World Systems And Capitalism: Immanuel Wallerstein’s Legacy — Binoy Kampmark

I did get to explain MMT to Emmanuel Wallerstein recently. He was non-committal, saying essentially that he did not understand it. Not in his bailiwick.

Oriental Review

World Systems And Capitalism: Immanuel Wallerstein’s Legacy

Binoy Kampmark

Planetary Thinking — Eric Berglöf

As policymakers, academics, and activists prepare for next month's United Nations climate summit in New York, they should consider precisely what it will take to build a truly sustainable global economy. First and foremost, the world needs a new multidisciplinary approach that is broad enough to tackle the challenge....

Project Syndicate
Planetary Thinking

Eric Berglöf

Pepe Escobar — All under Heaven, China’s challenge to the Westphalian system

Important. This is the future. Resistance is futile. (Listen up Washington, London, and Paris. The colonial period is over. You are now irrelevant. Get used to it. The alternative is WWIII and MAD.)

Incidentally, the post accounts for Chinese opposition to the spread of Christianity in the Central Realm, since it is a vehicle for Western global domination.

Asia Times
All under Heaven, China’s challenge to the Westphalian system

Pepe Escobar

See also

What the aftermath of a nuclear WWIII would look like.

MuckRock
Read the Scientific American article the government deemed too dangerous to publish

Robert Hovden

Jean Pisani-Ferry — Should we give up on global governance?

Executive summary

The high point of global governance was reached in the mid-1990s around the creationof the World Trade Organisation. It was hoped that globalisation would be buttressed by a system of global rules and a network of specialised global institutions. Two decades later these hopes have been dashed by a series of global governance setbacks, the rise of economic nationalism and the dramatic change of attitude of the United States administration. From trade to the environment, a retreat from multilateralism is observable. The 2008 elevation of the G20 to leaders’ level was an exception to this trend. But the G20 is no more than a political steering body.

The reasons for this retreat partially arise from political developments in individual countries. But such factors hide series specific roadblocks to global governance: the growing number and diversity of countries involved; the mounting rivalry between the US and China; doubts about globalisation and the distribution of the associated benefits; the obsolescence of global rules and institutions; imbalances within the global governance regime; and in- creased complexity.

What, then, should be the way forward? The demand for global governance has not diminished, but support for binding multilateral arrangements has. There is a need for alter- native governance technologies that better accommodate the diversity of players, provide for more flexibility and rely less on compulsion. From competition to financial regulation, such arrangements have been developed in a series of fields already. They are often hailed as pro- viding a solution to the governance conundrum. But their effectiveness should be assessed critically. Can they overcome the free-rider curse and enforcement problems? Usual game theory suggests not. Not all games are similar, however, and some collective action problems can be tackled without recourse to coercion.

Against this background, multilateralists hesitate over the choice of a strategy. One option would be to seek to preserve the existing order to the greatest extent possible. Its downside is that it does not address the underlying problems. An alternative option is to try to redesign international arrangements, putting the emphasis on flexibility and voluntary participation. Its downside is that it risks overlooking the intrinsic problems of international or global collective action. A potentially more promising approach would be to define the minimum conditions that the multilateral framework must fulfil to provide a strong-enough basis for flexible, variable-geometry and possibly informal arrangements.

In the end, we should neither cultivate the nostalgia of yesterday’s order nor invest our hopes in ineffective international cooperation. The narrow path ahead is to establish a suf- ficient, critical multilateral base for flexible arrangements and to equip policymakers with a precise toolkit for determining, on a field-by-field basis, the minimum requirements for effective collective action.

Bruegel

Should we give up on global governance?
Jean Pisani-Ferry

Ada Agada — A truly African philosophy

Review of

‘Consolation philosophy’ understands the human being as a unity of feeling and reason, in a cosmos rich with primal emotion…

Here I offer a brief presentation of this African philosophical synthesis, which I hope will help to resolve the dilemma eloquently put forward in 1997 by professor of philosophy at Penn State University Robert Bernasconi: ‘Either African philosophy is so similar to Western philosophy that it makes no distinctive contribution and effectively disappears; or it is so different that its credentials to be genuine philosophy will always be in doubt.’...

Presently, there is lively debate over the teaching of philosophy that involves viewing philosophy as traditionally Western or considering world philosophy. The status of "Indian philosophy" and "Chinese philosophy" is arguably part of the intellectual tradition of humanity, even though the methodology is different.

However, the case of African philosophy is different. Many Westerners doubt that anything good has come out of Africa, even though the ancient civilization of Egypt is the world's oldest. (China's civilization is the world oldest continuous civilization.) Others argue that Africa does have much to contribute and treating African thought in the context of the global intellectual tradition is not simply pandering to multiculturalism, as some charge.

My view is that the humanity's intellectual tradition extends far beyond the confines that academia has imposed on it through an arbitrary division of disciplines that that underappreciates the essential wholeness of the world system. This is true of many disciplines other than academic philosophy.

This article illustrates the author struggling with this conundrum in attempting to locate the African intellectual tradition.

Consolation philosophy is not only a philosophy of life, or meaning in life, but also a system of speculative metaphysics. Therefore, I extended the concept of mood to the external or mind-independent world at the risk of facing the charge of anthropomorphism. What epistemological framework could facilitate the projection of mind into the space of matter in a manner consequential for the reconciliation of freedom and determinism, emotion and reason, joy and sadness, optimism and pessimism? Panpsychism.

Panpsychism is the most ancient philosophical position, with its roots in prehistory where thought becomes blurred in the mists of time. It is the basis of various forms of idealism in the Western intellectual tradition. Now not only philosophers but also psychologists and cognitive scientists are reconsidering this position as a viable explanation to address the deficiencies of "scientific materialism" as the best or only rational alternative to supernatural belief.

Why is this important? Because Africa is no longer the backwater it once was and it is posed to play an increasingly influential role in the world as it comes online and develops quickly throughout the coming years of this century. How Africans come to see themselves will be increasingly determinative historically, and there are a lot of factors and influences in play regarding this.

How this plays out will contribute to the world system in terms of a culture that is becoming increasingly globalized. The West is confident that Western culture will become dominant and so Westerners will continue to dominate through Western ideas and values, in addition to materially through organization and technology. That may turn out to be a hollow expectation as the rest of the world begins to catch up.

Of course, the powers that be in the West will do what is in their power to delay this and to direct it in the channels they desire so as to maintain and extend control, that may not be as possible as they anticipate. The Zeitgeist is on the move and a new world order is emerging.

Enter Africa.

Aeon
A truly African philosophy
Ada Agada | research fellow at the University of Calabar, Nigeria. and author of Existence and Consolation: Reinventing Ontology, Gnosis, and Values in African Philosophy

See also

Music leads the way culturally.

Stoney Roads
The evolution of Afrobeat and its impact on dance music
Jack Woodford

Andreas Dombret — A stairway to heaven? The promises and limits of global integration

The speech is not short but it is important considering this is the Bundesbank.

The conclusion at least is a must read.

7. Conclusion

Ladies and gentlemen

I was born in the United States, grew up in Germany, and spent much of my life working around the world, including London. Personally, the backlash against the integration of our global community has shattered my core beliefs and worries me deeply.

But I accept that global economic integration has gone too far. Theoretically, it may be appealing to have one global market, but the reality is that it does not work. It has substantial negative repercussions - repercussions that our current approach to globalisation cannot handle well.

We need to find a new, third way; a middle way that harnesses globalisation's benefits and limits its negative repercussions. To stop a race to the bottom, national governments and parliaments will have to be more willing to go their own way rather than believing in entirely free, frictionless global markets and fully harmonised rules.

They will have to decide what level of compensation they want to provide to those who lose out from globalisation; and each society will have to reconsider where it makes sense to impose limits on global markets and internationally active firms.

However, there would still be substantial room for the harmonisation of rules, but it should be less, and focused, harmonisation with minimum standards only in carefully selected, meaningful areas. I personally will do everything I can to contribute to finding the right approach.

Ten years from now, I hope we will have adapted the multilateral system to form one that does not condemn distinct national rules as something illegitimate or inefficient, but one that combines sensible global integration with institutional diversity. Only if we become that open-minded and accept the rich diversity of human culture will we be able to sustain a close multilateral system that is geopolitically stable and enjoys the support of the clear majority of people.

We need to debate this earnestly and intensely so that we may arrive at new thoughts and ideas. On that note, I now look forward to debating with you. Thank you very much for your attention.

BIS

Andreas Dombret: A stairway to heaven? The promises and limits of global integration

Speech by Dr Andreas Dombret, Member of the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank, at the London School of Economics and Political Science, London, 8 February 2018

Branko Milanovic — The greatest reshuffle of individual incomes since the Industrial Revolution

The effects of of globalisation on income distributions in rich countries have been studied extensively. This column takes a different approach by looking at developments in global incomes from 1988 to 2008. Large real income gains have been made by people around the median of the global income distribution and by those in the global top 1%. However, there has been an absence of real income growth for people around the 80-85th percentiles of the global distribution, a group consisting of people in ‘old rich’ OECD countries who are in the lower halves of their countries’ income distributions.

Formerly Lead Economist in the World Bank's research department, Branko Milanovic gets that today doing macroeconomic properly in a connected world of open economies that the only closed economy is the world economy, and it is the proper study of macroeconomics. What passes for macroeconomics conventionally is based on the study of national economies which openness is often an afterthought. This is the study of mesoeconomics rather than actual macroeconomics.

In this scheme, micro-economic is the study of aspects of national economies; meso-economics is the study of national economies, and macro-economics is the study of the global economy as a closed system inclusive of its subsystems. Micro, meso, and macro must of course mesh since they are the whole and its parts. As a complete system these aspects are complimentary and influence each others through the web of relationships that constitutes the global system's intricate network. This system is dynamic and it is also a complex adaptive system characterized by reflexivity and emergence.

It must be further noticed and acknowledged that the global economic system is an aspect the world system, which includes social, political, and economic aspects that are intimately connected so that isolating aspects of them risks oversimplification and distortion.

The challenge is not only to progress but to progress in a way that harmonizes the social, political and economic aspects of the system. Otherwise, not only imbalances but also conflict will be the likely result, owing to winners and losers.

vox.eu
The greatest reshuffle of individual incomes since the Industrial Revolution
Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor, Graduate Center, University of New York and Senior Scholar, Luxembourg Income Center