SHARED PROSPERITY IN A FRACTURED WORLD

A thoughtful consideration of how to promote democracy, sustainability, and prosperity in a world riven by dislocation and conflict.

Harvard economist Rodrik identifies several existential threats to the modern world, foremost of them climate change, but also “democratic backsliding” and inequality, among other concerns. All are interrelated, he holds, and so are the solutions: Democracy requires a strong middle class; erasing global inequality requires alleviating poverty through economic growth; and saving the world from the worst ravages of climate change (which disproportionately affect poorer countries) requires building green economies. The old means of growing prosperity through “export-oriented industrialization” no longer works, inasmuch as technology has done away with the need for manufacturing labor; thus calls to return manufacturing to the U.S. are misguided. In any event, Rodrick notes, the greatest job growth in the developed world lies in nonindustrial fields such as long-term care and food service, so the greatest need is for “more productive jobs for workers with less than a college education.” Advancing what he calls “productivism,” Rodrik also urges policymakers to stop looking for perfect solutions but instead settle for “second-best” approaches: “We might wish that ­free markets would generate a sufficient number of good jobs, but when they ­don’t, governments need to engage in interventions that will often look messy.” In his smart and generally nontechnical argument, the author considers the value of meaningful jobs, which provide not just a meal but also “dignity and social identity,” and he locates some of them in a greening of technology while also acknowledging that green jobs “are more skill intensive than the brown jobs they replace.” He also locates a revivified progressivism in this transformation: “The left must be an advocate for structural transformation, in the ­service of both good jobs and the green transition.”

A closely reasoned—and pragmatic—call for remaking the world’s economy.