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02 September 05.
I think I've worked out that detail which causes liberal folk to hate the World Bank. The WB is the largest and best hope for global poverty alleviation we have, so one would think that it'd be the darling of liberals everywhere, but it has one fundamental difference from the typical liberal: it's not pro-labor. Can one be liberal but not pro-labor?Some people define politics as a labor vs capital fight, and then the liberal/conservative split is just a renaming of the two teams. For these guys, it's a no-brainer: you're either with us or you're against us. Then there are the non-economic, social definitions of liberal, which are just not quite apropos for an economic development organization. Though, gender inequality is a big deal within the WB, and there are reports up the wazoo about it in every context.Less hard-line economic definitions say that the liberal is simply concerned with reducing poverty or increasing equality. The two measures are not identical, because of the `all boats rise with the tide' philosophy espoused by the typical conservative when confronted with the poverty question. In almost all of the world, people are better off than they were fifty years ago: where they had hand fans before, they have electric fans, and where they had electric fans they have air conditioning. The all-boats story was the norm at the University of Chicago twenty-five years ago, and is therefore the default at the World Bank today. But the story says nothing about whether equality is expanding or diminishing, and one is hard-pressed to measure quality of life in absolute terms, since there's loads of evidence that most humans use relative terms themselves. My impression from the likes of Mr. JB (whose book I have reviewed) is that the WB thinks of those issues that would affect poverty as those which are in its scope to discuss, but issues of inequality are somehow politically out. This is an arbitrary division if ever there was one: every last action by the UN or any of its sister organizations (including the WB and IMF) is interventionist, and we're glad for those interventions (including Mr. JB). We think extortionary laws which oppress minorities to be worthy of international censure and even military intervention, but extortionary laws set by a wealthy few to exploit a poor majority are somehow just a matter of course. It's a question of careful spin, and I'm always incredulous when somebody manages to maintain ethics that say one type of intervention is virtuous and the other overstepping. So we've got three definitions of liberalism: caring about labor, about the poor, or about inequality, and they have different implications. Under definition one, which the black-clad Marxists go by, the WB is a big, fat conservative. By the concern about the poor definition, the WB is the paragon of liberalism. Their motto is `A world free of poverty', and I would say that the great majority of its employees buy into this. By the final definition, caring about inequality, the WB is borderline. In my conversations with managers there, I have rarely if ever heard any of them express interest in inequality issues, but when I say, "We care about equality," they invariably nod in agreement, perhaps even going so far as to vocalize a "yeah" (or offering to fund my inequality-measuring models). My impression, which again has nothing but touchy-feely support, is of a group of people just beginning to get it. So thanks, black-clad protesters, I think your message is slowly seeping through, and our best hope for reducing world poverty may eventually become our best hope for reducing inequality as well.
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