i'm a polynerd, but my formal education is in mathematics, computer science and constitutional law. i'm an expert in logic, which is why i'm good at arguing with people. i have an array of minors in topics that intersect with logic, like economics and physics....and music.
so, mark carney walks into a bar in davos and declares an end to the new world order, as the term has been used for the last 40 years. in fact, he's been talking like that in canada for a while. some people have suggested it's just political rhetoric, but he wasn't talking to voters in davos.
what carney is declaring an end to is the "rules based international order", and a term defined by opponents to it, like john mearsheimer, called "liberal internationalism". he cited the last president of the iron curtain state czechoslovakia, which no longer exists. while my father was a zappa fan, and i am fairly familiar with the vast discography, and was even a student of zappa's guitar playing, i am neither a rawlsian liberal nor a neo-conservative and would prefer to walk down a more hitchensian path of left-socialism and cite trotsky and orwell. we don't live behind the iron curtain, in eurasia; we live in oceania. the words that leftists use to describe this order are not "liberal internationalism", but american hegemony, and we realize this order started in 1991, not in 1945. it is the pax americana, the american hegemony, that allowed for a rules-based order. such a thing was not in place in the cold war, and could not have existed during the great power competition that defined the post-war era, from 1945-1991.
so, what carney is declaring an end to is american hegemony, the pax americana, and what he is declaring a start to is the old world order of great power competition that defined the cold war, from 1945-1991. he is arguing that canada, as a "middle power", needs to build a new non-aligned movement. it's worth noting that india signed a major trade deal with the eu about ten minutes later and is barely talking to canada, which it correctly sees as toxic.
then, when he gets home, an american car company closes a factory in canada for a product that was nearing end of life obsolescence anyways, and the liberal party unveils a new auto strategy that includes:
- a reversal of an ev mandate.
- incentives to generate foreign investment in the canadian auto industry
so, am i missing something? because i thought the pax americana was over. it was the pax americana that made foreign investment feasible, so long as it was from one american client state to the other. american military might secured the fdi in the american empire. the pentagon mitigated the risk and made it safe for japan or germany to build cars here.
if the pax americana is over, then how do foreign companies write off the risk of investing in canada?
or did that not cross the economist mark carney's mind? or did it, and did he neutralize it as doublethink?
it seems to me that if mark carney really believed that the pax americana was over, and really understood his own words, he would understand that the era of risk-free fdi is also over, and that canada needs to respond by using the bank of canada to build it's own industry, instead.
for him to go to davos and say what he said and then go home and legislate incentives to stimulate fdi in the auto sector suggests to me that something isn't quite clicking, there.
instead of cancelling the ev mandate and calling for fdi, he should be setting up a crown corporation to build evs for the domestic market. that would be the correct way for an economist to respond to the end of pax americana, if he understood it and believed it.
as it is, this won't be successful. canada assembles cars for export. with the lifting of american hegemony, all anybody in europe or asia sees in the premise of investing in canada is a lot of risk, and rightly so.