Sachs’s immediate concern is the implication for the Government’s budget, which must be slashed in order to bring inflation under control. If much of the nation’s health expenditures are now buried as fringe benefits on the books of enterprises that depend on Government subsidies, who will pick up the cost once the enterprises are forced to economize?
Getting a handle on the magnitude of the problem is obviously difficult in a country that cannot even explain why life expectancy has fallen sharply in the last two decades. But some number is better than none. And by pressing officials to address this and other pivotal issues, Sachs hopes to accelerate the pace of reform.
Sachs’s message of urgency is not universally accepted. Plenty of Western as well as Russian economists contend that a more gradual approach is not only possible but necessary. “Economic reform is a political process,” says Padma Desai at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. “First, you must build consensus.”
And even his sympathizers acknowledge that Sachs’s high profile and world-class impatience could generate a backlash in a nation still adjusting to the reality that it is no longer a superpower. “There’s a real dilemma here,” says Stanley Fischer, an international economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You have to make a lot of noise to get the attention of the West. But the more noise you make, the more you make it seem that the reform program is a Western program. And that could be the kiss of death.”
…
Please note that I’ve placed in bold font and italics Mr. Sachs reported ‘world class impatience’!
Here are the the last paragraphs of Beddoes latest broadside , about the coming Political Crises of 2024: In sum Trump and Trumpism!
Headline: 2024 will be stressful for those who care about liberal democracy
Sub-Headline: In theory it should be a triumphant year for democracy. In practice it will be the opposite
Nothing, however, will compare to America’s election, either for grim spectacle or potential consequences. It is hard to believe the most likely outcome is a rematch between two old men, both of whom the majority of voters wish were not candidates.
Donald Trump’s very candidacy undermines American democracy. That the Republican Party would nominate a man who tried to overturn the results of the previous presidential election dims America as a democratic beacon. A second Trump term would transform America into a loose cannon with isolationist tendencies at a time of grave geopolitical peril. His fondness for strongmen, particularly Mr Putin, suggests that his boast to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 24 hours would be at Ukraine’s expense.
Mr Trump may not become the nominee, and if he does, he may well lose. But the odds of a second Trump term are alarmingly high. The consequences could be catastrophic—for democracy and for the world. ■
Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-chief, The Economist
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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