The Good Club

In an age of austerity, what global political actors will have the resources and willpower to tackle major problems such as poverty, hunger, global warming, inequality of wealth, etc.? 

A recent issue of The Nation featured a book review by Mark Mazower that included an interesting anecdote about the super-wealthy people who seek to address world problems via their philanthropy:

In 2009, for instance, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and David Rockefeller called a meeting of their fellow super-philanthropists—people like George Soros, Oprah Winfrey and Ted Turner—to discuss what they could do in response to the global financial crisis and the longer-term environmental and health problems facing the world. When the participants gathered at an Upper East Side residence in New York on May 5, the meeting was shrouded in secrecy. It was scarcely surprising: the combined wealth of the people in the room was reckoned to be around $120 billion—and that was after already spending billions in the previous twelve years. Such sums dwarfed the social spending budgets of most member states of the UN down the road.

The so-called "Good Club" apparently had an important agenda at this private meeting -- though no one is precisely sure of the details. Most importantly, Mazower notes that the super-rich cannot solve global problems. That is a job better left to various international institutions: 

...did they decide, as some newspaper accounts have it, that it was up to them to tackle the threat of planetary overpopulation—probably the top global fear of wealthy American philanthropists for about a century? We cannot know. But we have learned enough about the history of private wealth to know that these do-gooders alone are inadequate vehicles to supply the global public goods that well-run multilateral international institutions can handle more systematically and openly.

Incidentally, the piece also discusses the work of NGOs and provides some interesting data. For example, 90% of NGOs have been formed since 1970 and "two-thirds of EU relief goes through them." Since 2003, these NGOs have been distributing more money globally than related UN organizations.


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Favorites of 2011: technocracy edition

Henry Farrell wrote a great line in his review of David Marquand's The End of the West; The Once and Future Europe (Princeton, 2011) for The Nation (pdf), December 12, 2011:

It is tempting to see the procedures of the EU as a long-term conspiracy to bore the public into submission.

In the next sentences, Farrell retreats a bit from this statement. The institution churns out regulations that Farrell notes are boring and hard to understand, but this result was not produced as a result of top-level secret planning: "The truth is more mundane. Europe’s leaders fell into technocracy by accident rather than design."

One consequence of this reality is the so-called institutional "deficit of democracy" that was met this year by protesters claiming to represent the bottom 99% of us. We'll see in 2012 and beyond if the EU is influenced by their frustration. This EU statement does not seem promising.

Photo credit: Justine (juznie)


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Climate news

Recently, I wrote a couple of manuscripts about the politics of climate change. Most of the analysis for both pieces centered upon post-Kyoto developments.

Here's an example of one interesting development, from the BBC, February 20, 2007:

EU environment ministers have agreed in principle to cut greenhouse emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by 2020.

The ministers, meeting in Brussels, also agreed to seek a 30% cut worldwide if matched by other developed nations.

That means at least 27 affluent countries, with a combined GNP larger than the US economy, are moving forward.

Germany is prepared to reduce by 40%.

Over at the Duck of Minerva, I recently blogged about the unique problem of China and greenhouse gas emissions growth.


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