How do we feel in this global mess?

An overview of our woes, as humanity, is not a surrealistic exercise. So much technological progress, but so much violence and destruction, so much suffering. And so many narratives as to who are the good and who are the bad guys. On what side are you? The only sure thing, is that I am a Corinthians Paulista fan. The rest has become a mess. – Ladislau Dowbor

We’ve exchanged Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the well-functioning market for the invisible fist of monopoly power.  – Nicholas Shaxson – The Finance Curse

Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, You see the world turn’d upside down.  – 17th Century ballad

I am an economist. My main area of interest is linguistics, I speak many languages, I read the bible in Hebrew, Dostoyevsky in Russian, Dante in Italian, Jorge Amado in Brazilian Portuguese, and so on. Yes, and Keynes in English, of course. I got into economics because I felt the need to understand our mess. This was 1963, in the dramatically unequal Nordeste in Brazil. With so much suffering and misery in the face of opulent sugar-cane magnates, I couldn’t help feeling the absurdity. How deep is our capacity to pretend we do not see? It is not because I studied economics that I became indignant: indignation brought me to these studies. Did I find the answers? What I found is a mixture of justifications, in the name of free markets – you can justify anything with enough math and models – and idealistic constructions. I am still looking. Aren’t we all?

I did my homework, I studied with good bankers in Switzerland, with planning specialists in Poland, I assisted countries in different continents, even worked as a consultant for the UN Secretary General. I watched decolonization, the rise of the rights of women, the erosion of the apartheid in South Africa, so many hopes. And I presently grasp the dramatic statistics, the inequality, the hunger, the climate disaster, the loss of biodiversity, and all this violence. But these are not statistics for me, I am 82 and still cannot bear to see a mother with kids sleeping on a sidewalk on São Paulo, the richest city in Latin America, while busy people and cars move back and forth. What kind of animals are we? Homo Sapiens?

I watch the horrifying news on the Palestine/Israel calamity. Is this a question of sides? Well, every side tries to bring to the media the most horrifying thing the “other side” did, and we have a choice of babies, children, women, in a show of barbarism on both sides, an evening-news tournament. According to who owns the news, we will have more barbarism on one side or the other. And then we have the commercials, with smiling guys, beautiful lasses and the opportunities we should not miss. Don’t look up. What is this all about? Every one of us has lived his own history, and it weighs.

I was born in 1941, on the Spanish border, by birth I would be a Catalan. During this war, in Europe, you did not choose your birth-place, you were born wherever your parents were pushed to. My Polish parents, an engineer and a doctor, escaped the German invasion in 1939 through the southern border, and reached France. They were not jews, but if they had stayed in Poland my father would have ended, as a mechanical engineer, in forced labor in German factories. Then the Germans invaded France, so my parents fled south to the Spanish border, but it was closed because of another war, the Spanish tragedy the world looked curiously upon, discussing what sides to take, in the late thirties. Thus, I was born on the Spanish border, in France, from Polish parents.

As a family, we were stuck in the Pyrenees, my parents and four kids. I remember, I was probably four, when we went to the fields with my mother picking pissenlit, a kind of grass you could reasonably eat or make tea with. Many gangs sought survival in the overall mess, my father was caught by some armed militias, tortured, but survived. It is impressive how we produce thousands of films glorifying wars, heroic soldiers, beautiful tanks, bombs. It sells well. We have to make deep search to find a film on what it is for families to live in a war. The misery, the cold, the hunger, the permanent insecurity and anguish. Angoisse, in French, is a stronger word. Don’t tell me about wars. We moved to Brazil because my parents, having lived through the two World Wars, had lost confidence in Europe and its high-culture barbarism. I thus am presently a Brazilian economist.

We are good at magical thinking. Will the dramas simply go away? In history, we have always let things get rotten to a point where insecurity, frustrations and greed have evolved into the ideal forms of releasing pressure, through hate, violence and war. I have just read a beautiful book, The Crusades Seen by the Arabs, by Amin Maalouf. Not anti-christian, just solid research in the Middle East documents of these times, around the 13th Century. The battles, the destruction, the massacres, the rapes, the humiliations. By god-fearing christians, by chiites, by sunnites, or among themselves. The two centuries of barbarian wars were followed by the Mongolian invasions. More massacres. Burning books was not a Nazi invention, at the time it was already a sport on every side.

Fast-forward to 2023. We just got out of the Afghanistan war, with tragical results for everybody. And the Iraq war, with the mess we presently see. And the Libyan drama. At the moment of writing, we have Ukraine, of course – Zelinsky is complaining that the Palestine conflict is distracting us – but the tragic Yemen war is out of the news, they are not white Europeans dying. And we have the Sudan massacres, of course, Africa is so unstable. How curious the coups in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso! Why don’t they just respect democracy? Well, I have worked in these regions, for seven years. I’ve seen thousands die of cholera, don’t we have the technologies to ensure safe water? Well, Bezos has to take a trip to space. Is he a moron? Is Zuckerberg? Larry Fink? I would rather consider them high-tech assholes. Yes, I know this is not an economic category. But do they not see what is becoming of the world?

Humans love narratives. You can justify just about anything, and humanity is impressively prone to believe just about anything. If there is a narrative we have to get rid of, it is that if you seek your own prosperity, without bothering with what happens to others, it will result in a contribution to the common good. In a way, individual greed would result in general prosperity. Well, it does not. The stark reality is that we are destroying our world for the power and riches of the happy few. You have to be a moron in Wall Street or the City to believe ‘greed is good’. It is not only a disaster for the environment that sustains us, it is a disaster for humanity, and thus for democracy. Billions of frustrated people around the world will believe whoever rides on their frustration and their hate. The world is not short of demagogues.

How can we believe in the “externality” narrative? You hear it or read it on every corner. Yes, we produce arms, but it is for peoples’ safety, and we don’t pull the trigger. We just produce arms, and respond to legitimate demand. The world is drowning in abuse debt? Well, those who run into debt should be more responsible. Shaxson goes straight to the point: “We need finance, but the measure of its contribution to our economy isn’t whether it creates billionaires and big profits, but whether it provides useful services to us at a reasonable cost.” ¹(p.12) But we are facing financial behemoths, and they fund whatever will make more money for them, whatever the social or environmental dramas. They are secure, too big to fail. Supported by our taxes when necessary. In few years, the externalities will be internal for everybody, and we are already feeling it.

Marjorie Kelly, as so many economists nowadays, separates the financial sector (financial-sector GDP) and the growth of the rest of the economy (real-sector GDP), “which is the real economy of jobs and spending on goods and services. When we separate these two, we see that about one-third of the GDP is being extracted out by finance. And that extraction is vastly larger than in the past.” ²(p.147) I calculated the corresponding numbers for Brazil, and came roughly to the same figure: over 30% of GDP drained by unproductive financial rentierism. ³ This was supposed to be a world of capitalists striving to make money by serving us better. Oxfam presents the real picture: “On current terms, low- and lower-middle income countries will be forced to pay nearly half a billion dollars every day in interest and debt repayments between now and 2029. Entire countries are facing bankruptcy, with the poorest countries now spending four times more repaying debts to rich creditors than on healthcare.” ⁴ That’s more than half of the world’s poorest countries, 2.4 billion people.

In case we are slow at gobbling the narratives, we can be helped by think tanks, presently a huge opinion-building network. Shaxson brings us “the most influential ideological organization”, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, as well as “the Wall Street-funded Templeton Foundation, the networks of the hedge fund tycoon Robert Mercer (a supporter of Steve Bannon and Breibart News), and what some call the “Kochtopus” – the tentacular nexus of political and financial links funded by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. Atlas’s membership includes the American Enterprise Institute, the similarly influential American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Cato Institute, the Freedom Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, and, at the time of writing, over 180 more. And those are just the funding networks in the United States: Atlas has littered the world with 475 partner institutions – and rising.”(p.127) Are they blind?

The system has become dysfunctional. The dominating interests are presently global, whether finance, communication, information, commodity trade, or the private information trade. But we have no global regulation capacity, except for the weakened international institutions inherited from the II World War, 80 years ago. We still have authorities checking our luggage in international airports, while the real economic flows are just virtual entries in computers. And so much rogue finance and tax havens, so much illegal arms sales, so many oligarchs navigating in the global institutional and legal mess.

Yes, we know what should be done, we have it in the SDGs, the ESGs, the Global Green New Deal, the Global compact, you name it. But we are helpless, just observing the world drifting down to the rapids and nearing the waterfalls. Just as a reminder, the technologies we master and the financial resources we squander are more than sufficient to ensure we have enough for everyone, without destroying our future. Greed is for morons. And watching how we are drifting down this slow motion catastrophe is sickening.