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,
human nature or psychology play a decisive role in the traumatic effects that civilizational history is repeating and that small elite groups capture the fruits of progress, because they have privatized nature by law.
What is the economic role of religion in such an agenda to balance production and distribution? Religion plays an overwhelming part in our consciousness and subconsciousness. It is not the same perception of ‘reality’ to see only matter and energy or to assume a non-material soul in living matter like plants, animals and humans. In the case of Pakistan, a consequent Islami ethics can help successfully to rationally optimize the allocation of human living chances. The afore mentioned rentier mechanism, which I call the Sisyphean paradox of economic growth, destroys the civilizational cohesion of any given society, because it pushes human living chances for the majority (99%) of people to point zero, i.e. internal and external violence spreads.
What economic system can we expect in the next society? Many people, even non-Marxists, are conditioned by pseudo-scientific assumptions of human history, materialism and socialism as a next society system. Marx himself reveals at the end of Volume 3/Capital that ultimately all surplus value disappears into a form of economic rent when the economic return from capital decreases. So, a peaceful system would be a kind of earth sharing economy, where the land value would be directed into public revenue, with some basic citizen’s dividend (‘the dignity payment’). Private property and the privatization of nature have to be distinguished by their effects on ‘common ground’.
Is capitalism a culture? The economic evolution of a capitalist system on a given territory is bound to specific ethical rules of human behavior; a refined ethical system, such as the Islami culture in oral, written and legal form, is a prerequisite of capitalist development (development of capital); an explicit Islami welfare policy and governance can only be practiced in this cultural context, i.e. the emergence of a Pakistani capitalism is a logical consequence of this economic motion. Please keep in mind that our human economies are limited physical worlds; at least, this seems to be the intent of the creator who is unlimited.
What do you wish to the people of Pakistan? If they can utilize and revitalize the spirit of the Golden Era of Islam, when religion, philosophy and science were unified, they will receive the creative help of the eternal upper force to build their Islami model society of the future.
Foresight/Auto-Interview/S.Ternyik/Nov.23, 2016.