Conclusion—Western vs. Eastern Replies to the Inverse Economic Pyramid: Innovation, Development, and the Material Future of Cosmoipolitan Justice

Abstract

Managerial, marketing, production, research, and human capital innovations in the emerging world—particularly in China and India—have led to a barrage of cleverly coined phrases such as ‘reverse innovation,’ ‘inverse innovation pyramids,’ ‘frugal innovation,’ and even ‘disruptive innovation.’ These trends in neo-innovation call for incremental improvement, collaborative exchange between suppliers and consumers, and markets targeting the middle and lower tiers of the global economic pyramid. Insofar as many of these models emphasize investment in human and cultural capital over sheer growth of economic capital, they also lead to an array of exotic corporate species that befuddle Western observers. Sen explains these best in terms of his conciliatory and dialectical assimilation of market efficiencies matched with the egalitarian assurance of democratic legitimation. In contrast, Lander privileges neo-liberal market approaches to the global economy as the unique achievement of the West, Europe, UK, and the USA as global template for future innovation. At the other extreme, Onuma offers a neo-Marxist critique of a long history of Eurocentric economic and moral exploitation of non-Western powers via the domineering imposition of an inherently biased and overly individualistic framework for international law. Once I lay out Sen’s capability account as a viable middle way, I conclude with four non-Western economic and social innovations that lend credence to inter-Axial—East to West—moral, social, and technological learning. I commend their mutually reinforcing material and egalitarian efficacy at expanding the capability sets of those at the middle and bottom of the global inverse pyramid.