Political economy and ethical dimensions of economic recovery

Abstract

Economic meltdowns seem to come and go. Yet we seldom learn to be more prepared for the worst. We took great pride in our modest achievements over a short decade or so. We felt very comfortable and strong and continued to plan for further and higher growth rates. We seldom look back to consolidate our achievements in time. We were confident that we could go on making higher and more significant achievements. Thus we pursued higher and greater rates of growth at all cost. When others prewarned us of the imminent crisis based on pointers that were so clear to them, we vehemently rebutted and flimsily justified our policies and actions. We even accused them of being jealous. We were quite certain of our own strength based on what we called as Asian values. We were so inspired by terms like "miracle" because we were flying high when others were in deep trouble. The buoyancy that we enjoyed were so clearly manifested in higher consumer demands with a stain of arrogance. We were quite happy with our negative balance of payments as long as we had balanced budgets. We were on a buying spree. We even made some wild decisions to invest in other countries that have repeatedly resulted in huge losses. We have more companies in telecommunications for our 22 million people as compared to not more than four in US with more than ten times our population. We also have established more than 20 public and private universities and more than 600 private colleges. More than half of them arc struggling to make ends meet. We had numerous small banks and finance companies that we had to force them to merge into a fair number, thus forcing many unemployed. On the domestic front, general affluence seems to be the order of the day. An increasing number of rich Malaysians are found shopping in big cities outside the country. They spend their holidays outside while the government is trying to woo tourists to our own resorts. We became increasingly materialistic despite the warning issued by the fifteenth century Muslim social scientist, Ibn Khaldun that affluence erodes the ethical and moral values towards decadence.