CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

360 CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
choice; they are forced to accept the same terms. As long as the indebted
country is spending more on education and health than the base line, a
portion of its foreign debt is being liquidated.
What does this do for capitalism? It strengthens the market’s opportunities
among five billion people. Every multinational corporation that produces
a product that can be bought in developing and transitional countries
should favor debt relief. Corporate interests are not the same as the interests
of the financial community. More than 80 percent of the world’s population
will have greater purchasing power when the unpayable debt is lifted. A winwin
outcome for poor and rich alike.
Debt is a roadblock to global progress. It’s time to stop playing penny
ante and put all the chips on a bet that the world will be better off when
it’s gone.
RECONSTITUTE THE WORLD BANK
As stated in Chapter 7, the World Bank has never put the whole of the financial
equation for development on the table. It has never analyzed the full
range of illicit outflows into western accounts, causing deprivation and slowing
growth in poorer countries. On the principal reason for its existence, it
has not asked the right questions. David Reisman, an economist, once said,
“[T]here is more merit in being fuzzily right than in being precisely
wrong.” 2 My estimate of $500 billion a year passing illegally out of developing
and transitional economies into western coffers may be fuzzily right, but
the World Bank, which has failed even to ask the question, is precisely
wrong. What assurance can we have that fuller, deeper, more challenging
queries will be posed in the future?
Reconstitute the executive directors of the World Bank. They and
other senior ranks need to contain many more sociologists, political scientists,
psychologists and, yes, philosophers, people who will ask a wider
range of development questions than the World Bank has been willing to
ask to date. At the moment the Bank is data driven ad nauseam. I’m all
for data. But dependency on statistical analysis means that where there
are no statistics there is no analysis. The Bank has allowed the availability
of data to shape the questions, rather than having questions determine
the pursuit of data. For the future, broaden the range of expertise and dis-