Commentators in newspapers in right wing ownership accuse the government of ‘vandalising’ the economy with bailouts and now increases in money supply. They decline to say what actions they, or the politicians they support, would have taken instead. And all miss a fundamental truth - the economy was already vandalised. (Incidentally the Vandals get a bad press - the originals had some positive qualities lacked by the present corporate ‘vandals’ and bankers.)
The sources of the destruction are globalisation driven by the avaricious needs of individuals high up the corporate control ladders who are totally free of patriotism, their political placemen (similarly afflicted when it comes to economics) and a perverse competitive force that belongs more to a societal example of Catastrophe Theory than the ‘dismal science’ (the sadly apt nickname for economics) - the Lemming-like "the other lot have made a fast buck out of shutdown-and-offshore so we will too" mentality.
Real industry, especially manufacturing and engineering, has been eviscerated and other productive sectors such as agriculture have had their needs neglected and standing reduced. We sometimes still hear talk of a ‘post industrial society’. You can certainly have a post-industrial society. Indeed we may yet get to find out what this is like (it will not be like the past quarter century). What you cannot have in a country larger than the Cayman Islands is a post-industrial economy.
I have said for many years that when a representative US Government came to see that the globalisation trumpeted by self interested executives was not working for the country they would, entirely understandably, stop singing along with the shrill brass. This was evident in the response - or lack of response - to the parts of Mr Brown’s recent speech to Congress that whispered the worn out words ‘free trade’.
But make no mistake, I am in favour of ‘free trade’ - which can and does work to mutual benefit when practised by responsible agents between societies with broadly similar sets of values in key areas. Here I am not talking about those conveniently elastic terms ‘capitalism’ or ‘socialism’. I refer to moral stances in relation to much more fundamental concerns such as the use of child labour, pre-Victorian working conditions and befouled environments.
We need to be clear that a particular concept - such as ‘free trade’ for example - is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. Its merit depends on the conditions and set of principles under which it operates. A bit like America’s constitutional right to bear arms - one thing in the birth of a nation phase, quite another today. What can produce great benefit in one set of conditions can be malignant in another.
And two more things. Trade is not the only thing that should be ‘free’. The people producing the goods to be traded should be free too (unless they are, you do not know that the export / import imbalance is what they would have chosen). And national currencies should be free to find their own relative levels. Undeniably, these conditions are not extant in many major participants in global trade.
There is one more critical factor - the distribution of power and choice in countries and regions used (and I choose this term deliberately) by globalised corporations to make their products. Used and then discarded in the mindless quest for ever greater ‘shareholder value’ and executive bonuses. Such has been the fate of great swathes of the Midlands and North of England and the Midwest of the United States. The production of industrial wastelands and ruined communities at home is as corrosive a by-product of global profit-seeking as is the chemical effluent discharged in the countries to which the jobs and production have been taken.
An essential part of the context needed for free trade to work properly is morality and social conscience. We have seen the total lack of principle (which resulted in the lack of principal) in the banking sector and the disregard for the fate of communities shown by those entrusted with the power to manufacture. Company executives should not be free to act regardless of scruple (nor should they want to - a change essential for a long run solution) any more than they should be free to ignore chemical pollution.
Corporations should be trusts, not in the sense of being monopolies (although they are often effectively these anyway) but in the sense of holding the livelihoods of individuals, the life of communities and the self respect of nations in their hands. We need due diligence here too.
I dread to think of the timescale that would be required for such a change - it could take a generation. You can see the resistance to universal social pressure to changing the disgusting bonus cultures and contempt for us mere ‘punters’ in banks and other ‘services’. There needs to be a comprehensive re-education of corporate (and no small part of our political) leadership. In fact we need our very own cultural revolution.
The original name for economics was ‘political economy’. What is needed now is ‘moral economy’ where concern for the human consequences of decisions is embedded in the psyches of the captains of industry as should be some sense of responsibility to the society that gave them the opportunities that they so frequently abuse.
Genuine competition might not be a bad idea to imbue too, rather than the claimed competition (such as in banking, communications, power and fuel supply and a good chunk of retailing) that is in reality informal cartelisation designed to exploit consumers to the maximum extent. Included too should be the politicians who have so often seen their primary role as the reinforcers of, and apologisers for, this dire mis-managerial capitalism.
We also hear talk of the still incomplete Doha round of international trade negotiations. In my view this should be the last of these discussions structured in the present way. Future discussions, if any, should have a fresh infusion of social and moral as well as environmental responsibility.
At home in England we are constantly tampering with educational syllabi. In recent years ‘citizenship’ defined in particular ways has assumed a considerable role. As part of the much needed moral restructuring of society there should be moral economics as well as bog standard economics on the syllabus.
Our society should also give careful thought to rebuilding the status and role of religion (the enlightened forms thereof) and indeed to the equivalent humanist philosophy and to strengthening the spontaneous movement to rediscover worship and ‘worthship’ while resisting intolerance, repression and religious apartheid.
It is a very tall order to accomplish this journey in full, but a useful start can be made. And this is a journey that we do need to make, because the current crisis reflects a spiritual problem every bit as much as an economic one. Failure to get a grip on the greed of globalisation, the culture of cheating and deceiving, the disregard for sustainable natural limits to growth and the lack of morality that produced these undesirables, will result in a post-industrial wilderness rather than a post-industrial economy. We should start that journey today.
The sources of the destruction are globalisation driven by the avaricious needs of individuals high up the corporate control ladders who are totally free of patriotism, their political placemen (similarly afflicted when it comes to economics) and a perverse competitive force that belongs more to a societal example of Catastrophe Theory than the ‘dismal science’ (the sadly apt nickname for economics) - the Lemming-like "the other lot have made a fast buck out of shutdown-and-offshore so we will too" mentality.
Real industry, especially manufacturing and engineering, has been eviscerated and other productive sectors such as agriculture have had their needs neglected and standing reduced. We sometimes still hear talk of a ‘post industrial society’. You can certainly have a post-industrial society. Indeed we may yet get to find out what this is like (it will not be like the past quarter century). What you cannot have in a country larger than the Cayman Islands is a post-industrial economy.
I have said for many years that when a representative US Government came to see that the globalisation trumpeted by self interested executives was not working for the country they would, entirely understandably, stop singing along with the shrill brass. This was evident in the response - or lack of response - to the parts of Mr Brown’s recent speech to Congress that whispered the worn out words ‘free trade’.
But make no mistake, I am in favour of ‘free trade’ - which can and does work to mutual benefit when practised by responsible agents between societies with broadly similar sets of values in key areas. Here I am not talking about those conveniently elastic terms ‘capitalism’ or ‘socialism’. I refer to moral stances in relation to much more fundamental concerns such as the use of child labour, pre-Victorian working conditions and befouled environments.
We need to be clear that a particular concept - such as ‘free trade’ for example - is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. Its merit depends on the conditions and set of principles under which it operates. A bit like America’s constitutional right to bear arms - one thing in the birth of a nation phase, quite another today. What can produce great benefit in one set of conditions can be malignant in another.
And two more things. Trade is not the only thing that should be ‘free’. The people producing the goods to be traded should be free too (unless they are, you do not know that the export / import imbalance is what they would have chosen). And national currencies should be free to find their own relative levels. Undeniably, these conditions are not extant in many major participants in global trade.
There is one more critical factor - the distribution of power and choice in countries and regions used (and I choose this term deliberately) by globalised corporations to make their products. Used and then discarded in the mindless quest for ever greater ‘shareholder value’ and executive bonuses. Such has been the fate of great swathes of the Midlands and North of England and the Midwest of the United States. The production of industrial wastelands and ruined communities at home is as corrosive a by-product of global profit-seeking as is the chemical effluent discharged in the countries to which the jobs and production have been taken.
An essential part of the context needed for free trade to work properly is morality and social conscience. We have seen the total lack of principle (which resulted in the lack of principal) in the banking sector and the disregard for the fate of communities shown by those entrusted with the power to manufacture. Company executives should not be free to act regardless of scruple (nor should they want to - a change essential for a long run solution) any more than they should be free to ignore chemical pollution.
Corporations should be trusts, not in the sense of being monopolies (although they are often effectively these anyway) but in the sense of holding the livelihoods of individuals, the life of communities and the self respect of nations in their hands. We need due diligence here too.
I dread to think of the timescale that would be required for such a change - it could take a generation. You can see the resistance to universal social pressure to changing the disgusting bonus cultures and contempt for us mere ‘punters’ in banks and other ‘services’. There needs to be a comprehensive re-education of corporate (and no small part of our political) leadership. In fact we need our very own cultural revolution.
The original name for economics was ‘political economy’. What is needed now is ‘moral economy’ where concern for the human consequences of decisions is embedded in the psyches of the captains of industry as should be some sense of responsibility to the society that gave them the opportunities that they so frequently abuse.
Genuine competition might not be a bad idea to imbue too, rather than the claimed competition (such as in banking, communications, power and fuel supply and a good chunk of retailing) that is in reality informal cartelisation designed to exploit consumers to the maximum extent. Included too should be the politicians who have so often seen their primary role as the reinforcers of, and apologisers for, this dire mis-managerial capitalism.
We also hear talk of the still incomplete Doha round of international trade negotiations. In my view this should be the last of these discussions structured in the present way. Future discussions, if any, should have a fresh infusion of social and moral as well as environmental responsibility.
At home in England we are constantly tampering with educational syllabi. In recent years ‘citizenship’ defined in particular ways has assumed a considerable role. As part of the much needed moral restructuring of society there should be moral economics as well as bog standard economics on the syllabus.
Our society should also give careful thought to rebuilding the status and role of religion (the enlightened forms thereof) and indeed to the equivalent humanist philosophy and to strengthening the spontaneous movement to rediscover worship and ‘worthship’ while resisting intolerance, repression and religious apartheid.
It is a very tall order to accomplish this journey in full, but a useful start can be made. And this is a journey that we do need to make, because the current crisis reflects a spiritual problem every bit as much as an economic one. Failure to get a grip on the greed of globalisation, the culture of cheating and deceiving, the disregard for sustainable natural limits to growth and the lack of morality that produced these undesirables, will result in a post-industrial wilderness rather than a post-industrial economy. We should start that journey today.
No comments:
Post a Comment