Perhaps the Anglos don't like a term associated with Disease.
The truth of the matter is that most of the current "conventional wisdom" regarding the economy attained that status as a result of "think tanks" such as Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies, The Heritage Foundation, etc., etc. which were endowed with private wealth by such worthies as Richard Mellon Sciaffe, who inherited the bulk of his fortune from his mother, and other such worthies of self-made or inherited wealth. These institutes have promulgated a view of society and the economy that, not surprisingly, is highly self-serving for existing wealth but which has approximately the explanatory and predictive power of one of Kipling's "just so" stories, such as How the Tiger Got His Stripes." The popular version turns Adam Smith's philosophy into a "Cult of the Invisible Hand" while ignoring everything Smith said about the need for government to insure the proper functioning of markets. Through endless repetition from Ronald Reagan, both Bushes and a host of commentators in print and on TV this has been turned into the popular understanding, such as it is, of the economy in the USA.
The "Anglo Disease" is what has happened when US and British economic elites vigorously exploited the vulnerabilities that such a popular view created within US and British societies and economies by first gaining control of the governments, discrediting and neutering regulatory authorities and then using their newly won "flexibility" to inflate the financial sector and financial assets to outlandish proportions with respect to the entire economy as a means of providing short term prosperity and of soaking wealth from the middle and working class and delivering that wealth to representatives of that elite through out-sized bonuses and profits from bogus financial schemes.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, "the long run" wasn't as long as they had hoped and we are not "all dead." Instead we are stuck with massive amounts of counterfeit financial "assets," and the first depression of the 21s Century.
Many of those involved believed their own propaganda and are now stuck with assets that were purchased at absurd prices, said assets having meanwhile been used to create other financial instruments which now are liabilities. They are at present succeeding in getting governments to use taxpayer monies and the "full faith and credit" of those governments to insulate themselves from the consequences of their own folly, while the taxpayers have no such insulation. The surprising and hopeful development is that so many of those taxpayers are waking up and realizing that they have been had. The challenge is to show them how they have been had.
Asking them to acknowledge that they are afflicted by the "Anglo Disease" is like telling them that, to get well, they have to smear feces on their faces! We should be able to devise a label that is easier to sell if we want our patent medicine to fly off the shelves, even if ours has the virtue of actually working. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
We should be able to devise a label that is easier to sell if we want our patent medicine to fly off the shelves, even if ours has the virtue of actually working.
But for the non-Anglo world -- that would be, oh, 95% of the world population, this label is smack on target and doesn't require to be changed one bit.
Corollary question: is it more important to promote the Anglo disease concept to the non-Anglo world (the rest of us) rather that to the UK/US/OZ? Europeans think a hundred miles is a long way. Americans think a hundred years is a long time.
There is, no doubt, a certain desire to rub some faces in their own shit in the expression "Anglo Disease". (Though it's only fair to point out that it's based on the expression "Dutch Disease", coined by The Economist and not apparently seen as a slur on the Netherlands by the Anglos of that august publication). And I must say that the Americans and British have been handing out the insults to others (continental Europe and France in particular) for a while now without anyone weeping over it. Perhaps the Anglos can't take a taste of their own nasty medicine?
But, by and large, I think it would be worthwhile to look for another name that would not set off defensive reactions. But nothing anodyne either!
Good comment, ARG.
On your other point I thoroughly agree that US financial elites should not just have their nose rubbed in it, but that this should be performed by some of the "lifers" with whom they should be sharing prison. Even that may come in time.
But my primary concern is not for the elites, but for the average person, especially the independents and "Reagan Democrats," who bought into the whole "just so" economic fairy tale pedaled by those elites and their political representatives. If this whole Neo-Whatever, CW, noxious approach to government and the economy can be made thoroughly repugnant as the chief instrument of their current misery we might inoculate the Anglo world against such folly for at least a couple of generations. This would be a good thing for the rest of the world, given the influence of said Anglo world in global affairs. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
