It has been very rightly said that the arbitrary one-sided decisions on increasing tariffs by the USA is bad economics (it is also bad politics) that can cause avoidable turmoil in an already troubled world economy.

However often criticism of recent destabilizing decisions is voiced in a way that suggests that the earlier situation was good and orderly which has been disturbed or disrupted now. This is where the criticism loses its potential of bringing real change, or really needed change.

From the point of view of bringing real change that is helpful for people as well as for all forms of life, it makes much more sense to say that the earlier serious distortions in economic policies had created serious problems but instead of resolving these distortions and the resulting problems, arbitrary decisions with a narrow vision are being taken now which can result in the worsening of problems instead of resolving them.

To give just one example, the earlier highly distorted thinking which led to the ‘hollowing out’ of the USA with much of its manufacturing being sent elsewhere was clearly based on highly distorted thinking which led to the breakdown of working class communities, but this was sought to be justified by several top economists. Perhaps even higher loss of jobs is being caused at present by indiscriminate mechanization and use of robots, and this is also being justified by economists and technocrats as being inevitable on the current path of ‘development’ and to achieve competitive advantage. The discontents of this distorted approach may also be manifested sooner than is often realized.

While distorted economic thinking and policies based on them cause many serious socio-economic crises among people, the resulting discontents are not often understood properly and instead narrow-minded politicians often channelize them in ways that can bring them to power on an agenda which has the potential of increasing problems instead of solving them.

While we criticize this new agenda, we should not forget that the problems were originally created by old established notions and we should not make the mistake of identifying the wrong policies and notions which caused the problems in the first place as the ‘orderly’ state of affairs.

The ideas of globalization which could ‘hollow out’ an important industrial power like the USA, from the perspective of stability and employment as well as the welfare of working class and industrial communities, were all the time being promoted by the  establishment and its economists as highly desirable, as the best available path of economic development at that time. This drowned any dissenting voices of the working class.

However leaving aside the USA experiences, if we concentrate on the impacts of globalization on the peasants and workers of many developing countries, here even more disruptive and harmful impacts were experienced in many contexts. While in the richest countries these can to some extent be made up by various welfare programs, in poorer countries the possibilities of this are much less.

Such disruptions linked to the earlier ‘order’ based on globalization accompanied by increasing dominance of giant multinational companies is even more harmful in the context of farming and food as very serious issues relating to health, environment and biodiversity as well as sustainable livelihoods of hundreds of millions of small farmers are involved here, and some of the harms, such as those caused by GM crops, for example, can be of an irreversible nature.

In fact instead of engaging in the fiction of comparing some of the latest disruptive policies with the satisfactory ‘order’ of earlier times, it makes much more sense to speak in terms of a continuing trend of worsening policies and argue that highly distorted notions promoted by very powerful forces have been resulting in disruptive policies for a long time that are delinked from the welfare of people, protection of environment and all forms of life, from peace and stability and from sustainability. Economics has also been increasingly delinked from ethics and ethical considerations. Many serious problems of the world today have been caused by the worldview and policies promoted by many leading economists who have been frequently identified with establishment views.

So the present phase of decisions which are now more widely seen to be highly arbitrary and disruptive, instead of being regarded as a departure from orderly or desirable conditions, should be seen more as a new phase of disruptive thinking and policies based on them which have long been the cause of distress and discontent, destruction of environment and biodiversity, instability and conflict. 

On the basis of such an understanding, we can start moving towards an understanding of economics and economic policies that can truly and sincerely be linked to providing the base for the welfare of all people in all countries, (instead of constantly thinking of various countries in terms of rivalry and even hostility), protection of environment and biodiversity, stability and peace.

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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Protecting Earth for Children, Planet in Peril, A Day in 2071 and Man over Machine-A Path to Peace. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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