No international expert is better qualified to diagnose SA’s multi-dimensional disconnects than Francis Fukuyama. He will give a live-streamed lecture from Johannesburg next Thursday evening. The event is hosted by the CDE which previously arranged for Harvard’s highly acclaimed development economist, Ricardo Hausmann, to publically explore the country’s blockages. Our policy makers largely ignored his valuable insights. Might this time be different?
The topics Fukuyama has addressed in books and international lectures span: social justice; patronage; dignity; trust; Marxism; capitalism; nation building; political identities; human nature; and social order. It is also significant that he teaches at Stanford University which is integral to Silicon Valley.
Those with long memories will recall Fukuyama rocketing to prominence via his 1989 essay “The End of History?” which foreshadowed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union’s demise. He queried whether the superior real-world performance of free-market, liberal democracy over economies centrally controlled by authoritarian governments would end such ideological debates.
According to the World Bank, 38% of the world’s population was extremely poor in 1990 versus less than 10% today. Trends suggest that by 2030 less than 3% of the world’s population will be extremely poor - excluding sub Saharan Africa where 90% of the world’s extreme poor are projected to reside. To get our politicians and policy makers to listen, Fukuyama needs to explain how there is a new wrinkle which determines such disparities.
Last month a senior World Bank official stated that SA’s annual growth over the next ten years will be capped at 1.4%. That is, SA is now completing a decade of per capita income stagnation and beginning another one. This is explained by how the world economy sharply pivoted in the early 1990s and how it is currently pivoting profoundly again - while this nation’s policies remain outdated and inward focused.
Through most of the industrial era, the self-made ultra-wealthy were more likely to have struck it big in real estate or through extracting natural resources than as innovators or industrialists. That is, until rather recently, industrialisation rewarded the exploitation of shortages.