Global Justice & Finance

by Tim Hayward

Overview

Can global justice be promoted by distributing money more equitably? Could even relatively small financial sacrifices by the affluent work, through benign leverage, to achieve that goal? Global Justice and Finance casts new light on such questions by considering what is presupposed about finance. Redistributive proposals assume money to be a reliable measure, store of value, and medium of exchange. Yet maintaining stable interest, inflation, and exchange rates in a dynamic capitalist economy is a considerable achievement involving a complex financial system. Such global coordination could, if so directed, contribute immensely to humanity's betterment, yet under the direction of a profit seeking elite it leaves a majority disempowered, impoverished, and indebted. To pay debts, ever more desperate measures to wrest value from the world's natural resources increase ecological pressures to harmful extremes, and those pressures do not stop short of driving wars. The profit seeking economy is held in place by the complex legal arrangements that constitute finance. Globally, there has developed, unannounced and unaccountably, what amounts to a privatised constitution - binding agreements that transcend sovereign jurisdictions. Hopes of redirecting the financial assets created within this system, by means of modest reforms, towards objectives of social justice and ecological sustainability may prove illusory. To achieve such objectives arguably requires the constitution of a global normative order guided by public and political decision-making. The achievement of a publicly accountable constitutional order that is superordinate to the financial system might be regarded as a revolutionary transformation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192862754
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	06/21/2022
Pages:	238
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Tim Hayward, Professor of Environmental Political Theory, University of Edinburgh

bTim Hayward/b is Professor of Environmental Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh. After completing a doctorate on human rights at the University of Sussex, he held positions in Italy and Wales before settling at the University of Edinburgh. Having written extensively on how environmental values might be integrated into social and political theory, his more recent work examines obstacles to political progress. The present study of the challenges presented by financialized capitalism has led to exploratory research into how populations are manipulated by propaganda into accepting policies that are not in their own best interests or those of justice, sustainability or peace.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Opening New Lines of Inquiry 1

The Costs of Money 2

Tasks for Political Philosophers 4

The Challenge 6

1.2 Justice and the Problem of Money 8

2 Money for Justice? 16

2.1 The Heuristics of Monetary Reasoning 18

2.2 The Challenge of Money for Proposals of a Tax for Global Justice 20

2.3 Global Finance as Help or Hindrance for Just Redistribution? 23

2.4 Conclusion 28

3 The Good of Finance and the Critique of Financialization 30

3.1 The Good of Finance 31

3.2 Criticisms of Financialization 36

3.3 How Can the Problem of Financialization be Explained? 39

3.4 Financialization and its Relation to Stagnation: Cause or Effect? 43

3.5 Why Is Stagnation a Problem? 49

3.6 Conclusion 52

4 Financialization and the 'Real Economy': an Ecological Perspective 54

4.1 The Critique of Financialization from an Ecological Perspective 55

4.2 Money and Finance from an Ecological Perspective 58

4.3 What Is the 'Real Economy?' 63

4.4 Conclusion 69

5 Can Giving Money End Severe Poverty? 71

5.1 Earning to Give: Peter Singer and Effective Altruism 72

5.2 Doing Good with Money, and the Value of the Marginal Dollar: the Case of Anti-Malarial Bednet Distribution 77

5.3 Cash Transfers as a Solution to the Dependency of the Poor? 81

5.4 The Paradox of Cashless Cash 86

5.5 Conclusion 93

6 Can Benign Leverage Be Relied on to Make the World More Just? 95

6.1 The Benign Leverage Assumption 96

6.2 The Paradox of Benign Leverage 100

6.3 Conclusion 105

7 Can Money Transfers Serve to Offset Ecological Harms? 107

7.1 Financial Stability as an Ecological Challenge 109

7.2 The Limits of Liberal Environmental Economics 113

Financial Compensation for Environmental Harm 114

The Indeterminacy of Discounting 116

7.3 The Radical Uncertainty of Prices, and its Implications 118

7.4 Conclusion 122

8 What Is the Good of Money? 123

8.1 What 'Kind of Thing' Should We Think of Money as Being? 124

8.2 Money as an Economic Good 128

8.3 Conclusion 131

9 The Monetary Constraints on Tax Justice 133

9.1 Tax Justice and Illicit Financial Flows 134

9.2 How Licit and Illicit Flows Intermingle in Shadow Banking Institutions 138

9.3 The Need for Political Control over the Monetary System 144

9.4 Conclusion: Mad Money vs Global Justice 149

10 Constituting Finance as a Global Public Good: the Scope of the Challenge 151

10.1 The Governance of Finance: a Privatized Global Constitution? 153

10.2 The Privatized Constitution: Central Banks and the Bank for International Settlements 159

10.3 Conclusion 164

11 Finance, War, and 'Humanitarian Intervention' 166

11.1 The Synergies of Finance and War 167

11.2 The Epistemological Deficit of Liberal Interventionism 174

11.3 Applied Epistemology in Conditions of Conflict 180

11.4 Conclusion 192

12 Conclusion 196

Bibliography 205

Index 223

Editorial Reviews

"It is to Tim Hayward's great credit that he paints so thorough and accurate a picture... — Steel City Scribblings

From the Publisher