The Hijacking of the Development Debate

Thomas Friedman and Jeffrey Sachs—articulate, learned globetrotting pundits— would seem an unlikely duo to hijack the development debate. Yet, through their best-selling books—Friedman’s The World Is Flat and Sachs’s The End of Poverty—their prominent exposure in the U.S. media, and endorsements by celebrities like Bono, the superstar lead singer of the rock group U2, they have done precisely that. Just a half decade after protests by citizen groups in Latin America and elsewhere discredited two decades of market-oriented neoliberal dogma, Friedman and Sachs have narrowed the debate with simplistic slogans of “more aid” and “more trade.” They have done so by putting forward myths about the poor, economic development, and the global economy. In many ways, Friedman and Sachs are leading us backward to the era that began with the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Helmut Kohl in the early 1980s. Those “free market” icons ushered in almost two decades of a one-size-fitsall approach to economic growth: privatization, government deregulation, and fewer barriers to trade and financial flows. This approach became known as the Washington Consensus. Market-opening policies were pressed on dozens of poor, indebted nations by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the U.S. government. Trade and foreign investment surged, and though many large corporations and consumers benefited, a heavy toll was too often visited on the poor, workers, and the environment. In the late 1990s, a global backlash of citizen protest erupted as the financial crisis of 1997–98 plunged hundreds of millions into poverty in Asia, Russia, and Brazil. For Americans, this backlash was most visible in the “Battle of Seattle” in December 1999, in which massive demonstrations shut down a World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial meeting. But this was hardly a localized phenomenon: elsewhere, activists reacted against the growing power of international corporations, which pitted workers, communities, and nations against one another in “a race to the bottom.” As corporations spread sweatshops to Mexico, China, Indonesia, and elsewhere, workers demanded that they respect such principles as the right to organize. Environmentalists struggled to maintain hardwon protections in the face of pressure from international investors. Farmers protested against land grabbing by corporate agribusiness. As privatization of basic services shifted wealth from government coffers into the pockets of private investors and increased the cost of water, electricity, and other basic services, citizen groups in Bolivia, Ghana, Uruguay, Argentina, and elsewhere fought off water privatization efforts and successfully replaced privatized systems with various models of public control. Since the election of Hugo Chávez as president of Venezuela in 1998, the electorates in more than a half dozen Latin