Video

Himalayan Consensus discussed at the Asia Economic Community Forum 2009

During the Asia Economic Community Forum, Laurence Brahm speaks about the meaning of terms such as “Anti-Globalization” and the “Washington Consensus” and the way that many current economic assumptions are damaging to the economies of developing countries. He asserts that assuming that universal greed (the so-called ‘rational profit motive’) at the heart of IMF and Neoliberal economic theory will produce self balancing markets, ignores many essential human values, and produces a flawed overly narrow model of development. Other systems exist, such as the model used by China in the last quarter century, and indeed, for developing nations in contemporary contexts, a new multilateral system is necessary. Pragmatic institutional transformation is a modern necessity. “In a world with increasingly finite and diminishing resources, we have to change our values of consumption.” In this second talk Brahm comments on how modern values of economic consumption and a reliance on hierarchies of specialists will lead to the disintegration of values and communities, and that the solution to modern problems exists in diversity and creativity rather than dogmatism or fundamentalism. He also points out how essential it is to battle climate change and address water security, or risk doing a great injustice to future generations of humanity. We must “take only what [we] need and give back as much as [we] can.”

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