False Economy - Alan Beattie [148]
As previously noted, India's history has left it with some big advantages over China and Russia. For one, it is a democracy. Very few countries have managed to become genuinely rich, reaching Western European or North American levels, without also becoming democratic. India's democracy is very far from perfect, but it can improve without a revolution or some similar enormous political upheaval. If China, by contrast, is to become a democracy, it will at some point have to undergo a traumatic change. The state bureaucracy will have to stay intact and functioning while its intertwined relationship with a single political party is unraveled. Other East Asian countries, like South Korea, have managed this fairly well. But there is no guarantee that China will be able to adapt its historical legacy in the same way. Russia, for one, made an utter hash of it. And Russia's experiment with democracy since 1991 has left many Russians distinctly underwhelmed by this newfangled Western import, and willing to accept traditional restrictions on freedom in return for traditional stability.
Though the giant panda is indelibly associated with China, the lumbering creature is perhaps not the best symbol that country could choose. The unconscious process of evolution has taken the panda on a path to oblivion, at least without continuing public subsidy, from which it cannot retreat and from which it cannot leap. No country finds itself in so intractable a position. But many nations have gone down routes that they would not have chosen had they foreseen where they would lead. And even if many in the country now recognize what needs to be done to change direction, it still takes large amounts of courage, luck, and strength to find a better path.
Conclusion: Our Remedies Oft in Ourselves Do Lie
Our circular whistle-stop tour of the economic history of the world started off by asking why Argentina is not the same as the United States and ended up seeing how countries choose different paths and get stuck on them. The same patterns and same problems that we have seen throughout history are continuing to recur. And while they can be corrected, changing paths can prove to be dauntingly hard.
Few of the patterns and themes of history are gone forever. Evidence of familiar missteps and the influence of long-standing interest groups remain on permanent exhibit. Sometimes, they all come together to put on a show for our convenience and entertainment. The dramatic acceleration of the global financial crisis in the autumn of 2008 was not the first time that year that the mistakes of past and present policy were clearly displayed. In the heat of a Geneva summer in July, the Doha round of global trade talks suffered the latest of a string of failed attempts by tinkering ministers to stop it sputtering haplessly along and instead get it purring smoothly forward. The negotiations, named after the capital of the tiny Gulf emirate of Qatar in which they were launched in 2001, were intended to continue the job of cutting taxes on imports on a multilateral basis—that is, involving all member countries of the World Trade Organization.
If warm words were edible, the Doha round could have fed the world for a decade. Everyone present paid lip service to the urgency of the situation. Despite strong growth in the international trade of goods and services throughout most of the previous twenty years, mutterings about the downside of globalization in some quarters—such as Capitol Hill—had risen to a threatening growl. An agreement to bring down the ceilings on import tariffs would, all agreed, send a powerful signal that the world was not going to repeat the mistakes of the 1930s. Never again would tit-for-tat tariff increases be allowed