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TED talks by Dambisa Moyo who ia an international economist who analyzes the macroeconomy and global affairs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osGXDSFaIlw TED Global 2013 Is China the new idol for emerging economies?2,149,483 views 16:19 • Subtitles in 25 languages When Patrick Henry, the governor of Virginia, said these words in 1775, he could never have imagined just how much they would come to resonate with American generations to come. At the time, these words were earmarked and targeted against the British, but over the last 200 years, they've come to embody what many Westerners believe, that freedom is the most cherished value, and that the best systems of politics and economics have freedom embedded in them. Who could blame them? Over the past hundred years, the combination of liberal democracy and private capitalism has helped to catapult the United States and Western countriesto new levels of economic development. In the United States over the past hundred years,incomes have increased 30 times, and hundreds of thousands of people have been moved out of poverty. Meanwhile, American ingenuity and innovation has helped to spur industrializationand also helped in the creation and the buildingof things like household appliances such as refrigerators and televisions, motor vehicles and even the mobile phones in your pockets. It's no surprise, then, that even at the depths of the private capitalism crisis, President Obama said,"The question before us is not whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and to expand freedom is unmatched." Thus, there's understandably a deep-seated presumption among Westerners that the whole world will decide to adopt private capitalism as the model of economic growth,liberal democracy, and will continue to prioritize political rights over economic rights. However, to many who live in the emerging markets, this is an illusion, and even though the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was signed in 1948, was unanimously adopted,what it did was to mask a schism that has emerged between developed and developing countries, and the ideological beliefs between political and economic rights. This schism has only grown wider. Today, many people who live in the emerging markets, where 90 percent of the world's population lives, believe that the Western obsession with political rights is beside the point,and what is actually important is delivering on food, shelter, education and healthcare. "Give me liberty or give me death" is all well and good if you can afford it, but if you're living on less than one dollar a day, you're far too busy trying to survive and to provide for your family than to spend your time going around trying to proclaim and defend democracy. Over the last 10 years, I've had the privilege to travel to over 60 countries, many of them in the emerging markets, in Latin America, Asia, and my own continent of Africa. I've met with presidents, dissidents, policymakers, lawyers, teachers,doctors and the man on the street, and through these conversations, it's become clear to me that many people in the emerging markets believe that there's actually a split occurring between what people believe ideologically in terms of politics and economics in the West and that which people believe in the rest of the world. Ladies and gentlemen, it's no surprise that around the world, people are pointing at what China is doing and saying, "I like that. I want that.I want to be able to do what China's doing. That is the system that seems to work." I'm here to also tell you that there are lots of shifts occurringaround what China is doing in the democratic stance. In particular, there is growing doubtamong people in the emerging markets, when people now believe that democracy is no longer to be viewed as a prerequisite for economic growth. In fact, countries like Taiwan, Singapore, Chile, not just China, have shown that actually,it's economic growth that is a prerequisite for democracy. In a recent study, the evidence has shown that income is the greatest determinant of how long a democracy can last. The study found that if your per capita income is about 1,000 dollars a year, your democracy will last about eight and a half years. If your per capita income is between 2,000 and 4,000 dollars per year, then you're likely to only get 33 years of democracy.And only if your per capita income is above 6,000 dollars a year will you have democracy come hell or high water. At its very best, the Western model speaks for itself. It's the model that put food on the table.It's the refrigerators. It put a man on the moon.But the fact of the matter is, although people back in the day used to point at the Western countries and say, "I want that, I like that," there's now a new person in town in the form of a country, China. Today, generations are looking at China and saying, "China can produce infrastructure, China can produce economic growth, and we like that." |
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