WorldCity Business Magazine

Good news for bad guys is good news for all

by Ken Roberts

Capitalism and democracy are great equalizers. They make it possible, and often profitable, for all sorts of people to become scoundrels, scalawags and scofflaws in the global economy. No longer is it the domain of only a sliver of unsavory oligarchs, despots and dictators.

That was apparent at our latest DHL Connections event, where the theme was just that crime in the global economy.

Charlie Intriago of Money Laundering Alert talked of how rampant corruption throughout Latin America finds a piggy bank in Miami. Attorney Mitchell Fuerst analyzed the sometimes-slippery “frontier mentality” that defines South Florida’s business environment. Alex Blair of Diligence compared his home base of London and its relationship with former Eastern Bloc nations to Miami and its relationship with Latin America. And it dawned on me the global economy is in the very infancy of enormous and powerful growth.

Here’s why: Not only are there more good people than bad, but the spread is growing every day.

While capitalism and democracy make possible unrivaled levels of illicit behavior, the number of people committed to making better lives for themselves and their families is skyrocketing.

They are in the former Soviet Union, where democracy is trying to find its sea legs. They are in China, where market forces are somehow, if awkwardly, coexisting with an authoritarian government. They are in India, where technology is unleashing rapid growth amidst an ancient caste system. They are in Latin America, where democracy has nearly made a clear sweep of the continent in just a couple of decades. And they are in Africa, where progress has been less palpable but is coming.

The forces at work are lifting hundreds of millions of people from extreme poverty.

Former Reagan appointee Clyde Prestowitz sees a transformative effect in the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reforms of Deng Xiaoping in China and the IT revolution in India. He has penned a book in homage to them: “Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East.”

Columbia University’s celebrity professor Jeffrey Sachs, meanwhile, has written “The End of Poverty.” In it, he recounts his work in Bolivia, Poland, Russia, India and Africa, while noting that international trade is a force in lifting up the poorest of the world’s poor.

Innovations in nanotechnology, biotechnology, computing power, agriculture, health care, wireless technology and other endeavors will transform all our lives.

The good news is that Miami and South Florida are poised to ride that wave, open as always to new ideas and new people, willing to gamble, willing to trust, willing to look past the scoundrels, scalawags and scofflaws to see the best in the rest of us.