ABSTRACT
Even cursory glances at the news (in whatever form one receives the news these days) would suggest that the state of the world is not as most people would prefer it. Armed conflict, disease, the ascendency of populism, rising inequality, environmental catastrophes. This is not as it should be in the 21st century, surely; do we have it in our power to address and reverse these issues? The optimist must certainly answer in the affirmative, but it is insufficient to have an optimistic outlook on life; this has to be coupled with concrete proposals to change the situation for the better, coupled with a will to do so. What we have discussed in the previous chapters has been an attempt to do just that. To show why current thinking is just plain wrong and morally indefensible. Is it not a laudable goal to wish to see a world in which the common good of humanity is the overriding goal and therefore to pursue strategies that can achieve this? Those who advocate free trade and unfettered markets cannot all be striving to continue to divide the world into the haves and the have not’s, there must be many, many neo-liberals who really believe that their ideology and agenda can in some way help to alleviate the poverty and deprivation that is characteristic of the majority of citizens on this planet. It is to those that this book is targeted in the main, but not exclusively, because what is required is an enlightenment from the darkness of despair that they must be feeling. To advocate a set of policy prescriptions that clearly result in the opposite of what was being strived for must be disheartening to those who genuinely believed in the neo-liberal paradigm, and wish to improve the situation of the poorest.
