Global Context

Global Context

a) Introduction Humanity is experiencing an unparalleled on-going process of globalised commercialism. It will transform both the human condition and the planet over the next century. Yet, the contemporary fixation with globalisation is odd. It’s hardly a new phenomenon. If it relates to the greater awareness and interconnectedness of different peoples around the world, globalisation has been a recurrent theme of human development for centuries past. If it is defined in economic terms - the expansion of international trade, the greater integration of national economies, the existence of transnational corporations and the importance of exchange rates - it’s also a rather old-fashioned concept; it expresses tendencies developing since the middle of the nineteenth century. However, since the last decade of the 20th century, there is something distinctively different about globalisation. The cause, the game changer, was the end of the Cold War and the demise of Communist regimes around the globe. For the first time in history it is possible to conceive of worldwide sociocultural, political and economic relationships in an entirely new way. Added to this was the development of the world-wide web – the internet – which transformed communication and information flows, patterns of work and social life. And in place, ready to exploit this opened-up world, were powerful transnational corporations (aka transnationals) able to think and act globally. Transnationals have been and remain the main drivers of the 21st century globalisation project, which seeks to remove all fetters to the worldwide spread of commercialism and global economic growth. The project’s distinctive character is defined by “the disappearance of boundaries – cultural and economic boundaries, physical boundaries, linguistic boundaries – and the challenge of organising our world in their absence” (Judt, 2009, p. 407). This is why the post-Cold War globalisation project is genuinely new; it is boundless. In a world without boundaries driven on by transnationals, the nationstate is increasingly relatively less powerful. No one nation-state can impose its will on all others. No one nation-state can solve the pressing problems of a boundless planet – worldwide financial melt-downs and recessions, extreme inequality, eco-system destruction, terrorism, criminality, and the like. In addition, the authority of the vast majority of nation-states is undermined by a minority of rogue opportunistic jurisdictions.1 These are states and statelets with compliant political elites which exploit opportunities afforded by free capital movements and the internet to provide tax havens, client secrecy and light-touch regulation for transnationals and wealthy families. Opportunistic 1

Other authors refer to these states and statelets as tax havens or secrecy jurisdictions. Neither descriptive is entirely satisfactory, hence my use of the term opportunistic jurisdiction.

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jurisdictions prosper at the expense of the majority of traditional jurisdictions; the result is a competitive ‘race to the bottom’ by every nation-states: tax bases shrink, transactional transparency deteriorates, and regulations are perennially relaxed.2 A world without boundaries requires Homo Sapiens (aka Sapiens) to think differently, more collectively; less in terms of us and them, and more in terms of “we”, the people of the world. We face common challenges and we must organise ourselves to achieve common objectives. This perspective, however, raises a number of further questions. What should the common objectives be? Whose interests should these objectives serve? Once questions of what and for whom are decided, there is a need to determine how the global economy should be managed; in which fora should a global debate take place; who should be invited to the discussions, and who excluded? Yet, rogue opportunistic jurisdictions are a serious threat to collective efforts to address the problems of a boundless planet. How are worldwide financial meltdowns to be averted when financial transnationals access opportunistic jurisdictions to evade necessary controls? How is income and wealth to be redistributed when transnationals and wealthy families use opportunistic jurisdictions to avoid paying their share of taxation? How is excessive extraction of planetary resources be reversed, and the habitats of other species protected, if transnationals simply locate in opportunistic jurisdictions to avoid environmental regulations? Cosmically speaking, a world without boundaries requires Sapiens to think more holistically; in terms of our species being just one very small part of a planetary eco-system which we share with other species. On one finite planet there is a trade-off between the expanding impact of Sapiens activity and what is left for the habitats of other species. Put starkly, the 200,000 year history of Sapiens is characterised by one simple fact: Sapiens growth causes degrowth (even waves of extinction) of other species with whom we share the planet. So the cosmic question we face is: when is enough enough? To be good neighbours to other species, perhaps Sapiens should establish boundaries, limits on its activity, valuing on the ‘rights’ of other species more highly. It is this type of reasoning which questions perpetual economic growth and calls for degrowth.

What is included in this Unit? The reader has to get some sense of the scope of the globalisation project and the challenges it throws-up. Section b initially sets out some hard numbers of the truly staggering size of the global economy, alongside insights about recent developments and projections of future trends. It also provides an innovative perspective on how the global economy can be perceived. In essence, it is a vast entity divided into three distinctive (though inter-related) economic sub-systems. These are the systems of scarcity, sufficiency and abundance. The global community can be divided into three categories: the people of poverty who inhabit the system of 2

Nation states not usually thought of as opportunistic jurisdictions share some of the latter’s characteristics. The UK is a prime case in point. It is said that when a USbased financial corporation wants to do something ‘dodgy’, they do it in their London subsidiary.

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scarcity; the people of adequacy who experience the system of sufficiency; and the people of plenty who live in the system of abundance. Economic activity within the system of abundance dominates and drives the global economy. The greatest threat to the system of abundance is underconsumption by the people of plenty, forcing a slowdown or even contraction of global economic activity. The system spontaneously responds to this threat by creating the institution of marketing; the latter is an intriguing concept which is fully explained in this section. The institution of marketing, working with and within corporations, aggressively seeks to ratchet up spending in value and volume terms. Section c identifies the key players of the global economy. The most important key players are the huge transnational corporations, and in particular vast financial mega-corporations, that have extensive power over developments in the global economy. A second group is the supra-national fora and global agencies through which nation states collectively exert influence. The final category relates to those who provide the intellectual justification for the globalisation project: eminent mainstream economists. Finally, section d discusses three, interrelated, policy challenges facing the global community in the 21st century. How can we increase global spending, alleviate the scale of extreme poverty and reduce excessive damage to the planet and other species?

b) Global economy – an overview The conventional wisdom about the global economy is to see it as simply the sum of activities of national economies. The primary focus of mainstream economic analysis is on nation states, with global trends an afterthought. This book turns convention on its head. The primary focus is on the global economy, and its different sub-systems, with nation states playing a truncated, secondary, role. This reflects a profound reality: the increasingly limited influence that any single nation state in isolation has over worldwide economic forces. Since the end of the Cold War the global economy has been on a roll. Between 2001 and 2010 worldwide economic activity doubled in size; this happened despite the most significant worldwide recession for seventy years. Today its size is truly staggering. In 2015 the nominal value of worldwide output is estimated at USD114,200,000,000,000 (CIA, 2016). To help the reader get a sense of what this figure means consider the following mental exercise. If a person wants to count 1 million US dollars, one dollar every second, it takes 12 days to complete. To count 1 billion dollars takes 32 years. So how many years would it take to count 1 trillion dollars? Answer: 32,000 years. To count 75 trillion dollars takes 2.4 million years!! The figures involved are so large the human mind finds it hard to cope; but they reflect the truly gigantic scale of economic activity on this planet every year. The global economy is not growing evenly around the world. Certain parts of the globe are experiencing a golden age of growth (O’Neil, 2011). For example, economic activity in the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) quadrupled in the first decade of the 21st century. Hence, whilst the global economy was doubling in size, one third of that expansion emanated from the BRIC nations. This is transforming the traditional landscape of major 3

economic nations. At the end of the 20th century the seven largest economies – the G7 – were all developed nations: the USA, Japan, Germany, France, Canada, the UK and Italy. By 2010 Brazil’s economy became larger than Italy’s, and in 2011 the size of the Chinese economy outstripped Japan’s for the first time. In terms of purchasing power, China surpassed the USA in 2015 to become the largest economy in the world. This audacious growth in BRIC nations has been driven on by a consumer revolution – ratcheting-up spending dramatically. Personal consumption spending in BRIC nations rocketed up 250 per cent in the first decade of this century. Over this period Chinese personal consumption grew by 1.5 trillion USD, or the equivalent of the UK economy’s output in 2010. If present trends continue, consumption by citizens of the BRIC nations will outstrip that of American consumers by 2020. And even newer nations are entering the fray. The new candidates for BRICstyle audacious growth over the next twenty years include Mexico, South Korea, Nigeria and Vietnam. In the global economy the only constant is change. An expanding global economy means greatly trade across national borders. Inter-national trade makes up roughly 25 per cent of global activity. BRIC nations now account for 20 per cent of inter-national trade, up from 10 per cent at the turn of the century. That said, about one-third of inter-national trade is internalised within transnational corporations; the flows of products shift between spatially dispersed units and divisions of the same globalised company. Consumers buy products that, quite literally, are world-wide in character. A youth buying a bike in France does not appreciate that she is purchasing an item involving production and assembly located in thirty different nations. Or a man buying perfume in Paris is probably unaware that the bottles have been on a round trip to Shanghi and back so that Chinese workers could stick labels on them at half the cost of French workers. There’s a downside to all of this: environmental damage. Latouche notes the increase of our environmental footprint over recent decades and claims it “was caused more by globalisation [of production] than by our consumption levels, excessive though these may be” (Latouche, n.d., p. 41).

The global economy has one over-riding characteristic: immense inequality. This vast and odious global inequality is multi-dimensional – spanning huge inequalities of income and wealth, consumption, access to assets, lifechances, CO2 omissions, biosphere drawing rights, ecosystem-damaging practices, and the like. Focusing on national economic entities distracts attention away from the underlying forces that generate these unequal outcomes. Yet if national economies are not to be the focus of attention, what is? Genuine insights about the global economy are gained when it is conceived of as the sum of three underlying sub-systems. The distinct, though interconnected, systems of scarcity, sufficiency and abundance (Sheehan, 2010). In the world today roughly 70 per cent of the global population experience the sub-systems of sufficiency and scarcity. The system of scarcity is the most retarded and under-development part of the global economy. The 2.5 billion people who endure the system of scarcity can rightly be called the people of poverty. This category includes the marginalised rural people on the 4

least fertile land of the Third World (husbanded mostly older men, women and children); it covers the refugees from various natural and man-made catastrophes; and it encompasses the poorest inhabitants of the gigantic shantytowns that surround the mega-cities of the Third World. The living conditions of the people of poverty are, from a Western perspective, appalling. In the mega-cities of the Third-World persons of poverty live in overcrowded slum housing with no sanitation, clean water, electrical power or waste disposal systems.3 Without a nebula of sophisticated social networks, each with a shared culture and strong reciprocal ties, the peoples of poverty and adequacy could not survive, especially in urban centres. Latouche (1993) calls these networks the informal. The informal is an array of diverse social networks based on family, clan or tribe; crucially they all have an economic aspect to their shared activities.4 A second category of the global population is the people of adequacy; that is, the roughly 40 per cent - 2.5 billion people - who experience the system of sufficiency. From the perspective of persons of poverty, the people of adequacy experience distinctively better material conditions. This is because the economic system they inhabit is relatively more developed and secure. There is no denying that the system has serious production constraints. But it is peopled by more skilled people, with access to some educational opportunities, which means its output limits are not as severe as those of the system of scarcity. This allows the people of adequacy in urban areas to move beyond the shantytowns and into more secure accommodation. In rural districts the people of adequacy are those with larger, more fertile farms. The people of adequacy include those who have stable but low level jobs in the formal economy (e.g. office workers, nurses) and those of middle rank in informal social networks. The people of adequacy enjoy the necessities of life - plentiful food, clean water, and decent but often overcrowded homes with access to forms of electricity and sanitation. They have limited access to health care and primary, perhaps secondary, education. This portion of the global population can also experience some decencies – furniture in every room, carpets, decorations – and the occasional luxury – books, children’s toys, attending a sports event, access to transport.5 But, without comprehensive welfare systems, there are threats of genuine hardship for those who suffer unemployment, ill-health and old age. This means persons of adequacy live one or two steps above the material conditions of the people of poverty, but with the persistent threat of falling back down if unfortunate circumstances arise.

The last 30 per cent the global population, the people of plenty, experience the third sub-system of the global economy: the system of abundance (Potter, 3

This is why the people of poverty endure very high death rates. Roughly 20,000 children under the age of five die each day due to a lack of food, clean water and basic medical facilities (UNICEF, 2011). That is the equivalent of 7 million avoidable deaths per year, or the equivalent of an Auschwitz every four months. 4 Latouche contrasts the informal with the formal economy of contracts and legal obligations, common in the system of abundance. 5 This could be access to affordable public transport, or ownership of a bicycle or even a motorised vehicle.

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1973). From the perspective of the other 70 per cent, it is self- evident that the people of plenty enjoy vastly superior material conditions. What is more, persons of plenty are spatially distributed across the globe. They make up all social classes in the advanced industrialised nations. They make up a solid bloc in the Gulf States, and form a majority of citizens in Russia and Eastern Europe. There are large concentrations of affluent consumers in the urban areas of the Middle East, South Asia, South-East Asia, the eastern seaboard of China and Latin America. This category even incorporates small affluent minorities living in the least developed nations, amongst them those at the very top of the informal social networks that support the peoples of poverty and adequacy.6 Persons of plenty live in a world saturated by branded products. This is no surprise, for the system of abundance has solved the problem of production. It has massive productive capabilities to provide a rich profusion of products, unparalleled in human history. It achieves this productive potential by utilising the most up to date technology, the most advanced equipment and the most highly educated workers. Its retail sector has extensive and sophisticated channels of distributing products to consumers, 24/7. Moreover, entrepreneurial corporations are constantly planning to expand productive capacity by investing in new equipment, applying better productive techniques based on scientific/electronic advances, and introducing new organisational and supply systems. The solution to the problem of production means that the most affluent 2 billion people enjoy consumer lifestyles that are immeasurably more prosperous than the other 5 billion people around the globe. For persons of plenty the necessities and decencies of life are all provided. Education – from primary through to higher education - is universally available often free at the point of delivery. High standard health care is almost always accessible to all and often either free or heavily subsidised. Reliable supplies of clean water, good standard housing, electricity and the like, are treated as necessities even for the poorest of the affluent. The average household can expect to: own their own home or have access to decent rented accommodation; enjoy various multiples – of car ownership, televisions, computers, mobile phones, wash rooms and bedrooms, holidays abroad and credit cards; buy new fashionable clothing – with new designs and colours - each season; eat different meals every day, with the occasional meal out; have a fitted kitchen, with a fridge, a freezer, a washing machine even a dish washer; “spoil” their children with plentiful supplies and varieties of food and drink, fashion clothing, electronic equipment and toys; regularly redecorate their homes, buy a new car, and insure their homes and personal possessions (including their pets); spend money on personal grooming, new handbags and new gadgets, even cosmetic surgery; access to many digital television channels and be able to download music when they want; finance parts of their affluent lifestyles by 6

The people of plenty, though numerically a minority of the global population, have the widest dispersal of incomes and wealth. This category includes those people living on something more than 10 USD per day right through to super rich, households with a net worth exceeding 1 billion USD. The latter are members of what Franks (2007) calls “billionaireville” who are both income and wealth rich. Hence in 2007 the richest 400 billionaires on the Forbes Global Billionaire’s List had a collective accumulated wealth of over 1 trillion USD.

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access to abundant sources of credit provided by the global financial system. Finally, they expect to be consumer-citizens, who can symbolise their success and self-identity through their spending decisions, and who have power and influence in society because they spend. The three sub-systems do not recognise any national boundary or city limits. Actually each system interacts with the others; they symbiotically act as sub-systems of a wider global economy. The most obvious interaction occurs through foreign direct investment by transnational corporations. The transnational movement of capital has been and remains a persistent trait of capitalism; the dominant movements emanate from the system of abundance to the systems of sufficiency and (less so) scarcity. Increasing foreign direct investment has meant that more transnational corporations locate production facilities in the systems of sufficiency and scarcity and export the resulting low-cost outputs to the system of abundance. Through these global product networks corporations increase profit rates on the final products sold to affluent consumers.7 Patterns of global trade criss-cross the three sub-systems; as already noted, one-third of global trade is internalised within system-spanning divisions of the same transnational corporations. Consider the example of a fruit-based transnational corporation operating banana production and packaging facilities in Honduras; it ships the bananas to the UK for sale in supermarkets chains. By contrast, the paper trail for the bananas takes a much more circuitous route, adding to the costs of the final product. The parent corporation pays a subsidiary in Cayman Islands to manage its purchasing network, a subsidiary in Luxembourg to operate its financial services unit, a subsidiary in Ireland to provide trademark services, a subsidiary in the Isle of Man to run it insurance services, a subsidiary in Jersey for management services and a subsidiary in Bermuda for shipping activities (Shaxson, 2012). Therefore, for every £1 that a UK consumer spends on bananas only 13 pence goes back to Honduras, generating one pence of tax revenue for the Honduran government (Christian Aid, 2013).8 A third aspect of system interaction is through the transnational movement of people around the global economy. Service and agricultural corporations operating in the system of abundance willingly employ people who have emigrated from the systems of scarcity or sufficiency. These immigrant workers – with few labour rights or protections – are important sources of low-cost labour for corporations who want to protect profit margins, whilst offering “value for money” to affluent consumers. The immigrant

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They do this, first, by widening markets to new groups of affluent consumers by lowering product class prices whilst retaining profits per unit steady and, second, by keeping product prices steady and increasing profit margins. 8 The £1 of sales revenue is divided as follows: 8 pence goes to the Cayman Islands for purchasing network services, 8 pence to Luxembourg for financial services, 4 pence to Ireland for the use of the brand, 4 pence to the Isle of Man for insurance services, 6 pence to Switzerland for management services and 17 pence to Bermuda for distribution network services. The supermarket retail mark-up is 40 pence, of which one penny goes to the UK government as tax. This means that for the £1 transaction, onshore tax authorities (Honduras and the UK) collect just two pence of revenue, a tax rate of 2 per cent.

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workers, although poorly paid, still receive in one week what they might earn in one or two months in their home country. The three sub-systems also appear intra-nationally, within nation states. The exemplar of this is India which, whilst enjoying rapid economic growth and rising affluence, still has a large proportion of the population suffering serious malnutrition. It is also possible to observe the three sub-systems within the same city – especially in the mega-cities of the newly industrialising nations. Lagos is an exemplar with over 20 million people living within its limits experiencing vastly divergence lifestyles, from unsafe slums to opulent mansions.9

The system of abundance is the driver of the global economy. Global output almost always moves upwards, though unevenly and with occasional regional recessions of varying severity and duration. Growth is driven on by consumer spending by the people of plenty.10 With the production problem for all practical purposes resolved, the greatest threat to the system, and the global economy, is under-consumption. That is a situation where affluent consumers, for a variety of reasons, slow down their rate of consumption relative to the potential growth of productive capacity.11 To counter this threat the system spontaneously generates, through the profit-seeking actions of business, the appropriate institutional arrangement which gives priority to consumption. The institutional arrangement is called the institution of marketing.12 The institution is a gigantic network of diverse groupings, which embraces a multitude of corporations, media, agencies and talented professionals. It colonises an array of propaganda mechanisms to produce a glut of commercial messages aimed at those who spend; they all share one common purpose: the intention to persuade people to buy more products and pay more for them.13 One straight-forward way of getting to grips with the idea of the institution is to define what it does. Broadly it has to four main areas of activity.  The products and their brand images. This encompasses the design, differentiation and development of products to make them “objects of desire”. What is more, it involves the creation of imaginative brand 9

When the three peoples live in close proximity to each other, the peoples of poverty and adequacy are keenly aware of the existence of a consumer mega-culture. However, they have insufficient incomes and access to credit to actively engage with it. This inter-connectedness however creates the seeds of the future expansion of the people of plenty. 10 The implications of globalisation of growth are profound. As O’Neil says for “most of my career, the dominant group in the world economy was US consumers...As the BRIC countries grow, their consumers will become the most important in the world” (2012, p. 138). 11 Persons of plenty fail to spend due to a mixture boredom, guilt, exhaustion and confusion. They are bored by and guilty because they have so much ‘stuff’; and confused and exhausted by the cornucopia of choice. 12 In this context, an institution is an organised grouping engaged in shared activities that require similar attitudes/mindsets, and which operate propaganda mechanisms that instigate cultural change. 13 These ideas are derived from the works of J.K Galbraith and David Potter (Sheehan, 2010).

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images for products – including the brand name - which highlight the salient selling points. The active persuaders and the mass media. Once branded products are designed and produced (in the expectation of sales), considerable efforts are made by the active persuaders - the agents of paid for advertising, marketing public relations specialists and celebrity endorsers – to persuade potential customers to buy the products. To communicate widely the messages of active persuaders members of the institution rent space and time in a variety of mass media. Any mass media “space” will do - direct mail, television, cinema, newspapers and magazines, spam emails, telephone texting, the internet, even blank walls in public toilets. The managed market-place. Once the branded products are available and potential target audiences have been “hit” by persuasive messaging, the next step is to provide the most persuasive environment in which potential customers can buy branded products. This is the managed market-place, which has two dimensions. First, there is the planned topography of the in-store environment (e.g. supermarkets, city centre department stores and virtual internet stores). Bricks and mortar stores are a three-dimensional setting designed to ratchet-up product sales; internet stores are similarly designed, but in two-dimensions. Second, there is the architecture of the out-of store environment, where clusters of stores are concentrated together (e.g. city centre boulevards, shopping malls, and themed shopping and leisure complexes). It is in the managed market-place that corporations interact together to stimulate extra spending by consumers. Brand management. This is the multi-disciplinary activity conducted by every corporate entity directed towards organising a portfolio of brands; it includes the effort to construct consistent commercial messages about the portfolio.

The institution operates at different levels of persuasion. The macro-level of persuasion creates the most conducive environment for spending to grow. This is not the intention of any member of the institution, but the inevitable byproduct of the huge glut of commercial messages produced. For, taken in the aggregate, the glut of commercial messages communicates, sotto voce, to the people of plenty a shared consumer mega-culture, a pervasive morality of indulgence and a customer mindset. The institution, indirectly working at this macro-level of persuasion, is hugely influential in creating a society made up of consumer-citizens who give priority to consumption. At the meso-level of persuasion the institution perpetually influences the different sub-cultures relating to a multitude of social groups (or distinctive milieu) within the people of plenty. Meso-level persuasion amplifies the importance of symbolising group identity - the sense of belonging and conforming - through consumption. Moreover, it continually engages with innovative consumers (i.e. trend setters and taste makers) to propose new fashions, different activities and novel lifestyle choices, all of which can be symbolised through new patterns of consumption. Meso-level persuasion concentrates on promoting new patterns of consumption that span different product classes and distinctive corporateguided markets. Within a favourable macro and meso-environment, the main 9

focus of the institution’s work is to create persuasive commercial messages on specific corporate-guided markets for branded products: the micro-level of persuasion. Much of the popular and academic literature on marketing and public relations examines micro-level of persuasion, without recognising the other levels. The institution, however, is most successful in giving priority to consumption when the three levels of persuasion – macro, meso and micro – reinforce each other. Multi-dimensional persuasion inculcates the morality of indulgence; educates about the practices of affluent consumption; perpetually provides new reasons and justifications to spend; and simplifies the complexities of abundant choice. Two final points should be made. The institution’s work is primarily aimed at affluent consumers, but not exclusively so. It exerts persuasive influences on governments conducting ‘collective’ consumption on behalf of communities; and seeks to sway corporations and governments making investment decisions, especially when the choices of decision-makers are swayed by conspicuous, inconspicuous, emulative and prestige motivations. Lastly, the institution establishes a vast array of relationships with a huge variety of corporations. It is not easy to clearly define the boundary between the institution of marketing and corporations. Perhaps the best analogy of the relationship is that of conjoined twins – separate but connected. Hence, the institution works with and within corporations, and corporations work with and within the institution.

The dominant concern in the system of abundance is how to stimulate global spending – especially consumption expenditure. This is all the more pressing because persons of plenty are already so affluent. It means that almost every affluent consumer can lower spending whilst still retaining a more than adequate standard of living. In this challenging environment, persuasion replaces production as the dominant economic problem. The problem of persuasion can be summarised in three fundamental questions. 1. How can justifications for spending be invigorated and enlarged in number? 2. How can the ‘hot’ consumer mega-culture be intensified to create evermore propitious conditions for spending? 3. How can the massive productive capacity available be utilised at sufficiently profitable rates of return? These are the three hows of the system of abundance.14 Working with and within corporations, the institution spontaneously provides answers to all these questions. More specifically, the work of the institution ensures that the

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In this sub-system there are revised questions relating to the what, how and for whom of production. What vastly complex combinations should be produced, and what new products should be designed to entice more spending. How can the technical problems of providing an ever-expanding cornucopia of products be solved? For whom: existing customers, who are always encouraged to spend more, and new consumers, who are persuaded to share in the plenty.

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willingness to spend of affluent consumers rises broadly in line with their ability to spend.15 Persons of plenty live in a ‘hot’ consumer mega-culture instigated by the mass messaging of the institution of marketing operating at the macro-level of persuasion. It’s a ‘hot’ culture in the sense that it is subject to perpetual refinement, revision and evolution. This creates the most propitious conditions for greater spending. An exemplar of how it works is the fashion “industry”. Here the institution, working with and within fashion-based corporations, makes strenuous efforts to continually reformulate what is “in-fashion”, especially for younger consumers; and then makes equally strenuous efforts to convince target groups to purchase new products in order to conform to these new fashion norms.16 Finally, the most observable element of a hot consumer mega-culture is perpetually restless corporate-guided markets. This market form is continuously disturbed by product differentiation and development, newlyestablished managed market-places, newly-popular celebrity endorsers, the competitive actions of rivals and the changing mores of trend-setters and taste-makers. Consider, as an example, the launch in 2012 of a new version of the Apple iPhone - the iPhone 5. This product development opened-up an entirely new corporate-guided market, and had knock-on effects on Apple’s other guided-markets for the iPhone 3G, 3GS, 4 and 4S. The iPhone 5 could be purchased in a variety of managed market-places, including the 400 or more iconic Apple stores which have opened since 2001.17 This, inevitably, evoked a response from Apple’s rivals, such as Samsung, HTC and Microsoft. In March 2013 Samsung launched its new Galaxy S4 smartphone, a development on the Galaxy SIII. Samsung thereby created yet another corporate guided market, in direct competition with the Apple portfolio and impinging directly on the corporate-guided-market for the iPhone 5. Still later in 2013 Apple launched two differentiated versions of the iPhone 5 – the iPhone 5S and 5C – instigating yet more corporate-guided markets. New products, new markets, new responses by rivals are the clearest markers of a hot culture. The discussion of how the institution is the driving force of the ‘hot’ culture is deficient without highlighting two dimensions of this phenomenon. First, there is the morality of indulgence; second, there is the customer mindset. Both provide essential underpinnings for increased spending. The ascetic morality of restraint, which values self-discipline, abstinence, sacrifice, frugality (even poverty), thrift, chastity, humility and hard 15

Put another way, as the incomes of affluent consumers’ increase the glut of persuasive messaging produced by the institution persuades them to increase spending. This stabilises the system-wide propensity to consume. 16 It is wrong to blame the existence of culturally hot societies solely on the institution of marketing. Affluent consumer-citizens, acting with constrained discretion, heat up the culture as well. Hot cultures allow avant-garde taste setters - fashion leaders and trend setters - to demand new cultural mixes that fuse together previously-distinct cultural categories. 17 The design of Apple stores is so iconic that Apple Inc registered it as a trademark. No rival can copy the store design without infringing the license (Bell, 2013).

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work, threatens the system of abundance. It makes persons of plenty susceptible to feelings of moral repugnance; guilt at having so much, revulsion at wanting more, and disgust with its triviality and environmental damage (Levine, 2006). In which case, those with the greatest ability to spend might choose not to do so. This threat of under-consumption raises the spectre of lower profits, unused productive capacity and slow (or no) growth. The institution counters this threat by promoting a morality consistent with the priority of spending: the morality of indulgence, which transforms vices into virtues. As Sheehan notes this: is a morality that releases desires rather than repressing them. Desire in all its forms is a virtue and the more intense and more insatiable the desire, the greater the virtue. It praises people for wanting and encourages them to want more. It is a morality that values material things, and especially objects of beauty. It extols the pleasures and comforts of possessions and entices people to accumulate many more. This morality also places great value on image and appearance; it is fixated with the body and how it is dressed and decorated. It measures people by their personal grooming. It is a morality of perpetual gratification, of jam today and tomorrow, and it lauds as virtues the spending and borrowing that finances such gratification. It is a morality of freedom, where people are free to choose how to indulge without any religious, political or educational leader saying “thou shall not”. [Sheehan, 2010, p. 78] Additionally, the work of the institution spontaneously creates a widelyshared customer mindset. Hence, persons of plenty increasingly see themselves: …less as workers, electors, pupils, worshippers or community members, and more as customers. The customer mindset ideally sees the consumer as one who is to be served, who is free to make choices, and who has personal agency. The consumer is someone to be treated with respect, who is in authority, and who is never wrong. [ibid., p. 79]

c) Global players For some – the powerful few – the globalisation project creates a vast boundless market-place and opportunities for unfettered growth. The most powerful proponents of the project are the major transnationals, the new sovereigns of the global economy. Transnationals achieve common goals by collective action through powerful corporate lobbying associations (e.g. bankers associations, chambers of commerce, retail associations, manufacturing federations, exchange federations, and the like); corporate lobbyists are influential advocates on a range of business and corporate issues, whom national and supra-national policy-makers ignore at their peril.18 18

These activities and activists form an institution of corporate lobbying, which applies persuasive techniques developed by the institution of marketing.

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The very largest transnationals challenge nation states in economic importance; on one basis, of the 100 largest economic entities in the world, 51 are transnationals and 49 are nation states; and the sales of each of the five top transnationals (General Motors, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, Ford Motor and DaimlerChrysler) are larger than the GDP’s of 182 nation states (Dicken, 2011).19 Transnationals span the systems of abundance, sufficiency and scarcity; they are the driving force behind economic innovation and cultural change, perpetually finding new ways to overcome physical and linguistic constraints. They are the main proponents of a high growth society. Moreover, The size of the dominant transnationals is unnerving. Consider CocaCola Inc.; it operates production and distribution facilities in 208 countries (including Afghanistan, the West Bank and both Inner and Outer Mongolia); its world-wide employment totals 93,000 people; it generates 80 per cent of revenue outside the USA (Zakaria, 2010).20 But, it is small-beer compared to the elite class of financial transnationals: Bank of America, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan-Chase, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, American International Insurance Group (AIG), Prudential Financial, Banco Santander, the ING Group, Daewoo Securities, and the like. Barclays plc is an exemplar of the scale of operations involved. Its activities span traditional and investment banking, wealth management and proprietary trading; its trading operations are located in 50 nations, including 298 subsidiaries in opportunistic jurisdictions; it employs nearly 150,000 people, servicing 48 million customers; in 2009 its assets totalled USD 2 trillion, about the size of the UK economy (Barclays, 2009; Barclays, 2010; Tax Justice Network, 2011). More unsettling still is the thought that as the economic system grows the more resilient, successful transnationals grow even larger, as they squeeze-out or absorb their less aggressive rivals. The 60 or so opportunistic jurisdictions sit at the heart of the transnationals-led globalisation project. Today, over half of world trade and banking assets and a third of foreign direct investment is routed through opportunistic jurisdictions. Corporate power emanates from its access to these jurisdictions to “get around the rules, laws and regulations of jurisdictions elsewhere” (Shaxson, 2012, p. 8). Opportunistic jurisdictions provide transnationals with a get out of jail card when it comes to onerous regimes of regulation and taxation. Additionally, the relocations threat is used by commercial lobbying associations to generally lower tax rates, shrink the tax base and weaken regulation across the board. As already noted, competition between jurisdictions is always a race to the bottom; and the winners are the transnationals and their shareholders. This is why one third of the top 700 UKbased corporations paid zero taxation in 2006 (op. cit.). Conventionally, the global economy is thought of an agglomeration of the economies of nation states. Nation states have this hold of contemporary thought for a variety of reasons. Each nation state has a shared history, its glorious victories and heroic defeats, each with its own pantheon of great 19

Dicken claims that the corporate figures are over-estimated. If corporations were measured on the same basis as nation states (that is, value added rather than sales) the former would be considerably smaller than is claimed. 20 In 2010, Coca Cola Inc ranked 72 in the top 500 companies listed by Fortune magazine (Zakaria, 2010).

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leaders. Each national people has an affective commitment to their own shared identifies and cultures; members of a nation can feel part of something greater than themselves. This means that the governments of nation states have legitimacy as political decision-makers, which cannot be replicated by supra-national institutions and agencies. The globalisation project, however, inevitably skews the balance of power towards transnationals and away from nation states; the threat is that nation states become hollowed-out as decision-makers, increasing marginalised and irrelevant. The sense of marginalisation is re-inforced when transnational lobbyists define narrow pro-growth policy parameters for nation states; “degrowth” initiatives being met with the withdrawal of corporate political funding and the threat to locate elsewhere. In addition, nation states have become dependent transnationals operating within their jurisdiction to generate vast volumes of exports, employment and (less so) tax revenues; when times get tough, they have little choice but to bail-out ‘too-bid-to-fail’ transnationals. Even the USA – the sole global ‘superpower’ – had to provide short-term loans to tide-over Harley-Davidson, Caterpillar and Dell Computers during the Global Financial Crisis (Rushe, 2010; Blackden and Wilson, 2010). Transnationals, however, have a conflicted attitude towards nation states. The latter enforce property rights within each jurisdiction (e.g. patents, copyright licences and bankruptcy law) which facilitate profitable transactions, especially on corporate-guided markets. Nation states also have the legitimacy to negotiate and police inter-national rules on trade practices, bank capital adequacy and intellectual property, and the like. Inter-national agreements set the rules of the game for transnationals. Finally, in times of crisis, such as 2008, transnationals want nation states to provide leadership; the cheerleaders of unfettered free markets become overnight converts to state planning; they call on nation states to bail them out and provide a roadmap to recovery. Therefore, in the right circumstances, nation states acting collectively – such as in the G20 fora - and through supra-national agencies – the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) – become influential global players. Transnationals are happy for this to happen, despite critics raising the spectre of big government and big business in a close, cosy relationship (Klein, 2007). Yet, transnationals “do not necessarily want nations to unite too closely...[and] must always be tempted to play the game of divide and rule” (Sampson, 1973, p. 279; his emphasis). Essentially, transnationals want it both ways: keep out of our way in good times, but work together to bail us out when things turn sour. The irony of transnationals aggressively using opportunistic jurisdictions to avoid taxation, whilst being bailed out with taxpayer monies, should not be lost on the reader.

Practical decision-makers have a primeval need to have beliefs and actions intellectually justified. Hard-headed policy-makers hold in high esteem top mainstream economists, at the premier Universities, who claim a scientific (!!) understanding of the inner workings of the global economy. This means leading mainstream economists are uniquely respected global players, for they are the intellectual high-priests of the globalisation project. There’s just one problem. Mainstream economists can’t agree amongst themselves. As 14

the old joke says if you placed all economists end to end they would never reach a conclusion. Very crudely, but not without insight, disagreements between mainstream economists divides them into two schools of thought. First, there are the free market fundamentalists. The fundamentalists embrace markets with near-religious fervour. They believe that markets and market forces are self-regulating, guided by the invisible hand (God!!). In the market-place consumers are sovereign and corporations subjects. Free, competitive markets encourage profit-seeking and entrepreneurship. Free trade between nations makes every nation a winner. What is more, the best governance is through small government. State action should protect private property and national borders; on the rare occasions requiring government regulation it should be “light touch”. At the macro-economic level, fundamentalists believe government should balance its budget and protect the value of money.21 The second school is the interventionists. This school’s common bond is scepticism about the efficacy of markets – due to market imperfections. Interventionists believe that corporate power mitigates the benefits of markets; monopoly markets erect barriers to competition and fix high prices. Trade unions impose rigid wages, usually at too high a level. Asymmetric information between buyers and sellers leads to market failure. International trade distorted by powerful trading nations reinforces global inequality. At the macro-economic level, interventionists argue that market-based economies are unstable; effective demand can either be excessive (causing inflation) or deficient (creating unemployment). They propose that governments promote macro-economic stability, through the management of effective demand. Despite their differences, fundamentalists and interventionists agree on some things. They have a common conception of the universal economic problem – that of scarce resources and unlimited wants. Both schools see the solution to this problem in the perpetual growth of output and employment. They concur that free markets offer an optimal solution for this universal problem; market prices act to contract demand to the available supply. Both share the view that free markets promote high growth, low unemployment, balanced trade and the eradication of extreme poverty; both accept that imperfect markets slow growth, increase unemployment, exacerbate trade imbalances and reinforce poverty. The disagreement relates to the practical reality of free markets. Fundamentalists are optimists, believing most markets are free. Interventionists are pessimists, fearing markets are very imperfect. Therefore, fundamentalists are critical of government intervention as it limits economic freedom, whilst interventionists promote government action to make markets work better.

d) Global challenges in a world without boundaries To consider the vast array of global challenges in the 21st century is a mindblowingly complex. To bottle the edges of the discussion, this section will only address three important, inter-related, global policy challenges. How can “we” 21

The strongest advocates of free market fundamentalism are, not surprisingly, found within the global financial system, which gains the most from a world with boundaries.

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increase global spending and alleviate extreme poverty, without trashing the plant?

All of the key players in the global economy are growthers, fervently devoted to perpetual growth and the growth society. From this perspective, the size of the global economy (remember, in 2015 valued at UDS114.2 trillion) is never big enough. Their overriding priority is to ensure the growth of global spending – generating higher output, profits and employment – to sustain the growth society. In the system of abundance this requires the perpetual expansion of consumption spending to justify higher investment spending to create new capacity. Unsurprisingly, the pro-growth agenda is the dominant discourse in the policy debates that occur at the G-20, the World Economic Forum, the Group of Thirty and the like. However, occasionally voices of dissent question the growth society. The United Nations (1996) identified five growth scenarios with negative connotations.  Jobless growth: where higher spending does not translate into more jobs.  Voiceless growth: where higher spending is not subject to democratic accountability.  Ruthless growth: where growth is associated with rising inequality between rich and poor.  Rootless growth: where local cultures are replaced by a mono consumer mega-culture.  Futureless growth: where growth despoils the planet and depletes the eco-system. Although mainstreamer economists are growthers, differences of emphasis can be detected within this broad church. For fundamentalists, spending growth is unreservedly better than no growth at all; and high growth rates are achieved through low, flat rate, taxes and minimalist state regulation. Interventionists agree that more spending is good, with a few reservations. Interventionists express angst about jobless growth; leading to calls for government action to promote “job-full” growth – via public works programmes which are heavily labour intensive. Interventionists are uneasy about ruthless growth, claiming government action must alleviate excessive inequality. Interventionists also worry about futureless growth; hence, the call for green growth – where higher spending reduces environmental damage – as contrasted with brown growth (i.e. business as usual). With these reservations, the mainstream consensus supports a growth society. The greatest fear for mainstreamers is a world without spending growth; raising the spectre of mass unemployment, increasing poverty, rising mortality rates...and lower profits. Mainstream economists use pejorative nouns recession, slump, depression - to describe periods when economic activity declines. In response both groups become prominent advocates of pro-growth policy responses. Of course, they offer different technical solutions in order to re-ignite growth, but both are fervent devotees of the growth society. By contrast, the thought of John Stuart Mill’s steady state, with unchanging spending and output, is anathema to them both; and, the Latouchian idea of intentional de-growth is even more repellent. 16

A second pressing issue for a growth society is to determine the sustainable growth rate for global spending? If spending grows too rapidly this can instigate accelerating price-inflation, which can only be corrected by slowing or reversing the expansion of spending. When there is low or no spending growth, combined with underlying increases in labour productivity, this creates unnecessarily high unemployment - with all its associated social costs. A sustainable growth rate avoids the abyss of rapid inflation and largescale unemployment. A third growth-related issue relates to large-scale trade imbalances between nations. A little explanation is required on this point. Significant trade imbalances can occur when states expand their own economies through export-led growth. Crucially, they build up huge trade surpluses which they refuse to spend to help the exports of other nations. Consequently, some nations run very large trade surpluses, whilst others run significant trade deficits; they are two sides of the same coin. This harms global growth when pressure grows on the deficit nations to purchase less imports. As deficit nations contract their economies to stem imports this harms trade surplus nations as they sell less exports, slowing spending growth in these nations as well. In aggregate, global spending growth is inevitably lower than if trade was balanced between nations. This is an intractable issue for the globalisation project. Its resolution shows no sign of an early resolution, especially when emerging nations establish export processing zones (EPZs) attractive to transnational corporations seeking low-cost locations for their global activity networks.

The second global challenge is to significantly reduce the level of extreme poverty. This is certainly the most pressing issue for the people of poverty. The nations of the world, through the auspices of the UN, have established key millennium goals. The most important being that extreme poverty should be reduced to half its level of 1990 – from 1.8 billion to 0.9 billion. This challenge is all the greater as the global population is projected to increase to 9 billion in 2050, with most of the increase expected in poorer developing nations in Africa. For supporters of the globalisation project, the only proven method of reducing poverty is audacious growth. Yet, rapid global growth over the last two decades has been extremely ruthless in nature, associated with markedly rising inequality. China’s ruthless growth has resulted in the richest 10 per cent of its population receiving 60 per cent of national income. South Africa also experienced very ruthless growth in the post-apartheid era, making it the most unequal nation on the planet. In the last twenty years the incomes of the richest 1 per cent of the global population (60 million people) have grown 60 per cent, while the incomes of the richest 0.01 per cent (600,000 people) have increased even faster. Meanwhile the poorest 20 per cent (1.5 billion people) still receive just 2 per cent of total income. Ruthless growth has also exacerbated the onerously unequal share of global assets, due to the existence of opportunistic jurisdictions. Consequently, around USD 32 trillion of assets, a quarter of global wealth, is held in offshore accounts. Unsurprisingly ruthless global growth over the last two decades has created

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1200 billionaires and annual double-digit expansion of markets for superyachts, sports cars, champagne and caviar (Jackson, 2009; Oxfam, 2013). Ruthless growth explains why the pace of extreme poverty reduction is painfully slow. Extreme poverty only fell from 1.8 billion in 1990 to 1.4 billion by 2005, due mainly to the audacious growth of China and India (UN, 2009). And, although the rate at which children under the age of five died due to lack of clean water food and basic medical care fell from 40,000 per day in 1990 to 21,000 in 2012, this still is the equivalent to an Auschwitz every four months. Finally, post the 2008 crisis, the UN agreed to delay the date for reducing extreme poverty to half the 1990 level, pushing it out to 2025. Put bluntly, whilst the rich get considerably richer, the life and death concerns of the poorest are put on hold. Dissenters from this narrative offer an alternative method of poverty reduction: redistribution. That is, a fundamental and irreversible redistribution of income and wealth from the global rich to the global poor. Additionally, reducing inequality would lower extreme poverty levels quickly. To illustrate the point Oxfam note that if the USD 240 billion which the top 100 billionaires added to their wealth in 2012 was redistributed to the global poor “this would end world poverty four times over” (2013, p.2). Furthermore, to lower inequality over the long-term, Oxfam propose paying decent wages for decent work, extending access to free health and education beyond the people of plenty, and cracking down on tax avoidance/evasion through opportunistic jurisdictions. Latouche (n.d.) argues that reducing excessive inequality would more equitably distribute the drawing rights on the planet’s biosphere. The present situation where 20 per cent of the global population consumes 86 per cent of the planet’s resources is indefensible.

The last global challenge is to achieve ecologically sustainable development. In other words, marrying perpetual economic growth and poverty reduction with the limits of a finite planet? The key question is: can we promote greater global affluence – increasing the membership of the people of plenty - without trashing the planet? So far the challenge has proved too difficult. As Jacobs (2012) notes “environmental degradation is far more evident now than it was twenty years ago. Climate change, water scarcity, food insecurity and rising commodity prices have made the environmental consequences of growth much more immediate to mainstream poicymaking” (p. 17). And this will become a more pressing issue as audacious growth rates spread across the globe. By around 2040 the Chinese economy will larger than that of the USA. Somewhere around 2025 Chinese consumers will spend more than US consumers. Around 2050 Russia and South Korea will have higher incomes per head than Italy. And beyond the BRICs there are another eleven nations – the N-11 – likely to experience audacious growth, with Indonesia, South Korea, Mexico and Turkey the most likely candidates (O’Neil, 2012). Growthers believe it is possible for the global economy to enjoy sustained growth throughout the 21st century, whilst improving the condition of the planet’s eco-system (Simon and Kahn, 1984; Easterbrook, 1995; Beckerman, 1995; Lomborg, 2005, World Nuclear Association, 2010; Jacobs, 2012). The solution is found in a techno-optimistic perspective of green growth. Green growthers claim that new technology, innovative product design, 18

market-led resource allocation and sagacious regulation, there is a possible future where “people, machines, and nature learn to work together to each other’s benefit” (Easterbrook, 1995, p xxi). All of the key global players are confident about the sustainability of audacious growth, differing only on the respective roles which markets and governments may play in this possible future.22 There is another perspective. Degrowthers believe that growth is innately rootless and futureless; in emerging nations, often voiceless as well. The growth society will trash the planet, destroy the habitats of other species and ultimately threatens the survival of Sapiens. Degrowthers highlight the planetary limits to perpetual growth (Meadows, Meadows, Randers and Behrens, 1972; Gardner, Assadourian and Sarin, 2004; Brown, 2005; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005a; Jackson, 2009; Latouche, 2010; Latouche, n.d.). The boundaries most regularly cited are: rapid depletion of natural mineral and energy resources; absolute scarcity of marine fish stocks; increased soil and water pollution; rapid deforestation; significant biodiversity loss; and climate change. Some degrowthers also argue that continued growth coupled with population growth is wholly unsustainable. Put simply: green growth is an oxymoron.23 Time will tell who is right. If the degrowthers are correct, a new remedy for extreme poverty is needed to replace audacious growth. Degrowthers argue trade-offs exist and choices must be made. Crucially, redistribution (of income, wealth, assets and biosphere drawing rights) must be put on the global agenda. But reducing excessive inequality inevitably creates winners and losers, which poses significant political challenges (Myrdal, 1975). Latouche (2010) notes, for example, that the only nation to achieve the criteria of sustainable development established by the WWF is…Cuba!! Can one imagine the challenges of persuading persons of plenty that the citizens of Cuba should be their role model? If growthers are correct, we can have it all: more spending and output, less extreme poverty and reduced environmental damage. There are no problematic trade-offs, and no difficult choices; yet, when does techno-optimism become foolish myopia? Of course, such a discourse is sapient-centric. The debates revolve around what happens to Homo sapiens, as if we don’t share our planet with a rich profusion of other species that require habitats different from those we choose to design. A trade-off exists: for as Sapiens expropriates more of the planet, less remains for other species to prosper; and some species are eradicated. As long as humanity suffers from species-ism (a mindset related to racism), seeing itself as superior, granting itself legal rights not afforded to other species, this is likely to continue.

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Fundamentalists highlight to the potential for green entrepreneurship and a green technical revolution that might spur rapid growth whilst improving the environment. Interventionists are proponents of green Keynesianism; with government leading an environmental reconstruction programme to stimulate spending and create new jobs (Jacobs, 2012; Green New Deal Group, 2008). 23 Latouche (n.d.) notes that over the next thirty years the resource intensity of each percentage of global grow is likely to decline by 30 per cent. Yet, due to audacious growth, the drain on global resources will still increase.

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e) What follows? The book takes the following structure. Units 1 and 2 provide the reader with an appreciation of different conceptions of markets which underpin debates about the globalisation project. Unit 1 outlines the imagined order of free markets, so beloved on mainstream economics. Practically-speaking, this imagined order has little value; ideologically, it powerfully justifies free-market globalisation. Unit 2 sets-out two more practically useful perspectives on markets in the global economy: global exchange markets and corporateguided markets; both conceptions inform and underpin the analytical discussion contained in later Units. Unit 3 explains how economic activity, globally and nationally, is officially measured; it describes how rates of economic growth and degrowth can be calculated; it comments on the scale of inter-national inequality; and it assesses the flaws in using GDP statistics to measure either human happiness or ecological balance. Units 4 and 5 cover the central overarching theory used to analyse the globalisation project: the theory of effective demand. Unit 4 provides the building blocks of the theory: the drivers and constraints on expected global expenditure, made-up of consumption and investment spending. Unit 5 applies the theory to analyse the performance of the global economy. It considers four scenarios: ‘organic’ consumption-led growth; unintentional degrowth, through a recession; government policy-induced growth; and intentional degrowth, via a thrift drive. The links between changes in effective demand and employment are investigated. Special attention is given to case of intentional degrowth and the mitigation of any adverse implications for employment and living standards. Lastly, it considers how the theory of effective demand explains global price-inflation and deflation. Units 6, 7 and 8 provide a comprehensive treatment of global finance. Unit 6 describes the truly astounding scope and scale of the activities of global finance. It also outlines the key players of global finance, the most important of which are financial transnationals. Units 7 and 8 explain how, from a growthers’ perspective, global finance has a Jekyll and Hyde character. Unit 7 clarifies its ‘positive’ aspects: the miraculous propensity to create spending power out of thin air, driving forward global growth; and establishing an array of short- and long-term rates of interest, which guide the decision-making of lenders and borrowers. Unit 8 elucidates its ‘negative’ dimensions, especially four categories of ersatz innovations, which have prospered in an era of lax regulation: option contracts; credit default swaps; securitisation and off-balance sheet activity; and new mortgage products targeted at low-income customers. Unit 7 winds-up by considering a less-flattering degrowth perspective on money creation and interest rate-setting; whilst Unit 8 concludes with observations on the attitudes of free market fundamentals, interventionists and degrowthers to ersatz innovations. Units 9, 10 and 11 consider the global policy implications of the preceding analysis. Unit 9 focuses on how global effective demand may be managed to achieve common worldwide objections, with a slant towards the continuing debate between growthers and degrowthers. Unit 10 sets-out an account of the recurring challenges of effectively regulating global finance. Unit 11 considers ongoing debates how to manage global inequality and achieve ecological balance between humans and other species. 20

Finally, Unit 12 offers an overview of the preceding Units, and reviews the major debates about the globalisation project which are set to continue throughout the twenty-first century.

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