Dr. Simon Baptist, the Global Chief Economist of the Economist Intelligence Unit, has given his future picture of Pakistan in a recent newsletter. What do you think about the analytic framework of the prognostics? The EIU is a successful company branch; Dr. Baptist has given Pakistan a fair prognostic treatment, concerning investment and innovation. It is up to the Pakistani leadership to learn from such analytics and to build up a long-term strategy to outperform the current empirical status quo which The Economist described mainly for possible investors.
Do you have a special leadership strategy in mind? Could tell us more about the scientific possibilities and methodology to elaborate such a strategic mind set? Let us first put the ideological factor aside and concentrate on the physical economy of Pakistan; this means in real terms, a great mass of nearly 200 million people have to make a great leap forward, but this has to be done within the cultural framework of Islam, i.e. only a progressive Islam can get control over capitalist over-competition and monopolization of living resources.
What do you mean by capitalist over-competition? Capitalism is a man-made (human, not natural) system to produce more capital from capital, e.g. a better technical (artificial) infrastructure on a given, but limited, territory. Over-competition for the masses of people on a given territory sets in, when the strategic assets of a country (location of real estate, key natural resources, in short the land value) is controlled by a small class of rentier elites which collects/captures the productive surplus value of labor and capital.
Is it really possible to circumvent this stage of unproductive capitalist motion? Yes. Capitalism is not the result of a natural law, but the creative outcome of human ingenuity to expand the physical boundaries of land and labor. However,