Tag Archives: capitalism

Davos reading

Posted on by

Once, I went to Davos. Like Lewis Lapham, I didn’t have to pay as I was then a “prospective supplier of supportive adjectives” ie. a journalist. For those who haven’t read it, whether Davos attendees, wannabees, or refusniks, Lapham’s 1998 book [amazon_link id=”1859847102″ target=”_blank” ]The Agony Of Mammon: The Imperial Global Economy Explains itself to the Membership in Davos[/amazon_link] is an instructive perspective on the phenomenon. I like the Walter Bagehot quotation he opens with: “Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.”

[amazon_image id=”1859847102″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Agony of Mammon: The Imperial Global Economy Explains Itself to the Membership in Davos, Switzerland[/amazon_image]

I’d certainly never pay to go back to the WEF-fest up the mountain, and have never since been offered the zero-price option. Perhaps I’d be vain enough to accept such an offer, but I hope not. There is something highly corrupting about it – more so, despite the interesting comparison John Gapper draws in today’s FT (Davos: Infotainment, Not A Conspiracy) – than is the case with other elite ‘clubs’ such as TED. I think it’s simply the sheer amount of money required to get there and concentrated there. Enough money to reflect real power.

Freaks of Fortune

Posted on by

Jonathan Levy’s [amazon_link id=”B00AFS6LXW” target=”_blank” ]Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America [/amazon_link]is a fascinating book. It is a history of the commodification of risk, the development of life insurance and, in time, the growth of wider markets for risk. Professor Levy, a Princeton historian, portrays the modern risk-based finance industry as the counterpart of the freedom of individuals in a capitalist society to manage their own lives. That responsibility of individuals for their own destiny meant the growth of institutions offering them the tools to do so, and the translation of highly individual risks into standard types of policy or financial instrument.

The early chapters start with the origins of risk management in marine insurance, and how those specific origins shaped early legal precedent in considering whether insurance policies should pay out. A cargo of slaves was considered insurable property whereas a working man who had taken out a policy could not successfully claim against his employer after being badly injured in an accident, because he had voluntarily taken the job, which paid a premium because of the dangers. The book’s descriptions of the historical examples are the best thing about it, revealing as they do patterns of thought so different from our own. It is particularly interesting about the link made between emancipation and the assumption of personal responsibility for risk – including by slave owners making the opposite argument, that slaves need never worry about their future as owners bore all the risks! – although I’m sure there is room for different interpretations of the historical record. (I’m a long way out of my areas of expertise here.)

There is also an interesting section on the early opposition to a secondary market in life assurance policies in the US – one existed then in the UK – and for the same kind of moral arguments that Michael Sandel raises in [amazon_link id=”184614471X” target=”_blank” ]What Money Can’t Buy[/amazon_link]. The need for policy holders to be able to gain some value from their policies (otherwise, why would they not just save money?) led to the early application of actuarial science to calculate surrender values. Indeed, early on most life policies taken out by farmers would benefit their creditors – they were used to raise working capital.The book goes on to trace the shift from a mass of small insurance companies starting up in the 19th century to the machinations of the big trusts at the turn of the century.

The underlying theme of the book is that, if we don’t put our faith in Providence, or rely on a master (whether a Feudal lord, or a slave owner, or indeed a husband), then we will of course seek other means of mitigating life’s risks. Some of these are a constant, such as storms or illness, and financial services have replaced a combination of fatalism and community support. Other risks are inherent to capitalism – “an economic system that thrives of radical uncertainty”, as the author describes it. Mitigating these means capitalism is inherently financial. However, individual responsibility for risks arising from personal choices will always have to be supplemented by collective responsibility, at a minimum by regulation of the financial services industry.

The epilogue points out that there was an era when risk seemed to have been tamed, in the 1960s, and the previously common phrase ‘freaks of fortune’, meaning the unexpected events that cause upheaval in every life, dropped out of use. The phrase lies dormant still, but that moment of stability in capitalism has passed. It is certainly obvious, post-crisis, that the state is the “risk manager of last resort”.

So it’s a fascinating story. I must say that the book was heavy-going despite the masses of terrific stories it tells – I think it’s because one has to chew quite a lot to extract the marrow of the argument, and my brief summary has no doubt not done it justice. Still, it’s worth perservering, with so much food for thought, and the stories are great. I would never have imagined finding a history of life insurance at all interesting, and it turns out to be very much so.

[amazon_image id=”B00AFS6LXW” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America[/amazon_image]

Culture and capitalism

Posted on by

The obituaries of Albert Hirschman (like this obit in the FT) pointed me to some of his other books, in addition to [amazon_link id=”0674276604″ target=”_blank” ]Exit, Voice and Loyalty[/amazon_link]. I’ll be ordering [amazon_link id=”0691015988″ target=”_blank” ]The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph[/amazon_link], of which the blurb says:

“In this volume, Albert Hirschman reconstructs the intellectual climate of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to illuminate the intricate ideological transformation that occurred, wherein the pursuit of material interests –so long condemned as the deadly sin of avarice –was assigned the role of containing the unruly and destructive passions of man”

[amazon_image id=”0691015988″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph[/amazon_image]

More importantly, Deirdre McCloskey cites it in her marvellous book [amazon_link id=”0226556743″ target=”_blank” ]Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World[/amazon_link], in a section describing the emergence in the 18th century of “the emergence of the economy as an explicit object of concern,” the separation of the economic or commercial sphere from the political and social. Although capitalism is as out of fashion as it has been in a generation, it’s salutary to remember its origins as a positive social and political trend incorporating personal freedom, cultural innovation and material prosperity. As McCloskey put it in her previous book, capitalism is founded on [amazon_link id=”0226556646″ target=”_blank” ]The Bourgeois Virtues[/amazon_link]. Our current problems stem from the severing of market economics from its social roots.

McCloskey’s book has a Ferdinand Bol portrait of late 17th century Dutch wine merchants on the cover. I think I’ll need to go downstairs to ferret out Simon Schama’s [amazon_link id=”0006861369″ target=”_blank” ]The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age[/amazon_link], which I’ve not looked at for ages.

[amazon_image id=”0226556743″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World[/amazon_image]

[amazon_image id=”0006861369″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age[/amazon_image]

Capitalism, democracy and pessimism?

Posted on by

On Wednesday evening I attended Professor Raghuram Rajan’s Wincott Lecture, which had the provocative title Are Capitalism and Democracy Failing Us? (He’s also written a couple of columns outlining the themes, in the FT and Project syndicate.) Professor Rajan is the author of [amazon_link id=”0691152632″ target=”_blank” ]Fault Lines[/amazon_link], a terrific and thought-provoking book about the political economy origins of the sub-prime crisis – a crisis he was one of the economists to predict publicly, in 2005.  So clearly it’s worth paying careful attention to what he has to say.

[amazon_image id=”0691152632″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy (New in Paper)[/amazon_image]

The argument in the lecture was that there is an interaction between capitalism and democracy. In good times this is positive, the beneficial economic and political structures are mutually reinforcing. But the crisis is giving us technocracy in some countries, oligarchy  in others, and these political structures are depleting the sense of fairness and trust on which democracy has to rest. There is an urgent need to restore to the middle classes a sense of opportunity, he argued.

The lecture covered the hollowing out of jobs in the middle of the labour market, the division of people into those who tell computers what to do, and those who are told what to do by the computers. Prof Rajan cited Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz’s book on skills, [amazon_link id=”0674035305″ target=”_blank” ]The Race Between Education and Technology[/amazon_link], and Charles Murray’s [amazon_link id=”0307453421″ target=”_blank” ]Coming Apart[/amazon_link]. He tied the problem of the squeezed middle into his own book, Fault Lines, arguing that politicians had responded to the hollowing out of the income distribution by means of credit – affordable housing, loans for consumption. In Fault Lines, this was presented as the political mechanism that paved the way for the subprime crisis. Consumption inequality did not increase as much as income inequality.

The question now is whether the technocratic policy responses we are seeing, from structural reforms in Eurozone countries to all the waves of QE, will end up only violating the quasi-property rights of those on low and middle incomes? It seems so – bondholders have been more or less entirely protected, and default avoided at almost any cost, and bank bonuses are as yet barely affected, whereas the rest of us can be sure we will get some mix of higher taxes and inflation. This mix, Prof Rajan argued, would undermine the legitimacy of capitalism and democracy.

An obvious question raised by Roger Bootle in his comment on the lecture – and in his own book ([amazon_link id=”1857885589″ target=”_blank” ]The Trouble With Markets: Saving Capitalism From Itself[/amazon_link]) which distinguishes between creative and merely distributive varieties of capitalism – is whether there is an alternative path. He agreed with much of the lecture, saying financial capitalism had become baleful in its influence. The answer, he agreed, appears to be education, although, as Professor Rajan pointed out, this is an inevitably slow response. But only an increased supply of highly skilled people can tackle the soaring skill premium and the elite society that has been shaped by the shortage of people who can tell the computers what to do.

Personally, I would add institutional and governance reform to the list – it is imperative to find policies that will have a visible impact much faster. (I talked about this in my Joseph Rowntree Foundation lecture earlier this year.) But yes, certainly education. Very few young people emerge from education systems equipped with the cognitive and non-cognitive skills they need now; indeed, a shocking number do not even have the basic skills to fill ‘low-skill’ jobs, according to employers. And its hard to be optimistic that any country has figured out for sure yet how to deliver better education. When we do, it will still take 15 or 20 years for it to affect the labour market.

So, a stimulating, but pretty depressing evening.

Professor Rajan, at the Wincott Lecture