By Dr. Mahmoud Mohieldin, Egyptian Economist, Quoted from Asharq Al-Awsat _ Some of the finest creations in literature and art are based on triads. Among the most famous in Arabic literature is Naguib Mahfouz's trilogy, which includes his dazzling novels about Cairo in the first half of the twentieth century, following the life of its protagonist, Mr. Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, and his family, in the parts: «Palace Walk» (Bayn al-Qasrayn), «Palace of Desire» (Qasr al-Shawq), and «Sugar Street» (Al-Sukkariyya).
Among the renowned classics is the work composed by the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri in the trilogy of «Inferno», «Purgatory», and «Paradise», known as «The Divine Comedy». One of the finest cinematic productions is the film «The Godfather», featuring Don Vito Corleone, in its three parts by director Francis Ford Coppola.
Over the past week in Bangkok, where the Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were held, I was struck by the repeated use of "triads" in describing global economic conditions and in reviewing the proposals and recommendations of international officials.
When the discussion turned to global challenges, they were articulated by Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, in three elements: artificial intelligence, energy, and debt. Likewise, the World Bank's World Development Report, when addressing the promising contributions of artificial intelligence, summarizes its requirements and conditions for realization into three: «adoption» of artificial intelligence innovations, then «adaptation» to them in a manner consistent with the circumstances of the country concerned, followed by the capacity for «development», all of which necessitate massive investments in human capital, digital transformation, technological infrastructure, and the governance of artificial intelligence applications.
Regarding global imbalances between the rise in China's surplus and the high US and European deficits, the IMF's recommendations also come in a triad: the United States must increase its savings, Europe must develop its investments, and China must raise its consumption; all of which require economic measures and structural changes that are not easy. The ternary classification fell short of defining what all other countries of the world ought to do in this context, as they went unmentioned.
There is no harm in form from using triads, or other compositions and divisions in public discourse, if doing so facilitates the explanation of topics or the delivery of opinions in focused messages; but the problem lies in some recipients assuming that what came in these messages, concise and summarized due to time constraints or diplomatic considerations, is the final word and the end of the matter.
An IMF assessment of the global economy described it as resilient despite successive shocks following the pandemic, wars, geoeconomic conflicts, and their aftermath; however, this resilience has reached its limit, indicating that the enablers of resilience and the deterrents of decline and deterioration are nearing exhaustion.
I believe that the reports of international financial institutions use macroeconomic indicators through a narrow lens, seeing through them only steady growth rates and a relative decline in inflation rates as evidence of resilience. However, if they were to incorporate multidimensional poverty indicators, for example, which have risen for the first time since 2010 according to the UN Development Programme report issued a few days ago, they would revise their description of conditions as resilient. How can this description hold true when more than 1.2 billion people live in acute multidimensional poverty across the 108 countries covered by the report?
They must explain what they mean by this resilience if they truly comprehend what countries suffer from the repercussions of increased debt service burdens in lagging behind the requirements of achieving sustainable development and its goals, and the sharp decline in education and health spending, which heralds that poverty will be followed by ignorance and disease, completing the wretched triad that development efforts came to combat by tackling the causes of nations' underdevelopment.
Despite the severity of poverty conditions and their repercussions, they did not receive the due attention in the World Bank and IMF annual meetings by the measure of panel discussions and seminars; economist Philip Schellekens observed that poverty was only mentioned once in a single event out of the 174 events included in these meetings.
Celebrating resilience alone is not enough, as economist Mohamed El-Erian emphasized in a lecture organized by Mashreq Bank in Bangkok on the new global order. Absorbing a shock and withstanding it are necessary to qualify for "resilience", but the economy must also possess the "agility" to move quickly, with a diversity of available alternatives, in designing a three-pillared approach of "resilience", "agility", and "optionality" to deal with successive economic developments, especially under conditions of uncertainty.
One of the most amusing triads of the annual meetings arose from diplomatic considerations regarding the omission of the term "artificial intelligence" from official meeting outputs; attendees were forced to agree on using an alternative term for "artificial intelligence", which has been known since the 1950s, after US President Donald Trump objected to it. According to his viewpoint expressed in his speech before the UN General Assembly last September, the word "artificial" can be interpreted to mean that this intelligence is fake.
Trump issued an executive order obligating official bodies in his country to use the term "superintelligence" exclusively, and his subordinates had to comply with this second term; they could no longer approve a statement or text mentioning "artificial intelligence", as President Trump classified anyone who uses it as an enemy. Since the term "superintelligence" is not internationally agreed upon, the workaround—for the time being—was to use a third term, namely "advanced intelligence technology", in an attempt to describe one of the major confusions shaping current conditions.
