Inadequacy of available knowledge for articulation of appropriate policies

Intellectual bankruptcy in response to policy challenges

Nature

Government leaders are increasingly confronted with the reality that the ideas on which they governed with success in the past are losing their relevance and much of their political force in the altered circumstances of the present. There are no credible insights on which to build the policies of the future.

Claim

The inadequacy of the advice offered to Russia following the dissolution of the USSR demonstrates that Western economists no longer know what advice is appropriate to economic systems other than their own. In a situation in which the issues go beyond the purely technical macroeconomic ones and touch on political and other factors, economists have little ability to distil Western experience or integrate it into an appropriate pattern of advice communicable to another culture. The language used fails to convey the essence of a free society and its political basis as understood in the West, whether or not this is relevant to the Russian condition. The advice given has been astonishing in its elitism and its inaccessibility. It is unrealistic for international economic institutions to be able to resolve political issues on which the usefulness of their advice depends. It is irresponsible under such conditions to disguise such inadequacy behind general economic truisms.