Archive for the 'Newsletter' Category

The Myth of Japan’s Failure

Published on February 1, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Eamonn Fingleton, The New York Times

The fashionable Shibuya neighborhood in Tokyo.

DESPITE some small signs of optimism about the United States economy, unemployment is still high, and the country seems stalled.

Time and again, Americans are told to look to Japan as a warning of what the country might become if the right path is not followed, although there is intense disagreement about what that path might be. Here, for instance, is how the CNN analyst David Gergen has described Japan: “It’s now a very demoralized country and it has really been set back.”

But that presentation of Japan is a myth. By many measures, the Japanese economy has done very well during the so-called lost decades, which started with a stock market crash in January 1990. By some of the most important measures, it has done a lot better than the United States.

Japan has succeeded in delivering an increasingly affluent lifestyle to its people despite the financial crash. In the fullness of time, it is likely that this era will be viewed as an outstanding success story.  More…

Image: Kosuke Okahara for The New York Times

Roland Robertson to Speak at 2012 Conference

Published on January 29, 2012 in Conference, Headline, News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

The 2012 Global Studies Conference is happy to announce distinguished scholar Roland Robertson as one of our plenaries for the Moscow Conference.

Roland Robertson is Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, USA; Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex; and Distinguished Guest Professor of Cultural Studies at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He was until very recently Professor of Sociology and Global Society at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Professor Robertson was the recipient of the first Distinguished Career Award from the section on Global and Transnational Sociology of the American Sociological Association, 2010. He began his academic career at the University of Leeds, and subsequently held appointments at the University of Essex, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of York (where he was Head of the Department of Sociology from 1970 to 1974). He returned to Pittsburgh in 1974 and remained there until his move to Aberdeen in 1999. He holds, or has held, visiting positions in sociology, pedagogy and religious studies at universities in various countries, including the USA, England, Brazil, Italy, Austria, Sweden, China (Hong Kong) and Turkey.

Robertson has published extensively in the sociology of globalization, culture, religion and sport. Among his most influential publications are The Sociological Interpretation of Religion (1970), Meaning and Change (1978) Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (1992) and a large number of other books and articles. He has also edited or co-edited various volumes, including the Encyclopedia of Globalization (2007) and Globalization: Critical Concepts in Sociology (2003).

His work has been translated from English into about twenty languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, German, Japanese, Chinese, Persian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Croat, Turkish, Italian, French, Polish, Russian, Danish, Korean, Greek, Swedish, and Hungarian.

For more information on Roland Robertson and other Plenary Speakers, please click here.

Rethinking the Growth Imperative

Published on January 28, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Kenneth Rogoff, Project Syndicate

CAMBRIDGE – Modern macroeconomics often seems to treat rapid and stable economic growth as the be-all and end-all of policy. That message is echoed in political debates, central-bank boardrooms, and front-page headlines. But does it really make sense to take growth as the main social objective in perpetuity, as economics textbooks implicitly assume?

Certainly, many critiques of standard economic statistics have argued for broader measures of national welfare, such as life expectancy at birth, literacy, etc. Such appraisals include the United Nations Human Development Report, and, more recently, the French-sponsored Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, led by the economists Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi.

But there might be a problem even deeper than statistical narrowness: the failure of modern growth theory to emphasize adequately that people are fundamentally social creatures. They evaluate their welfare based on what they see around them, not just on some absolute standard. More…

Image via Project-Syndicate.org

Europe’s self-destructive article of faith

Published on January 20, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Stefan Auer, Eurozine

European leaders’ unwavering commitment to ever closer union is causing more harm than good, argues Stefan Auer. Europe doesn’t need more integration; it needs more democracy to enable its nations to regain control over their destiny. Partial and well-managed disintegration may be preferable to a chaotic implosion.

Europe’s better times were meant to be ahead of it. Not so long ago, “the European dream” was believed to have provided the best “vision of the future”;[1] Europe was going to “run the twenty-first century”,[2] having created “an entirely new species of human organization, the likes of which the world has never seen”.[3] If the West – and most of the world – was American in the twentieth century, the twenty-first was going to be European. But not in any crude, old-fashioned, imperial, my-values-are-better-than-yours kind of way; rather in an open and open-ended reflexive, self-critical, you-are-as-good-as-or-better-than-me way. Europe was going to lead the world by example; do it gently. “Soft power Europe” would rule without anyone noticing but everyone benefiting. All these assumptions proved hubristic: Europe’s turn of fortune is humbling, humiliating and, perhaps, irreversible.

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The Globalization of Protest

Published on January 14, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Project Syndicate

NEW YORK – The protest movement that began in Tunisia in January, subsequently spreading to Egypt, and then to Spain, has now become global, with the protests engulfing Wall Street and cities across America. Globalization and modern technology now enables social movements to transcend borders as rapidly as ideas can. And social protest has found fertile ground everywhere: a sense that the “system” has failed, and the conviction that even in a democracy, the electoral process will not set things right – at least not without strong pressure from the street.

In May, I went to the site of the Tunisian protests; in July, I talked to Spain’s indignados; from there, I went to meet the young Egyptian revolutionaries in Cairo’s Tahrir Square; and, a few weeks ago, I talked with Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York. There is a common theme, expressed by the OWS movement in a simple phrase: “We are the 99%.”

That slogan echoes the title of an article that I recently published, entitled “Of the 1%, for the 1%, and by the 1%,” describing the enormous increase in inequality in the United States: 1% of the population controls more than 40% of the wealth and receives more than 20% of the income. And those in this rarefied stratum often are rewarded so richly not because they have contributed more to society – bonuses and bailouts neatly gutted that justification for inequality – but because they are, to put it bluntly, successful (and sometimes corrupt) rent-seekers.

To Read More…

Image via Project-syndicate.org

2021: The New Europe

Published on December 24, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Niall Ferguson, The Wall Street Journal

Welcome to Europe, 2021. Ten years have elapsed since the great crisis of 2010-11, which claimed the scalps of no fewer than 10 governments, including Spain and France. Some things have stayed the same, but a lot has changed.

The euro is still circulating, though banknotes are now seldom seen. (Indeed, the ease of electronic payments now makes some people wonder why creating a single European currency ever seemed worth the effort.) But Brussels has been abandoned as Europe’s political headquarters. Vienna has been a great success.

“There is something about the Habsburg legacy,” explains the dynamic new Austrian Chancellor Marsha Radetzky. “It just seems to make multinational politics so much more fun.”

The Germans also like the new arrangements. “For some reason, we never felt very welcome in Belgium,” recalls German Chancellor Reinhold Siegfried von Gotha-Dämmerung.

To Read More…

Map Illustration by Peter Arkle, via The Wall Street Journal

Designed to Fail

Published on December 16, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Sakuntala Narasimhan, Dawn.com

THE World Health Organisation (WHO) notes in a publication released earlier this month that a “huge amount of new financial commitment, worth over $40bn”, has been pledged by a collective of global agencies, towards maternal and child health projects in developing countries.

The strategies that these projects will focus on include “innovative approaches” like the use of cellphones “to create awareness and promote health” so that individuals and communities can have the information they need to make decisions about their health.

Although the publication mentions the need to “address structural barriers to health”, the assumption is that lack of information and knowledge is the limiting factor. This assumption shows a woeful ignorance of the socio-cultural complexities that make up the local matrices within which ‘development’ work has to be undertaken, which is why in spite of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been poured into developing countries as aid in the last five decades, there has been no commensurate improvement in the social sector parameters in terms of adequate food, shelter, access to healthcare and education.

Poverty persists in the developing regions; the gap between the haves and the have-nots has in fact widened in the wake of globalisation over the last two decades. Despite substantial growth in GDP, those on the lower economic rungs in these nations (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and many countries of Africa and South America) have seen their lifestyle parameters worsen.

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Financial Reform: Unfinished Business

Published on December 8, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

René Magritte: La Fissure, 1949

By Paul Volcker, New York Review of Books

It should be clear that among the causes of the recent financial crisis was an unjustified faith in rational expectations, market efficiencies, and the techniques of modern finance. That faith was stoked in part by the huge financial rewards that enabled the extremes of borrowing, the economic imbalances, and the pretenses and assurances of the credit-rating agencies to persist so long. A relaxed approach by regulators and legislators reflected the new financial zeitgeist.

All the seeming mathematical precision that was brought to investment, all the complicated new products, including the explosion of derivatives, that were intended to diffuse and minimize risk, did not work as had been claimed. Instead, the vaunted efficiency helped justify an explosion of weak credit and an emphasis on trading along with exceedingly large compensation for traders.

If those remarks sound critical—and they are meant to inspire caution—let me also emphasize that the breakdown in financial markets and the “Great Recession” since 2007 are also the culmination of years of growing, and ultimately unsustainable, imbalances between and within national economies. These are matters of failures of national economic policy and the absence of a disciplined international monetary system.

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Image:  Art Resource/©2011 C. Herscovici, London/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via NYBooks.com

As Its Economy Sprints Ahead, China’s People Are Left Behind

Published on November 24, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

A shopkeeper napping on a busy shopping street in Jilin. While Western companies look at China as a potentially huge market, consumers in Jilin and other heartland cities mostly settle for what state-run department stores and mom-and-pop shops offer.

By David Barboza, The New York Times

JILIN CITY, China — Wang Jianping and his wife, Shue, are a relatively affluent Chinese couple, with an annual household income of $16,000 — more than double the national average for urban families.

They own a modest, three-bedroom apartment here in this northeastern industrial city. They paid for their son to study electrical engineering at prestigious Tsinghua University, in Beijing. And even by frugal Asian standards, they are prodigious savers, with $50,000 in a state-run bank.

But like many other Chinese families, the Wangs feel pressed. They do not own a car, and they rarely go shopping or out to eat. That is because the value of their nest egg is shrinking, through no fault of their own.

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Image: Shiho Fukada for the New York Times

The Blizzard from Brussels: The European Commission Gets Busy

Published on November 16, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From The Economist

THE Europeans can rouse themselves occasionally. Two initiatives emerged from the European Commission this week, one to improve the audit profession, the other to tax financial transactions. The first raises serious questions about how best to protect investors; the second serious questions about policymakers’ priorities.

Auditing first. A leaked proposal from the directorate-general for the European Union’s single market suggests that Michel Barnier, the commissioner in charge, thinks the industry needs reform from top to bottom. The proposal envisages forcing clients to change auditors every so often, so beancounters and bosses do not get too cosy (although the evidence on whether this helps is weak). It also wants two auditors to work together on the accounts of especially important companies.

But by far the most radical proposal in the leaked draft would be to forbid audit firms from providing non-audit services. In America providing most non-audit services to audit clients is already forbidden, under the Sarbanes-Oxley financial reform passed in the wake of the meltdown of Enron, an energy-trading company. In some European jurisdictions, selling both audit and (say) consulting to a client is still permissible. Mr Barnier’s leaked proposal would not simply go down the route of Sarbanes-Oxley and forbid this. It would force the creation of pure audit firms.

To Read More…

Image: Pixomar