Noah Chompkins Interview

So I got the chance to ask Chompkins a question or two on my friends' radio show. It was cool. I will add a link to this post if the interview becomes available online. He made a few points that are pretty basic, but very true and bear repeating.

1. Exploiting "comparative advantage" through free trade policies is not, in fact, how countries have actually successfully developed throughout economic history. They have developed through the use of high protective trade barriers and massive government intervention, subsidization, and direction.

2. The globalized, liberalized capital markets we have today actually move massive amounts of speculative capital all over the place rather than finance productive investment to any significant degree. They are a destablizing rather than productive force.

3. Most important technological developments that form the basis of our high standard of living have involved significant amounts of government research and financing.

4. Globalized capital markets also have had a huge hand in promoting global inequality. They allow investors to work as a "virtual senate," by withdrawing capital from a country en masse whenver they don't like that country's economic policies. If you look at the period in our history when we had some social democratic policies, it was during a period when we, and the rest of the world, had significant capital controls in place.

5. Economic growth since ~1975 was slower than between 1945-1975, and post-1975 growth has been highly inegalitarian. Income for the middle and bottom of the income distribution has stagnated and even fallen since 1975, while it has increased immensely for the wealthy during that period. Furthermore, economic growth from 1945-1975 (which was egalitarian) was correlated with improving social indicators (infant mortality, life expectancy, health metrics, etc.), while economic growth since that time has actually accompanied the deterioration of such social factors.

Overall I was struck by how moderate-social democratic Chomsky came off. I agreed with him on just about everything he said.