FALTER Radio und Kreisky Forum Talks: THE US AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY AFTER COVID-19

Robert Misik in conversation with James
Galbraith


The global Covid-19 pandemic has effected a revolution in world
economic affairs. The liberal (or more properly, neo-liberal)
economic systems of Europe, North America and Latin America have
handled the crisis poorly. China, Vietnam, South Korea, Taiwan
and Cuba have done remarkably well. Why is this so? What does it
portend?
James Galbraith argues that it was precisely the most celebrated
features of the liberal Western systems – decentralization,
post-industrialism, the hegemony of finance and advanced
technologies, reliance on markets, willingness to trade public
health against economic objectives – that brought them low in the
face of the pandemic. Success occurred in those countries that
mounted an immediate, centralized public health response, that
could effectively lock down in whole or part, that were willing
to sacrifice all economic activity temporarily to public health,
and that dominated the production of basic manufactures such as
personal protective equipment and so were able immediately to
underpin behavioral mandates with material capacity. It was a
matter, in other words, of whether it was possible to mobilize
the whole society to protect public health, or not.
Looking forward, the new Biden administration in the United
States will launch a large, coordinated public health initiative,
together with patchwork fiscal assistance and income support, to
get the United States through the immediate crisis. Success is
far from certain. And in the aftermath, even if the pandemic is
contained over the next year, the American (and European)
economic model will face a profound restructuring in three major
areas: the advanced sectors, which provide US strength in world
trade; the services sectors, which provide the jobs; and the
financial sector, as unpayable private debts will have to be
written down.


James Kenneth Galbraith is an American
economist, with a chair at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public
Affairs, the University of Texas at Austin. He has advised
political campaigns in America and governments in China and
Greece. He served in the early 1980s as Executive Director of the
Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress. His
father, John Kenneth Galbraith, was one of the most celebrated
economists of all time, and a participant and adviser in US
governments from Roosevelt through Kennedy and Johnson.


Robert Misik, Author and Journalist


ZOOM Live Talk, February 1, 2021