LAREDO, Texas -- I recognize the people who have been getting tear-gassed
in Washington the past few days. I recognize their Birkenstocks and tie-dye
shirts and their idealistic rhetoric. Seven years ago, as an idealistic Ivy
League undergraduate, I, too, was a radical. And while I know these protesters
are well-intentioned, I also think they are wrong.
My childhood in Jamaica in the 1970s and '80s stoked resentments in me
about the International Monetary Fund. Every so often, our talk shows lit up
with speculation over whether we were going to "fail" an upcoming IMF test.
Few Jamaicans have formal education in economics, yet everyone understood the
consequences of failing an IMF test: A team of Washington-based economists
would swoop in to impose stringent austerity policies and to cut back our
already frayed social safety net. More beggars would appear on our streets;
crime would inevitably rise. Social unrest would follow.
I think that the fund's policies caused much damage to Jamaica's democracy
-- in part because the ensuing hardships sustained inept politicians who could
use the fund as a scapegoat to deflect attention from their own economic
mismanagement. Essentially, we felt we were not masters of our own destiny
simply because we were poor.
Yet the Washington protesters do not recognize that the picture is
substantially more complicated. For all its shortcomings, the IMF helped to
democratize capitalism in Jamaica. The best thing that the IMF ever did for
Jamaica was to force globalization (yes, the dreaded G word) down our throats.
Although it is arguable that some austerity measures were too stringent,
the fund forced us to privatize some industries and, more important, to lower
tariffs and to drop many of the arcane regulations that had long hampered
importing and exporting in our island economy.
More open borders gave working-class Jamaicans the opportunity to become
entrepreneurs in a system that had long been clogged by bureaucratic red tape
and nepotism. Thirty years ago, the majority of the country's wealth was owned
by only a couple of dozen families. These families had preferential access to
import-export licenses and price collusion was rampant.
This affected not only our wallets but also our entire culture. The corrupt
system quashed the entrepreneurial spirit of the public. Essentially,
working-class Jamaicans knew their place: They could maybe become teachers and
farmers and police officers, but they could not run businesses.
The opening of our borders was the most important part of a process in
which everything was fair game. To some extent, any young entrepreneur with
enough initiative and some start-up capital could start an import-export
business. The more ambitious among our working classes took the opportunity:
taxi drivers imported their own cars; reggae singers could import the
recording equipment need to launch their own careers.
Of course, many members of this new middle class are
only one paycheck away from economic hardship. Start-up capital remains hard
to come by. Inflation is high. In the mid-1990s, a leftist Jamaican government
severed ties with the IMF, and the national debt has soared from $4 billion in
1995 to $10 billion today (or 150 percent of gross domestic product).
But despite these setbacks, the cultural changes brought by democratized
capitalism have been resilient. On a recent airplane flight to Jamaica, I sat
next to a woman who was an informal commercial importer, or "higgler" in
Jamaican parlance.
She had been a housekeeper to a wealthy Jamaican family, but had long
dreamed of starting a dress shop. She borrowed start-up capital from an aunt
in New York, and now she runs a boutique out of her home in Jamaica, selling
clothes and makeup from an American discount chain to other aspiring members
of the Jamaican middle class. She is an unabashed social climber; she told me
she had her eye on a house in her former employer's neighborhood. She is
living proof that the new capitalists no longer know their place.
Some members of the Jamaican political and economic elite like to say that
democratized capitalism would have happened in the country in any event, that
sooner or later we would have had the foresight to abandon our tariffs and
open our borders. Perhaps. But I doubt we would have had the political will.
For that, we have to thank the "tyrants" at the IMF.
This is why I am not at the protests in Washington this week. Fellow
radicals, take note.
E.M. Brown is a lawyer. Copyright 2000 New York Times.
