‘COPY ADE ON BEHALF OF | INaTIONAL UNIVERSITY OF DATE OF DECLARATION = RIAN 2080 Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences SINGAPORE Social Values and the Theory of Late Economic Development in East Asia Chalwens Tolasen ‘One of the critical requirements in the study of late twentieth- century political economy is to understand the sociopolitical forces that have fostered Japan’s high-speed economic growth— and by extension that of its emulators in East Asia, the newly industrializing economies (tts) of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Since these forces are not obvious but are highly controversial, the analytical task is one of determining which theories apply to the Asian experience and which ones offer misleading comparisons. Many analysts, following a well- established school of English-language social thought, believe that the key to Asia’s economic growth lies in the various socie- ties’ “traditional cultural values.” In accordance with Western sociological theories that posit a connection between capitalism and religious values, they want to find a link between Asian reli- gion and Asian capitalism, For example, Umehata Takeshi, di- rector of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, writes, “All the countries now making rapid economic progtess, such as Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Japan, are countries which have been profoundly influenced by Confucian ideas. There is no doubt that the Confucian thought that exists, consciously or unconsciously, in the countries of East Asia, has had a helpful influence on their economic development.”* re Umehara and others of his persuasion go off the 38 Social Values and Late Econemic Development + 39 tracks. In my opinion they are trying to interpret the Asian cases using an inappropriate (and perhaps discredited) Western the- ory; and because of this theoretical inadequacy, they fail to iden- tify the major political drawbacks and dilemmas that these socie- ties face today. Umehara is, of course, in good company. Many others, including Kent Calder, Roderick McFarquhar, and Ro- nald Dore, follow him to one degree or another down the path first pioneered by Weber. They accept as fact Weber's theory that a link existed between Protestan: religious values and the ‘emergence of capitalism in the West, and hence they seek to find 1 similar link between the spirit of Asian capitalism and Asian religious values. I believe that such an approach is intellectually misguided and will generate wrong answers to questions con- cerning current economic and politic! problems that confront these societies. Before introducing the theory that I believe actu- ally applies to the Asian cases, let me explain why I think the Weberian approach is a dead end. There are problems with Weber’s theory of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism both on its own terms and in light of high-speed economic growth in Asia under capitalist aus- pices but without Protestantism—a development that Weber did not foresee and explicitly predicted could not occur. The most logical response to Weber's theory and the contra-indicated de- velopments in Asia would therefore be to reject the theory—to question whether there ever was any genuine connection be- ‘ween Protestantism and capitalism in the West since there as- suredly was none in Asia. But the power of Weber’s method and the influence he has had on English-language social science is such that this course is usually not followed. Instead itis argued that Asian capitalism differs because it rests on different religious values, or that Confucianism is the functional equivalent of Pror- estantism in providing the worldly but ascetic values that are alleged to be indispensable to capitalism. Dr. Kim Yoon Hyung of Korea, for example, adopts the first stratagem, “Because of this fundamental difference between Puritan and Confucian ra- tionalism,” he writes, “the state-guided capitalist economy, which was managed in an absolutely different spirit from West- cern capitalism (the free-enterprise system—that is, the competi- tive market economy founded on rational individualism and civil society), became well established in Japan, Korea, and Tai-40. + Japan: Who Governs? wan.”? While I agree that the state-guided capitalist economies of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan differ in fundamental ways from the Anglo-American model, I see no reason at all to suppose that such differences are caused by religion.> The likelihood that religion has nothing to do with economic development—in either the West or Asia—is reinforced by at- tempts to explain Asian economic dynamism in terms of “Con- fucian capitalism.” Weber himself thought of Confucianism as an impassable obstacle to economic development and blamed China’s economic backwardness on the influence of Con- fucianism. Similarly, the Western quest to find an equivalent of Protestantism in Japan in order to accommodate the Meiji achievements to Western theory produced some interesting spec- ulation on Tokugawa religion. But no one has even come close to finding in nineteenth-century Japanese the “mighty enthusiasm” that Weber posited.’ One of the biggest problems of conceiving Confucius as the god of wealth is timing, In the West, the Protes- tant Reformation occurred about a century before the appear- ance of capitalism, thereby suggesting at least the possibility ofa superficial correlation. In East Asia, Confucianism developed in the fifth century B.C.; thus it took two and a half millennia before it supposedly fostered any local capitalism. Even then one won- ders what the role of Confucianism was, since it is opposed to and explicitly condemns all forms of mercantile activity. Thelieve that Weber's contribution to social science theory has been seriously misunderstood. His theory is actually a philo- sophically idealistic reaction to Marx's materialism. He and ‘Marx were arguing about whether values are independent or de- pendent variables in the explanation of social phenomena. To divorce Weber's position from this intellectual context tends to trivialize it and make it overly mechanical. Today very few seri- ‘ous historians hold the view that Protestantism had much to do with the emergence of Western capitalism. They are more inter- ested in developments such as the forces that promoted invest- ment in things other than land by the upper classes and vigorous investment by the other classess the appearance of social mobil- ity, national transportation networks, information flows, and the ending of social barriers to entrepreneurship; and checks on the arbitrary power of rulers and institutions, thus providing predictability and accountability in government.* Religion may Social Values and Late Economic Development + 41 promote or inhibit these developments, but many other factors are just as important, including scienti‘ic breakthroughs, discov- eries of new territories, and innovations in military organization. Weber was concerned above all to show that values and similar forms of belief influence these kinds of developments as power- fully as material forces, and that, contrary to Marx, intellectual constructs could not be reduced to materialistic dynamics. Capi- talism is not possible without the appropriate values, but there are many other sources of these values than religion. For exam- ple, in the Korean case some supporters of Weber nonetheless argue that “nationalism has become the prime motive propelling, economic modernization since the 1960s.”” Most of the theorists who allege a link between Asian eco- nomic dynamism and “creative Confucianism” are actually not interested in Weber but have nationalistic, ideological, or jour- nalistic motives. They want to explain Asia’s competitiveness as due to primordial characteristics in order to get their own gov- ernments to protect them from it, or tocause the working people in Asian capitalist countries not to compare themselves with workers in other capitalist countries, or to find some new rally- ing cry for nationalism, or just to popularize very complex socio- economic developments for readers of their newspapers. Influen- tial examples of this type of writing include Herman Kahn, World Economic Development (Westview, 1979); Kim Il-gon, Jukyo bunka-ken no chitsujo to keizai (Order and Economy in the Confucian Culture Area) (Nagoya University, 1986); Roy Hofheinz and Kent Calder, The Easiasia Edge (Basic Books, 1982); Morishima Michio, Why Has Jepan “Succeeded”? (Cam bridge University, 1982); and Ronald Dore, Taking Japan Seri- ously: A Confucian Perspective on Leading Economic Issues (Stanford University, 1987). In addition to these writers, there are others who have tried seriously to address the relationship tetween social values and economic activity. Winston Davis, for example, argues that vir- tually all applications of Weberian thought to Asian capitalism cannot ge around the fallacy of post hac era. sxonter hoc: be- cause industry in modern Asia déveloped after particular systems of religious values were in place, it developed because of them. “Unless the connection between values and development can be made explicit,” Davis writes, “there seems to be no way to turn,42. + Japam: Who Governs? Weberian speculation into defensible, testable, or falsifiable hy- potheses. I would suggest that more attention be paid to the reli- gious attitudes which appear while development is taking place.” Davis is, in fact, the leading writer in English on the growth of new religions in Japan that help people manage the tensions of high-speed economic growth, and on the Japanese ideological use of religion to justify some of the inequities that economic development fosters.* ‘Albert Hirschman has also written a famous essay exploring the relationship between capitalism and social values and how theories of this relationship have changed over the conrse of cap- italism’s three centuries. He begins with the eighteenth-century thesis that capitalist relations of production civilized human so- ciety because they taught mutual benefit, the need to be prudent and reserved in order to obtain credit, and the virtues of fragal- ity, punctuality, and probity. By the nineteenth century this view was replaced with a vision of capitalism as destructive of truly human values, leading not to civilization but to overindulgence, the cash nexus in all relationships, and alienation. The nine- teenth century also inaugurated a new debate over whether capi talism had sufficiently penetrated society in order genuinely to supplant feudal values with bourgeois values, Many Engli speaking observers concluded that what was wrong with Ger- many and Japan was that capitalism had not fully developed there and that these “late-developing” societies suffered from feudal survivals. At the same time in America, many social critics concluded that American bourgeois society was puerile and crass because it had no legacy of feudalism—as in Germany and Japan. Perhaps Hirschman’s most valuable insight in this essay is that neoclassical economic theory taken seriously leads to sociologi- cal nonsense. “Economists who wish the market well,” writes Hirschman, have been unable, of rather have tied their own hands and denied themselves the opportunity, to exploit the argument about the inte- grative effects of markets [for society as a whole). This is so because the argument cannot be made forthe ideal market with perfect com- petition, The economists’ claims of allocative efficiency and all- ound welfare maximization are strictly valid only for this market. Involving large numbers of price-aking anonymous buyers and sel- Social Values and Late Economic Development + 43 «ers supplied with perfect information, sich markets function without any prolonged human or social contact among the parties. Under perfect competition there is no room for bargaining, negotiation, remonstration or mutual adjustment, and the various operators that contract together need not enter into recurrent or continuing rela- tionships as a result of which they would get to know each other wel, ... In this manner, [economists] have endeavored to endow the ‘market with economic legitimacy. But, by the same token, they have sacrificed the sociological legitimacy that could rightfully have been claimed for the way, so unlike the perfect-competition model, most markets function in the real world? A sociologically valid theory of the market must therefore in- corporate not just market principles end forces but also institu- tions, rules, histories, legal judgments, and cultural norms con- cerned with such things as gender, age, inheritance, and family obligations. This is the realm not of economic theory but of po- litical economy. In one sense the Japanese have built their economic system on a sociological rather than an economic theory of the market— ‘one that recognizes the links and connections between manufac- turers and consumers and tries to make the most of them. Thus, the Japanese system is filled with such institutions as keiretsu (developmental conglomerates), cross sharcholding, cartels of all kinds, insider trading, bid rigging (dango), linkages between banks and borrowers, and officially created trade associations. In short, the Japanese theory of the market rests on an assump- tion of the naturalness of oligopoly. By contrast the American theory of the market is to regard all contacts among buyers and sellers as forms of collusion and to promote a huge, often para- sitic apparatus of anti-trust law and lizigation, Robert Bellah is another thoughtful writer on social values and economic activity. He is concerned with what happens to society when people actually attempt to create an approximation of the “ideal market with perfect competition.” Following ‘Tocqueville more than Weber, Bellah wants to identify as pre- cisely as possible a ‘“noneconomic normative order capable of supporting the extensive developmert of economic rationali- ty." Genuine economic rationality, Bellah holds, is relatively tare in human history because it is so destructive of all other forms of human relationships. It means subjecting all relation-+ Japan: Who Governs? ships to the test of efficiency—for example, if the shortest dis- tance between two points happens to pass through a cemetery, economic rationality would dictate that society build its road through the cemetery. For people actually to tolerate periods of genuine economic rationality, they need some inner gyroscope that gives them a sense of orientation amidst continuous upheaval. Something like this developed in mid-nineteenth-cen- tury America, and Democracy in America was Tocqueville's analysis of the gyroscope that made it tolerable to Americans, ‘The Liberal Democratic Party in Japan has arguably been more of an economically rational party than a conservative ‘one—the true conservatives were the progressive coalitions that ruled postwar Kyoto—but the nature of the Japanese gyroscope is not fully understood. It may be religion, but it may also be based on group loyalties, nationalism, the bonding effects of in- temational competition for market share, such Japanese values as gaman (uncomplaining perseverance) so long as all do their share, and ideologies of physical and ethnic distinctiveness. Such popular Japanese fetishes as Nihonjinron (the theory of Japanese uniqueness) and racism may contribute to economic growth by perstuading Japanese citizens to accept the personal, environmen- tal, and political costs of their mercantilist industrial and trade policies. In other words, traditional social values can provide the raw materials for ideologists, whose intent is to keep the society docile and hardworking. Thope that the discussion thus far has suggested that explana- tions of high-speed economic growth in East Asia cannot be re~ duced to religious values but that, at the same time, an effective ‘managerial strategy for dealing with the societal consequences of economic growth is likely to be more political and social than economic. The theory that I contend more accurately addresses Asia’s economic problems than Weberian sociology can best be introduced by another quotation of Albert Hirschman: the ““un- derdeveloped countries as a group are set apart, through a num- ber of economic characteristics common to them, from the ad- vanced industrial countries and . . . traditional economic analysis, which has concentrated on the industrial countries, ‘must therefore be recast in significant respects when dealing with underdeveloped countries.”" What Hirschman has in mind is the theory of late economic development pioneered by writers Social Values and Late Economic Development + 45 such_as Thorstein Veblen, Joseph Schumpeter, and Alexander ~Gerschenkron,a theory that is perhaps best represented today in “she haoks.of Alice Amsden and Jung-en Woo on Korea and Rob- ert Wade on Taiwan.!? ~~ By “late development” all of these writers mean economic de- velopment following on and in response to the original beneficia- ries of the industrial revolution—or, in the cases of Korea and Taiwan, late late development in response to the industrializa- tion of Japan, Late developers—and the late late developers even more so—differ from the original developers in that socioeco- nomic factors such as the rise of a bourgeoisie, private invest- ment, entrepreneurship, and even pethaps Protestantism were ;not as important as the conscious political decision to industrial- Gerschenkron generalizes that the later the timing of devel opme -equal, the greater the importance of fi rs. While chis point is obvious with regard to the Leninist cases, classical exonomists have tended not to recognize its applicability to the other successful late develop- ers because they have overgeneralized the Anglo-American expe- rience and because they know too little about Germany and Japan. The theory of late development referred to by Hirschman is addressed above all to the two greatnon-Leninist late develop- ers—Germany after 1870 and Japan after 1868. In second-round late development, such as occurred in Ger- many and Japan, a mobilization regime forces its economic pri- orities on a society that may not necessarily be recalcitrant but that, in any case, has not evolved the bourgeois mores that press for industtialization from below. The two fundamental types of such mobilization regimes are the Leainist-Stalinist totalitarian model and the Bismarckian-Meiji acthoritarian one. Both in- volve social goal setting, forced saving, mercantilism, and bureaucratism. They differ in that the Leninist-Stalinist strategy relies on a socialist displacement of the market in order to estab- lish its goals whereas the Bismarckian-Meiji pattern is based on market-conforming methods of social goal setting and utilizes the market to implement its goals. The communist-type com- mand economy characteristically retains all ownership and con- trol in the hands of the state, whereas the capitalist developmen- tal state (Cos) rests on genuine private ownership of property but indirect state control of economic decisions. The CDs is infinitely46 + Japan: Who Governs? more efficient than its communist rival but not as efficient as the ideal market economy with perfect competition. Ar the same ‘time it is much more effective in achieving its societal goals than its purely market competitor. “The major sociopolitical problem of all high-speed economic growth is that jt generates acute social and political instability FFs is doubly so for the ate developers because industrializa tion is occurring in advance of and not in response to social evo- lution, But even for the original beneficiaries of the industrial revolution, where it occurred at a slower pace and was wel- comed by some important elements of society, industrialization edt serious instability, as described and analyzed by Mars and Eegels. Th these gare cases the state became the nsitnini Hot for Ieading mdustrialization itself but for intervening to alleviate, “Hie tension and negates thar adustalzation cased, Where it intervened successfully, the state thus headed off the revolu- tions that Marx and Engels predicted. And in the process these governments became “capitalist regulatory states.” Leninist and cps régimes deal with the forced sacrifices and political instability caused by industrialization in characteristi- cally different ways. The Leninist approach is cruder and sim- pler—and, as the events of 1989 and after throughout the com- munist world showed, less effective. The Leninists rely on a penetrative, totalitarian organizational weapon, the Communist Party, to preempt, channel, or suppress unwanted developments in the society. The elites of the cos have a quite different prob- lem. They must reconcile their state goals with the mass politics inherent in modernized, mobilized non-traditional societies with highly developed markets, private ownership of property, and large cities—i.e., sectors and locales in which a large measure of self-government and autonomy isthe only feasible form of social organization. These regimes set the goals of the society in their elite stare bureaucracies. But in order to implement these goals, they must enter the market and manipulate and structure it so that private citizens responding to incentives and disincentives make the market work for the state. I have coined the term ‘soft janism” to refer to the political arrangements through which the elites of the cps attempt to implement their goals."? The political solutions that late nineteenth-century German and Japanese elites came up with can be approximated in the Social Values and Late Economic Development + 47 following four-part model. First, at the center is a covert estab- lishment chat perpetuates itself through a conseryative alliance among t] jimally necessary interest groups, Second, the elite jeasures to forestall formation of mass move. ments that could interfere with its peak. above all the e ~oraunifiedtabor movement, Ahird, the elite develops and “propagates ideologies to convifice the public that the social con- ditions in their country are the result of anything—culture, his- tory, feudalism, national character, climate, and so forth—other than political decisions,Fourth, the elite undertakes diversionary activities that promoté national pride but that also deflect atten- tion from constitutional development. The most common such diversion, learned from Bismarck anc the Meiji oligarchs, has been imperialism, but in the atomic age Olympic Games, impe- rial weddings, anti-Americanism, and «évanchist_ movements (for Japan, the northern islands; for South-Kores, North Korea; and for Taiwan, the Chinese mainland! may serve as substitutes. By far the most important substitute fcr imperialism in the post- war era has been export promotion and competition for market share ae a ‘At the heart of this model is the covert conservative alliance that keeps the elite establishment in power. In Bismarckian and” Wilhelmine Germany, this included the two strongest economic interests in the country, the grain producers and heavy industry. ‘The German alliance, like the creation of Japan’s Liberal Demo- cratic Party in 1955, was intended to wage an all-out attack on organized socialism and was underwri:ten by state subventions, tariffs, and protectionism. The chief unintended consequence of this arrangement was to stunt democracic development, which in turn provided fertile soil for the later development of fascism and militarism. Economic development in Germany and Japan pro- duced economically capable but politically castrated bourgeoi- sies, which left the societies vulnerable to reactionary political movements, In the German case, Gordon Craig refers to “the whole miserable history of the German bourgeoisie, which had acquiesced in the powerlessness to which it had been reduced by its defeats in 1848 and 1866 and had compensated for its loss by combining an uncritical nationalism . . . with an idealization of private and cultural values (Innerlichkeit) which it used as an excuse for its lack of any sense of political responsibility.” The48. + Japan: Who Governs? important pre-Nazi German historian Eckart Kehr labeled the resultant system “bourgeois-aristocratic neofeudalism,” a term which could apply equally well to prewar Japan." In late Meiji Japan, after the promulgation of the Meiji Consti- tution, the conservative allies were the imperial household, the Meiji oligarchs, landowners, and the original zaibatsu. In the militarist era, after the seizure of Manchuria, the conservative allies were the imperial household, military leaders, the eco- nomic bureaucracy, and the new zaibatsw. In the era of high- speed growth, the conservative allies were_the economic bu- cracy, the Liberal Democrati a business, Since elections were now unavoidable, this last elite ‘made the narrow interests of farmers and small retailers sac- rosanct so long as they voted for the Liberal Democratic Party. Just as in Bismarck’s famous alliance of “iron and rye,” postwar Japan has rested on_an alliance of rice and automobiles—or, in institutional terms, Nokyo (the agricultural cooperatives), who voted for the LbP, and Keidanren (big business), who paid for it. The key point here is the distinction between formal sover- cignty—what the Japanese call tatemae—and concrete hegem- ‘ony—what the Japanese call bonne. The heart of soft au- thotitarianism is the concrete hegemony of a covert elite working, within a formal system of legality and popular sovereignty. Such an elite can be extremely effective—as the modern histories of Getmany, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan attest—but the attendant political underdevelopment can also be very costly in times of It is obviously not my place to recommend either continued soft authoritarianism or further progress toward democracy for contemporary East Asia. But I can perhaps outline the dangers inherent in either course. The danger of full democracy at this pointis that it will not lead to political stability but merely reveal the great instability already created by industrialization thus far. Full democracy at this point in such countries as Korea and Tai- ‘wan might lead them simply to spin out of control. On the other hand, further democratization could improve the endemic cor- ruption in such societies, their inability to change basic policies because of the resistance of entrenched interests, and their vul- nerability to violent groups. “The liabilities of soft authoritarianism have already been made Social Values and Late Economic Development + 49 clear. Its strengths are that long-term developmental goals for the economy can be set; serious investment in education and re- search can be depoliticized; and people can come to see their government as legitimate for what i: has accomplished rather than because of the formal political philosophy it expresses. If such countries as Taiwan and Korea choose to continue on this route, then they may want to take the postwar Japanese political system asa model but also asa guide to what to avoid. Following the Japanese course would involve expanding and consolidating the elites beyond the narrow confines of mainlanders, ex-mili- tary officers, and corporate directors, certainly to include the in- cipient bourgeoisie of the cities. It would also mean reinfo: the integrity of the elite through the circulation of its members much as Japan does with bureaucratic amakudari ("descent from heaven,” ie., early retirement and posting to the private sector). Overt repression, such as Korea perpetrated in May 1980 at Kwangju, must obviously be avoided. ‘The most important issue for the slites is to depoliticize the labor movements. One of Japan’s major postwar achievements was, after 1960, meeting labor's demand for job security in re- turn for labor's giving up any role in politics. Japan enjoys an unequaled comparative advantage in a labor force that is well educated, not exploited, and organized into company unions. Developmental elites elsewhere in Asia or in Latin America must decide what they want from labor—and then be willing to pay forit. To take the case of South Korea, its elites are well positioned to employ the politics of diversion. The instability in the North and the possible collapse of communist legitimacy following the death of Kim Il-sung means that Korea’s Nordpoliti is likely to be as diverting and as profitable as (former West) Germany's Ostpolitik. Further justification for elite guidance of Korea’s de- velopment can be found in the need for very large financial re- serves to pay for unification whenever it comes, ‘A compromise between democracy and soft authoritarianism might be found in a slow process of democratization using the indinavian countries as models. This would emphasize the Ss fegat institutionalization of civil and property rights, a court system oriented toward administrative supervision of the bureaucracy and the enforcement of contracts, an up-to-date50. + Japan: Who Governs? commercial code specifying the rights and obligations of buyers and sellers, and an accounting system that properly records and taxes values, gains, and losses. Such a course would be compati- ble with further economic development but would sacrifice a certain amount of direction over it and risk, as noted above, seri- cous political instability However, in the long run, greater political instability may re- sult from trying to maintain the current political status quo. The early industrializing states evolved—albeit painfully—in order to avoid the fate predicted for them by Marx and Engels (and many others). The capitalist developmental states may soon face similar internal challenges to their political and social norms. al protection in Japan, for exam- ple, is increasingly opposed by many groups in the country as well as by its trading partners. How well the capitalist develop- mental states adapt to these and other international pressures will depend on the wisdom of their leaders and the degree to which ideological and other distractions lose their effectiveness with the people. Successful economic development from above does impart a degree of political legitimacy, but ultimately such legitimacy can only come from the consent of the governed. Delaying democratization is feasible for a while but not indeti- nitely. The underdevelopment of democracy in modern Ger- many and Japan provoked two world wars against one and one world war against the other. Both world wars were aimed at least in part in eradicating the still potent heritages of feudalism in each society. Such an outcome is the ultimate danger in the Soft authoritarianism that is inherent in the cps strategy. At the same time it is much more successful in actually delivering on ‘economic development than its chief rival, Leninism. Comparative Capitalism: The Japanese Difference Apparently minor incidents or developments sometimes have a much greater impact than their own significance seems to war- rant. For example, in revolutionary situations, such incidents sometimes make explicit conditions that have been ripening for a Jong time, and they appear to bring on the revolution itself. A small occurrence, of no great importance in itself, can serve to reveal the corruption or incapacity of an ancien régime. Some- thing like this appears to have happened when President Clinton appointed Laura D’Andrea Tyson as ead of the Council of Eco- nomic Advisers and the economics profession exploded into a fit of backbiting and ideological hysteria, Paul Krugman of arr, himself often touted as the leader of a new wave of economic theorists not mired in the rigidities of the past, spluttered that the Tyson appointment ignored the estab- lished “pecking order” in the profession. Robert Lawrence of Harvard commented that the choice must mean that Clinton in- tended to be his own economic adviser. After several of the pro- fession’s Nobel laureates complained that Tyson’s appointment had been made without their approval, a standard, mainstream economist, Alan Blinder of Princeton, was named as her deputy.! Laura Tyson is a well-known economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and was then the research director of its Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy (skit). She, st