Introduction

So far we have been tracing – with a focus on the body of the subject – the dynamics of power and ideology as a set of intertwining processes. We looked at how ideology and power cannot work, cannot present themselves to be, in the absence of the bodily matrix of subjectivity. An ethics of responsibility corresponds to the very beings of the ghostly body and the subject, we observed. This ethics has to question the ideology of immediacy that is commonsensically ascribed to the body. In this chapter I move on to deal with the processes that produce the body in its purported immediacy of being. These processes, as I trace, include the significatory and power mechanisms acting at multiple axes of identity. My focus is on the sexually differentiated body, as I find a discussion of bodily metaphors to lead inevitably to a discussion of sexual difference. Although I later devote a whole chapter (Chapter Four) to a detailed appreciation of the notion of ‘sexual difference,’ my prevailing concern is the identity of the woman – how ‘woman’ as a category is projected in its immediacy to a relationship with the body.

The act of naturalization of the body as something direct and unmediated is reflected and re-iterated in this move. The unthinking immediacy of sexual difference is commensurate with and a grounding instantiation of the given-ness of the body.

Introduction

A common allure and risk of academic writing is to treat theoretical arguments as transparent and belonging to obvious ‘positions’ marked by a certain proper name (Foucault, Derrida, Marx) or a denotative common noun (structuralism, phenomenology, hermeneutics). It is as if one need not engage with the specific dynamics of the proposition, once the ‘lineage’ is properly established for all to gloss readily over. Of course, the elementary trainings of writing continue to deal with this as a simple problem, as something s/he has to bear with if one wants to enunciate anything clearly and without ambiguity, a small trick of the trade. Does this innocuous operation indicate something more? Does it point at a concealed commitment to a very specific – albeit dominant and ubiquitous – mode of thinking, being and/or doing? A manner of working with concepts in which the history of the uses – to which a word has been put to – is erased at the moment when the ‘meaning’ of the word is fixed. A forgetting of the fact that these other past/present/future uses shape the shades of its meaning as much as its present intended use. Paleonymy – the traces of the history of the uses that cling tenaciously to words – is the expression Spivak (1993) uses to mark this forgotten phenomenon. Throughout this chapter, when I discuss certain ‘positions’ I try to address the specific nuances of their enunciations, to attend to the paleonymy of utterances, and not to chart them along pre-given classificatory grids.

The Need for Different Paradigms

The global crisis is also an intellectual provocation, and the discipline of economics has not risen to the challenge. Why not? The problem lies perhaps in its search for a universal model that is unattainable, and in a subsequent flight from empirical reality. To get our feet back on the ground, we need to rethink the assumptions behind economic modeling and also rethink the institutional organization of research and higher education.

“Wanted: A new Galileo or Copernicus capable of reformulating economic theory. Please present models to the top twenty economics departments in the world (according to the US News and World Report rankings). If you fail to receive any replies, proceed to the top twenty sociology departments.” Imagine this ad in an internationally recognized newspaper like Le Monde, Corriere Della Sera, Financial Times, or The Wall Street Journal.

Today's world leaders are struggling in vain to shed some light on the economic gloom brought about by the global crisis. Their tool of choice: the dim lantern of a low-amperage Keynesianism. I imagine that they are asking themselves: How can I be the next Franklin Delano Roosevelt? It seems that they are not finding any answers.

The last few years have not been kind to the reputation of economists. For more than two decades, we watched as the profession rose in prestige.

Pain and Innovation

The Chinese call it Weiji. In Mandarin the word denotes, from its first character, “crisis,” and from the second character, “crucial or opportune moment.” What opportunities appear in the present global economic crisis? What are the most promising solutions of the many that are being proposed? Under which cover or pretext will they be enacted? I risk a preliminary forecast: Do not expect the birth of a radical new model for the economy, but a new way of connecting its principal sectors. Synergy is appropriate as a name for these processes.

Just like with a coin the planetary crisis that engulfs us has two sides. On one side, “Tails”—where the actual value of the metal piece appears-is, in our case, negative values: employment, economic activity, profits, savings, stock values, available credit, exports, and so on. On the other side of the coin, “Heads” —usually depicting a bust of a president or monarch, a face or a figure of authority—we find a serious but hopeful countenance. The doublesided configuration is a very old numismatic convention. It makes one think about the predecessors of the current crisis.

The Great Depression of the thirties, which also began in the United States, was not only a period of hardship and unemployment—it was a fertile era for social innovation as well. As a response to the economic and social crises of that era, the government initiated a veritable cascade of novel programs and experiments.

I argued in chapter 6 that a key policy to achieve full employment is to spend on investment to increase the investment-to-output ratio. This has been the basis for the policy of industrialization followed by a number of successful East and Southeast Asian economies, including the People's Republic of China (PRC). The result is that the expansion of the manufacturing sector has been the catalytic force underlying the economic transformation that East and Southeast Asia has undergone during the last three decades. As the Asian Development Bank (ADB 2007b), Felipe and Estrada (2008), and Felipe et al. (2007) document, the newly industrialized economies (NIEs), Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the PRC, have seen their economies transform in the direction of industrialization. And the structures of output and exports have changed in the direction of a higher sophistication, e.g., larger shares of electrical machinery and transport equipment. In this chapter, I provide an in-depth empirical analysis of the transformation of developing Asia's manufacturing sector. Box 9.1 presents the empirical regularities that recent research on the patterns of economic growth has highlighted.

Given that it is very difficult for the market to achieve full employment due to the political and technical problems discussed in chapters 4, 6, and 13, and assuming national policies have shifted toward the achievement of full employment, one could ask if governments in developing countries could and should act as employers of last resort and contribute to this objective directly. Suppose, for example, that due to the use of efficiency wages ( Stiglitz 1976), during downturns firms lay off the least skilled workers. What can society do? As noted in chapter 11, William Vickrey (1996) proposed a program of “savings-recycling public employment” to achieve full employment. Here, I briefly describe a similar proposal known as Public Employment Services (PES) that falls into the broader category of active labor market policies.

Forstater (1998, 1999), Mitchell and Wray (2005), Mitchell and Muysken (2008), and Wray (1998, 2007a, 2007b) have argued that the government should promote full employment through direct job creation and have proposed the implementation of PES programs. Why? Long-term unemployment and underemployment may be due to skills mismatch or to problems with the individuals who are unemployed, in which case the solution is job brokerage or training (chapter 17). But if the problem is job shortage, then improving the match between job seekers and vacancies, as well as training, will not do much. In this case, only direct job creation by an employer of last resort that can offer an infinitely elastic demand for labor can ensure full employment.

As I noted in chapter 6, countries like the People's Republic of China (PRC), Thailand, or Malaysia have been advised to shift their growth model from one based on export-led growth (ELG) to one based on domestic demand-led growth (DDLG). In this chapter, I elaborate upon this issue by analyzing both growth models and their policy implications, and discuss the possible dilemmas that policy makers face.

How Is Export-Led Growth Usually Understood?

In general, the ELG strategy consists of the encouragement and support of production for exports. The rationale, going back to the classical economists, is that trade is the engine of growth, which can contribute to a more efficient allocation of resources within countries as well as transmit growth across countries and regions. Exports, and export policies in particular, are regarded as crucial growth stimulators. Exporting is an efficient means of introducing new technologies both to the exporting firms in particular and to the rest of the economy, and exports are a channel for learning and technological advancement. In the words of Thirlwall (1994, 365): “the growth of exports plays a major part in the growth process by stimulating demand and encouraging savings and capital accumulation, and, because exports increase the supply potential of the economy, by raising the capacity to import.”

Denounced by the Hierarchy in 1863, condemned by Archbishop of Dublin Dr Paul Cullen (1803–1877) in 1865, and, after the failed rising of 1867, damned along with other secret societies in Pope Pius IX's 1870 Papal Bull, the IRB swiftly earned the wrath of the Catholic Church in Ireland. As the IRB was neither illegal nor secretive in the United States, and since it boasted of a mass following since its creation in New York in 1858 by John Mahoney (the source of a separate, but nonetheless welcome source of funding to its Irish-based cohort), such clerical condemnations had little effect on US Fenians. In Ireland, however, the clerical line extended far into local parish and community life, into which the IRB became an intrusive force invading traditionally hallowed and, until then, uncontested clerical territory.

A key feature of clerical resentment of the IRB came from the presumed linkages existing between it and the long legacy of agrarian-based secret societies, the better known among these being the eighteenth-century Catholic ‘Defenders’ and ‘Rightboy’ (O'Hegarty in his A History of Ireland Under the Union calls them ‘Whiteboy’) societies. Formed to carry out sometimes violent campaigns, these outlawed societies targeted mainly the property and livestock of local absentee landlords, despite longstanding clerical condemnation.

In this chapter, I discuss the roles of fiscal and monetary policies in achieving full employment. These two are the main tools that governments have at hand to achieve this objective. I start with a discussion of fiscal policy and budget deficits and address the widely held belief that budget deficits cause inflation, lead to increases in interest rates, and crowd out private investment. I move in the following section to a discussion of monetary policy and the evidence of the role of interest rates in stimulating investment and averting inflation. In this chapter, I argue that governments and central banks have powerful tools to contribute to full employment. In fact, failure to understand how these tools operate in modern economies is an important reason for pervasive involuntary unemployment.

For a long time, economists have distinguished between policies for stabilization (short- and medium-term issues) and policies for growth (long-term issues). The tools to stabilize the economy (i.e., to counteract economic fluctuations) are monetary and fiscal policies that focus on aggregate demand. Some economists think that these have no impact on long-run growth (i.e., the neutrality-of-money proposition).

Any discussion of development must start with a consideration of the state and prospects of agriculture. If this sector cannot be transformed, there can be no genuine revolution of economic growth. The World Bank's (2008) World Development Report highlights the importance of this sector for development. As the food crisis that erupted in early 2008 (labeled “a silent tsunami” by the United Nations' World Food Programme) showed, the international community cannot neglect agriculture, for this crisis may bring obstacles to globalization (food markets are in turmoil, protests are growing, and trade and openness can be undermined).

Agriculture is still the largest employer in many developing countries in Asia, including Bangladesh, Cambodia, the People's Republic of China (PRC), India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, and Viet Nam (in 2000–2004, agriculture was still the largest employer in developing Asia in 12 out of 23 countries for which data were available). And in many other countries in the region, although it is not the largest employer, it still employs a very significant share of the labor force.

Figure 5.1 shows the generalized tendency for agricultural output and employment shares to decline as countries become richer. This is also the case across much of developing Asia. Especially significant have been the declines in output that occurred in the PRC and India: in the former from about 32% in the 1970s to about 13% in 2000–2004, and in India from about 42% to about 23% during the same period.

World poverty is closely related to unemployment and underemployment. This is especially the case in developing Asia, where about 500 million unemployed and underemployed people have to cope without significant government welfare support. Recently, institutions such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank have started using the term inclusive growth in setting their policy agendas. In this book, Jesus Felipe argues that if policy makers across developing Asia care about inclusive growth defined as growth with equal opportunities, then achieving true full employment should become the paramount objective of Asian governments.

The best strategy to reduce poverty in developing Asia is to introduce a set of policies that will generate full employment. While a number of policy initiatives will be useful—particularly those that target productivity improvements in agriculture and stimulate investment in industry, and those that condition the broader macroeconomic environment (monetary, fiscal, and exchange rate policies)—the key is to coordinate their implementation to ensure that they pull the economy toward full employment.

This policy mix is important because ongoing structural change, the key to development, makes the attainment of full employment a moving target and governments are continually confronted with political and economic choices that at times seem to be conflicting. But at all times, the policy process must aim at ensuring that there are enough jobs available to meet the needs of the labor force.

Point of Departure

A quiet Saturday morning early March, summer has entered its final weeks and it is noticeably less warm than a couple of weeks before when the first semester of the New Year officially began. Traditionally, students are welcomed back on campus with what is commonly referred to as Orientation: a week of picking up booklists, going to introductory sessions and ‘signing up’ for all sorts of clubs and societies that are supposed to make life on campus about more than just studying alone. From the University of Melbourne, located in the heart of the city, to Latrobe University on the outskirts, all universities have days when these clubs and societies present themselves, often with traditional Australian barbeques, games and lots of beer. Now, a couple of weeks later, classes have begun, and the time of orientation and introductions is supposed to be over. Yuva, the Indian student organization at Monash University's Caulfield campus, made good use of Orientation to recruit newly arrived Indian students. Earlier, Rohit, one of the organizers of Yuva, had explained to me that they had only recently formed this club. Some of the Indian overseas students on campus had been playing cricket together for some time, and one day one of them had suggested forming a club so that others could join in as well. Rather appropriately then, this particular morning they had their first official club activity planned: a mini-cricket tournament.