January | 2013 | Fighting for Fairness by Remaking the Real Economy

Among all the debate about the vices and virtues of capitalism there is rarely any serious attempt to define its key characteristics. Whatever they are, they appear to work better than the best known alternative that has so far been tried: centrally planned totalitarian communism. Whether good capitalism or bad, compassionate, predatory or even ‘conscious’, all capitalisms appear to depend on the ownership and control of the established legal entity known in the United States as the corporation, or the public limited company elsewhere. That is the corporate form Chandler described as ‘the most powerful institution in the economy’ on which the affluence and growth of the past century and a half has been based.

The corporation was the legal form which was enabled to issue shares to many dispersed individuals and so accrue sufficient funds to make large scale capital projects possible. Initially its legal creation required a royal charter, then an act of parliament and finally, after 1844, a company could be legally established by a relatively simple process of registration. Limited liability followed a decade later. This was the precious means by which industrialisation was enabled.
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Advanced economies everywhere seem to be led by politicians who are media competent but practically inexperienced. They seem not to have learned anything from the experiences of the past year, only yearning for a return to business as usual. But there are vital lessons and changes need to be made.

Recession: The much talked of double-dip morphed into talk of triple-dip and the lost decade, and, eventually in 2012, to the previously unthinkable notion that GDP growth might be a thing of the past for advanced economies. Systems thinkers warned of the classic systems life cycle characteristics which accompany permanent change from one phase (eg maturity) to the next (eg decline): for the first several time periods, the idea of permanent change is never accepted – ‘it’s a blip’, ‘a double dip’ – until the permanency of change is absolutely undeniable. By which time most opportunities for improvement have been lost. This scenario seems ever more probable, given the increasingly apparent limitations on earth’s capacities and the ever increasing demands placed upon it.
Continue reading Lessons for Advanced Economies from 2012 →