The Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development -- a pro-establishment, rock-ribbed
bastion of pro-market thinking -- has released a report predicting a
collapse in global economic growth rates, a rise in feudal wealth
disparity, collapsing tax revenue and huge, migrating bands of migrant
laborers roaming from country to country, seeking crumbs of work. They
prescribe "flexible" workforces, austerity, and mass privatization.
The
report, Policy Challenges for the Next 50 Years , makes a number of
assumptions about the impact of automation on skilled jobs in the
workforce, the end the recent growth in the developing world (especially
the BRIC nations), and a series of worsening environmental
catastrophes.
As Paul Mason points out in The Guardian, the OECD
does not countenance the possibility of rupture -- states opting out of
market capitalism, say, or non-state actors refusing to accept claims
on property. It seems unlikely that the changes the OECD envisions will
not be attended by more changes in the way people think about the
legitimacy of the economic and political system that produced them.
The OECD has a clear message for the world: for the rich countries, the
best of capitalism is over. For the poor ones - now experiencing the
glitter and haze of industrialization - it will be over by 2060. If you
want higher growth, says the OECD, you must accept higher inequality.
And vice versa. Even to achieve a meager average global growth rate of
3% we have to make labor "more flexible", the economy more globalized.
Those migrants scrambling over the fences at the Spanish city of
Melilla, next to Morocco, we have to welcome, en masse, to the tune of
maybe two or three million a year into the developed world, for the next
50 years. And we have to achieve this without the global order
fragmenting.
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