Here are the figures from the World Bank for the two relevant periods by region:
Average Per Capita GDP Growth Rates 1960–2010
Region | 1960–1980 | 1980–2010
sub-Saharan Africa | 2.0% | 0.2%
Latin America and the Caribbean | 3.1% | 0.8%
Middle East and North Africa | 2.5% | 1.3%
East Asia and Pacific | 5.3% | 7%
Developed Nations | 3.2% | 1.8%
(cited in Chang 2015: 25–26).
Note carefully: in every region except East Asia per capita GDP growth rates slumped under neoliberalism.
There is one exception: East Asia. Was neoliberalism pursued here? Well, to some extent in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan from the 1990s (think East Asian financial crisis and the Japanese lost decade), but not in China, which is where the really spectacular growth occurred in the 1980 to 2010 period.
Also note well: Japan, South Korea and Taiwan from the 1950s to the 1970s pursued (and to some extent into the 1990s) massive anti-free market, state-directed industrial policies combined with access to Western markets. They industrialised and were very successful.
China from the 1980s has been following a similar playbook with a mixed economy and state-directed industrial policy and neo-mercantilism. The success of China is not – repeat not – because of neoliberalism (see here). Nor was the success of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, before the 1990s.
But we’ve known all this for years.
The late Angus Maddison was widely recognized as a leading scholar on the history of rates of economic growth. In 1995, Maddison published a study called Monitoring the World Economy 1820–1992 (OECD Development Centre, Paris, 1995), the first authoritative study on the effects of globalization and neoliberalism on growth rates in the developing and developed world, as compared with the Bretton Woods era.
Maddison compared growth rates both in terms of real GDP and real per capita GDP in seven major regions of the world from 1950 to 1973 with those in the early era of globalization (1974–1992). He found that there were significant declines in the average annual growth rates in six of the seven areas: in fact, the average annual rate of growth of world GDP was only half of what it had been under Bretton Woods. That is, world economic growth was about 50% lower than in the Bretton Woods era.
The only region that showed an increase was East Asia, precisely the region dominated by the protectionist state-led model of industrialization, led by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and (from the early 1990s) China.
Maddison’s study can be supplemented by the following research:
Mark Weisbrot, Dean Baker, Egor Kraev, and Judy Chen. 2001. Scorecard on Globalization 1980–2000: 20 Years of Diminished Progress, Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)
http://cepr.net/publications/reports/the-scorecard-on-globalization-1980-2000-20-years-of-diminished-progress
Chang, Ha-Joon. 2015. “The Failure of Neoliberalism and the Future of Capitalism,” in Satoshi Fujii, Beyond Global Capitalism. Springer, Tokyo. 19–34.
Weisbrot et al. (2001) and Chang (2015) confirm the findings of Maddison. The era of globalization was a disaster for much of the Third World.
Of course, even neoliberalism delivers some poverty reduction because per capita GDP growth was still positive, and it is correct that global poverty has fallen over the last 20 years: but the overwhelming number of such people are in China and East Asia, and above all in China where the government largely rejects the orthodox policy prescriptions of neoliberalism.
So which system was better for the Third World: (1) the Bretton Woods era of import substitution industrialisation that gave a space for economic nationalism or (2) neoliberalism?
The answer is (1). The system also avoided the endless economic crises and instabilities of neoliberalism as well.
We live in interesting times, however. Even the IMF is starting to admit – even if in coy and embarrassed terms – that neoliberalism has failed.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chang, Ha-Joon. 2015. “The Failure of Neoliberalism and the Future of Capitalism,” in Satoshi Fujii, Beyond Global Capitalism. Springer, Tokyo. 19–34.
Weisbrot, Mark, Baker, Dean, Kraev, Egor and Judy Chen. 2001. Scorecard on Globalization 1980–2000: 20 Years of Diminished Progress, Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)
http://cepr.net/publications/reports/the-scorecard-on-globalization-1980-2000-20-years-of-diminished-progress
There is a lot to digest here, and some good analysis.
Here is the killer insight on the more doctrinaire versions of neoliberalism:
“Hayek realized that the great democratic masses might not accept the imposition of the New Neoliberal Order from above; especially in a democracy, neoliberal gains might be quickly reversed at the ballot box. Hayek often complained that the socialists thought they knew what was best for the masses, often absent their consent, but in this regard, effectively, the neoliberals were no different. The one place where Hayek and the NTC diverged from Polanyi was that they could never ever allow that the blowback from markets could ever be considered a ‘natural’ response of the masses. At various points, Hayek would blame the recalcitrance of the populace to ‘market reforms’ on the scurrilous class of intellectuals, or on the self-interest of the politicians, or even upon the fundamental ignorance of the populace about the consequences of their preferences. But, contrary to Polanyi, they took that pushback into account. Polanyi, so besotted with the trope that opposition to encroachment of the market was ‘natural’, never entertained the notion that it, too, could be manipulated. The eventual solution favored by the bulk of the neoliberal thought collective was to render democracy so hamstrung and ossified that it would never prove capable of neutralizing neoliberal market structures erected by the strong state. Their strong state had to come cladded with strong defenses against the will of the governed. ‘I doubt whether a functioning market has ever newly arisen under an unlimited democracy, and it seems likely that unlimited democracy will destroy it where it has grown up.’ This became the watchword of the later Hayek, of Bruno Leoni, of James Buchanan and the Virginia public choice school, of the ‘Washington consensus’, and the architects of the WTO and the European Union and the independence of central banks.” Philip Mirowski, “This is Water, or is it the Neoliberal Thought Collective?,” Naked Capitalism, May 26, 2016.
That is an excellent summary of the historical tendency of modern neoliberalism, because – once disastrous neoliberal programs fail and as things get worse and worse – in a democracy you get an angry, resentful and rebellious electorate who will start voting for anti-free market parties.
These days neoliberalism, as practised by governments, has degenerated into an open crony capitalism and corporate tyranny that is effectively trying to dismantle democracy by means of so-called “free trade” agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
And, with respect to Hayek, we also have his weird interview with the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio in 1981:
“[A]s long-term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period. At times it is necessary for a country to have, for a time, some form or other of dictatorial power. As you will understand, it is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally, I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking in liberalism. My personal impression. . . is that in Chile . . . we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government . . . during this transition it may be necessary to maintain certain dictatorial powers, not as something permanent, but as a temporary arrangement.” El Mercurio, p. D8-D9, 12 April, 1981.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Friedrich_August_von_Hayek#Support_for_Pinochet
To return to Mirowski’s argument, the point that Neoliberalism isn’t monolithic is well taken: it is divided into all sorts of streams, where there are different definitions of what “freedom” even is, and Neoliberalism is undoubtedly a type of political movement too.
But I don’t think Philip Mirowski has properly defined what he means by “Classical liberalism.”
If we mean the general political and economic program of 19th century Classical liberalism, this was different even from most streams of modern Neoliberalism which even Mirowski seems to admit.
By the 1940s/1950s, for example, Austrians like Ludwig von Mises were the last aging dinosaurs of 19th century Classical liberalism.
But here’s the thing: the emerging Neoliberal movement (which was itself heterogeneous) was despised by Ludwig von Mises, who regarded these early neoliberals as being too interventionist.
But the modern Rothbardian anarcho-capitalists and Misesians aren’t neoliberals. The Misesians are old-fashioned 19th century Classical liberals. The Rothbardian anarcho-capitalists are bizarre, utopian free market cultists (who, strangely, also have a decidedly anti-free market bias in their mistaken opposition to fractional reserve banking).
It is true that Hayek provided an intellectual inspiration for modern neoliberalism in his political writings and ideas on knowledge and prices, but his practical policy ideas in later years – such as, for example, his crackpot ideas on money and banking – have not been taken seriously by modern Neoliberal ideologues.
Today most modern Austrian economics is a train wreck of absurdity and has degenerated into a cult like Marxism. But there was, however, one stream of Austrian theory that is of interest: the thought of Ludwig Lachmann, who, if anything, was closer to G. L. S. Shackle than other Austrians.
However, I see no modern Austrians anywhere who have carried on Lachmann’s insights into economics, and this is not really surprising because Lachmann’s theories – if seriously developed and combined with a sensible pragmatism about government – would probably morph into a type of Post Keynesianism.
Mirowski states that “Keynes was the exemplary Classical Liberal of the interwar period.” This is a bizarrely untrue statement. Keynes was a progressive liberal, and came to reject the economic doctrines of Classical Liberalism. This can be seen in Keynes’ book The End of Laissez-Faire (1926).
Even late 1920s British Liberalism had departed far from its Classical Liberal origins. For example, when Lloyd George became leader of liberal party for the 1929 general election, he proposed a large program of what we now call Keynesian stimulus to solve Britain’s problem of high unemployment after the disastrous return to the gold standard. At this time, Keynes was an economic adviser to the Liberal party and helped design that program. That program can hardly be described as Classical Liberalism.
Not even Keynes’ essay “Am I a Liberal?” (1925) refutes this. The Liberalism with which Keynes identifies himself here was very much the progressive liberalism that had diverged from its 19th century ancestor.
By 1939, in an interview with the leftist British journalist Kingsley Martin (1897–1969), Keynes seemed quite comfortable with defending what he called “liberal socialism”:
“The question is whether we are prepared to move out of the nineteenth-century laissez faire state into an era of liberal socialism, by which I mean a system where we can act as an organized community for common purposes and to promote social and economic justice, whilst respecting and protecting the individual—his freedom of choice, his faith, his mind and its expression, his enterprise and his property.” (Moggridge 1982: 500 = Keynes and Martin 1939: 123).
This political vision has long parted company with Classical liberalism.
There is a final point about Post Keynesianism. Mirowski states that “Post-Keynesians and other heterodox factions seem not to grasp that effective political mobilization requires a thoroughgoing alternative to the neoliberal definition of what a market is, comprehension of how diverse markets work, and appreciation for what it means to participate in a market society.” I find that baffling given that any good reading of Post Keynesian literature reveals that this is precisely what Post Keynesians are engaged in.
Nor do I see “[e]ndless denunciations of ‘capitalism’” within Post Keynesianism either, which if anything is a trait of vulgar Marxism. On the contrary, the line I usually see is that Post Keynesianism is the right empirical description of how capitalism actually works and that Post Keynesian economic theory is what is required to make capitalism work properly.
As for the political side of things, I wouldn’t doubt a new and forceful alternative to Neoliberalism is necessary. But an ideology that invokes and takes up Post Keynesian theory and economic policy recommendations isn’t even necessarily committed to being left-wing politically, though admittedly it is probably more likely to be so.
But I can imagine a socially conservative movement hostile to the socially and culturally destructive aspects of capitalism and the extremism of the modern cultural left taking up the economic ideas of Post Keynesianism and shunning modern Neoliberalism. Or non-dogmatic Keynesian Marxists could adopt it. Or progressive liberals.
Given the way that the modern Postmodernist and cultural left is destroying itself by its sheer insanity and toxic obsession with rotten ideas, it is not even clear at this point whether the left could even provide a serious and popular political alternative to Neoliberalism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Moggridge, D. E. (ed.). 1982. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. Volume 21. Macmillan, London.
Moggridge, D. E. 1992. Maynard Keynes: An Economist’s Biography. Routledge, London.
As should other countries: it’s plain common sense.
The EU and Eurozone are catastrophic. Of course, sanity prevailed and the UK never joined the Eurozone, but the EU itself is still catastrophic.
Britain should leave the EU as quickly as possible, for the following reasons:
(1) to protect the UK’s economic and political sovereignty;
(2) to protect its democracy;
(3) to protect its welfare state and social services;
(4) to have some hope for a Post Keynesian-style or MMT-style economic policy in the future;
(5) to take control of its borders and immigration policy, because the EU open borders policy is disastrous – disastrous for the welfare state, the working class, the real wage, the employment prospects of the British people and its very social cohesion.
The UK should follow the example of Norway and Switzerland: neither Norway nor Switzerland is a member state of the European Union, but both are part of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA).
Britain can have liberalised trade with the EU by joining the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) or by bilateral trade agreements, and obtain any necessary extra labour by controlled immigration, not open borders mass immigration.
What will happen this year as another million or more migrants come flooding into the EU?
The Germans are due for a federal election in late 2017 and the French will elect a new president between April and May 2017, and those election cycles will be dominated by the consequences of as many as 2 million new migrants in Europe. If we add to this the possibility of an economic downturn in Europe in 2016 and 2017, things could get very ugly indeed in Europe. What happens as the population is subjected to another savage round of austerity? What happens as neoliberal labour market deregulation is ramped up as the only neoclassical solution to integrating 1 million or more migrants into the labour market? Unless an historic volte face happens, the mainstream left will continue to defend the EU and mass immigration and probably discredit itself for years on end.
The population will be driven to the populist right and far right, and the mainstream right will quickly realise that any further support for the EU, open borders and mass immigration will be political suicide.
I was also struck by an article published late last year about Syriza and the migrant crisis.
If true, I was not aware of the details here:
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, “Some Tips for the Long-Distance Traveller,” London Review of Books 37.19, 8 October, 2015: 39–41.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n19/ghaith-abdul-ahad/some-tips-for-the-long-distance-traveller
According to this article, the government in office in Greece before Syriza had a “turn back the boats” policy from Turkey which stopped the flood of migrants, but when Syriza came into office they reversed this, and threw open the door to the EU. Merkel made the mistake of then opening the door to Germany and Western Europe.
And now we see the consequences of this! If true, what poetic justice indeed that the EU, after having smashed democracy in Greece in 2015, may well be hit by an existential crisis set off this year by the chain reaction of events from this one action of its victim Greece.
When the history of this period is written, it may well be said of Alexis Tsipras that he made a decision that caused the collapse of the EU.
I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that James Galbraith is profoundly insightful in this passage:
“... in the late 1980s, Japan entered economic crisis for reasons of its own. Deregulation of the Japanese capital asset markets set off what was, and would remain until the NASDAQ, the largest speculative bubble in human history, combining speculation in stocks and speculation in real estate to an astonishing degree. Valuations in both became wholly unhinged. At the peak of the bubble, it was notoriously suggested that the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was worth more than the entire state of California. Given the demand for Japanese assets, the yen revalued; Japanese manufacturing at the lower end, in textiles and electronics, went into depression and migrated to less expensive shores in China and South Asia. The crash came in 1988, precipitating a deep recession in domestic demand from which the Japanese economy as a whole did not begin to recover for over a decade. This dimmed the luster of the Japanese model for American observers, even as they largely overlooked the obvious point: there is evidently no development path that an unfettered, liberated, free capital asset market cannot screw up.” (Galbraith 2008: 79–80).
By “capital asset market,” Galbraith of course means “financial asset market” – that is, the banking and financial sectors and the stock, share, and secondary financial asset markets.
First, many Western economists mistook Japan’s industrial policy as some sort of cause of its 1990s lost decade, or at least assumed (falsely) that Japanese industrial policy was discredited because of it. That was profoundly mistaken: it was financial liberalisation and deregulation that were the fundamental causes of the 1990s lost decade.
Asset bubbles can be created in virtually any monetary system, but especially when the financial sector is left to do what it likes: just think of Tulip mania, the numerous bubbles of the 19th century (such as the disastrous Australian property bubble of the 1880s), and of course the late 1920s stock market bubble in the US.
Secondly, and here is my fundamental point: what Galbraith describes above in Japan is the essence of the rise and fall of neoliberalism over about the past 30 years.
Ineffectively regulated financial asset markets cause catastrophe; they always have and probably always will; and one important reason why the post-WWII golden age of capitalism (1946–1970s) had such stability was the proper regulation of the finance sector. When 1980s and 1990s liberalisation of the financial sector occurred in the West, disaster emerged again, just as it did before the 1930s.
It was also Thatcher’s UK that was a trailblazer in this respect: Thatcher’s financial deregulation – an important element of which was the Big Bang (1986) – contributed to the so-called Lawson boom (1986–1988), at the centre of which was a debt-financed property bubble. When this collapsed in the late 1980s, a debt deflation ensued in the UK in the early 1990s recession (Stewart 1993: 56–57, 101–102).
Japan and Thatcher’s UK were harbingers of the tremendous disasters that occurred later in Clinton’s bubble years and the US real estate bubble in 2000s.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Galbraith, J. K. 2008. The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. Free Press, New York.
Stewart, Michael. 1993. Keynes in the 1990s: A Return to Economic Sanity. Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Given all the shocks and neoliberal reforms imposed on the UK economy by Thatcher, did real UK per capita GDP growth show some miraculous surge or historically unprecedented growth in the Thatcher years?
In short, no, it did not. The average real UK per capita GDP growth rate fell from its golden age (1948–1973) average.
One can see the data below and skip the averages at the end to the broad picture:
Averages
Average real per capita GDP growth rate, 1948–1973: 2.34%
Average real per capita GDP growth rate, 1948–1978: 2.17%
Average real per capita GDP growth rate, 1979–1990: 2.05%
Average real per capita GDP growth rate, 1979–2001: 1.99%
The average real per capita GDP growth rate during the Keynesian golden age of full employment fell from 2.34% to 2.05% under the Thatcher years. There was no miracle here.
In fact, Thatcher’s disastrous monetarist shocks induced the worst post-WWII recession seen to that point in Britain.
Even if one includes the pre-Thatcher stagflationary years of the 1970s and take the average for 1948–1978, this was 2.17%, and still higher than the average under Thatcher.
Indeed, the fall in real per capita GDP (and real GDP) in Thatcher’s years was just part of the general trend seen in the neoliberal era in country after country as average rates of growth fell compared with the post-WWII era. When full employment demand management was abandoned, growth rates slumped, precisely as you would expect, given that real output is driven by aggregate demand.
Finally, one can see the data above in graph form below. But you cannot see the important trends I have described above, and this is one of the reasons why graphs are not always a good way to present real GDP data.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Maddison, Angus. 2003. The World Economy: Historical Statistics. OECD Publishing, Paris.
In short, the migration effect of austerity and internal devaluation has actually been worse in Lithuania than in Latvia!
Some 83,200 Lithuanians emigrated in 2010, the highest level of emigration since 1945. In 2008, the emigration rate was the highest in the EU countries (2.3 per 1,000), and forecasts predict a population decline of a further 10.9 per cent for 2008–2035.
As for real GDP, it contracted by 14.8% in 2009 – that is to say, Lithuania was hit by an actual depression in that year. Growth was a mild 1.4% in 2010, which was nothing to boast about.
In 2011, it was 5.9% (for figures, see here). The moderate growth rate for 2011 may well be the result of export-led growth, but the truth is that the price was appallingly high and utterly unnecessary.
Why? The reason is that any export-led growth that Lithuania – or indeed any of the Baltic nations – experienced in 2010–2011 could have been achieved by currency depreciation of their own independent currencies, which would have allowed a space for stimulating the domestic economy by Keynesian fiscal expansion.
Thomas Palley gives a talk here on macroeconomic disasters of neoliberalism over the past 30 years, and the underlying macro issues contributing to the financial crisis of 2008.
Thomas Palley is a leading Post Keynesian, and the author of Post Keynesian Economics: Debt, Distribution, and the Macro Economy (New York, 1996).
Thomas I. Palley is a well published, but underrated, Post Keynesian economist. He is the author of Post Keynesian Economics: Debt, Distribution, and the Macro Economy (New York, 1996), which is a useful textbook for Post Keynesian economics.
There are two videos below. In the first interview, Thomas Palley talks about the structural problems of neoliberalism: how the stagnation of real wages has been a severe underlying cause of neoliberal bubble economics, where people are driven into private debt. We need a fundamental reform of macroeconomic policy, not merely effective financial regulation (although the latter is, of course, important).
In the second video, Thomas Palley talks about the problems of the Eurozone - the flawed design of the euro system (introduced in 1999), which robs Eurozone countries of their monetary and fiscal indepedence. The Eurozone is a grave threat to social democracy. The role of central banks in the neoliberal Eurozone (where they have become “detached,” as Palley says) is even worse than the old neoliberal idea of central bank “independence.”
The belief that austerity in the Baltic states has been “successful,” and that it is a sustainable path to growth is one of the most truly absurd things I have heard of late.
Let’s focus on Latvia here, which has implemented austerity and “internal devaluation” (or “wage and price deflation”). Let’s look at some figures: (1) GDP and (2) unemployment.
In contrast to other countries that went big with Keynesian stimulus (like Australia), Latvia has suffered a massive depression in 2008–2010 where real GDP slumped by 30%.
Latvia’s GDP growth after the depression has not been that impressive: in two quarters growth has been 0.2% and in one quarter 0.1%. It has even fallen to 0.2% in Q1 2011. Its non-tradeable goods sector has contracted badly and remains subdued. The GDP growth has been accomplished by export-led recovery, but that growth path is unsustainable: austerity in European nations – Latvia’s trade partners – will hit Latvia hard, and derail their recovery. While Lithuania, Estonia and Russia are large trading partners of Latvia, it is also dependent on a number of EU countries for exports, as we can see in its trade partners by percentage of exports in 2010:
Thus 34% of its exports are bound for EU countries where austerity will depress demand and reduce Latvian exports. Already a number of Baltic states have hit capacity constraints and will see their exports fall this year (see “Baltic Growth Set to Slow as Export Capacity, Demand Are Capped,” May 12, 2011). With no room for domestic stimulus, there may well be lower growth or a return to recession.
Unemployment has fallen to 13.9% in April, 2011, but, despite the export-led GDP growth, double digit unemployment is still a catastrophe in Latvia: the country will have mass unemployment for years.
How has the voting population allowed this to happen? The answer is that the labour movement in Latvia is weak and its ethnic nationalism causes its majority Latvian citizens to vote for their own Latvian party, despite the unpopularity of that party’s economic policies. The social costs of “austerity” have also been a disaster, as Jeffrey Sommers and Michael Hudson have noted:
“But Latvia’s model is not replicable. Latvia has no labor movement to speak of, and little tradition of activism based on anything other than ethnicity. Contrary to most press coverage, its austerity policies are not popular. The election turned on ethnic issues, not a referendum on economic policy. Ethnic Latvians (the majority) voted for the ethnic Latvian parties (mostly neoliberal), while the sizeable 30% minority of Russian speakers voted with similar discipline for their party (loosely Keynesian) …. While the economic crisis was deep enough to drive even Latvia’s depoliticized population into the streets in the winter of 2009, most Latvians soon after found the path of least resistance to be simply to emigrate. Neoliberal austerity has created demographic losses exceeding Stalin’s deportations back in the 1940s (although without the latter’s loss of life). As government cutbacks in education, health care and other basic social infrastructure threaten to undercut long-term development, young people are emigrating to better their life rather than to suffer in an economy without jobs. Over 12% of the overall population (and a much larger percentage of its labor force) now works abroad. Moreover, children (what few of them there are as marriage and birth rates drop) have been left orphaned behind, prompting demographers to wonder how this small country can survive. So unless other debt-strapped European economies with populations far exceeding Latvia’s 2.3 million people can find foreign labor markets to accept their workers unemployed under the new financial austerity, this exit option will not be available. Jeffrey Sommers and Michael Hudson, “The Spectre Haunting Europe, Debt Defaults, Austerity, and Death of the “Social Europe” Model,” http://michael-hudson.com, January 22, 2011.
If Latvia is a “success,” then one truly wonders what a failure would look like.
Latvia’s export-led growth will falter, and what is required is more domestic growth, but with continued austerity that will not happen. If one defines economic “success” as suffering a huge depression, mass unemployment, 12% of the whole population working abroad, a brain drain, falling birth rates, poverty, and unreliable export-led growth, then Latvia has “succeeded.” For anyone else not enslaved to neoliberal propaganda, Latvia is a miserable failure, a lesson in what not to do.
The election in Ireland, with voter turnout over 70%, has seen the public throw out Fianna Fáil, the neoliberal party that has caused a depression in Ireland (see “Ireland’s Sham Recovery: GNP versus GDP,” September 15, 2010). Voter disgust and anger with current policy is all too clear. But the trouble is that no radical and alternative economic policy has been put forward by the major parties.
The new government will be a coalition of Fine Gael and Labour, with some rhetoric from the Labour party already that it will renegotiate the EU-IMF program. However, this might be doubtful in a coalition government with the centre-right Fine Gael.
One can only shudder at the new age of austerity that is now being planned in Europe and America by neoliberals and conservatives. If the most extreme of them have their way, we will see what has happened in Latvia: depression, mass unemployment, a brain drain, falling birth rates, and mass poverty.
UPDATE
Here are two other views of the situation in Ireland, which are worth reading:
