940’s- to the 1960’s the government was promoting economic growth and increasing equality. Because this was during the cold war state socialism was the most influential and also the most contested we dominated economic thinking china Asia and many other countries. The government in these countries owned the entire means to production and their for the means for assets were filtered through the government. States with high socialist governments tried to keep high employment and equality in the handing out of what it controlled. Income, health care, housing and educational opportunities.
In Latin America they tried an approach called import-substituting industrialization and this was where developing countries should strengthen their ability to produce and manufacture goods for their own markets rather than exporting it and always using imported goods which are more expensive. This would benefit the entire country because local growers and buyers would get more money and all of the money would stay with in that place circulating. With all of these ideas their was lots of things that did not work out.
He marks the 1980’s as the point to transition out of the post world war II era of the development state policies and the ascendancy of neoliberalism. By the end of the 1990’s china had still not adopted neoliberal policies. The overall growth rate and per capita growth rate were significantly higher in the developmental state era than they were in the neoliberal era. But in china the growth rates were higher in the neoliberal era. The average increase in overall income in the poor and middle income countries just barley stayed ahead of population growth.
Economic growth in most developing countries has slowed substantially and income distribution has become more unequal their fro poverty in developing countries has worsened for the most part or has slowed. The most publicized global austerity has been the sweatshop labor conditions. Highly dealing with clothes and footwear. The most publicized US problem was with Nike shoes where people in Indonesia were making 14 pairs of shoes a day and earning 14 cents a hour.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
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The article by Robert Pollin dealt with global austerity. One of the first thing that he says is that the living standards are much higher than what people thought they would be years ago. After this the author says that neoliberalism is responsible for the spread of global austerity but then asks who is responsible for neoliberalism. I thought that this question was very important because knowing this would help in knowing the other part. The thing that shocked me most in reading this article was when Pollin was talking about sweatshops and global manufacturing production. One of the things was talked about was when it was made public that people in Indonesia were making 14 Nike shoes a day for 14 cents an hour. If this was made public and everyone knew about the horrible conditions that were taking place in making this brand of shoes, then I wonder why people didn’t take action to show this company that these actions were unacceptable. Another thing that shocked me in reading this was that in the year 1970 wealthy countries, committed to paying 0.7 percent of their annual GDP for development aid. I wonder what exactly it is that qualifies a country as being wealthy. A lot of people look at the United States as being wealthy but we are billions of dollars in debt. Paying this sort of thing is just something that is going to send the country further and further into debt. Overall, I thought that the author pointed out some good things and made some strong points.
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