the IMF and Its Discontents

Many of you will be familiar with this critique of The IMF or World Bank, from Chomsky and many other sources. What distinguishes Joseph Stiglitz is that he served as senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and is a former member and chairman of the US President's Council of Economic Advisors, and received the Nobel Prize in Economics 2001.  So he knows his target from the inside.


The IMF and Its Discontents

bcq The IMF has drawn vocal criticism over the years. In his 2002 book, Globalization and Its Discontents, Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz denounced the fund as a primary culprit in the failed development policies implemented in some of the world’s poorest countries. He argues that many of the economic reforms the IMF required as conditions for its lending—fiscal austerity, high interest ratestrade liberalizationprivatization, and open capital markets—have often been counterproductive for target economies and devastating for local populations.

The fund has also been criticized on the basis of overreach or “mission creep.” William Easterly makes this case in his 2006 account of the failures of Western aid to the undeveloped world, The White Man’s Burden. While he acknowledges some IMF successes in firefighting financial crises in Mexico and East Asian countries in the mid-1990s, he criticizes many of the fund’s interventions in severely impoverished countries, particularly in Africa and Latin America, as overly ambitious and intrusive. In addition, he describes many of the fund’s loan conditions and technical advice as out of touch with ground-level realities.

In recent years, the IMF’s work in more advanced economies has drawn ire as well.   

In recent years, the IMF’s work in more advanced economies has drawn ire as well. Greece has been the most high-profile example, as troika-imposed austerity measures deepened the country’s economic contraction. In July 2015, popular discontent led to a “no” vote in a referendum on whether to accept the IMF’s loan conditions, which included raising taxes, lowering pensions and other spending, and privatizing industries. The government subsequently ignored the results and accepted the loans. However, the Greek case also saw the IMF soften its stance on austerity, at least compared with the European Commission and ECB. In 2016, senior IMF economists argued that more austerity would be counterproductive, and in 2018 the fund raised the alarm about the unsustainability of Greece’s debt burden, putting it at odds with the rest of the troika.

However, others dismiss the suggestion that the IMF’s approach changed. In 2016, the Guardian’s economics editor, Larry Elliott, wrote that “the IMF’s remedy for Greece and Portugal during the Eurozone crisis has been straight out of the structural adjustment playbook: reduce public spending, cut salaries and benefits, insist that state-owned enterprises return to the private sector, reduce minimum wages, and restrict collective bargaining.”

THE TIME ZONE RESEARCH LAB (Nadia Chaney)

Nadia Chaney and Epok the Usher present...
THE TIME ZONE RESEARCH LAB

WHAT:
It’s a community research lab that uses art-based practices to investigate the nature of Time and Temporality. It will take place in-person in Montreal and online anywhere in the universe.

PURPOSE:
1. To befriend Time as a being in its own right, to understand its entrapment in late capitalism. To imagine and practice the liberation of Time. To find and enjoy new ways of relating to Time.
2. To study together and generate knowledge in an environment of creativity and kindness that brings us all abundance and a sense of hope.
3. To generate 100 arts-based activities that investigate various aspects of the nature of Time and Temporality.





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Sha Xin Wei | skype: shaxinwei | mobile: +1-650-815-9962 | asu.zoom.us/my/shaxinwei
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resources re systemic bio-socio-technical change (three ecologies)

Here are four thoughtful, relevant articles and a video by Varoufakis

Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University

COVID-19 et capitalisme génétique
Thierry Bardini

Closing remarks: novel approaches to complex societal change and sustainability
Sander van der Leeuw

Plausible and desirable futures in the Anthropocene: A new research agenda
Xuemei Baia, Sander van der Leeuw, et al.



Sophie, would you kindly add these to our psf archive?  Thanks!

Balance & Structures / Prototyping Social Forms gathering

Thanks everyone,

Let’s reach out to our Prototyping Social Forms B21  as well as present company.  

Please check out past conversations at

Sophie, How about if we collect more references from the recent email into that Google drive I think we set up. (I don’t have the link handy...)

Let me digest our recent emails and propose some new seeds... maybe we can even try to gather telematically with refreshments.  A practical question :  I’ve been thinking about reaching out to the PSF group in a constructve and senators way but how should we weave the several strands of conversations together?

Xin Wei
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 Building21 McGill | ASU-Santa Fe Center for Biosocial Complex Systems
European Graduate School |  AI & Society Journal |  Topological Media Lab
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On Apr 4, 2020, at 12:19 AM, Garrett Johnson <gljohns6@asu.edu> wrote:


I'm certainly happy to join the conversation! 

Apropos, Muindi Fanuel Muindi (UW, poetry, philosophy) and I are kicking off a reading group spurned by how the self is being produced and modulation by mediated, narrative, sociological, and ecological virality. Here are the readings

On Fri, Apr 3, 2020 at 3:00 PM Sophie Strassmann <sophie.strassmann@mail.mcgill.ca> wrote:
Dear Social Forms Community,

I would like to have a Skype call centered around social organizing because it is absolutely fascinating to see the adaptive nature of human beings amid this crisis from a social theory research point of view. 

The other amazing angle is the massive win to the environment. Spring is bringing flowers and baby animals  all over the natural world beyond the confines of our apartments, funeral homes, and empty wedding halls. 

>>> Please send me an email (sophie.strassmann@mail.mcgill.ca) if you are interested in having a Zoom/Jitsi or otherwise meeting.

Xin Wei, as you know, I am not at all in the world of art installation/theater. I CAN coordinate a discussion of our artistry network and simply make sure it stays on topic. 

If this is a bad time for such a discussion (ex: artists' block), I'd be happy to stay in the realm of theory and dive into the brilliant buzzing thriving social phenomena emerging from this sad time, which is more my area.

To all pease be well,

Sophie

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