The Right to Development and the Importance of Human and

Social Capital as Human Rights Issues

by
Professor Winston P. Nagan
Trieste Forum on Science and Technology:
Impact on Society and Economy

World Academy of Art & Science

Trieste, Italy

March 4-6, 2013

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

Introduction ............................................................................................................................3

The Conceptual Challenges of the Right to Development.....................................................5

The UN Decisions Relating to the Right to Development .....................................................5

Contextual Background .........................................................................................................6

Some Suggested Elements That May go into the Formulation of a New Economic
Theory of Development .........................................................................................................11

New Economic Thinking, Development and Social Change.................................................14

Human and Social Capital in Development: The Vicos Experiment ....................................17

Human and Social Capital Development: Opportunity Lost .................................................18

Issues that a New Global Economic Theory Founded on the Basis of the Normative
Salience of Human and Social Capital May Consider ........................................................... 19

The Development Agenda According to Neo-Liberalism (Free Trade/Fair Trade) ..............23

CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................................25

The Consequences of the Current Global Economic Order: The Need for a
Revolutionary Global Economic Theory of the Right to Development with an
Emphasis on Decision and the Salience of Human and Social Capital .....................25

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 INTRODUCTION

One of the most far-reaching decisions of the United Nations General Assembly was the
adoption of the Declaration on the Right to Development in 1986. The Declaration was adopted
with an expectation of optimism about progression to a new global economic dispensation. This
did not happen. However, the Declaration remains an important symbol of global expectation.
Notwithstanding it is an instrument that remains contested in many global fora. To the extent that
the expectations of the Declaration received modest success, it is possible to explain this by the
fact that the Declaration anticipated an economic theory that had not been intellectually and
scholastically developed to make it work in practical policy arenas. On the other hand, a
competing theory had evolved which embodied an important level of intellectual coherence and
was justified by a version of conventional economics that supported the political perspectives of
the capital intensive states and related interest groups. In this competitive universe of economic
paradigms, the right to development initiative was seriously disadvantaged. However, today
things are changing.

In a recent volume of CADMUS, a publication of the World Academy of Art and

Science, the editors boldly called for “Revolution in Economics.” The editors declare that “the
discipline of economics is at a crossroads. Either it undertakes a complete re-evaluation of its
fundamental postulates and a critical reassessment of their utility to solve real problems or it
risks sliding further into irrelevance.” The editors believe that now is the time “for a renaissance
of thinking in economics.” They maintain “inadequate thought” leads to “failed policies.”

The central challenge to the conventional wisdom of economic theory is that the
construction of its 19th century roots were significantly influenced by a conception of science
identified with a Newtonian universe. This approach generates an approach to economic order
that is largely mechanistic having an autonomous machine-like character. This approach serves
as a foundation and a constraint on economic thinking. The CADMUS editors note that the
conditions of economic organization have changed. Economic evolution has developed a
knowledge based service economy. Under these conditions, the central fact of economic
importance is the critical value of human capital. This is a profoundly important insight for
understanding economics in its relation to the social and psychological sciences, including law,
and the necessity of understanding the interdisciplinary interdependence of social science,
economics and law.

It is a part of the intellectual legacy of the World Academy of Art and Science that a
former president of the academy, Harold Lasswell, also recognized the centrality of human and
social capital in the social sciences and law. He spent a lifetime seeking to create a
comprehensive theory for inquiry about the individual human being in the global social process.
This focus on the individual as a capital resource is also a important idea behind the

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contemporary development of human rights perspectives and practices in global society. The
right to development refines the human rights perspective by making the individual a central
component of development from a human rights point of view. In this sense, the individual
human being as a bearer of social and economic capital becomes important in the development
of a theory of development itself. What seems to be emerging from this discourse, with the
human being placed in the center of an appropriate focus of inquiry, is the necessity of
integrating knowledge across disciplinary lines as one of the most important elements in the
creation of a revolution in economic thinking.

According to the editors of CADMUS “today there is an urgent need to reconnect

disparate fields of thought in the social sciences-economics, politics, sociology and psychology.
Unification of the social sciences and the humanities can generate precious insights into social
process.” I would add the discipline of law to this process as well.

One of the great insights of President Franklin Roosevelt was his statement with regard to
the crisis of the Great Depression that this crisis was not the product of an autonomous machine.
It was a crisis created by human choices and one that could be ended by human choices. Clearly,
the insight suggests that human choice is integral to human and social capital. Connecting the
idea of human capital to human choice brings in the centrality of understanding choice in terms
of decision and the architecture of decision itself. The related challenge is the direction of
decision making and choice with respect to defensive human goals and values. The most
defensible goal of choice and development is the common good of all. Human choice is
implicated in the Declaration of the Right to Development and therefore expresses a challenge of
new economic thinking to give decision making a central place in theory and to understand
challenges of decision for giving operative effect in policy arenas for the advancement of human
and social capital in global economic order.

As the editors of CADMUS indicate, we need a richer and more scientifically integrated
understanding of a multitude of disciplines which can inform a new paradigm of revolutionary
thinking in the development of a useable theory of human capital defined developmental
processes. I believe that the new thinking pioneered in WAAS is one of the most challenging
initiatives for grappling with a coherent and defensible economic theory to give credibility to a
global right to development. In short, the context presented by the new economic thinking
suggests a promising root to fully understand the problems and possibilities of an emphatic
emphasis on human and social capital for triggering the dynamism of development in social
process.

Here it seems to me that the model developed by former WAAS President, Lasswell may
facilitate the new economic thinking processes. Lasswell developed a human centered social
process description that could serve as a model for knowledge integration across disciplinary
lines. Lasswell expressed this in an elegant and reasonably simple framework: Social process
means social interaction at any level. Social process/interaction consists of human beings (human

4
capital) pursuing values, through institutions based on resources. This model can be expressed
with greater complexity and clarity at any level of social organization. I would suspect indeed,
that it is a tool that can bridge the divide between the universe of macro-economics and the
universe of micro-economics. This model as will be later shown is compatible with the UN
Declaration of the Right to Development as well.

The Conceptual Challenges of the Right to Development

The conceptual basis of the international right to development is to be found in the

Atlantic Charter which Roosevelt declared in the U.S. Congress in 1941. The Charter emerged as
an agreement with Churchill to codify the war aims of the allies. The Charter contains the
famous Four Freedoms for which the war was being waged. The Four Freedoms were a merger
of Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism and Churchill’s eclectic humanistic conservatism. The Four
Freedoms became the war aims of the allies and the basis for a post-war form of global
organization. The Four Freedoms were: the freedom from fear (security); the freedom of speech
and expression (political); the freedom of conscience and belief (confessional); the freedom from
want (economic and material well-being). It should be recalled parenthetically that when the UN
unleashed its millennium development project it recalled that the project was intrinsically a part
of the Four Freedoms articulated by Roosevelt.

The end of the war generated conditions which held an uneasy coexistence with the Four
Freedoms and the UN Charter. The Red Army had largely beaten the Nazis on the continent.
This represented the geographic reality of a socialistic sphere of influence. In certain economic
circles this fact saw the state and its control over the means of production as represented also the
extinction of private property and correspondingly, an extinction of human freedom. A group of
individuals met in Mount Peleron and devoted their intellectual efforts to resisting state tyranny.
Among the tools they used was a recasting of forms of 19th century capitalism as a intellectual
barrier to the unlimited growth of state power. The consequence of the Mount Peleron initiative
is a good example of the durability and power of ideas especially when coherently and elegantly
expressed, as well as justified at the altar of scientific verification. The fundamental ideas had
ideological traction: strong state equals weak freedom. This idea challenged the Roosevelt idea
that necessitous human beings experienced diminished freedom. In this view the state was not a
destroyer of freedom but an active promoter of freedom by expanding opportunity and
promoting equality.

The UN Decisions Relating to the Right to Development

A threshold concern with the United Nations Declaration of the Right to Development is
the challenge to give it an appropriate juridical status. Juris consults have designated the
prescriptions and guidelines in these instruments as forms of international economic soft law. I
suspect that the weak position that the Declaration on the Right to Development holds in global
affairs is that it has been urged to be construed as a document of human rights. However, it is by

5
no means clear that the juridical character of this instrument is obvious. Additionally, I suspect
that behind the motivation for the adoption of the Declaration was that it was meant to be a
directive providing normative guidance for the idea of global social justice. However, it cannot
be said that at the time it was adopted, our theories of political economy, which implicate the
social justice normative dimension of global political economy, had been adequately developed
to provide a strong conceptual and normative foundation for the Declaration. Additionally, our
theories of justice from a philosophical point of view had not evolved to provide us with an
objective justification for a universal theory of global social justice universalizing the concept of
human dignity.

Institutionally the UN has taken the right to development as a serious part of its mandate.
However, it cannot be said that it has established a dominant place for even the discourse about a
charter-based right to development. In point of fact, the UN has strenuously pressed the right to
development as an important and evolving charter-based expectation. At the same time as the
UN has pursued this track, the issue has had little traction in many of the centers and fora of
global economic policy making. This would suggest that the evolving law of development carries
an even softer legal pedigree than its compelling symbols might suggest. It would be appropriate
to step back for a moment and trace this development to provide a better understanding of the
contemporary prospects and challenges for a human right development today.

Contextual Background

An important component of the contextual background that has triggered my interest in

revisiting the right to development idea, is the importance of the current global economic
recession which I believe is founded and generated by a seriously flawed economic theory. That
theory emerged as we said as a response to the implied threats which it saw in the development
of a theory couched in human rights terms of a general right to development. That flawed theory
is today described as economic neo-liberalism.

At the end of World War II, the victorious powers represented distinguishable versions of
political economy. In Eastern Europe the Red Army, which was significantly victorious over the
Nazis established a geographical sphere of influence with the USSR as the main center of
influence. In that sphere of influence the expectation of political economy was that it would be
under state control. In the geographic sphere of the West, the guidelines of post-war governance
were influenced by the Atlantic Charter and the war aims of the allies. Both of these emergent
expectations envisioned an important role for the state in the reconstruction of Europe. These
contending perspectives however, shaped the evolution of the UN approach to the issue of the
future of global political economy.

During this period an important group of center left economists and philosophers met in
Switzerland and formed the Mont Peleron Society. They saw the danger that the Soviet style
state posed for human freedom, in particular its claim to the exclusive patrimony of the national

6
economy. This approach they saw as an incipient threat to freedom on a global basis. The
fundamental idea behind this was that the extinction of economic freedom represented the
demise of human liberty. A central component of this emergent perspective was the role of
private law institutions. This role historically had established the important technical basis for the
protection of private property. Hayak the Austrian economist, refined this idea by an ingenious
merger of law (property law) and economic theory (Law, Legislation, and Liberty. 1973,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press). The tradition of private law in both the civil and common
law provided legal protections against the arbitrary taking of property.

This question of property rights, law and newer approaches to economic theory which
required political interventions into traditional private law institutions, came to a head during the
period of the New Deal of the Roosevelt Administration. The Supreme Court led the charge in an
effort to dismantle New Deal legislation on the basis that they violated private property rights.
These private property rights were justified as being beyond the reach of legislative sovereignty.
Indeed, they were justified by natural law. This challenge was not so much theoretically resolved
as it was resolved by changes in the composition of the court.

In 1945, the UN Charter came into force. Among its major purposes was the obligation to
“achieve international cooperation in solving problems of an economic… character.” Article 55
of the text explains that the UN shall promote “higher standards of living, full employment, and
conditions of economic progress and development.” In 1966, the UN adopted an important
human rights treaty: The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. The
Preamble to the Covenant recognizes the influence on its adoption of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, the Atlantic Charter, including its provision for a freedom from want. Overall,
the document is an early step in recognizing the right to development. It also places prime
responsibility for giving force to these rights on the state. It should be noted that Articles 6 and 7
identify a right to work and the right of an opportunity to work and related work rights. Although
the Covenant has a comprehensive codification of prescriptions, it does not give us any guidance
that identifies a theory of development or a global theory of political economy based on social
justice goals. Indeed, I would be surprised if anyone in this ordinance could provide a citation in
conventional economics that even refers to this instrument.

We must step back a moment to a period shortly before the adoption of the Economic
Rights Covenant. In 1960, the UN General Assembly adopted a declaration on the granting of
independence to colonial countries and people. This was a sovereignty supporting declaration. It
effectually suggested that realizable development progress will be facilitated by the expansions
in sovereign bodies politic. It also recognized that colonialism had been exploitive and an
impediment to development. It therefore implied that new sovereign status would be an ideal
vehicle for economic, social and cultural development.

This declaration was followed by a highly controversial sequence of General Assembly

Resolutions. These were the Resolutions relating to permanent sovereignty over natural

7
resources of 1962 and 1974. These Resolutions effectually sought to advance thinking about a
state centered right to development. They also underline the strength of sovereignty by changing
the conventional international law of rules about the protection of private property in the global
environment. It was around Article 4 of the 1962 Resolution that the battle lines were drawn.
This Article sought to change the traditional way in which private property was protected
globally. Under this Article, a sovereign state could nationalize private property for reasons of
public utility. Additionally, the sovereign would only consider compensation in terms of
“appropriate” standards. The prior regime required the sovereign to provide prompt, just, and
adequate compensation. In effect, the control over foreign investments would be subject to
sovereign economic discretion. This issue became a major matter of juridical importance which
resulted in changes to the doctrines of sovereign immunity and act of state. Following on these
Resolutions the UN adopted a program of action for the establishment of a new economic
international order. The primary objective of this program was to improve the economic position
of the new sovereign participants in global society.

This new program was suggesting that a new regime secure a higher level of international
cooperation regarding economic resources and processes. The approach also saw cooperation as
an important obligation on the older sovereigns. The fundamental ideas in this program were
codified in the Declaration on a New Economic Order (1974). In 1975, this was followed by the
adoption of a charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States. These instruments sought to both
promote and prescribe a legal regime for a new international order based on the primary role of
the sovereign state in the management of economic order. A decade later the complex
prescriptions in the (New International Economic Order (NIEO) and its state centric orientation
were merged into the 1986 Declaration on the Right to Development. The model implicit in this
document seeks to strike some sort of balance between the individual social participant and the
near exclusive reliance on a state centric economic paradigm. The focus on the individual is
reflected in Article 1 and Articles 2 (1&2). The rest of the document in all the other articles
stress the state central approach to development. In Article 1, it is stated that the right to
development is an inalienable human right. It also states that individuals and peoples are entitled
to participate in development. This therefore means that the human rights foundation of the idea
of individual and peoples human capital is also a foundation of modern human rights. This
suggests that a new theory of economic thinking must account for universal human rights.

At this point, the development initiative presents a critical intellectual challenge for those
who wish to give the Declaration policy relevance. Notwithstanding the reference to individuals,
the Declaration has a largely macro-economic emphasis. Although I have not seen a macro-
economic theory based on the Declaration. However, regardless of the underdeveloped theory of
macro-economics in this context, there is the ringing reference to an inalienable human right.
This suggests that we also are lacking a theory of micro-economic importance. Additionally, the
integration of a macro and a micro-economic perspective would seem to be a critical foundation
for giving the right to development intellectual credibility and efficacy in policy arenas.

8
 World Academy fellows such as Orio, Giarini, Ivo Slaus, and Garry Jacobs, call for a
new economic theory that is relevant to our time. I would suggest that notwithstanding the
imperfections in the drafting of a right to development, the right to development represents a
concept that with proper clarification could enhance the kind of thinking that anticipates a new
global economic paradigm. It is particularly important from a right to development point of view,
to recognize that the individual participant in economic order is a capital resource and the
appropriate development of this resource is the pathway to the generation of a new and
sustainable economic message. Additionally, the normative constraint on how individual capital
is nurtured and developed has to be guided by the normative component of human rights, which
places a premium on human well being.

It is worthy of note that although the right to development has had diminished traction the
UN continues its vigorous promotion of this idea. Its recent project dealing with developmental
targets for its millennium initiative is a very clear project that focuses on developing human
capital via projects such as the eradication of illiteracy.

The theoretical limit implied in the right to development is that we do not have an
identification of the critical stakeholders in this project. The stakeholders include a multitude of
participants and theory would have to account for that. For example, the assumption that globally
states largely monopolize economic activity obscures the reality of the global enterprisory
private sector. That sector includes not only conventional business activities across state lines,
but also the significant monopoly the private sector has on global capital and its related financial
institutions.

This omission has tended to obscure the salience it has been given to neo-liberal
principles of economic order. For example, the private sector was outraged over the resolution
related to permanent sovereignty over natural resources. It categorically rejected the weakening
of the protection of private investment property. This battle implicated the entire new
international economic order paradigm. It implicated it at levels below the economic radar
screen. For example, sovereignty is given operational effect in many different ways in
international society. The capital export in countries worked on a restriction on the immunity of
sovereigns from legal accounting when they acted in the market (restrictive theory of sovereign
immunity). Another major technical doctrine that could insulate a state when it took foreign
property was the Act of State Doctrine. This Doctrine too was gradually reduced so that a state
nationalizing foreign property could be challenged in foreign courts. This led to the so-called Hot
Good Doctrine, which meant that if a state took foreign property, wherever that property showed
up abroad it could be subject to legal proceedings, which would seize the property and litigate its
title. The owners of private property investment were fighting back. In this regard it became
apparent that development of any sort could not happen without foreign investment.

This meant that foreign investment could come in with terms favorable to the investor.
The abuses of this newer approach to global economic relations is well documented in Perkins,

9
The Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. New state elites found that there was plenty of capital
to borrow often for dubious projects and often to satisfy foreign bank accounts of the new elites.
This process of neo-liberalism generated diversified forms of economic activity in which
corporations could relocate to undeveloped countries and produce goods, which could be sold to
the corporations’ original corporate home. Outsourcing became an important tool in the
exploitation of the regulatory vacuum of doing business abroad. Cheap labor, relaxed labor
standards, access to developed markets, and tax avoidance schemes, all of which made doing
business in an unregulated market attractive for self-interest but unattractive for the common
good. The limits on this model include vast accumulated debts vested in the sovereigns, which
was a further limitation and what a state centric model could do about development.

The principle behind the Declaration on the Right to Development included the
idea of sharing economic and technical resources to benefit the new states.1 The United
Nations promoted the principle of sharing as a mandatory, rather than a discretionary, obligation
to sustain global equity. It is clear that this evolving international law was confronting two
radically contentious ideological perspectives. The first would center on the promise of
protecting property in the international environment. The protection of property would be
a marker of a state's commitment to a paradigm sympathetic to the global private sector
rather than the national or global public sector. The second perspective is associated with the
perspectives of international socialists or social democratic ideology. It recognized that the
public should control all economic development or that the public shares in the management
of the production and distribution of wealth and related values.

The contemporary state of the global economy witnessed the ascent of the privatization
of national and global economic institutions. It also witnessed emerging market economies,
free trade zones, and the dominant role of corporate enterprise. The mantra of the free trade
market phenomena has been "world peace through world trade."2 The ascent of the private sector
is considered to be more efficient and less wasteful than corrupt and inefficient state
bureaucracies.

The global institutionalization reflected these developments (the legal and political
cultures of the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank). To some degree, they came at the
expense of working through the development agencies of the United Nations. However,
a significant policy shift had emerged in the global economy. The emergence of a coalition
of economically dominant states, the Group of Eight, now approximately a group of 20,
reflected this policy shift. This shift has the appearance of creating an Economic Security
Council of the UN but functioning outside of the organization. From a technical point of view,
the international economic soft law associated with the new international economic order has
become even softer. On the other hand, it is unclear what the general emerging rules are that

1
Id at art. 3(3).
2
Lawyer Roles, supra note 2, at 134.

10
govern the neo- liberal economy. The institutions of this perspective have been under
pressure in part because the lex specialis within these institutions is sometimes
incompatible with general international law and international human rights law. Moreover,
critical appraisal of many of the operational rules often shows that the rules are enforced
strictly against the powerless and often ignored by the powerful. Moreover, the efficiency
of the model is under critical examination because the outcomes seem to generate greater
global disparity and greater global alienation, and some would even suggest, the radical
division between rich and poor may be a cause of radical religious activism or possibly even
apocalyptic terrorism. In the next section, we try to provide some of the tools that may facilitate
a revolution in economic thinking along the lines of a human right to development. We start with
the importance of the global context and how that context may realistically mapped. We borrow
from the work of a former president of the World Academy, Harold Lasswell and a current
fellow of the academy, Michael Reisman:

Some Suggested Elements That May go into the Formulation of a New Economic Theory of
Development

We start this section with some guidelines drawn from the Declaration on the Right to
Development. Article 1 stipulates the following:

“The right to development is an alienable human right by virtue of which every

human person are entitled to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social,
cultural and political development, in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms
can be fully realized.”

Article 1(2) expresses the controverted norm that the human right to development
includes the exercise of an inalienable right to full sovereignty over all their natural wealth and
resources. This provision provides for a more state central in development policy and
application. Article 2(1) stipulates that “the human person is the central subject of development
and should be the active participant and beneficiary of the right to development.” This provision
moves somewhat from the state centered view. The central point is that the human person is not
an object of development, but a subject of development. Seen in this light, the human person is
more closely analogous to the idea of the person representing individual and social capital.

The above quoted excerpts from the right to development assume a context from which
the essential subject generated claims for development emerge as challenges for policy, decision,
prescription, application, and enforcement. This requires a realistic map of the entire global
social process. Because it is from this process that the challenges relating to individual and social
capital as central elements of a right to development emerge. Below is a map appropriated from
the traditions of international law scholarship inspired by fellows of the World Academy
(Lasswell, McDougal, Reisman).

11
 This chart developed by Lasswell, Mc Dougal and WAAS fellow Reisman is meant to
provide the essential global context for a new economic theory of development. The model
provides for an identification and an inter-relationship of change together with a standard which
may evaluate them against the preferred objectives of a theory of development. The approach
clearly demonstrates the development must be understood in terms of all comprehensive values
implicated in human rights and not simply a single value such as wealth. Fundamental to
understanding the map is an effort to identify the idea that all variables are inter-stimulating each
other in global society. The map helps us to generate specific targets of change recognizing their
inter-dependence and inter-stimulation as factors implicating the entire context.

I. The context of ecological values. Time was when the conventional wisdom in economics was
that nature and related environmental resources were unlimited. Today, the reality of climate
change challenges this earlier altruism. A new economics must consider both the potentials and
the limits of the ecology of the planet. The ecology of the planet, therefore, is a crucial factor of
context for a new political economy.

II. The context of global social interaction. Global social interaction involves the shaping and
sharing of all values. The outcomes of this process generate the aggregate statistics of human

12
development or the lack of human development. One of the most important problems that
emerge from global social interaction are the problems of effective power and social conflict.
However, the new economic theory must have a useable model of the global social process in
order to fully appreciate the problems it generates on a global basis for all values.

III. The global process of effective power. The global social process reproduces the institutions
and imperfections of the production and distribution of global power. It is well understood that
the outcomes of global power represent conflict and competition. Additionally, the expression on
global power in society is done through the process of decision-making itself. We can call this
decision-making according to naked power. Since power expresses itself in terms of conflict, war
and often violence, it will be obvious that peace and security are critical foundations for a social
process that seeks to maximize its human capital resources. In short, war consumes human
capital resources, and does not enhance or reproduce it. The new economic theory must,
therefore, account for the global processes that generate and sustain human conflict, since these
processes generate deficits in development.

IV. The evolution of power into behavioral constitutional processes. Conflicts about power do
not always endure indefinitely. Indeed, there are periods when the power broker contestants in
conflict may see that the continuance of conflict may only result in zero sum losses. This
realization may generate the elements of inter-elite collaboration from which understandings
may emerge about how to manage power in ways that avoid conflict and promote collaboration.
If this happens, a society may emerge with a series of understandings about how power is to be
distributed, indeed allocated among the power broker contestants. This level of
institutionalization of power will reflect the emergence of the power dynamics constrained by
distributions which have the support of the authority of community members. When there is a
form of constitutional process, we effectually have expectations about institutionalizing the
forms of authorized decisions about decision-making itself. This is the foundation for the
establishment of a system of public order in which all the values are distributed and produced via
the authorized institutions of society. It would, therefore, be appropriate that the new economic
theory develop and map the constitutive process (local to global) because it provides the
framework of authorized decision-making regarding all the basic values in society including
wealth. In this sense, a constitutional order that has a working capacity has an approximation to
the idea of the rule of law. And the constitutive process is made operative by the constitutive
functions of decision –making. Thus, constitutive decision-making may both directly and
indirectly influence development and progress. Additionally, a theory of economic novelty
would have to account for the decision-making functions:

1. Intelligence which includes gathering information relevant to making decisions and its
processing, storage, retrieval, and distribution to all participators performing decision
functions.

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 2 .The decision-making function of promotion requires agitation and recommendation of
certain policies which in the form of prescription have the quality of law. In this sense,
promotion is a critical component in decision for directly changing the common interest.
It is in this sense, that we cannot look at economics as value-free.

3. Prescription. This decision function implicates the formulation and adoption of certain
policies as authoritative pronouncements in appropriate sectors of the social process.

4. Invocation. This function of decision-making is essentially a provisional decision

function that characterizes behavior as incompatible with the law and goals of the
community. Those who perform the invocation function raise the question of what
initiatives enhance or violate community prescriptions.

5. Application. This is the authoritative characterization of conduct as lawful or

unlawful. To secure lawful ends, the applier must use tools of some form of sanction to
secure appropriate application. In terms of the objectives of development, the
consequences of development may be critically related to the actual applicative
performance. The new economic initiative must, therefore, give careful attention to the
idea of application if development goals are to be real.

6. Termination. The decision function of termination means the termination of something

in the status quo and its replacement by something that changes the status quo. New
economic theory must ensure the termination of dysfunctional traditional standards and
the embrace of new thinking.

7. Appraisal. The theory of decision-making as applied to development requires that there

be constant measures that may be appraised in terms of advancing toward progressive
developmental goals and avoiding the regression to the opposite.

New Economic Thinking, Development and Social Change

The new economic thinking has its focus on development in terms of human capital and
its potentials for improving the human prospect. The new economic thinking would have to
identify a plurality of community systems that are inter-dependant and inter-determining and
range from the local and the global. What we observe are territorial communities who know what
they want and where they need to go but they lack resources and skills. An extreme example is
“cargo cults”. If placed on a continuum, we may see the socio-pathological condition of hyper
development. There are a multitude of problematic circumstances in between. For us to develop
an approach that permits us to identify where we are and where we want to go, we would have to
measure development in terms of the existent state and potentials for transformation of at least
the following nine values; power, wealth, enlightenment, skill, well-being , affection, respect,
rectitude and aesthetics.

14
1. Power. The most important expression of power as decision is the understanding of the
institution within which it expresses itself. For example, globally, power is significantly
decentralized. This means an economic paradigm of global salience runs into the problem
of the degree of lack of institutionalization of power. It is probably true that the most
power-deprived are the least well-off in global society. The new theory must be able to
map global power and to appreciate it capacity to be mobilized for rational
developmental objectives.

2. Wealth. In general, this refers to the aggregate volume and composition of what a
society produces. It may also refer to income in the community and it may also refer to
the notion of an aggregate resource base. In general, when wealth is developed, the
outcome is an increase in the volume and composition of products without depleting the
resource base. P+I÷ (R)

3. Enlightenment:

What we mean by enlightenment is the prescription and application of education in social

and economic development. The nature of enlightenment as a social capital is evident
when education in a society leads to development. A society with an increased education-
knowledge base uses enlightenment to extend development through informed decision-
making. Decision-makers would make decisions based on informed enlightenment.

4. Well-being:

Well-being including health refers to the state or condition of a society and its members.
The well-being of a society is directly proportional to the level of “life expectancy” and
indirectly proportional to the expectancy of disease occurrence in that society. The
optimum level of well-being, however, is dependent on other values in that society.

5. Skill:

Skill is the ability to perform tasks (especially employment or professional tasks), as a

function of human capital development. The skill value is for the benefit of society. Skill
development is a consequence of an increase in the strength of the “skill pool” in a
society where the skills are directed towards development. Skill is a critical component of
individual and social capital.

6. Affection:

Affection is a form of positive sentiment and underlines the loyalty of individuals and
associations to the group. Being a basic value, it has tremendous social capital. The
increase in scope of positive sentiments in a society increases development achievements
and goals.

15
 7. Respect:

Showing regard for other individuals within a society is crucial in development. A lack of
respect gives rise to discrimination, which in turn is a direct cause of retarded
development.

8. Rectitude:

Rectitude drives moral behavior in society. When rectitude of individuals within a

society matches the development goals of the same society, there emerges what we call
rectitude development.

These values are the critical components of the theory of a right to development. They are
also implicated in the development and enhancement of human and social capital.

The system of mapping the global social, power, constitutive and public order processes
represent the essential contextual background for a political economy that focuses its theoretical
foundations on the development of human and social capital. Essentially the repository of human
and social capital should be focused on the value institutional context and the framework of
decision making that shapes this context in ways that maximize the human and social capital
capacity in society. The values approach gives us a shorthand method of understanding that
human and social capital are clearly implicated in at least nine values that a cross cultural world
can be observed with a appropriate tools of investigation. The challenge for theory is to
understand the divergent institutions respecting the cultural values and their level of efficacy in
practice. We could start with the first challenge of theory which is to establish the appropriate
goals of human and social capital development. Here the challenge is to generate procedures and
practices, as well as a theory to explain and justify this, which has the task of maximizing the
production, distribution and sustainability of every value institutional process in order to
maximize the structure, understanding and deployment of human capital.

As a consequence we want to maximize the production, distribution and sustainability of

power, wealth, respect, skill, enlightenment, well being, affection, rectitude and aesthetics. In
developing this framework we will be alert to the interdependence and inter-determination of
functioning value systems. This means that power may be sought for its own sake but it may also
be used to maximize value shaping and sharing and sustainability with regard to every other
value listed above. Wealth may be sought for its own sake but may serve as a base of power to
acquire power and all other values. In short, every value may be sought for its own sake and may
also serve as a base of power to shape, share and sustain every other value. This approach
requires us to see economics as not a disembodied field from human relations, and if we see in
the value processes the repositories of human and social capital, we bring a sense of realism
required for a durable new economic theory.

16
 It will be obvious that these value institution relationships that we identify are sought to
contextualize what happens in the context of the global social, power and constitutive processes.
The central feature of power and constitutive process is the centrality of decision making. We
can expand this idea further by suggesting that the centrality to the development and uses of
human and social capital is the capacity for the human agents of capital formation and use, to be
active and important decision makers in the very processes through which human beings
generate value through human capacity. I therefore suspect that the mechanistic approach to
economics represents a dramatic failure in its omission to understand the role of decision as a
critical component of human and social capital. I now will proceed to provide a few practical
examples of these theoretical possibilities.

Human and Social Capital in Development: The Vicos Experiment

The Vicos Experiment was a form of intellectual inquiry that also sought to induce a
form of constructive, evolutionary social change in development. The inspiration for the
experiment emerged from a view that peasants were incapable of modernization. The project was
led by an anthropologist, Allen Holmberg and a former president of WAAS, Harold D. Lasswell.
The project was located in the Uplands of Peru and included the village of Vicos. The project
leader understood that the Vicosinos were the occupiers of land owned by an absentee landlord.
Their position on the land was defined as the status of serfdom. With a small grant from the Ford
Foundation, Holmberg purchased the land and the hacienda and essentially became the patrone.

The farming practices of the village was unproductive because they had no incentive to
produce crops that would be expropriated by an absentee landlord. This involved the project
leaders in providing incentives to improve the village economy via farming. That also meant a
movement away from near survival to a circumstance of modest prosperity. The incentive was
that if the villages cooperated in farming operations, they could keep the profits for community
purposes and if the profits were sufficient, they could purchase the land and become land
owners. The project leaders found that the initiatives of the serfs with their intimate knowledge
of farming capacity and climate, etc., and supplemented by some technical expertise, essentially
produced a significant sequence of crops and upon marketing, funds as well. It was important
that the villages were participating in the decisions about agricultural production. This initial
initiative raised questions about how to exercise decision making in managing the profits from
farming activity. This permitted the interveners to promote the idea that maybe decision making
should be shared with the community and decisions eventually evolved to issues about
healthcare, in particular, healthcare of women, schooling, including schooling for women, and
the project evolved with a self conscious direction of training in the processes of decision
making and an awareness of appropriate goal values. One significant event was when the
community decided they would invest in a truck to transport their products directly to the
metropole and increase the value of their products by direct marketing.

17
 The model pursued in Vicos attracted external attention. Some of the Peruvian elites were
particularly concerned about what they saw as an incipient process of empowering the
underclass. Other Indian communities saw Vicos as a model that they would try to emulate. The
Vicos leadership were willing to transfer skills to other Indian communities as well.
Unfortunately, a delegation of Indian leaders on the way to Vicos to retrieve the recipe were
attacked by hired goons. Several were killed. This gave the sovereign Peruvian state an excuse to
terminate the project on the basis that it was disruptive of social peace. Although the project was
ended technically, enough of the seeds of change and the processes of decision making to
enhance human capital had been transferred. This village is still an example of the importance of
developing human capital on the basis that it is sustainable over time.

The idea behind Vicos was recently of interest to the World Bank. One of the participants
in the project presented the Bank with a broad prototypical framework of how this could be
replicated elsewhere. The World Bank has also developed a more limited version of this idea in
its projects that have dealt with micro-enterprise finance. It would seem that bank theorists
would prefer to focus on a narrower framework of value institutional capital. The Vicos project
combines elements of macro theory, intermediate macro theory and micro theory. The theoretical
value of the Vicos experiment is that it can be simplified in terms of a useable development
prototype. In this sense, it could have some value for new economic theory to focus on the
multitude of possible prototypes that might be given operation effect worldwide. Several years
ago I discovered that there were several women from the village of Vicos who had completed
advanced doctorates in the United States.

Human and Social Capital Development: Opportunity Lost

When the transformation to democracy in South Africa was underway, the ANC the
major opposition party at the time, convened a meeting to discuss central concerns in the
development of a new South African Constitution. I was invited to attend and to present a paper
on the problems of socio-economic justice under a new dispensation. The focus of my paper was
on the transitional arrangements in which the previous government was giving away huge
amounts of state investment to its friends and cronies. In short, a new black government coming
in would have very little in the treasury to devote to the issue of social justice and the
consequences of the apartheid system. I wrote a paper in which I suggested that the constitution
should include in its text the idea of a human right to development. I generally suggested that the
foundation of such a right would be in the empowering and decision making skill of the poorest
of the poor. In short, the paper worked on the assumption that the poor have the least effective
voice in the arenas of governmental power.

To my surprise, I found that many of the ANC’s leaders were skeptical of this idea. One
of them said, you need to show us how such an idea could be implemented practically, as a
constitutional mandate. The assumption behind this was that as an institutional matter a court of
law would be ill equipped to prescribe and apply this idea without entrenching on executive and

18
legislative powers of the other branches of government. I then produced a response. I suggested
that the right to development idea include in its text the creation of a constitutional commission
on the human right to development. This commission would comprise of experts in law and
disciplines related to development. One of their functions would be to serve as an arm of
advocacy of the poor. In this role it could monitor legislation or executive action to determine its
effect on the aspirations of the poor and it could advocate for changes sensitive to the claims of
the poor. Additionally, the commission could have an arm of education in which it would seek to
transfer education about decision, values and institutions. It could have a propaganda arm to
generate solidarity among the poor and a sympathetic perception of the poor in the larger body
politic. It could also monitor legislation and determine whether such legislation in undermining
the interest of the poor was also undermining the interests of the constitution. In short, they
would have a strong arm of well funded litigation capabilities. Regrettably, the forces opposed to
establishing a human right to development as a constitutional right prevailed, and I lost.
However, the position of the poor in South Africa has remained somewhat static with an
unemployment rate of about 25 percent. I have recently heard from scholars who have found my
paper and suggestions that had this issue been resolved and adopted, South Africa would have
been in a far better position today than has been the case.

I used the two illustrations from Vicos and South Africa to indicate that a state centric
model of development may in certain circumstances be a problem. In other work I have done in
Latin America, I have found the state support for the plight of the poor to be a verbal truism.
However, when concrete initiatives are generated, what state elites see is that the empowerment
of the poor or the indigenous people may constitute a threat to the primacy of the current elite. It
therefore means that a new economic theory has to be sensitive to the sovereignty dynamics of
imperium and dominium and must also search for those elements of fundamental law and human
rights law to weaken the negative inclusions of the state and hopefully to strengthen the real
public interest in the body politic. In the South African illustration given we can only speculate
about the specific role of a constitutional right to development in the enhancement of human and
social capital. But it is a matter that a new economic theory should seriously consider.

Issues that a New Global Economic Theory Founded on the Basis of the Normative Salience
of Human and Social Capital May Consider

1. The right to development and the millennium declaration

This is a program generated by and promoted by the UN. It is an aspect of the UN

commitment to the universalization of the right to development. The program has struggled for
want of support from globally privileged centers of economic advantage. However, the goals of
the millennium initiative are intricately connected with the ideas of generating policies that
secure and advance the importance of human and social capital. The specific goals are as
follows:

19
 1. Eradicate extreme hunger and poverty

2. Achieve universal primary education

3. Promote gender equality and empower women

4. Reduce child mortality

5. Improve maternal health

6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases

7. Ensure environmental sustainability

8. Develop a global partnership for development

One of the factors that may have diminished the global salience of this initiative is that it
isn’t sustained by a articulate, coherent and compelling economic theory. This kind of initiative
would benefit from the thinking generated from the World Academy’s effort and call for a
revolution in economic thinking.

2. The problem of globalizing and institutionalizing world economic policy

In general, the UN was the key forum generating discussions concerning a political
economy of world order based on the NIEO or the principles centralizing private property and
neo-liberalism. What emerged was a shift in the locus of discourse from the UN to something
outside of the UN. This emerged as a group of four, group of eight and more recently, a group of
twenty. For an outsider this appears to be the creation of a kind of global, economic Security
Council functioning outside of the UN’s authority structure. This raises the question about such
an important forum and its level of institutionalization, which would include a concern for
transparency, responsibility, and accountability and more pertinently, what its normative
foundations are. For example, does its process explicitly and deliberately embrace a right to
development as a human right rooted in the concern for human and social capital? Here it seems
that at another level of international concern, the call for a revolutionary economic theory would
require that the theory critically evaluate whether the organization of the group of twenty
diminishes or enhances global solidarity and well-being. We would do well to consider the
disappointment of Nelson Mandela when he met with the G8. According to Mandela, everyone
had their pens and papers but the pens had no ink. According to Mandela:

“As long as poverty, injustice, and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can
truly rest… The steps that are needed from the developed nations are clear. First, is
ensuring trade justice… The second is an end to the debt crisis for the poorest countries.
The third is to deliver much more aid and to make sure it is of the highly quality… But
not to do this would be a crime against humanity, against which I ask all humanity now to
rise up.”

20
 3. Corporate responsibility for global values

Corporations have as a primary responsibility a focus on profit maximalization. As

institutions of economic power in the global context many corporations have GDPs that are
higher than many states. Yet, the control and regulation of corporate conduct globally, is weakly
regulated and falls far short of the importance of transparency responsibility and accountability.
In short, a new revolutionary economic theory must apply as appropriate, principles of good
governance to private for profit entities in order to make them so far as possible accountable for
the fundamental values of human rights, human dignity, and the deliberate focus and
development of the widest level of human and social capital. Practice falls short of this objective.
In significant measure major transnational corporations find attractive the global business
environment which has weak regulatory standards. In such a context corporations can make up
their own rules of the game and some of these practices may be seen as significantly contrary to
agreed upon global values. Let me provide two anecdotal illustrations:

John Perkins in his well reviewed book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004),
provides a multitude of examples of the construction of state indebtedness in which states are
scammed into obtaining vast loans for development projects. The loans fund foreign companies
engaged in dubious projects and vast sums are siphoned off to local elites which sums end up in
foreign bank accounts. Years later, when honest governments come to power, they find they are
straddled with an enormous debt and can find nothing to show what the funds were expended on.

Another illustration is the vast pollution of the upper reaches of the Amazon by
Texaco/Chevron. Here the company was both negligent and venal in its casual and colossal
pollution from its oil extracting operations. It fought tooth and nail to prevent itself from being
accountable. Its practice including bribes and other forms of corruption. Eventually an
Ecuadorian Court found them liable for the pollution in the amount of some nineteen billion
dollars. The company is still trying to fight the judgment. We could provide scores of examples
where corporate operations involve the support of practices which violate human rights. I will
not mention the role of the private sector in the globalized drug industry or practices of sex
trafficking. These are criminal for-profit activities. Currently, there is a strong body of evidence
that suggests that corporate malfeasance, negligence, or greed, has had a great deal to do with the
current recession. This has raised the question of an economic theory that may more critically
examine and appropriately contextualize the structure and function of corporate enterprise in
global society. Among the suggestions for reform are the following:

1. Limit the power of top executives and financial decision-makers who may have
the power to use the corporation for inappropriate ends and for personal gain;

21
 2. Allow institutional investors, such as pension fund managers, to nominate
independent directors to the boards of the corporations in which they are major
investors;

3. Implement an aggressive program to make employees on all levels stakeholders in

the corporation itself, thus giving them an interest in the success of the corporation;
corporations may achieve this by awarding stock options to employees as bonuses
or rewards for excellent company performance;

4. Give blue and white collar employees a direct voice in corporate decision-
making to represent the perspectives of professional and non- professional employees in
the business to improve the objectivity and quality of corporate decision-making;

5. Reduce salary packages and stock options for top-level executives to avoid
artificial inflation of the company's share price; stock options may remain part of
an executive incentive package, but the corporation should limit their magnitude to
protect and enhance corporate interest.

4. Human social and capital development in the context of world trade issues

One of the central challenges at a practical level is the problems of free trade and the idea
that free trade favors the powerful and the alternative idea of fair trade which favors a balanced
perspective. Some of the issues that serve as an important dividing point of reference are listed
below:

1. A critical review of the "North" states' agricultural subsidies. The $353 billion of
agricultural subsidies given by the North to its farmers radically depresses world
prices of agricultural commodities critical to Africa; as a consequence, African produce
remains unsubsidized while the North subsidizes its produce, generating manifestly
unfair competition;3
2. A critical review of WTO rules of the past that institutionalized discriminatory trade
consequences for the South;
3. Improved "special and differential treatment" in WTO agreements for the "South"
would permit poorer nations to adjust or generate some flexibility in the application of
WTO agreements;
4. For improved access to the "North" markets, the least developed countries,
including thirty-three in Africa, should be given duty-free rights of access.

3
See ActionAid, Reducing Poverty in a World of Plenty: The Crisis of Aid, in IMPACT OF RICH
COUNTRIES' POLICIES ON POOR COUNTRIES 23, 28 (Robert Picciotto & Rachel Weaving eds., 2004).

22
 5. Enlarged "Aid for Trade" to facilitate the volume of export to "North" markets
would improve compliance with WTO rules.
These issues are summarized as problems for global development by Professor Stiglitz as
follows:

Both as it was conceived, and even more as it has evolved, today's development
round does not deserve its name . . . . Many of the issues that it has addressed
should never have been on the agenda of a genuine development round, and many
issues that should have been on the agenda are not.... Those in the developing world
who believe that there has been a history of bargaining in bad faith have a strong case. 4

When the trade issues are put into the context of the priorities of the World Bank for
example, the question has been raised in bank circles as to how much human rights should factor
into its financing of a bank conceived developmental agenda. Perhaps the time is now
approaching that the economic foundations of the bank’s policy and direction should be
subjected to a more compelling and even possibly revolutionary rethinking of the appropriate
theory for the economic ordering of the World Bank. In the context of the bank’s work, there
should be a recognition of a global commitment to a right to development with an explicit
emphasis on the development of human and social capital as the true repository and generator of
human values on a global scale.

The Development Agenda According to Neo-Liberalism (Free Trade/Fair Trade)

The World Trade Organization (WTO) has undergone a continuing crisis of indecision.5
When the WTO admitted third world players to its process, it had to ensure that third world
governments and their advisors understood the complex rules governing world trade and
development.6 Thus, the WTO consistently assumed that third world countries would violate
ground rules of world trade. The experience in the organization and the greatest skill of those
representing the so-called "South" states began to review more critically the fine print of
agreements and regulation to avoid discrimination through the rules and processes of the
WTO. Thus, the "South" began to push for a much more informed discussion and a
more meaningful agenda reflecting its critical interests. These interests represent Africa's
interests as well. The agenda it put forward contained the following issues:

These claims were presented to the WTO process during a period dominated
by the mantra of economic liberalization and free trade. The WTO, while making verbal
commitments with some measure of empathy for the claims of the South, has in effect done

4
Joseph Stiglitz, The Development Round That Wasn't, ECON. TIMES (India), Dec. 15, 2005.
5
THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION MILLENNIUM ROUND: FREER TRADE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST
CENTURY 36 (Klaus Giinter Deutsch & Bernhard Speyer eds., 2001).
6
PETER VAN DEN BoSSCHE, THE LAW AND POLICY OF THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION: TEXT,
CASES AND MATERIALS 24 (2005).

23
very little to advance them politically or legally. Mr. Tetteh Hormeku of the Third World
Network best articulates the nature of the problem from the African perspective:

Trade liberalization has not been beneficial to African economies. We have not
improved our location in the global economy. We have not moved out of dependency
on primary commodities. We have not moved into more efficient provision of
manufactured goods and services. We are on the receiving end of the global economy,
which is repatriating our resources and locking in IMF and World Bank
conditionalities through trade agreements.... What we have at the moment is a trade
paradigm that Mrican countries should open up all sectors of their economy to foreign
providers in a context that destroys the basis for domestic production and jobs. It can
never lead an Mrican country out of poverty.7

Conclusions can be drawn from the two illustrations of enterprise economics in

the global system. The major role lawyers play in defining the maximum freedom for the
corporate or entrepreneurial sector indicates that a corporation with an army of lawyers
might fare well in the system. Conversely, when governments and private sector
watchdogs seek to police the business sector, they often cannot generate the legal muscle to
constrain corporate or economic license. This presents a challenge to the legal
profession and to the teaching of law. An effective and socially responsible corporate or
legal culture may function optimally when it works within a framework of established rules
expeditiously and fairly enforced.

It is hard to imagine a successful capitalist system without an excellent commercial

and corporate legal framework. This framework is in fact a central feature of a working,
dynamic, entrepreneurial system. When the system works well, the corporate lawyers
themselves, within the corporations, serve as an internal restraint to ensure compliance with
the law and to ensure further that corporate energy and resources are not wasted on public
investigations and possible prosecutions. The WTO system also seems to have developed
without regard to effective input from the lawyers of the South. When they finally learned the
rules of the game, those who benefited from the unfair system were reluctant to modify
the rules sufficiently to reflect the fundamental policies of world economic order. It is clear,
however, that without a legal framework that is defensible, free trade may become unfair
trade, and grotesque exploitation may lead to conflicts and alienation.

Thus, there must be some circumspection about how the global economic system
appropriately is regulated so that corporate activity falls within the fundamental norms
established by law. There is no obvious or easy answer to the problem of managing power,
material, technological and financial resources, and common rules that function within

7
Michael Fleshman, Trade Talks: Where is the Development, 20 AFR. RENEWAL 14 (2006),
available at http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/afrec/vol20no1/2Oltradetalks.html (quoting
Tetteh Hormeku).

24
and across state lines without a framework of developed legal expectations. Lawyers must
play a major role in organizing the business of teaching business; they can outline appropriate
legal standards to enhance accountable and responsible enterprise. In short, the
ideological principle that enterprise behavior does not include social responsibility is no longer
tenable. However, this new view requires more focus on the development of evolving legal
rules and principles that touch on many areas of law-domestic, regional, and international.

CONCLUSION

The Consequences of the Current Global Economic Order: The Need for a Revolutionary
Global Economic Theory of the Right to Development with an Emphasis on Decision and the
Salience of Human and Social Capital8

The shortest way to get a grasp of the consequences of the current state of global
economic order is reflected in numbers. The planet has a population of roughly 6.5 billion
people.9 Every year 30 million people die of hunger,10 and 800 million people are starving
or suffer acute malnutrition.11 Roughly one billion are underemployed or unemployed.12
The above figure may be contrasted with the fact that the richest 2 percent of adults in the
world own more than half of the global household wealth.13 The richest 1 percent of adults
own 40 percent of the global assets, and the richest 10 percent account for 85 percent of the
total world assets.14 On the other hand, the bottom half of the world adult population owns 1
percent of global assets.15 Every two minutes four people die from malaria.16 One in five
people (one billion people) in the world survive on less than $1 a day.17 Another 1.5 billion
live on $1 to $2 a day.18 More than one billion people do not have access to safe water.19

8
John Hooper, Pope's Book Accuses Rich Nations of Robbery, THE GUARDIAN (London), Apr. 5,
2007, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0,2050253,00.html.
9
U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. & World Population Clocks, http://www.census.gov/main/www/
popclock.html (last visited Apr. 1, 2008).
10
See Global Policy World Hunger-Social and Economic Policy, www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/
hunger/hungerindex.htm (last visited Apr. 1, 2008).
11
See Conscious Alliance, Educate, www.consciousalliance.org/educate.htm (last visited May 8,
2007).
12
See ILO WORLD EMPLOYMENT REPORT 1998--99, www.ilo.org/public/englishlbureau/inf/pr/
1998/33.htm.
13
See Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Growth, http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_
canadian_initi/growth/index.html (last visited Apr. 1, 2008). See also, Richest 2% Hold Half the World's Assets,
FIN. TIMES, Dec 5, 2006, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/41470ec0-845b-lldb•87e0-
0000779e2340.html.
14
James Randerson, World's Richest 1% Own 40% of All Wealth, UN Report Discovers, THE GUARDIAN
(London), Dec. 6, 2006, available at http://business.guardian.co.uklstory/
0,1965149,00.html.
15
Id.
16
See Human Development Report 2005, The State of Human Development, ch. 1,
http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2005/pdf/HDR05_chapter_1.pdf.
17
Id.
18
Id.

25
 About 2.6 billion people lack access to improved sanitation.20 Some
authorities hold that approximately five hundred million people on the planet live in relative
comfort, which is in stark contrast to the six billion people in the world who struggle to
survive and live. Even in the United States, 44.8 million people are deprived of medical
health care or coverage21 and almost forty million Americans live close to or below the
poverty line.22 In short, globalism, which has produced a vast increase in the production of
values, seems to fail miserably in the distribution or sharing of those values.

As the new millennium unfolds, statistics indicate that nearly 800 million people are
illiterate.23 This fact illustrates that people basically are powerless. They are treated as
economic commodities to be exploited by the powerful or as economic waste matter to be
discarded by the market. The adverse effects that the global market has caused does not
just include illiteracy, but other areas including: demographics, the migration of people, issues
of conflict, trade, aid, debt, debt repayment, etc. However, this new world order referred to
as neo-liberal global economics, is not solely to blame. For example, the economic
arrangements in China, India, Brazil, and other parts of Asia demonstrate that each of these
state-commanded economies are designated to benefit the elite who are not held accountable
by government constraints for their actions.

Further, neo-economic freedoms may vanish much like they did in the former
Soviet Union, when it transitioned from a communist state to a capitalist market. These
problems include the mass concentration of wealth in actors well-placed in the former
communist regime.24 Many of the dominant communist elite took a lion's share of state-
owned enterprises, essentially claiming it as their own property.25 In order for economic

19
Id.
20
Id.
21
U.S. Census Bureau, Newsroom, Mar. 23, 2007, http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/
www/releases/archives/health-care-insurance/009789.html.
22
U.S. CENSUS BUREAU, POVERTY: 2005 HIGHLIGHTS, available at http://www.census.gov/hhes/
www/poverty/poverty05/pov05hi.html (last visited May 8, 2007).
23
See HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2005, CH. 1: THE STATE OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT,
available at http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/20O5/pdf/HDRO5_chapter-I.pdf.
24
Vladimir Volkov & Julia Denenberg, Wealth & Poverty in Modern Russia, WORLD SOCIALIST,
Mar. 11, 2005, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/mar2005/russ-mll.shtml.

Twenty percent of the Russian population lives below the poverty line and
the great majority of Russian families are teetering on the edge of poverty.
Then there is the other Russia. Russia is ranked third in the world for the
number of billionaires. The greatest part of shareholdings in the largest
Russian enterprises can be found in the hands of this tiny social layer. There
are more billionaires in Russia (36) than anywhere else in the world. The
total assets of these thirty-six richest Russians amounts to $110 billion-24
percent of the country's economic output.
Id.
25
JOSEPH RAPHAEL BLASI ET AL., KREMLIN CAPITALISM 33-36 (1996).

26
freedom to be preserved, public and private laws need to be implemented and adhered to, in
order to prevent a select few from destroying this freedom.

The economic revolutions in India, China, and Brazil were successful because their
populations implemented a strong legal framework that did not allow any individual to
manipulate the market system. The central flaw in the philosophy of economic liberalization
from a lawyer's point of view is the principle that liberalization if unconstrained will result in
a license for the liberalizer and oppression for the victim. A specific problem with socialist
regimes is that the government can abuse its power of control. The concentration of power
does not necessarily mean that everyone shares in it; such a belief is typified by the myth:
"dictatorship of the proletariat." In practice, the proletariats likely will be disempowered by the
internal elites who manage the power of the state, according to their own interests.

If we take a social democratic state where the power resides in both public and
private sectors, a high level of disparity arises. Nonetheless, the power of the various groups,
if reasonably well distributed, imposes certain checks and balances sufficient to sustain a
reasonably transparent, responsible, and accountable system. For example, in a neo-liberal
state, certain groups abhor government interference, except when the government acts in its
interest. In this type of state, corporate culture stakes a claim to legitimacy on the basis that
state officials and state elites simply are inefficient.

To generate economic efficiency, it is important to allocate as much power to economic

enterprise as possible. Thus, labor unions must be weakened because they represent a
dysfunctional limit on the freedom of enterprise. Social spending, spending for education,
health, and other public purposes are matters for which the state is an ineffectual
distributor. Thus, where possible, these matters must be privatized in order for these
enterprises to be most efficiently run. In short, the private arena does not need many rules; the
master rule of enterprise is to generate productivity and profit, while stimulating the
interest for invention and for economic expansion. The public's fear of depreciation in
social and political capital by such a process is seen as a necessary, but short-term, cost for the
greater good of society.

The state's imperfections in its exercise of power recreates a need for a strong legal
infrastructure that would help to foster the ideals of responsibility, transparency,
and change. It is not clear what standards govern decision-making inside major economic
enterprises when its business cannot be on an optimal level. Whether power and authority,
transparency and openness are invested solely in government or not, we will not have
solved the problem of how power itself is controlled, regulated, appraised, and changed in the
interest of the people.

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 Furthermore, we should keep in mind, that the abuse of economic power could have
large-scale impacts on the political and legal cultures of a society and could generate social
unrest and political deterioration.

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