“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Herbert Stein, economist.
SA’s economic policies — designed to benefit the politically aligned — aren’t sustainable. We must adopt the playbook common among high growth countries: identify relevant global trends and pivot policies to benefit from them.
The preferred alternative, organically growing SA’s domestic economy has long been much more difficult. Given our extreme youth unemployment alongside widespread poverty and excessive household indebtedness, it would now take more than two generations to achieve some semblance of normal workforce participation — the necessary precursor for sustaining broad upliftment.
Over the next, say, two years, the wars in Ukraine and Iran are likely to twist politics and economics across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Three trends with abundant disruptive potential in the medium term are AI, China’s overproduction, and political missteps, such as poorly managed migration. In less than a generation, these trends, alongside sharp demographic shifts, could reshape the global economy as holistically as the industrial revolution did.
Navigating
Successfully navigating such sweeping shifts requires key events be objectively assessed. Yet, as most people now access news digitally, they routinely click on headlines to stories that perpetuate their biases and blindspots.
Just as AI can identify suspicious transactions in a payment system, it can identify – and counteract – events depicted in ways that strain journalistic standards to serve partisan interests. But do sufficient swaths of the public want their biases challenged?
While our AI concerns are rational, our acceptance of a broad degrading of objective reporting is not. The Cold War ended while the Internet was undermining journalism’s revenue models and standards. That is, as survival pressures hit all time lows, in the minds of many, distinguishing between entertainment and news became optional.
Headlines serve as click bait for a targeted audience and then articles and videos validate biases and blindspots common to members of that audience. Whether the threat is a global pandemic or proliferation of nuclear weapons, effective communication leading to prudent responses is greatly undermined.
AI has much potential to reverse the resulting political polarisation. But will it, and when will this happen? Coverage of today’s leading news story, the complicated war in Iran, is not encouraging.
Credible reports indicate IRGC leaders brutally executed tens of thousands of Iranian protesters earlier this year. Yet the unacceptable dangers of an Iran armed with nuclear weapons and funding terrorist proxies are routinely downplayed by public intellectuals and most politicians. Nor is there much acknowledgement that, given what we think we know about the missile math, it almost certainly would have been wiser to have decisively confronted the IRGC sooner.
Blindspots
SA’s political discourse has been framed by our dominant party around historical injustices. The blindspot has been commercial principles. AI could assist by making it easier for voters to discern between public opinion being manipulated and workable solutions.
Whereas famines and plagues had always been common until a couple of generations ago, food production and obesity have subsequently flourished. Survival pressures have, accordingly, ceased to shape policy priorities. Instead, Marxist-conditioned ideologues have expanded their focus on class-based oppression to categorise nearly all groups — except straight white males — as oppressed.
Fabian and ‘long walk through the institutions’ efforts have been slow but effective. Political biases have been institutionalised thus undermining the crucial role of the “fourth estate”, news outlets. Two highly consequential wars and the emergence of AI should be inspiring a pivot back to more objective reporting, but are they?
Welcome change
The status quo is starkly unsustainable. And as SA’s purchasing power is insufficient to fuel adequate growth, our economic and foreign relations policies must be reconceived to align with globally defined success paths.
Through its aggressive subsidising of strategic industries China has undermined the global trading system. The threats to auto manufacturing employment, particularly in Europe, can no longer be ignored. New alliances could favour fair-trade among likeminded countries to counter China unsustainably expanding its trillion-dollar-plus trade surplus.
We should welcome such changes as they offer high growth opportunities. However, the benefits will be harvested by countries with commercially aligned economic and foreign policies. SA being seen as aligned with China, Russia, and Iran alienates us from key Western nations while anti-immigrant actions strain our regional relations. Such isolationism is a direct consequence of mixing racist policies with patronage politics. And it precludes our adequately integrating into global value chains – our only viable path to high volume job creation.
Patronage motivated policies which are racist and isolationist must end. Irrespective of where it is located or what it sells, any SA company whose revenues are earned through value-added exporting should enjoy sweeping dispensations from anti-competitive regulations, particularly race-based legislation regarding ownership and labour regulations. This practical path can swiftly upgrade our politics and policies.
[Image: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-hands-holding-wallet-and-cash-17668871/]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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