Mandarins in revolt
The most arresting part of the G20 communiqué coming out of its just- concluded meeting in Hangzhou, China, is the bit about the Bernie Sanders- sounding “Revolution Action Plan.” For some reason my word processor underlined that phrase when I transferred the G20 document into it to count its length: 7,217 words. I may be the only person in the world, apart from those who wrote it, who has read the thing all the way through. It has all the novelistic suspense of a Liberal election platform. I may also be the only person to have read the Liberal election platform all the way through, which I did to count what turned out to be its 325 promises.
I didn’t do a complete promise count on the G20 document. There’s only so much of your life you want to give over to that kind of thing. But I’m betting it’s not far off 325. And, if anything, these ones are even more grandiose. The Liberal plan included prosaic things such as improving food labels by requiring more information on dyes and sugars. That may or may not be wise but it’s probably do-able. The G20, by contrast, wants to guide a revolution.
The revolution plan in question is actually the “New Industrial Revolution Action Plan.” There’s a new industrial revolution coming, you see, associated with the digitization of everything, and the G20, urged on by the OECD, wants to be out ahead in shepherding it along.
You can imagine a 15th-century version of the G20, outfitted with soothsayers, mystics and alchemists rather than economists and spin- doctors, deciding that this fellow Gutenberg is doing some very interesting things with what he calls “movable type” and we very much want to get on top of it and, forsooth, maximize the synergies it offers for things like jousting, inquisitions and bloodletting.
Face it. If it really is a revolution, you’re not going to control it. That’s the thing about revolutions. They completely re-make the landscape in ways you can do very little about.
Luckily, t he G20 doesn’t really seem to have a plan f or the New Industrial Revolution ( NIR). Its statement on what to do is as follows: “We commit to strengthen communication, cooperation and relevant research on the NIR, facilitate small and medium-sized enterprises to leverage benefits from the NIR, address employment and workforce skill challenges, encourage more cooperation on standards, adequate and effective IPR (intellectual property rights) protection in line with existing multilateral treaties to which they ( sic) are parties, new industrial infrastructure, and support industrialization, as committed in the action plan.” Even allowing for the fact that this may be a translation (quite possibly done using Google Translate), as calls to revolution go, it’s not quite “workers of the world unite!”
The G20 does express concern for growth. But then the rest of the communiqué goes into truly numbing description of Treaties, Accords, Agreements, Consensuses, and Understandings that all look to be about policies that will mainly reduce growth. This includes making sure the terms of the Paris climate agreement are adhered to; cracking down on tax havens and other low- tax jurisdictions by ostracizing and sanctioning them; and continuing the same tighter post-2008 regulation and supervision of financial institutions that seem to have caused many in the finance sector to cut back on support to the very innovators the G20 hopes to encourage.
The accord talks of fostering the “inclusive growth” that so often involves redistribution from innovators and other members of the one per cent to everyone else, whatever their contribution to growth; and, finally, a new initiative to do something about the worldwide glut of steel, which we simple folk outside of global government might actually think would be good for growth even if it’s bad for the subsidizers who have caused this perceived over-supply.
Rising above this swamp of detail, the big question about the G20 is whether global co-operation and coordination are such good ideas. Do we really want a global cartel of big governments?
The G20’s headline pledge to defend globalization and trade liberalization is certainly better than if the group had endorsed Trumponomics. But the G20 countries are the same ones that suffocated the Doha Round of the WTO and are still sitting atop the pillow that makes sure it stays dead. Likewise, the G20 pledge not to engage in competitive currency devaluation is also welcome — if not exactly credible or enforceable.
The communiqué’s next-to-last paragraph, number 47, says: “We reaffirm that the G20’s founding spirit is to bring together the major economies on an equal footing to catalyze action. Once we agree, we will deliver.”
The inelegance of such global bureaucratese aside, if the 20 member countries ever did all agree, heaven help us all. Let a hundred flowers bloom, said Mao, another revolutionary, in one of his rare periods of lucidity. If the global bureaucrats get control of the world, growth may be gone for good.
THERE’S A NEW INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION COMING AND THE G20 WANTS TO SHEPHERD IT ALONG.