Comment on the Presentation:
"The Wealth of disadvantaged Nations:
How Emerging Market Economies Can Manage
Globalization to Get Rich,"
by Frederic S. Mishkin, Ph.D.
H. William Batt
[Reprinted from
GroundSwell, November-December 2004]
On the evening of Thursday, October 7, 2004, Professor Frederic
S. Mishkin delivered the 19th Annual Henry George Lecture to a
capacity audience of students, faculty, and visitors at Scranton
University. Dr. Mishkin is the Alfred Lerner Professor of Banking
and Financial Institutions at the Graduate School of Business,
Columbia University. His title was "The Wealth of Disadvantaged
Nations: How Emerging Market Economies Can Manage Globalization to
Get Rich." The lecture constituted a preview of a forthcoming
book that will likely have that title, and will follow over ten
other books that he has written on the subject of money and banking.
The 7th edition of his textbook, The Economics of Money, Banking and
Financial Markets, was issued this year and is the leading textbook
on the subject. Mishkin proved to be a fluid and agile speaker, so
adept at presenting his material that it was difficult to keep up
with his presentation, even with powerpoint visuals and a later
audio tape to help.
If one takes the view that the lecture series is intended to make
leading economists more mindful of Henry George's contribution, the
university has been generally successful. Moreover, the speaker
selection committee, now headed by Economics and Finance Professor
Hong Nguyen, has been markedly prescient: some five past invitees
have later gone on to win the Nobel Prize in economics. Those were
Robert Solow, Robert Lucas, Amartya Sen, George Akerlof, and Joseph
Stiglitz. Other past speakers are just as well, if not better known:
Alfred Kahn, Alan Blinder, Charles Schultze, Alice Rivlin, Paul
Krugman, Gregory Mankiw, Robert Hall, and Jagdish Bhagwati. The
beforehand dinner jokes often suggest, in fact, that the path to
Sweden goes through Scranton. But no stipulation now exists that the
subject matter must discuss Georgist ideas. So it was that Dr.
Mishkin paid dutiful homage to Henry George at the beginning and end
of his speech, but those of us representing the Schalkenbach
Foundation -- Pat Aller, Bill Batt, and Heather Remoff -- were hard
put to discern much understanding of Georgist thought in what he
offered.
The presentation opened by the speaker's observation that
George's concerns were about economic development, poverty, and free
trade. He also noted that (unlike contemporary economists) George
was a moral philosopher. But apart from evincing a concern about
poverty, Dr. Mishkin's solution differed not greatly from his peers
today. He would expand the economic pie and increase productivity
such that more wealth might accrue to poor people and poor nations.
"Trickle Down." He conceded that many colleagues have
grown skeptical of the value of globalization, especially Stiglitz,
who became especially disillusioned after serving as Chief Economist
of the World Bank during the Clinton years. But for Mishkin it's a
matter of "doing it right" as opposed to the blind and
haphazard way many nations and policymakers have pursued in the
recent past. There are two dimensions of globalization, he argued:
open trade in both goods and financial capital. We are now entering
a third great wave of globalization: the first was from 1870 to
1914, the second followed World War II, and the third is the present
accelerated era. Much of his forthcoming book will be case studies
of how certain nations have pursued sound strategies -- Japan,
China, India, Korea, Singapore, and Chile, and how other nations
have taken a wrong turn -- Argentina and Mexico to take two
instances. It is not to say that even the now successful examples
have had a stellar record over the past century and more. Progress,
he argued results largely from the development of internal practices
in each nation, not due to intervention or aid from international
agencies. His new book, he argues, will be an argument about how to
do it right.
In this sense Dr. Mishkin can't fail but to become the darling
apologist for the financial community, the IMF and the World Bank.
He bestowed lavish praise on a widely-touted book by Peruvian
economist Hernando DeSoto: The Mystery of Capital. In that book,
DeSoto argues that it is the tenuous legitimacy of property rights
in the global South nations that prevents the capital that exists
from being leveraged for more development. (See my review of this
book at http://www.progress.org/2004/desorev.htm)
If only legal titles are made more secure, goes that thesis,
these countries will be then able to bootstrap themselves into
sustained and comfortable growth patterns; there is no need for aid
from the global North financial institutions to ensure their
success. Collateralized loans, whether from within or beyond a
nation's borders, will be adequate -- if well designed -- to ensure
that what capital exists is harnessed in the service of further
capital. Prevailing practices of corrupt markets, underground
economies, insecure legal titles, currency manipulation, the lack of
transparency in financial institutions, and so on need to be ended,
not by further aid. Rather, tough love for these nations is the best
solution, and this is best administered by such organizations as the
IMF, the World Bank, and other global instruments.
So in the final analysis, Dr. Mishkin wants more trade and
financial intercourse, not less. Globalization will promote more
efficient production, by fostering comparative advantage, by more
intense competition, and by breaking up the complicity of elites
that now prevent adequate performance within nations. He argues for
the enhancement of private property rights, greater legal
enforcement of contracts, more transparency, better corporate
governance, and removing government from the credit markets. This
will promote competition and increase liquidity of financial
capital.
What were we Georgists to think? We had the opportunity following
his presentation, to ask only one question. It fell to me, Bill
Batt, to suggest that in the Georgist scheme of things, important as
titles to real property may be, the value inherent in those titles
was mostly the accretion of land rent, the birthright of the total
community and not something leveraged for the private advantage of
particular interests. Were that rent collected for the benefit of
all, economic performance would be improved and governments could
eliminate revenue streams that are now dysfunctional to their
systems. Dr. Mishkin either missed the point or elected not to
address it. To him, land was capital. He is clearly no Georgist, nor
is it evident that he really understands George.
Vye Kelly, whose husband Jack once sat on the Schalkenbach Board
of Directors and who continues to live in Scranton, warmly received
the delegation representing the foundation. It was a warm and
hospitable exchange but there is no indication that the speaker went
away any more sanguine.