Economics, Democracy, & The New World Order | Danny Quah | TEDxKL

good afternoon ladies and gentlemen you've just seen a graphic description of what it means to be poor in this world I invite you to imagine that you wake up every morning seeing people around you who are poor on top of that you realize that you live in a society that actually has an abundance of resources but those resources have been ring-fenced for the political elite your soul yearns for political and economic system that's better than the one that you live in suppose you live in a society where discrimination is rife suppose you live in a society where government cronies get most of the advantages in that society suppose you live in a society where the political and economic extractive elites have made off with the nation's wealth and Treasury you'd be pretty pissed off you'd want something that's better than what you currently have you would want a system that's fair that's open that's transparent you want a system that practices meritocracy guess what most of the world agrees with you most of the world thinks that that's the kind of system we should have 25 years ago the Soviet Union where such political manipulation and economic restriction was practiced to an extreme the Soviet Union collapsed 25 years ago and the wolf celebrated the world announced that history had ended the world announced that there was only one way forwards for everywhere in the world now and that way forwards was described by two planks of thinking liberal democracy and free market capitalism because after all what could be more fair and more transparent than a political system where each man and each woman gets an equal vote what could be more transparent meritocratic then an anonymous free market determining success or failure according to how hard you had worked history had ended as far as the technologist who's interested in design might be concerned these political and economic systems have a further attraction have a further appeal they're meant to be self-correcting their automatic stabilizers built in political systems that are democratic are flexible and innovative the free market adjusts to end disturbances shock the system this announcement twenty-five years ago with the collapse of the Soviet Union told us the way forwards for the world for economics and democracy and the world order this was how we were going to organize the global system the United States the United Kingdom other Western economies that ringed the Atlantic Ocean was the center the crucible on which these ideas had been tested and out of which these ideas would be unfurled across the world and unfurl they did big time in 1970 45 economies in the world were considered democracies by 2010 triple that number this was a huge success the entire world whatever economy you find yourself in this was the way to go history had ended we knew what the world order had to look like but then something happened history decided that it wasn't quite finished with humanity in September 2008 Lehman Brothers collapsed the US subprime mortgage housing market defaulted and the world merged into a global financial crisis trillions of dollars of economic wealth around the world were destroyed overnight half the world's GDP half of what the world Labor's to make every year was just disappeared over the course of 12 months 34 million people were thrown into unemployment the entire world was imminently on collapse what happened to this brave new world order that we had constructed 25 years ago free market capitalism that's been replaced there's now a witch-hunt for economists who describe the wall in of the benefits of the free market the advantages of the free market have been replaced by easy nostrils like how the free market bills financial institutions that become too big to fail the government's then need to bail out that banks were the new villain banks which were the heroes of the free market capitalist system had become villains where you heard people describing how if you give villains a gun they will rob a bank but you give a man a bank he will rob the world this was not how the world was supposed to come out but that's ok we've still got liberal democracy well actually maybe not the world's most autocratic system the world's most centrally controlled system China will imminently overtake the United States as the world's largest economy in the process of doing this a report that appeared in The Financial Times earlier this year but for many of us who have been studying these statistics something quite unsurprising in the course of doing this massive overturning of a new world order of now the old world order China at the same time pulled 627 million people out of extreme poverty more than the entire world of a hundred and fifteen democracies did over hundreds of years what's happened in the world not only is the world upside down but over the course of the global financial crisis it was the non transatlantic axis economies that came to the rescue of the global economy China over the course of the global financial crisis grew four and a half trillion US dollars three times what the United States was able to do in Europe today Europe's most successful economy Germany grows because it exports to developing Asia Germany today exports more to developing Asia than it does to the United States than it does to the of the transatlantic exes in the United States Germany today exports more to developing Asia then it does to the United States the world's economic center of gravity shifted in the last quarter of a century away from its 1980s mooring in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean then right there was the transatlantic axis lurching steadily eastwards pulled by the rise of China and illiberal non democracy and the rise of East Asia countries that followed liberal democracy perhaps a name but not necessarily in practice this was not supposed to happen it was not supposed to happen on many different levels 20 years ago the world's most influential economists wrote that if you believe that the rise of Asia the rise of China was real well you were going to be surprised if you were surprised the same way that you would have been surprised by the collapse of the Soviet Union this was not supposed to happen sure China and many East Asian economies seem to have continued follow free-market capitalism but then free market capitalism seemed to have failed us in the global financial crisis those economies along the trans-atlantic axis remained liberal democracies but then they lay flat on the floor while the rest of the world the illiberal non-democracies grew what's happened in the world this challenges our view of what the world order is let me tell you how we should try and think about what's happening China's real impact is not that it is now a larger economy than the United States but because it presents a different political system it takes us away from our standard notions of liberal democracy but liberal democracy is a fine goal when I began this lecture and I told you what practice in non liberal democracies 90 monstrous looked like it was very easy to agree why we should go for something better but here the danger is liberal democracy has become a catchphrase a code word for everything in life that we don't have but that we want to have let's become a shiny bauble that we dangled before economies in the world to get them to transform to become the image of the transatlantic axis and you know what for the well-being of the world maybe that's the wrong thing to do here's what I think a liberal democracy ought to be liberal democracy doesn't have anything to do with elections doesn't have anything to do with ballot box what it has to do is making your government insecure your rulers and your governments should on a daily basis know that their position in life is constructed on the shifting sands of the wishes of their people and they need to serve those people and here's the surprise from that view which might seem to be just a small change from the initial description because by that account every time we hear about how China's Communist Party needs to get its economy continuing to grow at 10% a year because otherwise its people will be unhappy right there you've got the statement about China being as much a liberal democracy as anyone else every time you hear a statement about some government saying relax we're a liberal democracy because we have ballot box elections but I'm sorry we have not been able to serve you well turn away from them they're not liberal democracies I mean conclude here's a surprise the biggest non democracy in the world for the last 50 years the United States has been acknowledged well leader it has been global hegemon it has proclaimed that it was there to serve the needs of the world but think about this for a second we the will have allowed the United States to do this not through any ballot box election we have decided to choose the United States as global hegemon world leader of this global order because they are the most powerful and richest nation in the world well that will soon no longer be true they are unrivaled in status and influence they have a military armament structure that Dwarfs the rest of the world but you know what maybe that's not the right way to run the world either let me conclude by putting forward a proposal here's my proposal if you really believed in the ideals of liberal democracy then you should bear in mind this picture liberal democracy says you serve the needs of the majority of your stakeholders where is the majority of people in the world here's the thought experiment go to a point into the South China Sea what such as I've drawn here draw a circle 4000 kilometers around that point that is a tiny circle it covers only 25 million square kilometers 1/6 of the world's land area and here's the surprise it includes us here in ASEAN includes us here in Cairo and it includes more than 50% of the world's population if the world really believed in the ideals of improving the lot of humanity and it believed in the ideals of liberal democracy as truly it ought to practice then right here is where decisions of global significance ought to be made it is you who should be deciding how we run the world thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 175,800

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Length: 15min 57sec (957 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 02 2015