What do we want to see emerge from the greatest crisis of capitalism for 70 years? If I had to answer in a single phrase, I would say: New models for a sustainable social market economy. This requires us to change as well as our states.
Capitalism will not end in 2009 as communism ended in 1989. It is too deep-rooted, too diverse and too adaptable to suffer such a sudden death. There are far more varieties of capitalism in the world today than there ever were of communism, and that diversity is one of its strengths. The rainbow reaches from wild west to wild east, and extends to major national variants of a market economy, such as China, that purists would say are not capitalism at all. So some versions of capitalism will weather the storm; others will be left in ruins or at least very substantially transformed.
An extreme “neoliberal” version of the free-market economy, characterized not just by far-reaching deregulation and privatization but also by a Gordon Gekko greed-is-good ethos — and fully realized in practice only in some areas of Anglo-Saxon and post-communist economies — seems likely to find itself in the latter category. But how about a modernized, reformed version of what postwar German thinkers called the “social market economy”?
Very definitely still a free-market economy, this model nonetheless calls for the state to provide a strong legal and regulatory framework for private enterprise, for the involvement of stakeholders as well as shareholders, an attempt to balance long- and short-term considerations in economic decision-making, a national commitment to a social minimum for all citizens, and a strong moral ethos among those involved in business activity. This then needs to be combined with the 21st-century demands for ecological sustainability in the face of climate change, and ethical sustainability, in the face of global poverty. A tall order, to be sure.
Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, has observed that today’s big private banks are global in life but national in death. When it comes to the bailout, it’s the national government most directly concerned that takes the lead. And that means us, national taxpayers, picking up the bill.
Yet all this talk of states and systems is only half the story. It was the conduct of individual human beings that led us into this mess, and it is the behavior of individuals as well as the structuring of systems that has to change. This is most flagrantly obvious in the case of bankers, but we should not kid ourselves that it stops with them.
Not for the first time, novelists (such as Tom Wolfe) and filmmakers (such as Oliver Stone with his Wall Street, featuring Gekko) were ahead of economists and political scientists in identifying the disorder. The classic justification for capitalists making large sums of money is the risk they take, but in this case they did not even take the risk. We did. When the bubble burst we, the taxpayers, were left to pick up the bill.
Yet we can’t blame it all on bankers. Every ordinary Brit or American who spent money he or she did not have, encouraged by soaring house prices, lax mortgage lending and seductive advertising, bears a share of the responsibility. So, oddly enough, do the superfrugal Chinese, whose massive savings were recycled to allow — even indirectly to encourage — Western profligacy.
More than 30 years ago, Daniel Bell explored in his Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism the paradox that the dynamism of capitalism depends on individuals living by somewhat different values in their personal lives as producer and as consumer. Extending Max Weber’s famous argument about the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, he suggested that the production side depends on people harking to values such as hard work, punctuality, discipline and a readiness to accept deferred gratification.
The demand side, by contrast, depends on them being self-indulgent, expansive, pleasure-seeking and given to living in the now. Add to this the new constraint that the planet will not sustain more than six billion people enjoying constantly rising living standards achieved by the methods of production and consumption so far used. Complicate matters further by the moral argument that the world’s rich have no right to deny the world’s poor a materially better life, which would still be a fraction of the affluence we ourselves enjoy.
What you end up with is not just a systemic conundrum but also a personal challenge to every one of us. The challenge is to find a new balance in our double-lives as producers and consumers, at the same time consciously contributing to a larger set of new international balances between economy and environment, oversaving East and overspending West, rich North and poor South. That, too, is what I mean by a sustainable social market economy.
