that despite so much progress
in science and health
people today often are less
satisfied and happy
than they were yesterday,
no matter the state of their wealth.
Increased longevity
is no cause for levity
if so many people swarming
leads to global warming.
And could you explain why leaders
who were successful pleaders
and campaigned one way
before they were elected,
later take policy turns no one would have suspected,
leaving supporters feeling dejected?
Perhaps a speech of valedictory
should teach that Life is contradictory,
with often a random trajectory
instead of straight line, from A to B.
HL
6/21/15
What’s the True Cost of Free Trade?
Japanese farmers against the Trans-Pacific Partnership rally in Tokyo, Japan, June 13, 2015 (Reuters/Yuya Shino)
If there’s one thing more disconcerting than Republicans opposing Barack Obama at every turn, it’s the rare occasion when they actually agree with him. True, the gridlock resulting from their dysfunctional obstinacy is unproductive. But there is something comically reassuring about the predictability of their childlike tantrums. If Obama said Rachel Dolezal was white, the GOP would swear blind she is black.
So when Obama recently teamed up with congressional Republicans to try to ram through the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) against the wishes of the labor unions, his own party, and the progressive movement in general, he was modeling the kind of bipartisanship we could all do without.
The TPP is a deal among the United States and 11 other nations in Asia, Australasia, and the Americas that has been negotiated mostly in secret and that would lower tariffs, gut regulations, depress wages, and wreck the environment, all in the name of “free trade.” The first attempt at passing it through Congress failed after a Democratic rebellion. As of this writing, Obama was working with Republicans to try again.
The TPP is an appalling initiative on its own terms. Labor unions and others are right to point out that it will hurt American workers. Moreover, Obama’s pursuit of it is as clear a betrayal of his candidacy as one is likely to find. When running for president in 2008, he said: “I voted against CAFTA [the Central American Free Trade Agreement], never supported NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement], and will not support NAFTA-style trade agreements in the future.” Former Labor Department secretary Robert Reich has described the TPP as “NAFTA on steroids.”
But left there, the analysis of the TPP’s flaws would be entirely solipsistic. The fact that it will be bad for America isn’t actually the worst thing about it. When viewed through the wider lenses of underdevelopment and migration, the pact illustrates much of what is wrong with the neoliberal global framework the West has erected over the last 30 years.
Given Congress’s refusal to pass comprehensive immigration reform, what the TPP helps build is a world in which capital is free to roam wherever it pleases, while borders remain closed to people. While machines and money may scour the globe in search of cheaper labor, weaker unions, and looser regulations, people are stopped from crossing borders in search of the kind of work that might pay them enough to feed their families.
It’s a system in which economic and military power go hand in hand. “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist,” The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman once wrote. “McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”
Such is the huge gated community that is now the West, spreading chaos and deprivation with its economic and foreign policies and then retreating into its fortified laager to repel those who attempt to flee the mayhem it has wrought. “Free trade,” when dictated by corporations and defined by the powerful, is actually anything but free—and the cost is ultimately paid in human lives.
You can see them perish in rickety vessels on the Mediterranean, having been fleeced by unscrupulous traffickers in Libya—who are thriving thanks to the nation’s near-total collapse following the bombing four years ago—only to be repelled by European nations.
You can see them in Mexico, where, thanks to NAFTA, corn production collapsed when farms and smallholdings withered against competition from US agribusiness.
But it is perhaps most starkly evident right now in Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.
In June 2009, five years after the United States ousted Haiti’s democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, its Parliament passed unanimously a law raising the minimum wage to $5 a day. David Lindwall, the deputy chief of mission there for the United States, believed this new rate “did not take economic reality into account,” and so worked with factory owners and contractors to push the hourly rate down to 31 cents.
With poverty in Haiti so endemic, entrenched, and enduring, people already had few options. In 2005, I went to Dajabón, a town in the Dominican Republic that borders Haiti, where it was possible to buy a Haitian child for $100.
“Half of all Haitians struggle to eat even once a day,” Helen Spraos, Christian Aid’s Haiti representative, told me. “Once they reach rock bottom, the one way they can provide for their children is by sending them to live in the cities or in the Dominican Republic. There at least they may be fed and have some prospects for making a living.”
Many were used as slaves and prostitutes, or were exploited in the sugar fields. Now the Dominican Republic is poised to expel anyone born there to undocumented Haitian parents, deporting them to Haiti, a country many have never even seen.
Neither the West in general nor the United States in particular is uniquely responsible for all of these woes. But when rich nations simultaneously rig trade and raise barriers to migration, they both exacerbate the misery beyond their borders and create the conditions for bigotry to flourish at home. “Globalization, being a force without a face, cannot be the object of ethnocide,” points out Arjun Appadurai in Fear of Small Numbers. “But minorities can.”
It is not poor migrants from the Global South who are undercutting Western wages. It’s big business and those legislators who want to let the rich move their money wherever they wish, while preventing the poor from moving their families where they must.
One of the most striking—and controversial—findings from the new economics of well-being (more colloquially put, happiness) is that income does not always have the expected relationship with well-being. On average, individuals with more income are happier than those with insufficient income within countries, and wealthier countries are happier than poor ones. Yet periods of rapid change—including positive change such as rapid economic growth—are often associated with drops in happiness. In earlier cross-country research,Eduardo Lora and I identified this trend as the “paradox of unhappy growth.”
No country better demonstrates this paradox than China. Its past two decades were characterized by unprecedented rates of economic growth and poverty reduction. Indeed, much of the reduction in the world’s extreme poverty rate during that time can be explained by the millions of Chinese who exited poverty. GDP per capita and household consumption increased fourfold between the years 1990 and 2005, and life expectancy climbed to 75.3 years from 67 years in 1980. Yet during the same period, life satisfaction levels plummeted. Levels dropped precipitously in the initial stages of rapid growth, beginning in 1995, and slowly began to recover beginning in 2005. This trend was first identified by Richard Easterlin (the first modern economist to work on happiness). He estimates that life satisfaction fell by 5 percent in the same years that the average rate of growth was 8 percent.
Figure 1. Average life satisfaction in China, by various series, 1990-2010
Source: Easterlin et. al (2012). The integer response options of the series are: WVS, 1–10; Gallup 1, 1–4; AB, 1–5; Gallup 2, 0–10 except 1999 and 2004, 1–10; Horizon, 1–5, except 1997–1999 and 2001, 1–4; Pew, 0–10. Series with response options of 1–4 or 1–5 are plotted to twice the scale of series with response options of 1–10 and 0–10.
Of course one problem is that we do not have good or comparable statistics for either life satisfaction or mental health for the pre-transition period, a problem common to many transition economies and which also applies to other statistics as well. The World Values survey (WVS in Figure 1) only began collecting life satisfaction data for China in 1990 and again in 1995, and Gallup in 1995.
During the same period, there also were significant increases in suicide and mental illness. China had one of the highest suicide rates in the world in the 1990s: 23.2 suicides per 100,000 people per year from 1995 to 1999, a rate which gradually fell to 7.8 per 100,000 by 2012. Mental health reports, on the other hand, increased as suicide rates fell (perhaps because more individuals sought treatment): inpatient admissions to mental hospitals increased 13.4 percent from 2007-2012; outpatient visits, 12.4 percent. Mental health services have historically had low priority in China, and the issue has only recently surfaced in the public domain.
Despite our inability to compare these trends with those in the pre-transition period, there is no doubt that for the period of rapid growth, well-being metrics—including measures of mental health—tell a very different story from that of income metrics. What explains the discrepancy?
Complex trends in satisfaction and mental health
Changes in the pace and nature of economic growth tend to bring increases in insecurity (as rewards to different skill sets change) and in inequality, as there are winners and losers in the process. These trends were particularly stark in the case of China: its economic boom occurred as centrally planned macroeconomic management was replaced by free market principles and accompanying changes in social welfare structures—while traditional safety nets were dismantled as millions migrated from rural to urban areas in search of new opportunities. It is telling that inequality in life satisfaction increased at the same time itdecreased on average.
In a recent Brookings paper, “Happiness and health in China: The paradox of progress,” written in collaboration with Shaojie Zhou and Junyi Zhang of Tsinghua University, I took advantage of a new nationally representative survey to explore the determinants of mental health and life satisfaction in China in greater depth. The two variables are, not surprisingly, inversely correlated with each other, but with some important differences.
The usual correlates of life satisfaction—such as age, income, gender, and health—are consistent in China. Yet there are also some differences that reflect the very rapid nature of China’s transition and growth, and associated “progress paradoxes.” More educated respondents, those in urban areas, and those with insufficient rest and leisure, for example, are much less satisfied with their lives than the average. In contrast, respondents in rural areas, workers in more stable jobs in the public sector, and respondents with less education are more satisfied than the average. Respondents without “hukou” (legal residential) status had significantly lower levels of life satisfaction as well. The lack of security that is associated with China’s rapid progress is an important factor in life satisfaction, as are a number of quality of life issues associated with long working hours and high workforce stress.
The patterns in mental health reports also reflect the same progress paradoxes. Urban and more educated respondents, as well as those with insufficient time for leisure or sleep, were more likely to report depression and anxiety than were those living in rural areas and the less educated. Physical health directly and significantly affects mental health, with people reporting minor ailments having more severe mental health problems in both rural and urban areas (the causality could run in both directions, of course). In contrast, physical health is much less important to life satisfaction.
Finally, a novel finding in our paper is that reports of mental health problems are the highest at the same age range that life satisfaction is the lowest (at the middle-aged years), and then decrease as life satisfaction increases. The standard U curve in age and happiness becomes an inverse U in age and depression/anxiety. The U curve is often explained by the double burdens (family and financial) of the middle age years. They are likely compounded in China by long hours and insecure labor arrangements on the one hand, and the additional burden that aging parents place on only children in their middle-aged years on the other.
China’s rapid economic progress has not been free of cost. Given the many years of very high rates of growth, it may be time for a new public focus on (1) increasing the supply and quality of mental health care, and (2) improving working conditions, job security, and other quality of life related areas. Happier people are, on average, healthier and more productive, and mental illness tends to have debilitating effects on performance in the workplace. A new public focus on these issues in China would help people live better, happier, and more productive lives, leading to more sustainable growth and development in the long run.
No comments:
Post a Comment