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33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
Towards a more equitable, stable and prosperous world, January 17, 2004
Robert Pollin's "Contours of Descent" is a lucid and coherent dissection of neoliberal economic policies as practiced in the U.S. and around the world. The author very effectively cuts through the political doublespeak of recent U.S. administrations to show that neoliberalism has served as the guiding principle for both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Following a careful and methodical critique of the Clinton/Bush record, Mr. Pollin advances an alternative set of policy proscriptions that might lead us towards a more equitable, stable and prosperous world.Mr. Pollin is a Professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. The humanity and practicality that infuses this book is no doubt a reflection of Mr. Pollin's real world experiences, which includes work on developing living wage proposals in various U.S. cities, serving as a consultant to the United Nations Development Program in Bolivia, and as Economic Spokesperson to the 1992 Presidential campaign of Governor Jerry Brown. Neoliberalism is defined by the "Washington consensus" of decreased government spending, free trade and deregulated markets. Mr. Pollin critiques the system for its three major defects: The "Marx problem" pertaining to the relative bargaining relationship between employers and workers; the "Keynes problem" of the tendency of financial markets to engage in speculation; and the "Polanyi problem" of the corrupting effect of corporate power. The author builds a convincing case that all three problems have been exacerbated by neoliberalist policies, resulting in a host of deleterious effects. These include widening gaps between the rich and poor (Marx), speculative bubbles in the financial markets (Keynes), accounting scandals (Polanyi), and others. Moreover, the author provides research to show that the cumulative effect of these policies has been to slow world economic growth, thereby undoing years of progress and preventing many developing nations from significantly raising living standards for their citizens. Mr. Pollin critiques the Clinton administration and Robert Rubin in particular for championing financial market deregulation as the linchpin for its "Eisenhower Republican" economic strategy. The author is presuasive in detailing how the stock market boom of the 1990s provided fuel for the economic boom; unfortunately, its demise quickly erased most of the gains attributed to the Clinton economy, such as a real decrease in the number of persons living in poverty. In fact, the author suggests that the single-minded pursuit of a balanced budget allowed Clinton to squander a historic opportunity to use surplus government dollars to invest in education, healthcare and the environment --programs that the author believes are critical to creating a more durable kind of prosperity for the American people. Mr. Pollin launches a no less scathing critique of the Bush administration's policies, which the author believes have been designed to be little more than a "bonanza to the rich" at the expense of workers. The author explains that crisis has been used by Bush to justify giveaways to corporations and the wealthy; meanwhile, aggressively anti-labor and anti-environmental policies have further squeezed living standards for most. Furthermore, by highlighting the inconsistencies in Bush's budget proposals, Mr. Pollin suggests that the administration is intent on creating a fiscal crisis in order to force a dismantling of the populist social safety net. One section that I found particularly interesting was Mr. Pollin's discussion of stimulating the economy by means of defense spending and the Iraq war. His analysis of the situation however suggests that the occupation of Iraq will further slow the U.S. economy as a whole but will benefit specific corporations engaged in the production and distribution of oil, thereby calling into question the real motives for the war. Mr. Pollin dedicates a chapter examining the "landscape of global austerity" that has resulted from Washington's imposition of neoliberal policies onto the developing world. The analysis focuses on case studies in India, Argentina and elsewhere to highlight the human costs of the neoliberal experiment in specific countries. For example, the author shows how Asian sweatshop bosses have repressed their workers in order to gain competitive advantage for their export-oriented economies. The author argues that "policies to eliminate sweatshops and guarantee workers decent...minimum wages" are needed to narrow inequality, restore impoverished communities and develop new markets. The final chapter explores the author's alternative economic policies more fully. The recommendations include full-employment policies, living wages and labor rights to solve the Marx problem, and financial system regulation, taxation, and increased banking reserve requirements to solve the Keynes problem. The issue is one of morality as well. Recalling Adam Smith, the author suggests that continuing with the failed neoliberal experiment of privileging the interests of capital over the rights of people amounts to "corruption of moral sentiments on a global scale" and should rightly yield to an economics dedicated to equity and social justice. I strongly recommend this powerful, insightful and humane book to everyone.
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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
Powerful, February 11, 2004
Read "Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity" by Robert Pollin, the co-author of "Living Wage." Pollin is a brilliant economist interested in using economics for the good of our society. He's also ruthlessly honest, and you won't catch him bragging, a' la Dick Gephardt, about the glorious Clinton days. Pollin's critique of Clinton's economic program is harsh and that of W. Bush's devestating. The lessons are clear, and Pollin closes with useful recommendations.
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27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
What the Democrats won't admit about Clinton-omics...., November 17, 2003
From "Clintontime" by Alexander Cockburn at (...)
We find the liberal populists Michael Moore, Al Franken, Paul Krugman and Molly Ivins all pouring sarcastic rebukes on Bush2 and, categorically or by implication, suggesting that in favoring the very rich and looting the economy in their interests Bush stands in despicable contrast to his immediate predecessor in the Oval Office.
So just get a Democrat, any Democrat, back in the White House and the skies will begin to clear again.
But suppose a less forgiving scrutiny of the Clinton years discloses that these years did nothing to alter the rules of the neoliberal game that began in the Reagan/Thatcher era with the push to boost after-tax corporate profits, shift bargaining power to business, erode social protections for workers, make the rich richer, the middle tier at best stand still and the poor get poorer.
We have just such an unsparing scrutiny of Clintonomics in the form of Robert Pollin's Contours of Descent.
Pollin is unambiguous. "It was under Clinton" he points out, "that the distribution of wealth in the US became more skewed than it had at any time in the previous forty years. Inside the US under Clinton the ratio of wages for the average worker to the pay of the average CEO rose from 113 to 1 in 1991 to 1 to 449 when he quit. In the world, exclusive of China, between 1980 and 1988 and considering the difference between the richest and poorest 10 per cent of humanity, inequality grew by 19 per cent; by 77 per cent, if you take the richest and poorest 1 per cent.
The basic picture? "Under the full eight years of Clinton's presidency, even with the bubble ratcheting up both business investment and consumption by the rich average real wages remained at a level 10 per cent below that of the Nixon-Ford peak period, even though productivity in the economy was 50 per cent higher under Clinton than under Nixon and Ford. The poverty rate through Clinton's term was only slightly better than the dismal performance attained during the Reagan-Bush years." We had a bubble boom, pushed along by consumer-spending by the rich.
The REAL legacy of the Clinton era is that the bargaining power of capital to cow workers, to make them toil harder for less real money, increased inexorably. Speculative rampages were given a green light.
At the end of Clinton's eight years, when the bubble tide had ebbed, what did workers have by way of a permanent legacy? Clinton, Pollin bleakly concludes, "accomplished almost nothing in the way of labor laws or the broader policy environment to improve the bargaining situation for workers Moreover, conditions under Clinton worsened among those officially counted as poor."
Nowhere is Pollin more persuasive than in analysing the causes of the fiscal turnaround from deficit to surplus, an achievement that had Al Gore in 2000 pledging to pay down the entire federal debt of $5.8 trillion. Was this turnaround the consequence of economic growth (producing higher tax revenues), along with the moderate rise in marginal tax rates on the rich in 1993. If indeed these were the causes of fiscal virtue, we might take a benign view of Clinston's fiscal policies. On the other hand, if surplus was achieved by dint of hacking away at social expenditures and at social safety nets, plus gains in capital gains revenues stemming from the stock market bubble, then progressives, even Democratic candidates, might not so eagerly extol the Clinton model.
In a piece of original and trenchant analysis Pollin shows that almost two thirds of Clinton's fiscal turnaround can be accounted for by slashes in government spending relative to GDP (54 per cent) and on capital gains revenues (10 per cent). Pollin then asks the question. Suppose there really had been a peace dividend after the end of the cold war was won. We could have had a few less weapons systems, 100,000 new teachers, 560,000 more scholarships, 1,400 new high schools and still had a budget surplus of $220 billion.
Wall Street applauded the surpluses and the ordinary folk paid the costs of all those slashes in the budget: fewer teachers, a dirtier environment.
Pollin suggests answers that steer past easy rhetorical flourishes about trade protections. If we are to move towards a world in which families don't have to line up outside churches to stay alive and teenagers don't have to work for 20 cents a day in Third World sweatshops, we have to have policies here that promote full employment and income security.
Such policies would have to include a strengthening of workers' legal rights to organize and to form unions; and also to fight on a level playing field in the conduct of strikes. To get a measure of fairness and stability in the financial system financial institutions would have to honor asset-based reserve requirements, of which one example would be the margin requirements Greenspan failed to impose in September, 1996. This same policy instrument could be used to channel credit to socially beneficial projects such as low income housing.
Despite the best efforts of our doctrinal leaders, the moral sentiments of the people are not entirely corrupted. Consumers, for example, are prepared to pay a premium of they can be assured they are buying products not made in sweatshops. And third-world countries need not survive only under the sweatshop conditions ("tremendous good news") praised by Krugman and his colleague at the Times, Nicholas Kristof. They have to be permitted to return to the somewhat protected conditions encouraged in the development policies of an earlier era, without agencies of the US government decreeing that their reformers and their union organizers be murdered by death squads.
Posted by hulka99
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