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.

Communitarianism, anyone?

Is a communitarian agenda a possibility for British – or any – politics these days?

This question arises from the appearance in the past year of both Hilary Cottam’s “Radical Help” (2019) and Paul Collier’s “The Future of Capitalism – facing the new anxieties” (2018) - and of similar ideas being expressed in a variety of places over the past decade, including The “Kafka Brigade” (de Jong); clumsy solutions (Grint); “Reinventing Organisations” (Laloux); The “Big Society” (Cameron); and Red Tory/Blue Labour (Bond)

And, of course, behind all this lies the shadow, of the millenium’s “The Third Way” (admittedly more of a rhetorical than real moment); Paul Hirst’s writings of the 1990s on “associationalism”; the communitarian movement embodied in Amitai Etzioni’s writings and activities in the US in the latter part of the 20^th century; and those of GDH Cole in the pre-war period.

So there have clearly been a set of powerful – if peripheral - ideas with which we have been very reluctant to part ……could it be that their time is coming?

I want to explore this question – using three approaches

-       identifying the common, distinctive features of policies, values and behaviour which can be found under these various labels

-       reminding ourselves of the original debates more than 100 years ago around “community”

-       setting up some “stress tests” for what is obviously a set of highly relevant propositions

1.  The common agenda

Collier’s critique of “utilitarian technocrats and Rawlsian lawyers corroding” the values of cooperation is, for me, very apt  

As far as I am aware, no one has so far attempted to extract (from the disparate elements I’ve sketched above) a common agenda. This is my first, very rough attempt -

- a dramatic change in the balance of rights and responsibilities – with more effort put into strengthening citizen “obligations” and less into “rights”

- Increased role for voluntary organisations – and cooperative activity

- Greater role for mutualised societies; and for (smaller) local authorities

- Municipalisation of services such as water

- More support for social enterprise
- and for local banks
- taxation of rent-seeking activities

- less emphasis on university education and more on vocational education

- development in youth services of “role model” (mentoring)

- rethink on aspects of state regulations in health and safety field

- importance of values of “respect” and “trust” being developed (by example!)

2.   The original debate about “community”

Movement from the close, if not stifling, “community” of towns and villages of past centuries (governed by social norms of respect, trust and acceptable behaviour) to modern “society” - where relationships are looser and anonymous – was a product of industrialisation. And industrialisation took a good two centuries to work through – it was in the late 1980s that the term “post-industrial” was first heard.

It was German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies (1855-1936) who gave us the terms “Gemeinschaft” and “Gesellschaft” with which to make sense of that movement. And the French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) first used the term “anomie” in 1893 to describe this feature of modern society.

The blog has several times this year found itself exploring issues of community solidarity - which had been one of the priorities of my political activity between 1968 and 1990. Some social scientists were telling us, in the 1960s, that the process of clearing the old slums had broken a crucial system of mutual neighbourly support (although other forces were also at work); and that a new system of social support was needed.

This coincided with the establishment in the early 1970s of a new department in local government for such things which, in Scotland, was given a quite explicit “preventive” objective. I became Chairman of such a committee in 1971 and used it to ensure the appointment of community workers to try to build more of the spirit of community in areas whose residents were suffering from what was called in those days “multiple deprivation”

In 1977 the UK national weekly "Social Work Today" commissioned me to write a substantial article which argued that our democratic system was failing such citizens - and that political parties no longer performed some of the functions we had attributed to them. In the meantime a few of us had managed to develop a strategy which saw support for these communities deepening – a strategy which has been continued by successive Scottish governments… 

Only one of the reviews I’ve read so far of the Collier book questions its realism – but does so in a rather smart way which reveals all that’s worst in a book review –

Collier’s paragon of the wise and ethical centrist is Emmanuel Macron, a man who, fewer than two years into his presidency, has disastrously low approval ratings, is widely seen as a tool of the wealthy, and just endured the most destructive burst of popular outrage France has seen since 1968. If that analogy didn’t already look foolish when Collier was writing The Future of Capitalism in 2017 and early 2018, it certainly does now.

The dream of a post-ideological pragmatism is itself ideological, of course, but what’s most interesting about Collier’s proposals is that if implemented, they would require not a variety of business-friendly Macronism but something closer to the redistributive politics of Bernie Sanders. The blunt policy instrument Collier most regularly suggests wielding is taxation. But because he’s a serious economist writing a book and the imagined remit of the serious book-writing economist is to rise above politics, to “move beyond the tired binary of Right and Left,” in the equally tired phrase you always find in works like The Future of Capitalism, Collier can’t bring himself to subscribe to a leftist budgetary project. Il faut être absolument centriste.

In the end what emerges most forcefully from The Future of Capitalism is its past — namely, Collier’s deep nostalgia for the collective purpose of the postwar West, which he himself experienced as a child and young adult growing up in Britain. That sense of collective purpose was forged in the fire of World War II. The institutions that defined the postwar liberal order gained legitimacy from their incorporation within a collective project to preserve peace.

What project exists today that could command a similar consensus and simultaneously revive growth throughout the developed world? Even though consensus is proving enragingly tough to secure, the answer is obvious: climate change. But Collier has little to say on the issue, or indeed several of the other major gyrations affecting the global economy today. The threat of automation, for example, which surely demands at least some consideration if your subject is the future of capitalism, is confidently brushed aside in one sentence: “Robotics is, I think, unlikely to reduce the need for work — our wants are probably insatiable.”

But Nobel-ish Prize-winning economist George Akerlof has called The Future of Capitalism “the most revolutionary work of social science since Keynes,” which is both generous and wrong.

Collier says we need “radical new thinking” to get out of the mess we’re in — and we do — but he himself offers little more than tut-tutting social regressivism. Whatever good ideas The Future of Capitalism does contain struggle to emerge from the crush of their author’s monomania for the Trente Glorieuses.

Taxing the metropolis to fund the revitalization of small cities, giving tenants the right to buy houses at deep discounts: these aren’t bad ideas on their own, but how do we make them happen? The answer, of course, is through the political process, but on that The Future of Capitalism is by turns silent or blithely optimistic.

Collier’s good ideas remain undercooked because they have the misfortune of nesting in a book of political economy that has nothing useful to say about politics.

As I say, this is a good example of a bad book review - my definition of which is one which tells us more about the reviewer than the book! 

The post is already too long. Collier’s book is so important that that I will try to deal with the third of the “approaches” the post talk about in the next post 

update; just come across an essay on communitarianism on an amazing blog

https://theworthyhouse.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/On-Communitarianism-PDF.pdf

Capitalism - facing the new anxieties

I have just completed a book within 24 hours – the first time I have done this in many years. Before I reveal the title, let me offer a short para from page 201 which gives an excellent sense of the book’s focus

Capitalism last worked well between 1945 and 1970 - when policy was guided by a form of social democracy that had suffused through the main political parties (of Britain). Its ethical origins had been in the cooperative movement of the 19^th century created to address the urgent anxieties of the time.

Its narrative of solidarity became the foundation for a deepening web of reciprocal obligations that addressed these anxieties.

But then the ethical foundations of social democracy corroded – as its ethical leadership passed from the cooperative movement to utilitarian technocrats and Rawlsian lawyers. This ethics lacks resonance with people - and voters have gradually withdrawn their support.

The text then continues with what might seem a curious question – “Why did political parties not turn to pragmatism?” to which I will return later….

The book is “The Future of Capitalism – facing the new anxieties” by development economist Paul Collier who shows within a few pages the advantages such economists have over “normal” economists - he quotes extensively from the work of a social psychologist whose “Righteous Mind” I praised to the skies a couple of months ago and he is clearly familiar with works of moral philosophy and politics…..Such “intellectual trespassing” has been unheard of since the great days of Albert Hirschman!!

The author had been invited in 2017 by the editor of TLS to write a review of several books – a review which duly appeared as “How to Save Capitalism” and inspired him to keep pursuing the issues which had been raised in the books he had been given for review. 

Paul Collier is best known for his Bottom Billion – why the poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it? (2007) which one review put into excellent context in this way –

Before “The Bottom Billion”, the prominent economists’ debate about foreign aid was largely between Jeffrey Sachs’ passionate call for more assistance (“The End of Poverty” and his new “Common Wealth”), countered by William Easterly’s cautionary tales of aid gone wrong (“The Elusive Quest for Growth” and “The White Man’s Burden”). Collier’s Bottom Billion enters the fray with a very different kind of argument, calling for a variety of interventions, some of which are not really aid at all. Sachs wants more aid and Easterly wants less, but Collier wants different

And his disinclination to follow “the conventional wisdom” shows in his latest book which takes aim at both “left” and “right” ideologues – as well as technocrats, financiers, fat-cats and lawyers

There are three parts to the book – the first which looks at the “three appalling cleavages” which now divide societies which Collier designates as “geographical, educational and moral” which are not, for him,

“just problems I study; they are the tragedies that have come to define my sense of purpose in life, This is why I have written this book. I want to change this situation”

Part II is entitled “Restoring Ethics” and starts by reminding us that Adam Smith’s first book, prior to “The Wealth of Nations" was “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” which explored the various moral obligations find have no place in the economists’ rational calculator. He then argues that Jeremy Bentham is responsible for the subsequent wrong path taken by economics and then has short rather tantalising chapters on the “ethical state”, the “ethical firm”, the “ethical family” and the “ethical world”. In that sense it’s thoroughly in line with the thinking on the very recent post about healthy families, organisations and societies  - and indeed uses the same triple structure as Robin Skynner and John Cleese’s famous book on “Life – and how to survive it” (1990)

Part III is called “Restoring the Inclusive Society” and offers a range of interesting suggestions

I'll continue the analysis in future posts......

Reviews

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/economy/2018/11/paul-collier-move-left-economy-and-talk-language-belonging

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-future-of-capitalism-paul-collier/

https://www.usaidalumni.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Paul-Collier-book-review-by-Jim-Fox.pdf

http://www.bresserpereira.org.br/terceiros/2019/mar%C3%A7o/19.03-Contemporary-Capitalism.pdf

http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/index.php/2018/10/the-future-of-capitalism/

https://longreads.com/2019/02/19/maybe-what-we-need-is-more-politics/

https://www.interest.co.nz/opinion/98627/angus-deaton-asks-why-advanced-countries-around-1970-economy-no-longer-serves-most

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2019/06/government-reform-when-will-we-ever.html

The Incredible Lightness of the "Deep" State in Romania

I am today doing something unique in the blog’s 10 year life – commenting on an apparent murder case and the anger it has aroused in the troubled society of Romania in which I have been living for the past few years. For more than a week now, television programmes have had endless, back-to-back discussion of the tragedy – with camera shots lingering over the details of gardens and fields as various searches were conducted.

The blog has covered aspects of Romanian society and politics on numerous occasions – the last being this fairly comprehensive post on the country’s problems a couple of months ago. 

I am moved to offer this coverage of what is actually at least two murders because it reveals very starkly aspects of the “deep state” in this part of the world – and the huge difficulties facing those who want to hold that system to account

The initial source of my information is a post on the issue from a journalist friend of mine who runs the Bridge of Friendship blog. On this occasion he was sharing an important article (in a Bulgarian-based journal called “Baricada”) written by a Romanian journalist Maria Cernat. And my long-suffering Romanian partner, Daniela, has helped me make (some sort of) sense of the issue and its significance.

Nothing is ever as it seems here – and I have therefore added some “editorial” comments to the excerpts I have selected from the “Baricada” article which is very-well written and should be read in its entirety…..

Romania has been in a state of shock for more than a week, after a 15-year old girl – Alexandra Măceşanu, from the southern city of Caracal, was killed on July 25th. Alexandra had gone to a larger city for private lessons. Due to Romania’s general lack of public transport, she was forced to hitchhike back home. The government recently eliminated free regional transport and now private transport companies aren’t obligated to service routes which don’t generate a profit. That is how she was abducted by a 57-year old automobile mechanic, Gheorghe Dincă, who operated an unlicensed taxi service. He took her to a house in Caracal. In spite of the fact that Alexandra called the emergency phone number 112 a few times, police didn’t manage to pinpoint her signal immediately, and didn’t enter the house until the following morning, because of lack of permission from the observing prosecutor. In the 19 hours between the first call until police entered the house where she was being held, Alexandra was repeatedly raped and then killed.

Curiously, the article does not report on what happened next with Dinca being taken to the police station where he demanded to speak with one particular policeman - with whom he was then allowed to speak for one hour and to whom he confessed not only the murder but that he had burned her body (he also confessed to another murder with the victim’s remains also being buried in his garden). There is presumably a tape-recording of that hour’s highly irregular conversation – but we have to ask why on earth it was ever allowed. It has certainly allowed all sorts of conspiracies to emerge and circulate about "collusion" of police and "mafia" and dark networks......

The burned remains were taken to Bucharest and the victim’s DNA confirmed. Not surprisingly, however, the family dispute these results. As indeed the defence lawyers might obviously dispute the confession…..

I give these details simply to demonstrate the murky aspects of the operation of the Romanian state….The article continues.....

The case has shaken Romania not only because of the brutal abuse of the adolescent, but also because state institutions acted with inexplicable slowness, which enabled the criminal to follow his plan to completion. Alexandra phoned 112. It took the police 19 hours to intervene……

Three months prior, another young girl from the zone- Luiza Melencu, was killed by the same man. This horrible fact was publicized, along with a 2012 human trafficking case at the Deveselu military base. The base has been used by American air defence since 2011.

Romanian society is even more upset than it was in the case of the Colectiv nightclub fire, where more than 60 people died. Now various answers are appearing in response to the questions of who is to blame: some condemn the prosecutor, Cristian Ovidiu Popescu, who didn’t permit Alexandra’s rescue, refusing to issue a warrant to allow police access to the house. Police were made to wait for hours on the doorstep of the criminal’s house. Popescu was lauded by the former anti-corruption prosecution (DNA) chief, Laura Koveşi. To some people this means that he is from the movement #rezist (which was a main force behind the 2017 protests in support of anti-corruption – note of the translator). But others say that the police didn’t need a warrant, but could have entered the house out of the need to save a life. In that case, the blame falls on the Social Democratic party-ruled government.

The article doesn’t mention that Popescu was sacked immediately the media got hold of this information and a new prosecutor appointed who then seems to have enforced a 5-day closure of the house before a proper search could be carried out. This beggars belief – just imagine the outrage in northern Europe if a proper search was not carried out until 5 days had elapsed!!

The audio of the victim’s phone calls with the 112 emergency hotline operator and the police officer were released recently. This has sparked a huge debate about ethical journalistic standards since the parents initially agreed only to the printed version of the phone calls being released. The audio is almost unbearable to listen to. Alexandra called 112 three times. In one conversation she says she has been kidnapped and raped and the police officer tells her to hang up because she’s keeping the line busy and there are other people calling!

Then, as if this horror was not enough, the press released the recording of a phone call between one local chief of police and someone who is known in the city as a local head of an organized crime network. The gangster criticized the police while the officer humbly thanked him for his cooperation!

Ecaterina Andronescu, the Minister of Education from the Social Democratic party, the party which basically destroyed public transportation and left children such as Alexandra at the mercy of people who own cars, was sacked. Andronescu declared that she was taught as a child not to get into strangers’ cars! The cruelty of this declaration knows no bounds since Alexandra had no means of transportation due to the decisions of these politicians! 

At this stage I have two observations – the article fails to mention that this “gangster” actually operates a security company (under due legal authority) which is obliged to cooperate with the police and to respond to any police requests for assistance. Indeed it was after such an approach that the “gangster” actually identified and reported the perpetrator’s car to the police – leading to the reported expression of gratitude! Security companies are, at the best of times, "shady enterprises" and I am not suggesting that its boss in this instance was a model citizen. But, in the unforgettable words of a political colleague of mine in the 1970s - 

"we have to be careful with words - it's all we have!!" 

My second point is that it is simply untrue to imply that the Minister of Education “left children at the mercy of people who own cars” since this is the Minister who actually initiated the system of school buses some years ago…..But this tragedy happened during school holidays when that system was suspended (as happens throughout Europe during the summer vacations) 

Romanian journalists, it appears, can never miss an opportunity to take partisan shots…..

.

My previous posts on Romania have emphasised what a divided society it is – in the last few years the country has become very polarised with the implicit attitude that "if you’re not for us, you’re against us" 
The neutral mugwumps who want fair reporting are simply crushed between the 2 forces.
But please read the full article to see how it places the murder as what Maria Cernat, the author, calls a "symptom of:

-       a passive culture, in which neighbours and family knew about Dincă’s violence  against women (because he had a history of domestic violence), but didn’t react;

-        a profoundly vicious economic system, which generates inequalities that can be fatal for those who lack the good fortune of being born to the privileged elite;

-       the reactionary attitudes of politicians, who want half-baked solutions to serious problems – be it the #rezist camp, which seems to be inescapably locked into a pathetic slogan, “F*ck PSD” (PSD being the ruling Social Democratic Party – note of the translator)

-        the way, in which tragedies such as this one, lead to solutions such as absurdly giving the police even more force than they had before the tragedy;

-        an apparent strange cohabitation between the institutions of force and the thieves, who have escaped justice miraculously in many cases;

-        the trafficking of vulnerable persons, for whom gender and class are not simply social traits, but social determiners that could easily sentence them to a terrible death".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Forest

The State of the Fourth Estate

Journalists, ironically, don’t tend to get a good press – not according to various polls which rate public trust in various institutions and professions and which generally find journalism in the bottom of the league in such tables.

And Trump hasn’t helped with his constant refrain of “fake media!”

But, until recently, journalism (and the media generally) was recognised as such a crucial part of our system that it was known as the “fourth estate”….. But no more apparently….One recent article indeed referred to the “myth of the fourth estate”

This book chapter gives a good overview of the topic.

Over the years I’ve apparently devoted almost 20 posts to the subject – with more than half in the past 2 years (see below for a full list).  I know this because my very recent post on public services accused journalists of dereliction of duty and I used my “search” button to check out what I have been saying about them over the past decade,  In fact it’s remarkably measured – if not complimentary!

I recognise, for example, that the best writing generally has often come from journalists of the calibre of George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Joseph Roth and Walter Benjamin - well before the “new journalism” of the 1970s…….and writers such as Joan Didion and Svetlana Alexievich

Clearly there are journalists …and journalists…..The hierarchy probably starts with “writers” – with specialist “correspondents” having a certain prestige status - and the “run of the mill” sort traditionally known as….”hacks” (presumably from their habit of “hacking” away at the typewriter and with cigarette smoke enveloping them!!). I wonder, however, whether generalist television journalists actually warrant the title of journalist since they use images rather than words???

And people have switched from newspapers to television and the social media. The internet has decimated newspaper advertising and journalists’ jobs – to say nothing of killing investigative budgeting…….

Two other trends have been noticeable –

   -  first a growing number of people are turned off by the grimness of the news coming from their sets and want something more positive. A couple of years ago, for example, The Guardian started a series called The Upside with “good news” stories. But I confess my heart drops a bit when I spot such an item and I rarely click it!

-  And an increasing number of writers are turning to scientific or curious topics and producing fascinating books eg on things such as salt, silence, walking ….even history of economic ideas

Historian Timothy Garton Ash recently produced a large and worthy book exploring such themes (which, another mea culpa, I have not been able to persevere with). It’s called  “Free Speech – 10 principles for a connected  world” and attracted a long review here

We need also to be careful to distinguish journalists as individuals from the corporate structures which employ them.

Most of what might be called the ”sins of commission” (titillation, partiality, bias and downright criminal behaviour) are the results of owners’ and editors’ judgements which reflect their political and financial interests.

Journalists tend to more guilty of “sins of omission” (what they can’t be bothered writing about) and “sins of laziness” (living on press releases)

More specifically my posts have expressed the following concerns

·       Although coverage of what is too easily labelled “corruption” and the blunders of government is extensive, it is too often focused on titillating details - and fails to explore the underlying forces at work eg public spending cuts, ideology, government fashions…

·       articles recognising and exploring the possible effects of such coverage on public cynicism and fatalism are very rare. This raises wider issues about journalistic ethics..   

·       hundreds of thousands of academics and think-tankers (and a few consultants) have been devoting their energies to over the past 40 years to mapping the progress of reforming the public services. But only 2 of tens of thousands of books on the subject have been written by journalists

The archive on journalism

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2011/03/investigative-journalism.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2011/07/british-bread-oz-circus-and-bulgarian.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/03/fighting-big-brother.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/04/suborning-democracy.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/06/getting-under-skin.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2015/05/confessionals.html Pat Chalmers

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2015/05/is-british-journalism-dead.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/05/journals-worth-reading.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/08/in-praise-of-journalists.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/09/making-sense-of-global-crisis.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/03/why-we-should-not-be-so-cynical-about.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/03/brexit-and-reassertion-of-nation-state.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-writers-craft.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/11/kenneth-roy-voice-to-renew-faith-in.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-stuff-of-journalism.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2019/03/in-praise-of-literary-magazines.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2019/03/what-does-brexit-tell-us-about-ourselves.htmlhttps://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/02/bad-economics-and-journalistic.html

Looking for a positive purpose

I’m always on the lookout for books which challenge how we look at the world.  A few years back I read a really original book - The Puritan Gift (2003) – which told a powerful story of how and why American business had changed its values in the second half of the 20th Century. No less a figure than Russell Ackoff wrote a foreword calling it simply

“one of the best books I have ever read in my long life – a social history of the American nation which also doubles up as a commentary on managerial culture”

I blogged about it at the time but the book’s theme and message does deserve broadcasting….

It was written by two brothers (then in their 80s) who had migrated from Scotland in their youth and it argues that the mid-20th century strength of American business, and the prosperity and cultural confidence it created, was due to key characteristics inherited from the country's founding fathers, the Puritan dissenters. The authors list these characteristics as:

- a sense of moral purpose in life;

- a liking and aptitude for mechanical skills;

- collegiality, giving the group priority over individual interests; and organizational ability.

“The Puritan Gift is a rare ability to create organizations that serve a useful purpose, and to manage them well.”

Sadly but all too typically, the book seems to have been ignored by the management scribblers – although it is still in print. About the only person to review it seems to have been Diane Coyle to whose excellent blog I’m indebted for the following summary –

The book starts with a history of the early days and heyday of US corporations, using an Armory in Springfield, Massachussetts as a case study which illustrated the importance not only of technical know-how and innovation – but of good employer standards and collegiality – sharing know-how and best practice with other gun-makers.

One fascinating chapter describes the transplantation of this American approach to Japanese business through the actions of three communications engineers employed in the MacArthur occupation. The Japanese communications and electronics industry was remade in the image of the best of America, and the Hoppers attribute the success of the consumer electronics industry to the adoption of these management practices. A war-destroyed, impoverished country became the world's second biggest economy in the space of three decades.

Decay set in early, however, and the Hoppers' first villain is Frederick W Taylor. He started the process of turning efficient organisational structures into social hierarchies, with top managers increasingly less likely to be engineers or technicians working their way up from the shop floor.

Business schools continued this evisceration of the actual process of business, creating a professional cadre of managers, superior in status in pay, and with purely financial and abstract knowledge in place of the tacit skills and experience previously displayed by management cohorts. The downfall was completed by the steadily increasing celebration of greed, sucking the moral heart out of American capitalism.

Coyle completes her review by saying –

It's hard to disagree with the outlines of this argument, harder to know what to do about it. The final part of the book is a brief attempt to suggest some ideas, with a list of 25 principles of Puritan management. Most of these seem very sensible without setting the heart racing.

The key aspect of the Puritan Gift seems to be the sense of purpose. As John Kay has argued (in The Foundations of Corporate Success), a good business is one with a clear sense of purpose. The profits are a by-product, but without the core purpose there is no hope of sustained profitability.

Discussion about the purpose of companies ebbs and flows…..The notion of “stakeholders” was much discussed in the 1990s as a more useful concept than the much-criticised one of “shareholder value” which had emerged from the greedy 1980s. Such discussions do not these days attract much interest - but a much more interesting one hopefully got underway recently – partly sparked by talk of the “platform economy” and books such as Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organisations to which I dedicated a post a few months back.    

If I have one point to draw from my (relatively) long life, it is that we need to return to this fundamental question of purpose. And to take more seriously the question of the nature of the “good society”, the “good organisation”, the “good city”.

I know we get embarrassed by such phrases – so by all means let’s talk instead of the “healthy society”….. the “healthy organisation”……”healthy cities”…….(as did Robin Skynner and John Cleese in their 1990 book "Life - and How to Survive it!")

Update; apparently the British Academy started a new programme in 2017 on “the future of the corporation” I learned this from Paul Collier’s new book "The Future of Capitalism – facing the new anxieties” (2018) which, so far in my reading, I’m finding a very exciting read – imbued with a moral passion economists don’t normally like to display. Its opening pages use Jonathan Haidt’s analysis in “The Righteous Mind” to give one of the most incisive treatments of our present social malaise I have read in the past few decades.