zeebaldone overview
To: Branko Milanovic, Finland Station
Branko Milanovic, one-time relentless researcher of global income distribution and inequality and more recently critical observer of global economic policies, posted a piece on Donald Trump being “a tool of history” and his inauguration “a symbolic end to neoliberalism” (Branko Milanovic: “To the Finland Station”. Trump as a tool of history) in which he ends with a paragraph acerbically critical of neoliberalism as a “mendacious” ideology that “called for rules while breaking them all”.
Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times and probably the most respected voice in global economics journalism, seems to have misread Branko Milanovic’s piece as an endorsement of Donal Trump and made clear that he found it “surprising and, above all, deeply disappointing” (Link).
Branko Milanovic’s near-immediate clarification (How the mainstream abandoned universal economic principles (but forgot to mention it)) is a short but hard-hitting criticism of the “neoliberal establishment” and its stealth abandonment of “the principles of globalization” in the face of China’s economic and geopolitical ascent.
His observation is correct but also misses the point as it implies that the original pursuit of the Washington Consensus’ not only had development outcomes but also development intentions. While maybe true for the most invested minds at institutions like the World Bank, it has from the very beginning been heavily criticised, too, by NGOs, other UN institutions, many governments in the Global South, and indeed in academia.
The story is not that the economic mainstream betrayed their stated convictions but that this change of mind and discourse betrays as many times before that the Global North never intended to give up its dominant position.
So I thought Branko Milanovic could have gone a step further in his critique and wrote the following comment addressed to him - at the Finland Station.
Dear Branko,
Having come from a periphery of sorts and via a non-standard route, you are destined for sure, privileged maybe, to see and see through what others struggle to permit their senses to even acknowledge.
The banners of equality, human rights, democracy, decolonisation, development, and, yes, development policies have served and powered three forces and purposes: those resisting the five hundred years of European expansion and the fossil-fuel-powered destruction of the biosphere in their various guises; those, like you, who worked inside the very institutions of that expansion with the best of intentions, but, crucially, also those who used them as the legitimising veil behind which the exploitation of people, the destruction of the biosphere, and the concentration of riches could continue unabated.
Those “achievements of modernity” were reached in the places thriving on the superabundance of global rent capture. If they can exist without that underlying pipework is an open question. To believe they can, is the illusion that is now falling apart in the Trump moment you describe. How they could be spread globally were the struggles of the past. Today the question is whether some of it can survive at all.
Paradoxically, you were never closer to admitting that thought than in your discussions of Doughnut Economics and degrowth. You argued that the population of the rich countries in the global north would never vote for such ideas. Well yes, precisely! But that does not prove the analysis or proposition wrong.
Your life’s work and publications show that deep down you share that sentiment.
What is to be done? Keep going!
A fan
January 9, 2025 #zeebaldone