After 68, a lot of us expected
the future to be a cooperative one - but the 1980s turned out to be the Age
of Greed.
We all know about Nixon’s decision in
1971 to take the USA off gold – and also of the massive OPEC spike in the price
of oil a couple of years later. And some of us remember the UK’s financial “Big Bang” of
1986 which brought London into the eye of the financial system.
But few people remember that there was a time
in the 1960s when the question of the purpose of the company was a very live one –
with “market share” being considered the most important “number”, certainly not
share value. There’s a nice
little video here of Charles Handy reminding us that it was Milton Friedman
who articulated most clearly in 1970 the view that the purpose was to maximise
share value - and his acolytes who introduced the idea in 1976 of senior
managers being given “share options” as incentives.
Handy regrets the failure of people then to
challenge what has now become the scandal of the gross inequalities which
disfigure our societies - which Ferdinand Mount’s “The
New Few” quite rightly traces back to that period. Until that point, the ratio
of Directors’ salaries to average wages had been 40 to one for quite a few
decades – compared to the current obscenities of 1,000 to 1.
And Paul Collier’s “The Future of Capitalism”
reminds us that the question of the accountability
of the corporation remains a live issue…..
But I simply didn’t understand the significance of the younger Democrat’s disowning in 1975 of the classic American populist tradition – to which the last post drew attention - until reading The Atlantic long article 3 years ago on the subject.
It was at that point that I made the
connection with Robert Greene’s “generational
cycles”. Amazing the way the mind works……
The full version of Greene’s “The
Laws of Human Nature” can be read here.
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