Trade's Transitional Time
May 17, 2015 1:35 PM   Subscribe

 
Get this neoliberal crap out of here.
posted by wuwei at 1:42 PM on May 17, 2015 [3 favorites]


Former Director General of the WTO
well that explains it
posted by p3on at 1:58 PM on May 17, 2015


"Or, more precisely, I have organizations that speak on behalf of the consumers (there is nothing like a referendum for consumers) -- the consumer organizations -- against me. Why? Simply because the business of the consumer organizations is to convince their members and followers on social networks that if they were not doing their job then the people would be at risk. They are protecting the consumer, which is about promoting precaution."

And here's where I become increasingly dismissive. Yes, consumer organizations occupy a weird space where they have to toot their own horns, but lowering standards to the lowest common denominator isn't the answer either. And the author assumes producers are fine when standards are set, because at least they can sell all over the world when they meet those new worldwide standards. But in the reality I live in, producers fight mightily to see that the adopted standards are the ones they can meet cheaply but are prohibitively expensive for other producers.
posted by zachlipton at 2:08 PM on May 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


One can always gauge the intellectual honesty of an author if you see them attempting to coin a neologism, "precaution", without first clearly defining WTF it is supposed to mean.
posted by polymodus at 2:35 PM on May 17, 2015


Get this neoliberal crap out of here. Wake up sheeple!

FTFY.
posted by chavenet at 3:56 PM on May 17, 2015


Zachlipton, if I read Lamy correctly he's saying that the new name of the game will be to harmonize precautions in a way that raises standards. I'm certainly skeptical of free trade rhetoric and no fan of neoliberal cheerleaders, but this does seem like a notable thing for a former WTO director to be saying, even if I doubt that's how trade negotiations are really going to work.

I do have reservations about how simple the old political economy really was, since he seems to have decided that people only matter as consumers and not, say, as workers.

Also, polymodus, he is almost certainly borrowing the term precaution from the precautionary principle, an idea wielded as often as not by opponents of WTO-led standards reductions--as in the case of GMOs.

Thanks for the post, infini!
posted by col_pogo at 6:44 PM on May 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


Really interesting, thank you.

Lamy I think says that future trade agreements will raise minimum standards, because consumers will not tolerate lower standards politically. So if country A and country B have a new trade agreement, then all the covered goods will need to comply with the highest standards of A and B.

("Yay!" says the left).

However, the neo-liberal bit comes next: he expects the real winners from this to be the global multinationals who have the capital and expertise to be the actors who can comply with these higher standards and achieve the economies of scale that allows them to still make a profit in the tighter regulatory regime.

("Boo!" says the left.)

So if you're happy with BOTH increased regulatory standards AND multinationals, it's a good news story. If you dislike one of these, well, you can probably find some reason to out-group him.

(If anyone wants to correct my summary, I'd be much obliged: I feel there's lots of language and jargon in there which would mean more to someone with expertise in the field, which I don't have!)
posted by alasdair at 2:45 AM on May 18, 2015 [3 favorites]


It works because it is painful. It is painful because it works.

At the end of the day, this has to do with what is good and what is bad. And "good" and "bad" have to do with values.

I tend to go with alasdair's analysis, This was a frustrating piece to parse because it contains a lot of abstractions and its few concrete examples are not well linked to the ideas that they are meant to illustrate. The praise for TTIP as an example of the new and the implied criticism of the TTP as an example of the old pretty much clinches it. The TTIP's provisions favouring corporate actors over national governments, which are some of the main sticking points in the TTIP, and the article's tut-tutting over TTIP's mysterious "poor progress", tells us where he is coming from.

His new world allows large actors in the first world to dictate the terms on which actors from the rest of the world can interact with the first world - and if the word "China" is mysteriously absent from his article (except for one mention in connection with the TPP), you can be sure it was not absent from his thoughts.
posted by Autumn Leaf at 6:01 AM on May 18, 2015 [2 favorites]


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