Since the imposition of free market policies in the 1980s, globalization has come to represent an ideological battle between those who favor economic growth and deregulation through the growing power of multinational corporations, versus those who prefer a more sustainable and democratic approach to international development, socio-economic justice, and the securing of basic human rights and needs.
The severity of the global financial crisis is evidence of the urgent need to reform
economic theory and education. But though the
“irresistible force” of the crisis is immense,
so is the inertia of accepted economic ideas, argues Steve Keen.
Although the global financial crisis has revealed the flaws of free market economics, a return to Keynesianism is not enough to secure recovery. The needs of our times include fairer income distribution, a
sustained attack on poverty, and urgent action on climate change, writes Walden Bello.
Rather than economic growth, waste is the most serious threat to the environment.
In switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy, the global economy could grow larger and sustainably feed an increasing population - without destroying the earth's ecosystems, argues Garry Lipow.
Historically both state and market control of the economy has resulted in the same phenomenon: an impoverished underclass and a new class of
the super rich. Only a truly shared economy controlled by civil society can secure universal wealth and prosperity, writes Phillip Blond.
The global financial crisis has forced the high priests of efficient market theory to question their unfaltering belief in the rationality of markets and investors. This
shift could be the beginning of a significant change in the paradigms underpinning the wider economc system, writes Gillian Tett.
Apologists for the current economic system continue to occupy Wonderland, because
it is only in Wonderland that environmental problems can be solved by a blind adherence to economic growth,
argue Richard York, Brett Clark,and John Bellamy Foster.
As ideas aimed at perfecting globalization turn into policies, progressives must boldly aspire once again to paradigms of social organization that unabashedly aim for equality. Ideas are not enough, says Walden Bello.
