Can the genie be put back in the bottle? part III of the discussion of Collier's Future of Capitalism

Half-way through writing this post I discovered that the great Branko Milanovic was also these days thinking and writing about Paul Collier’s “The Future of Capitalism” but beat me by a day!

And another book has appeared suggesting that markets and the state (alone or combined) are not sufficient to deal with our social needs – by an ex-Governor of the Bank of India. It is The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave Community Behind; Raghuram G. Rajan (2019) the main thrust of which can be found in this article,

To someone with my background, this critique is an obvious one. Indeed its relative rarity reflects the grip which technocrats have developed on our minds these past few decades.  

Our collective memories have become so short these days, people need to be reminded of the “Big Society” (Cameron 2010) and “The Third Way” (Blair 1997) both of which were doomed to failure by virtue of their elitist support and origins - although the “Third Way” was more philosophically grounded by the writings of Anthony Giddens. It was also less focused on Britain – with support from not only Bill Clinton but also Gerhard Schroeder (as witness this 1998 manifesto)

Why the third way failed – economics, morality and the origins of the “big society”; Bill Jordan (2010) is a very thoughtful treatment of the experience…..

The last post reminded us all that the discussion about the respective roles of state and market goes back at least a hundred years (and was evident in deeds if not words in the late 19^th century as both the UK and Germany started to respond to working class pressures); and suggested that there were two ways we could look at what might be called the “communitarian” option – as a set of policies and beliefs; or as an historical settlement reflecting specific conditions.

My suggestion of “stress tests” for what is obviously a set of highly sensible propositions was, I appreciate, a bit opaque. In phrasing it in this manner, I was conscious of the charge which the famous Angus Deaton had already made of Collier’s and Rajan’s books – that the “genie (in this case of “meritocracy”) could not be put back in the bottle”… meaning exactly what?? It’s odd that he just leaves the (obvious) question dangling at the end of his comments..

Does he perhaps mean that we have as a society experienced certain new things we will not readily give up? If so, what things?

Or has something contaminated the appreciation we had previously for certain values and behaviour? If so, what exactly is this contaminant of “meritocracy”? Michael Young wrote his famous “Rise of Meritocracy” as a satire in 1958 - its full title is actually The Rise of Meritocracy 1870-2033 – an essay on education and equality).

Is Angus Deaton really saying that human nature has changed so dramatically since 1970 or so that we no longer have the capacity to choose our own future? Whatever happened to “free will”?

It is understandable that Etzioni was unable to persuade his fellow north Americans to adopt “communitarianism” in the 1990s – in “the land of the free” its emphasis on social responsibilities perhaps smacks too much of the country’s early Puritan settlers – the decline of whose spirit I discussed last week - and of the contemporary Amash sect

I sense a lot of historical whitewashing going on in these exchanges. Paul Collier is quite open about his contempt for leftist writing (and seems particularly hostile to Wolfgang Streeck, a favourite of mine) – which explains the absence of some obvious names from the index to his book.And the “Third Way” scribblers are also absent (despite their centralist position) presumably because they have been guilty of ideological sloganizing….
But why is Paul Hirst and his associationalism missing from the book  - despite a recent celebration of his work? Perhaps the publisher is too left-wing? Or the phrase “associative democracy” too narrow for the scope of Collier’s book? Such excisions from the history book don’t do anyone any favours…

Collier refers to a talk he was invited to give to the Danish social democrats in 2017 where he met the new leader whom he recently praised in this article – which also suggests their party as a good example of the sort of pragmatism which he considers European social democracy needs these days - although a lot of us thought that New Labour's emphasis on "triangulation" and "evidence-based" approach was as pragmatic as you get......
 Remarkably, my googling had just unearthed this fascinating history of the development over a 150 year period of “Associationalism” in Denmark

My point therefore about “stress tests” is that clearly some countries are more disposed to communal ideas than others. Take, for example, my own country – Scotland. We may be part of o United “Kingdom” but the “1707 settlement” expressly retained our educational and religious freedoms in which schooling, for example, has always been more open; one of the most famous books about this bears the title “The Democratic Intellect”. And we have also been more open to ideas of support for community endeavour – with community planning and social enterprise being amongst the central planks of the Scottish government for the past 20 years.

Indeed there is an argument that it is the smaller countries who are most able to offer the sort of support for civilised ideas of the healthy family, organisation and society which Collier has made the core of his book.