The economic mainstream has flowed on its capital oriented way with relatively little deviation despite its manifest limitations, errors, omissions and downright falsehoods. And despite the occasional disasters to which it gives rise.
In the middle of last century, J M Keynes corrected some of the more apparent errors of the classical model, but his aim was improvement rather than revolution. He did argue powerfully that ‘the madmen in authority’ should accept the maintenance of full employment as their moral responsibility, but renegade he was not.
In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, Michael Tomasky suggested the lack of any alternative big theme gave the free marketeers a head start in shaping and continuing to dominate the United States economy. The free market big theme may have been planted by Adam Smith, but it developed on the open prairies of North America where land was the free resource – confirmed by the Homestead Acts – which drove the early development of the US economy. So the big theme was not just markets freed from government interference and control, but personal freedom to claim a bit of America and the right to defend it with guns to fight off its previous occupants, the native Americans. That tradition gave primacy to ownership. When Friedman declared that corporate officials had no social responsibility other than to make as much money as possible for shareholders, it was hardly a shot out of the blue, but the confirmation of a long tradition.
The takeover of British confectioner Cadbury, with its long and honourable history in British industry, from its Quaker origins to its death throes earlier this year, has been featured as the main topic of two posts on this site, and mentioned in passing on five others. It is a compulsive story which celebrates the satisfaction of greed, the naïve stupidity of ideologically driven government, the destruction of Britain’s real economy and its real jobs, and the fatalistic acceptance of all this by the population at large.
A recent article in The Economist pointed out that Britain, the original industrialiser for long in relative economic decline, owned 45% of the world’s foreign direct investment in 1914, but now has substantially less than 10%. The United States’ foreign direct investment peaked at around 50% in 1967 and is now less than half that. Today China (including Hong Kong and Macau) has a share of just 6%, but is growing fast. Britain and the United States might best be described as in the post-mature phase of their economic development. Such characterisation is also confirmed by the Anglo-American emphasis on finance and wealth ownership, rather than technology, customers and wealth creation. Those latter are the concern of more dynamically positioned economies, such as China and India, which are in the early growth stages of their development.
The idea that companies, if not all economic activity, exists to maximise the wealth of shareholders or owners, dominates the world of corporate governance and much else. Bankers and traders believe it. Industrial managers have been led to accept it. Universities and business schools preach it. It is part of the free market ideology, often identified by its origins, as the Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-American approach. And its many adherents claim it is the only system that really works. Shareholder value is, for them, the acid test, all that matters. All this is despite clear evidence to the contrary from Germany, Japan, China, India and many other jurisdictions.
Much of the literature on corporate governance argues that these other approaches are in fact converging on the Anglo-American model and even assesses the level of their maturity in terms of how closely they comply with the Anglo-American line. It’s all nonsense.
As Nobel laureate Paul Krugman pointed out ‘a country is not a business’. So why, he asked, do politicians think it is sensible to ask a successful businessman for advice on running the country? Why, for example, is David Cameron asking Sir Philip Green for his input? His views are clear and predictable, and of no relevance to running a successful economy.
Before the British coalition government’s proposed cuts were announced they were greeted by 39 top business people writing to the Daily Telegraph confirming that they would create the necessary jobs so as to make the public sector cuts work. That way tax rises might be avoided and long-term cuts in public sector activity achieved. For them, any reduction in tax and spend would be a Good Thing. Well, business people would say that, wouldn’t they! But were they expressing a seriously thought through strategy, or merely expressing the currently dominant free market fad?
Vince Cable’s closing speech to the Lib-Dem’s first in-government conference has been greeted by City and business types as ‘intemperate’, as ‘emotional language’ and ‘playing to the gallery’. But he is surely right to suggest that good real economy businesses are being destroyed for the short term gain of City speculators and their ‘accomplices’ who make fat fees from takeover deals. Cable is merely making a statement of truth, which has been highlighted several times on this site regarding particular situations such as the Kraft takeover of Cadbury.
Moreover, he is also right to suggest that, left to its own devices, capitalism tends to the establishment of monopolistic positions. Again, as is highlighted elsewhere on this site, you can have free markets, or you can have competitive markets. But you can’t have both. Competition has to be protected, or it will be destroyed by those same speculators and their accomplices.
The new rules on bank liquidity, now agreed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, will contribute to reducing banks’ risk-taking. But not a lot, and only slowly. Under pressure from the banks themselves, the rules have been softened and their implementation slowed down. Timidity in tightening requirements is justified on the grounds that too fierce and too rapid rebuilding of bank balance sheets would take too much out of the real economy and so contribute to the much feared double dip recession. But beware!
The forthcoming Oslo conference of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and International Labour Organisation (ILO) is to discuss ways of dealing with unemployment arising from the 2007-8 credit crunch. As noted elsewhere on this site, the question is one of emphasis between, on the one hand, repaying the public indebtedness which was rashly incurred as a result of private greed, and on the other hand, the protection and regeneration of employment, particularly for the most vulnerable.
Fighting for Fairness by Remaking the Real Economy 