What The World Needs Now : Notes From England

England - I am here for my alumni reunion at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex.

 IDS “aims to understand and explain the world, and to try to change it- to influence as well as to inform.”

In this two day meeting, the alumni are scholarly articulating the problems of the world and plotting what development work needs to be done in a changing landscape and shifting geopolitics.

One of the major theses that needs to be communicated is that reduction of so much inequality should be done with or without the global economic crisis.

Among others, the global economic crisis is a failure of the banking and financial systems and so one proposal is not to deal with the economic crisis because to spend much time in terms of more research to produce more knowledge for something that has happened already will be derailing in many ways.
The lessons of the global economic crisis speak for themselves or to wax Latin :Res ipsa loquitor.

This call is to let the economic crisis evolve and hope it will metamorphose into a less virulent strain.
 It is more efficient to focus on something that is sure to change the world and that is to work on instruments towards reducing inequality without excluding the importance of economic growth.

The alumni are poised to embark on a project that believes that reducing inequality can be one of the solutions to the global economic crisis.
This 2009 crisis is a crisis at the core ( rich) affecting both core and periphery (poor.)
 Hubert Schmitz, IDS research fellow working on globalization, thinks that to concentrate work on the poor countries is limiting because “ concentrating on the dependent variable ‘poverty’ would cut off from understanding the dynamics which leads to shifts in poverty and prosperity.”
In short, former poor countries in East Asia which are now the so called emerging markets are driving the changes in the center.

Definitely, we need a new language or discourse or paradigm or new conversations to describe the changing development landscape.
In these uncertain times, the task is to ask the right question.
It was noted that in our management of these uncertain financial times, some of the myriad of responses are mistaken views to go exclusively global or focus exclusively on the local when the response should be integrating both the global and local.
There is a disconnect between macro and micro economics and the task is to articulate the discourse between the macro and micro or to find the middle space between the big picture and the small picture.

There is no one shared view on development perspectives.
Development policies are most often influenced by voices from positions of power and authority.
Which is why in this age of mobile phones and internet connection, it is important to hear different perspectives or to hear our own local stories of what we think the changes should be.

Making the world a better place is not a monopoly of development experts.
One challenge put forward by Professor Lawrence Haddad, head of the Institute of Development Studies is how to successfully collaborate with other voices such as the private sector, or the great majority who are very connected via information technology who are “just getting on with their work and who are not too bothered whether the self designated development experts work with them or not.”


https://www.flickr.com/photos/ids_uk/sets/72157621859137086
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ids_uk/sets/72157621859137086/

Let me share a feedback about the above piece ( What The World Needs Now)  from an economist  in Wall Street, New York  who studied at the Wharton School of business on the ailing economy of the United States :

“The US condition does not keep me awake at night, but it disturbs me...Great powers of course in most cases, do not instantly collapse (though Russia quickly unraveled not too long ago).  They tend to linger, remain relatively wealthy, though with less influence in the world.

The US dollar does bother me...It is a matter of time as to when it will experience a big decline...There might be like a sand pile phenomenon...you never know when the last grain of sand will cause the sand pile to collapse.

China will never flex its global powers until it has too.  I think it operates consistent with my view:  one should not make unnecessary enemies.  Messianic powers (e.g. US) often do...and they get conflicted between their self-interest and their messianic goals of imposing freedom and democracy.”