Now is the time for a less selfish capitalism By Richard Layard

[Demeter]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3f6e2d5c-0e76-11de-b099-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

Published: March 11 2009 20:02 | Last updated: March 11 2009 20:02

What is progress? The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has been asking this question for some time and the current crisis makes it imperative to find an answer. According to the Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment, progress means the reduction of misery and the increase of happiness. It does not mean wealth creation or innovation, which are sometimes useful instruments but never the final goal. So we should stop the worship of money and create a more humane society where the quality of human experience is the criterion. Provided we pay ourselves in line with our productivity, we can choose whatever lifestyle is best for our quality of life.

And what would that involve? The starting point is that, despite massive wealth creation, happiness has not risen since the 1950s in the US or Britain or (over a shorter period) in western Germany. No researcher questions these facts. So accelerated economic growth is not a goal for which we should make large sacrifices. In particular, we should not sacrifice the most important source of happiness, which is the quality of human relationships – at home, at work and in the community. We have sacrificed too many of these in the name of efficiency and productivity growth.

Most of all we have sacrificed our values. In the 1960s, 60 per cent of adults said they believed “most people can be trusted”. Today the figure is 30 per cent, in both Britain and the US. The fall in trustworthy behaviour is clear in the banking sector but can also be seen in family life (more break-ups), in the playground (fewer friends you can trust) and in the workplace (growing competition between colleagues).

Increasingly, we treat private interest as the only motivation on which we can rely and competition between individuals as the way to get the most out of them. This is often counterproductive and does not generally produce a happy workplace since competition for status is a zero-sum game. Instead, we need a society based on positive-sum activities. Humans are a mix of selfishness and altruism but generally feel better working to help each other rather than to do each other down.

Our society has become too individualistic, with too much rivalry and not enough common purpose. We idolise success and status and thus undermine our mutual respect. But countries vary in this regard, and the Scandinavians have managed to combine effective economies with much greater equality and mutual respect. They have the greatest levels of trust (and happiness) of any countries in the world.

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Lord Layard is at the London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance. He has written ‘Happiness’ (2005) and co-authored ‘A Good Childhood’ (2009)

[begin_within]

1. I don't see how it's possible because the essence of capitalism is taking more than your share.

[Big Blue Marble]

5. How do we determine what is our share?

Clearly, nearly one of us in the Western World have taken more than our share of the earth's resources.
And yet most of us are quite resistant to reducing our life style to that of the third world.

We hope, rationalize, that we can bring up their standard-of-living closer to ours while denying the burden
on our planet to do so.

I strongly disagree that essence of capital is taking more than your share. That is far too simplistic.
The essence of capitalism is that the private owners of capital are allowed a fair profit for investing
their capital in the production of goods and services.

What we have today is a far cry for this simple tenet of basic capitalistic theory. It is oligopolistic capitalism
on steroids and we must find a way to make it more democratic.

[begin_within]

7. From each according to his/her ability, to each according to his/her need

I can't remember if that's Aristotle or Plato

[BlooInBloo]

2. Asking a scorpion to not try to sting you is just dumb, as the frog found out....

Don't waste time trying to change scorpion nature, just take steps to REGULATE the damn scorpion.

[TBF]

3. Impossible to regulate a scorpion, it's too dangerous. View it in a museum (zoo)

as a relic of the past and learn from the experience. Evolve - consider a system that is more favorable to most rather than slaving away for the few greedy elites who own everything.

[BlooInBloo]

4. It's funny because you self-refuted.

"Visit it in a ... zoo."

[jody]

6. Agree that unconstrained capitalism coupled with greed and a political system that lets the

obscenely wealthy purchase through campaign donations a majority of the votes in our Senate and House does not "form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity".

On the other hand any form of central planning that substitutes the opinions of bureaucrats for the freely made decisions of We the People regarding what products and services we MUST purchase will not work if we take the failed attempts of Russia and China as a reference point.

IMO and to the extent possible we should encourage capitalism but constrained so that any single business entity cannot grow so large that they can declare, "We are to big and important to fail so We the People must pay our debts."

Without those constraints, the game of capitalism is simply heads corporations win and tails We the People lose.

That's on the production and operations side which yields all the products and services we consume.

On the other side, I support We the People who through our elected representatives achieve a more equitable distribution of the profits obtained through constrained-capitalism focused on such key sectors as health, education, welfare.

[bemildred]

8. Less-selfish Capitalism is socialism.

Why not just admit it? It's still not Communism, it's "moderate".

[Demeter]

9. Actually, It's Called a Mixed Economy, or a Regulated One

Take the best of each and blend them together, using each feature in its best aspect.

[bemildred]

10. Well, a lot of people are going to call it "socialism".

Because you are going to wind up putting something other than maximizing profit first. So why not bite the bullet? I mean, I don't object to "mixed economy" either, you are just trying to balance various "values" in an equitable way that still allows the profit motive as one of the values one has to balance.

[Demeter]

11. No Doubt, But They'll Get Over It

And it will join Social Security and Medicare as a Third Rail kind of issue.

[bemildred]

12. And we'll all be better off.

I do think employee-owned enterprises are a great idea, but other arrangements work too. It's the corporation as a sort of medieval fiefdom that seem to cause the trouble.