Is our social DNA changing?

The book profiling “character” in older generations had me musing these past few days about what, if anything, could be said about trends in contemporary behaviour and social values.

There’s always something we can fault the latest generation with – for example the “attention deficit” which modern IT gadgets seem to develop…and how this might affect future “characters”…

More critically, surveys such as the World Values and Eurobarometer indicate a large and significant trend since the early 1970s toward more individualistic, selfish and less trusting societies….

Daniel Bell had warned us as far back as 1976 in his Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism  that the spirit of 68 was difficult to reconcile with business requirements but could never have anticipated the contempt with which businesses subsequently chose to treat their employees – with wholescale layoffs and casualization of the workforce.

Richard Sennett is a philosophical sociologist who has followed these developments for almost 40 years, starting with his “The Hidden Injuries of Class” (1972), a study of class consciousness among working-class families in Boston; then “The Corrosion of Character” (1998) which explored how new forms of work were changing our communal and personal experience.

 “Respect in a world of inequality” probed the relation of work and reforms of the welfare system; and “The Culture of the New Capitalism” (2006) provides an overview of these changes

Francis Fukuyama is a prolific, elegant and much misunderstood writer whose The Great Disruption – human nature and the reconstitution of social order (1999) is an important bit of evidence of the deep concerns at that time of where we were heading.

All of these, of course, were based more or less exclusively on analyses of the United States of America and it is important to look more widely if we are to understand this important question of how the DNA of the human race might be changing….

Reckless Opportunists – elites at the end of the establishment by Aeron Davis (2018) is a small book which ruthlessly exposes the almost criminal damage which a new breed of elites have inflicted on a once proud nation,

It is the result of twenty years of intense research, over 350 interviews with the heads of corporations, senior civil servants, journalists, politicians and public relations firms. In response to Brexit, Aeron Davis wrote this slim but telling volume in less than three months. It is, in effect, a short anthropology of how the United Kingdom’s elite became clueless at governing.

Davis’s report is thus a frontline account of the way the political, industrial, financial and media elites are disabled by their own culture and methods from acting in the collective interests of the country.

“No one seems to trust anything or anyone else’. Davis observes that

‘self-interest and competition has left politicians willing to destroy their parties, civil servants their departments, chief executives their companies, and journalists their publications’.

He then sets out to explain how the new elites undermine the institutions they head.

The reporting of quarterly returns by fund managers prevents long-term investment.

Within this world, leaders have to sell themselves continuously and rely on specialists in corporate affairs to attract investors. Communications  teams spend 70 per cent of their time ‘keeping stuff out of the papers’. One result is the fading of rooted expertise and the rise of short-term consultants. This shift, echoed in politics and government, is leading to a massive loss of institutional memory essential to self-belief. It is not just bosses that come and go at speed. In 2009, Davis wanted to find out more about weapons of mass destruction decisions in Iraq, only to find there was only one person still in the department with the relevant knowledge. Of twenty-five permanent secretaries at the time, eleven had been in the post less than two years.

The parallel, insecure worlds of government and commerce, are run on ‘selfdeception’, much of it embedded in the selfserving systems of ‘communication’. ‘Greater transparency’, Davis claims, only leads ‘to more mystification’. Finance directors manipulate the rate of return to serve the public listings of the share price, and when successful,move on before the consequences are realised. Many financial journalists are in effect ‘embedded’, writing to other specialists and reinforcing a small world that believes almost religiously in the free market.

How does it maintain itself? It works through numbers. ‘Econocracy’, not democracy is the name of the game, as targets are imposed on those below while being evaded by those at the top, who are anyway hired hands: CEOs with one- or two-year contracts.

Guy Standing developed the theory of the ‘precariat’ to describe the working classes of our time. Davis shows that those at the top, while they may be doing nicely in terms of incomes, face precarious employment.

Embracing economic models that work until they fail, constantly shifting, being fired, replaced or moving on, they live in constant fear of the chop. These assertions sound like a caricature, but are set out with compelling,

Davis’s gripping account reveals a country and an economy led by rootless lemmings taking the wider public with them over the cliff edge. Lemming-like behaviour is reinforced by accountants who provide steady support without taking responsibility. The government spends £800 million on outside consultations, while civil servants retire to circulate through its fee system, as their experience and contacts are hoovered up by the private sector.

Rootlessness is magnified by the sale of so many sectors of the UK economy to overseas investors: 54 per cent of company shares traded in 2014 were foreign owned and 98 per cent of FTSE 100 companies ‘have subsidiaries or joint ventures registered in overseas tax havens’.

After twenty years of interrogating the managers and politicians of the UK, Davis finds their leadership to be ‘solitary, rich, nasty, brutish and short’. Leadership could and should, he feels, be ‘connected, modestly paid, nice, civilised and long’. But it is not. He provides a two-page list of reforms that might help.

Building Character

Nobody seems to want to talk any more about “character” – perhaps it has shades of “self-discipline” and “self-control” when the spirit of the age continues to encourage the self to flourish?
So it took some courage for David Brooks to produce in 2015 a book entitled “The Road to Character” consisting of profiles of 8 people whose life demonstrates “character” including Dwight Eisenhower, Samuel Johnson (!), George Marshall (of Marshall Fund fame), St Augustine (!), the american woman behind Roosevelt’s New Deal (Francis Perkins), the charity worker behind “The Catholic Worker” (Dorothy Day) and George Eliot, the British writer.

It’s an interesting format – there’s something a bit forbidding about the 700 page full Biography, warts and all, which assails us these days…..There is, of course, a danger that you just get the highlights – what they call a “hagiography” – which happened in 2007 when Gordon Brown published his “Courage – eight portraits” profiling Mandela, Bonhoeffer, Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Cicely Saunders, Aung Ky, Edith Cavell and Raoul Wallenburg.

But Brooks’ book manages to give us rounded profiles. It starts by contrasting two sets of values –

-      what it calls “CV values”, the achievements with which we regale potential employers on our CVs

-      the “eulogy values”, the human qualities for which we would like to be remembered at our funeral (Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Really Effective People” makes a powerful start with this point.

Five of the individuals chosen by Brooks are from my parents’ generation to which I paid due tribute many posts ago

My generation, undoubtedly, had it too easy… Recent posts have recognised just how far we have fallen from decent moral standards… I have no real memory of Eisenhower but use these amazingly prescient words of his 1960 farewell Presidential address on the very first page of my Dispatches to the Next Generation

We . . . must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Brooks’ book includes this passage – as well as an important page in the Marshall section about the importance of institutions which took me back to a post of a couple of years ago about the importance of thinking institutionally. And about the wider issue of what I call “stewardship” ie the concept that we have a duty to hand anything, of which we have been asked to take care, back in the same condition as it was when we were entrusted with it…..Now there’s another idea we don’t hear much of these days!! 

All in all, it made me realise that Robert Greene’s otherwise excellent Laws of Human Nature focus exclusively on the negative aspects – and need to be rerun through a more positive lens….Wikipedia, for example, tells me that

“the Character Strengths and Virtues (CSV) handbook of human strengths and virtues by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, represents the first attempt on the part of the psychological research community to identify and classify the positive psychological traits of human beings. The CSV identifies six classes of virtue (i.e., “core virtues”), made up of twenty-four measurable character strengths.” 

The six core virtues are -

Strengths of Wisdom and Knowledge: Cognitive strengths that entail the acquisition and skilful use of knowledge

Strengths of Courage: Emotional strengths that involve the exercise of will to accomplish goals in the face of opposition, external and internal

Strengths of Humanity: interpersonal strengths that involve supporting and befriending others

Strengths of Justice:  that underlie healthy and harmonious community life

Strengths of Temperance: that protect against unhealthy excess and egotism

Strengths of Transcendence: that forge connections to the larger universe and provide meaning in life

https://demosuk.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/476_1505_characternation_web.pdf

Turning Points

I’m much exercised at the moment by the notion of “turning points” in recent history when “forces” were finely balanced and a decision or accident was enough to push the system on one direction rather than another…..

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.

Generational Cycles

I was so taken in July by Robert Greene’s “Laws of Human Nature” that I devoted a long post to it – which excluded his commentary on a pattern of generational cycles to which a 15^th century Arab author first drew our attention.

Ibn Khaldun noted that human beings pass through generational patterns – specifically four.

-       The first-generation revolts against the old order, and brings fresh, new ideas.

-       The second generation, having been part of the generation that saw change, wants to establish some form of order.

-       Then the third generation appears, they are more pragmatic and less connected with the past. They are interested less in ideas and more in building things. People become materialistic and individualistic during this phase.

-       The fourth generation comes along and senses that society has lost its vitality – that its values are wrong. People become cynical, and this lays the foundation for the revolutionary generation to disrupt the status quo. And the cycle repeats.

Today I want to tell the story of how my generation basically destroyed the world -

If we apply the generational hypothesis to our own times, by starting with

-       the silent generation that experienced the Great Depression and the World War as children, we notice that they were cautious, embodying a spirit that embraces order and stability.

-       The baby boomers, who grew up in the 60’s saw their parents as being too conservative. They became more open, idealistic, and adventurous.

-       Then came Generation X, they were recovering from the chaos of the 70’s. This generation rebelled against their parent’s idealism and controversy, seeing the holes in their philosophy, they embraced individualistic values and self-reliance (if not downright greed – my comment).

-       Then the Millennials emerged, distrustful of the individualism of the past after witnessing the terrorism that took place in 9/11 and the financial disaster of 2008, and valued security and teamwork more.

Fifty years ago, graduates like me didn’t need inviting to get involved in politics - although 1968 was marked for me not by student protest but by getting elected to a town council. The older generation patently needed replacing, we thought, and we were the ones to do it. This was the period of the Penguin exposes of what was wrong with British society – and of a whole variety of Royal Commissions beavering away at reform of the various systems of trade unions, broadcasting, universities, industry etc

My first taste of real power was 1971 (as a committee chairman) although I was also holding down a position as an academic which gave me the opportunity to absorb the new thinking about political economy and public economics which was then being articulated in the States. Social science was still new then – and economists still few in number. We had, sadly, a certain arrogance about the new tools at our disposal and toward our elders…….Tony Crosland had been my hero – author of "The Future of Socialism" (which followed James Burnham in arguing that management rather than ownership was the issue) had been published in 1956....... 

And in the States, a new generation of politicians arrived in Washington in 1975 – “the Watergate Babes”….who considered those who had borne the Democrat’s flag for the previous decades as “old-fogies” who no longer deserved a place in power…..

An article in the Atlantic magazine recently gave a wonderful sense of the intellectual mood which was around then

In 1974, young liberals did not perceive financial power as a threat, having grown up in a world where banks and big business were largely kept under control. It was the government—through Vietnam, Nixon, and executive power—that organized the political spectrum. …. suspicion of finance as a part of liberalism had vanished.

The story starts with the newly-elected young Democrats targeting in 1975/76 one of the great stalwarts of the Democrat part, Wright Patman, who represented the proud tradition of American populism- 

The story of Patman’s ousting is part of the larger story of how the Democratic Party helped to create today’s shockingly disillusioned and sullen public, a large chunk of whom is now marching for Donald Trump……….
 In 1936, Wright Patman authored the Robinson-Patman Act, a pricing and antitrust law that prohibited price discrimination and manipulation, and that finally constrained the Walmart of its day from gobbling up the retail industry. He would go on to write the Bank Secrecy Act, which stops money-laundering; defend Glass-Steagall, which separates banks from securities dealers; write the Employment Act of 1946, which created the Council of Economic Advisors; and initiate the first investigation into the Nixon administration over Watergate.

Far from being the longwinded octogenarian the Watergate Babies saw, Patman’s career reads as downright passionate, often marked by a vitality you might see today in an Elizabeth Warren—as when, for example, he asked Fed Chairman Arthur Burns, “Can you give me any reason why you should not be in the penitentiary?” 

……..Patman was also the beneficiary of the acumen of one of the most influential American lawyers of the 20th century, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. In the 1930s, when Patman first arrived in Washington, he and Brandeis became friends. While on the Court, Brandeis even secretly wrote legislation about chain stores for Patman. Chain stores, like most attempts at monopoly, could concentrate wealth and power, block equality of opportunity, destroy smaller cities and towns, and turn “independent tradesmen into clerks.”

In 1933, Brandeis wrote that Americans should use their democracy to keep that power in check. Patman was the workers’ and farmers’ legislative hero; Brandeis, their judicial champion. ….Brandeis did for many New Dealers what he did for Patman, drafting legislation and essentially formalizing the populist social sentiment of the late 19th century into a rigorous set of legally actionable ideas. This philosophy then guided the 20th-century Democratic Party.

Brandeis’s basic contention, built up over a lifetime of lawyering from the Gilded Age onward, was that big business and democracy were rivals. “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few,” he said, “but we can’t have both.” Economics, identity, and politics could not be divorced, because financial power—bankers and monopolists—threatened local communities and self-government.

This use of legal tools to constrain big business and protect democracy is known as anti-monopoly or pro-competition policy.…..

J.P. Morgan’s and John D. Rockefeller’s encroaching industrial monopolies were part of the Gilded Age elite that extorted farmers with sky-high interest rates, crushed workers seeking decent working conditions and good pay, and threatened small-business independence—which sparked a populist uprising of farmers, and, in parallel, sparked protest from miners and workers confronting newfound industrial behemoths. 

In the 20th century, Woodrow Wilson authored the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Federal Reserve Act, and the anti-merger Clayton Act, and, just before World War I intervened, he put Brandeis on the Supreme Court. Franklin Delano Roosevelt completed what Wilson could not, restructuring the banking system and launching antitrust investigations into “housing, construction, tire, newsprint, steel, potash, sulphur, retail, fertilizer, tobacco, shoe, and various agricultural industries.”

Modern liberals tend to confuse a broad social-welfare state and redistribution of resources in the form of tax-and-spend policies with the New Deal. In fact, the central tenet of New Deal competition policy was not big or small government; it was distrust of concentrations of power and conflicts of interest in the economy.

For decades, Patman had sought to hold financial power in check, investigating corporate monopolies, high interest rates, the Federal Reserve, and big banks. And the banking allies on the committee had had enough of Patman’s hostility to Wall Street.

Over the years, Patman had upset these members by blocking bank mergers and going after financial power. As famed muckraking columnist Drew Pearson put it: Patman “committed one cardinal sin as chairman. ... He wants to investigate the big bankers.” And so, it was the older bank allies who truly ensured that Patman would go down. In 1975, these bank-friendly Democrats spread the rumor that Patman was an autocratic chairman biased against junior congressmen. To new members eager to participate in policymaking, this was a searing indictment.

Not all on the left were swayed. Barbara Jordan, the renowned representative from Texas, spoke eloquently in Patman’s defense. Ralph Nader raged at the betrayal of a warrior against corporate power. And California’s Henry Waxman, one of the few populist Watergate Babies, broke with his class, puzzled by all the liberals who opposed Patman’s chairmanship. Still, Patman was crushed. Of the three chairmen who fell, Patman lost by the biggest margin. A week later, the bank-friendly members of the committee completed their takeover. Leonor Sullivan—a Missouri populist, the only woman on the Banking Committee, and the author of the Fair Credit Reporting Act—was removed from her position as the subcommittee chair in revenge for her support of Patman.

“A revolution has occurred,” noted The Washington Post.

Over the next 40 years, this Democratic generation fundamentally altered American politics. They restructured “campaign finance, party nominations, government transparency, and congressional organization.” They took on domestic violence, homophobia, discrimination against the disabled, and sexual harassment. They jettisoned many racially and culturally authoritarian traditions. They produced Bill Clinton’s presidency directly, and in many ways, they shaped President Barack Obama’s.                 
The result today is a paradox…… the destruction of the anti-monopoly and anti-bank tradition in the Democratic Party has also cleared the way for the greatest concentration of economic power in a century. 

“A revolution has occurred,” noted The Washington Post. 

Update; Just discovered this highly relevant book The Fourth Turning – an American prophecy – what the cycles of history tell us about america’s next rendezvous with destiny  by W Strauss and N Howe (1997)

How did we allow them to get away with it?

Ferdinand Mount is an eminent member of the English political elite. He wrote the Conservative Party's 1983 election manifesto and led Thatcher’s Policy Unit for a few years. He is not the sort of person you expect to find  penning in 2012 an explosive book called “The New Few – a very British oligarchy” and arguing that the salaries of the Business and financial elite are obscene and totally unacceptable.

I had picked up a remaindered copy of his book last week and soon realised that, when I wrote recently about Burnham’s 1941 “The Managerial Revolution”, I had forgotten that it was based on an earlier book – “The Modern Corporation and Private Property” published in 1932 by Princeton law Professor Adolf  Erle and his Harvard economist friend Gardiner Means – which basically transformed how the world understood corporate power.

Until then, everyone believed that company shareholders were all-powerful. Berle and Means exploded that myth and proved that the managers had gained the upper-hand. I remember the respect in which we held that book in my economics course in the early 1960s…

“The New Few” not only tells that story but goes on to remind us that, in the 1980s, new financial devices such as Investment Trusts and the consolidation of Pension Funds placed immense power in the hands of another set of managers (those in the financial sector) who cosily worked with the Directors of companies to do exactly what they wanted – not least in matters relating to their own remuneration…  

Time was when the maximum ratio between the boss’s pay and that of the average worker was about 30 to one. How many people realise that that ratio is now almost 1,000 to one??? Totally and absolutely indefensible.

Mount then moves the focus to banks and financial institutions with a little chapter suggesting that the system has suffered from “three illusions” –

-       That markets knew best

-       That big was beautiful

-       That greater complexity meant more progress

And goes on to indicate that there have always been four “escape routes” from financial disasters

-       Laws to regulation monopolies and mergers

-       Proper ratios between reserves and loans

-       The level of reserves considered “prudential”

-       Separation  of bank activities between “basic” and “speculative”

The Vickers’ Independent Commission on Banking was set up in 2010 to explore some of these questions and reported a year later. 

There seems to be mixed views about whether they (and subsequent government actions) achieved significant change. 

This academic says no – and Vickers says yes but not quite enough….

I’m not an expert on such questions but my feeling is that inertia won out….

Just Words

A bit of light relief this morning….when no fewer than 2 stories about language and punctuation caught my eye at first light and reminded me of another a few weeks back and my own little “sceptic’s glossary” of business and political words which are used to keep us “in our place” ie down

First, the Pope appears not to like adjectives – at least not “authentic” which I confess I quite like. He certainly doesn’t like the qualifying “authentic Christian”

“We have fallen into the culture of adjectives and adverbs, and we have forgotten the strength of nouns … Why say authentically Christian? It is Christian! The mere fact of the noun ‘Christian’, ‘I am Christ’ is strong: it is an adjective noun, yes, but it is a noun.

“The communicator must make people understand the weight of the reality of nouns that reflect the reality of people. And this is a mission of communication: to communicate with reality, without sweetening with adjectives or adverbs.”

So far, so Orwellian…in the best sense of George Orwell’s classic guide to clear expression and thinking - “Politics and the English Language” – written in 1946.

But I was bit taken aback by another statement which runs as follows -

 “But what should communication be like?” he said. “One of the things you must not do is advertising, mere advertising. You must not behave like human businesses that try to attract more people … To use a technical word: you must not proselytise. It is not Christian to proselytise.”

I’m sure a lot of missionaries will have something to say about that!

It was in fact only a couple of months ago that the newly-appointed Leader of the House of Commons, one Jacob Rees-Mogg set out to his staff come basic rules of language. He doesn’t want to see the following words or phrases – “hopefully”, “due to”, “meet with”, “got”, “equal”,

I actually have a lot of sympathy with people who get upset by some words which have crept into our language in the last few decades - although Moggs' selection is just a little bit....eccentric,,,There are lots of others I would rather have in my sights 

Thirty Six years before Orwell, Ambrose Bierce was another (American) journalist whose pithy and tough definitions of everyday words, in his newspaper column, attracted sufficient attention to justify a book “The Devil’s Dictionary” whose fame continues unto this day.

A dentist, for example, he defined as “a magician who puts metal into your mouth and pulls coins out of your pocket”. A robust scepticism about both business and politics infused his work

And at the millennium, I started to include in my project documents a little glossary questioning the jargon being used by consultants in the “institution-building” business which has become “JustWords - a sceptic’s glossary and bibliography for the fight against the pretensions and perversities of power”. That contains a lot of references to other gems such as The Devil’s Financial Dictionary by Jason Zweig (2015)

In 2007, the Local Government Association felt it necessary to recommend that 100 words be banned (not the same thing as book burning!!), And two years later it had expanded the list to 200 words -. Some of the words have me baffled (I have not lived in the UK for 30 years!) but I find this is a quite excellent initiative. The offensive words included -

Advocate, Agencies, Ambassador, Area based, Area focused, Autonomous, Baseline, Beacon, Benchmarking, Best Practice, Blue sky thinking, Bottom-Up, Can do culture, Capabilities, Capacity, Capacity building, Cascading, Cautiously welcome, Challenge, Champion, Citizen empowerment, Client, Cohesive communities, Cohesiveness, Collaboration, Commissioning, Community engagement, Compact, Conditionality, Consensual, Contestability, Contextual, Core developments, Core Message, Core principles, Core Value, Coterminosity, Coterminous, Cross-cutting, Cross-fertilisation, Customer, Democratic legitimacy, Democratic mandate, Dialogue, Double devolution, Downstream, Early Win, Embedded, Empowerment, Enabler, Engagement, Engaging users, Enhance, Evidence Base, Exemplar, External challenge, Facilitate, Fast-Track, Flex, Flexibilities and Freedoms, Framework, Fulcrum, Functionality, Funding streams, Gateway review, Going forward, Good practice, Governance, Guidelines, Holistic, Holistic governance, Horizon scanning, Improvement levers, Incentivising, Income streams, Indicators, Initiative, Innovative capacity, Inspectorates (a bit unfair!), Interdepartmental surely not?), Interface, Iteration, Joined up, Joint working, level playing field, Lever (unfair on Kurt Lewin!), Leverage, Localities, Lowlights (??), Mainstreaming, Management capacity, Meaningful consultation (as distinct from meaningless?), Meaningful dialogue (ditto?), Mechanisms, menu of Options, Multi-agency, Multidisciplinary, Municipalities (why?), Network model, Normalising, Outcomes, Output, Outsourced, Overarching, Paradigm, Parameter, Participatory, Partnership working, Partnerships, Pathfinder, Peer challenge, Performance Network, Place shaping, Pooled budgets, Pooled resources, Pooled risk, Populace, Potentialities, Practitioners (what’s wrong with that?), Preventative services, Prioritization, Priority, Proactive (damn!), Process driven, Procure, Procurement, Promulgate, Proportionality, Protocol,

Quick win (damn again), Rationalisation, Revenue Streams, Risk based, Robust, Scaled-back, Scoping, Sector wise, Seedbed, Self-aggrandizement (why not?), service users, Shared priority, Signpost, Social contracts ,Social exclusion, spatial, Stakeholder, Step change, Strategic (come off it!), Strategic priorities, Streamlined, Sub-regional, Subsidiarity (hallelujah); Sustainable (right on!), sustainable communities, Symposium, Synergies, Systematics, Taxonomy, Tested for Soundness, Thematic, Thinking outside of the box, Third sector, Toolkit, Top-down (?), Trajectory, Tranche, Transactional, Transformational, Transparency, Upstream, Upward trend, Utilise, Value-added, Vision, Visionary,

And what about coach, mentor, drivers, human resource management, social capital, tsar ???? Anyway – a brilliant initiative (if you will forgive the term)

And in 2009 a UK Parliamentary Committee actually invited people to submit examples of confusing language which they then reported about in a report entitled Bad Language! 

The final gem which hit me this morning was this great piece on the semi-colon and the art of punctuation

Uncharted Waters

Last month's "prorogation" may not have been, in strict parlance, a “coup” – but the UK Supreme Court judgement today on Johnson’s suspension of parliament was historic, unanimous and damning. The suspension was unlawful – and the Houses of Parliament should and will resume their operations – from tomorrow.

For the umpteenth time (what a strange phrase!), we are all left pondering the question – “What Next?” At this stage, I am surprised that none of my foreign readers (namely 95% of my readership) have posed the obvious question for the situation in which a Parliament has consistently rejected the Government’s flagship Brexit Deal (and also No Deal) – for nigh on a year……As well as a proposal for a General Election.

Namely what is wrong with the idea of a Coalition or Government of National Unity?

There are two levels of answer. The first – rather fatuous one - is that it’s just not English!! Unlike the Europeans, they don’t do consensus. It’s part of the imperial tradition…It’s all or nothing…..none of these pansy compromises,,,,

The second more serious answer has me grasping for the path-dependency model which is used to explain why countries as diverse as Italy, Poland, Romania and Russia have had difficulty adjusting to the requirements of political modernity.

88 years ago (in 1931) a National Government took office in the middle of the Depression, headed by a Labour Prime Minister (Ramsay MacDonald) who had presided for 2 years over a minority Labour government supported by the Liberals - but his 1931 Cabinet consisted of Ministers drawn from the 3 main parties. MacDonald was branded a traitor by the Labour Party and subsequently expelled.

The experience has scarred the Labour party ever since – and made it very difficult to consider coalitions – let alone a National Government…..

But it's still amazing that you hear so few voices making such a call...in other countries it would by now have been deafening and irresistible....
But, then, the UK is not normal - and the victorious plaintiff correctly emphasised that the issue had once again demonstrated the need for a written constitution. But we all know that will never happen...And who said the Brits were pragmatists????

Update; I loved the reaction to the brooch worn by the woman who presided over the Supreme Court judgement – particularly the potential Shakespearian reference

New Economic Thinking - part V of this series

Let me return to the list of books I suggested last week were key reading for anyone wanting ideas with which the socio-economic systems which rule us might be more effectively challenged and changed.   

I realise that it will strike many as an odd collection – some are descriptive; others prescriptive. Some (Bregman, Collier, Mander) are easy to read; others (Arrighi, Gibson-Graham) much more demanding. Some go into great depths on the source of powerful economic ideas (Blyth, Davey, Mason) whereas others explore the practicality of economic alternatives (Cumbers, Labour party, Laloux, Mazucatto, Restakis, Tirole). Some focus on political institutions (Dorling, Wainwright); others (Kennedy, Srnkek, Streeck) take a much wider sociological perspective. And I don’t necessarily agree with them all – eg Mulgan

So why are they on the list? Simply that they illustrate the variety of ways in which the search for a better way can be approached and of which we need to be aware. The diagram in this post makes the point, as always, much better graphically. It is the same one which heads this post - but much easier to read

I was heartened by this article in June about the support developing in Britain amongst younger leftist thinkers for a new economic model… It starts with a bold assertion -

For almost half a century, something vital has been missing from leftwing politics in western countries. Since the 70s, the left has changed how many people think about prejudice, personal identity and freedom. It has exposed capitalism’s cruelties. It has sometimes won elections, and sometimes governed effectively afterwards. But it has not been able to change fundamentally how wealth and work function in society – or even provide a compelling vision of how that might be done.

The left, in short, has not had an economic policy. Instead, the right has had one. Privatisation, deregulation, lower taxes for business and the rich, more power for employers and shareholders, less power for workers – these interlocking policies have intensified capitalism, and made it ever more ubiquitous. There have been immense efforts to make capitalism appear inevitable; to depict any alternative as impossible.

In this increasingly hostile environment, the left’s economic approach has been reactive – resisting these huge changes, often in vain – and often backward-looking, even nostalgic. For many decades, the same two critical analysts of capitalism, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes, have continued to dominate the left’s economic imagination. Marx died in 1883, Keynes in 1946. The last time their ideas had a significant influence on western governments or voters was 40 years ago, during the turbulent final days of postwar social democracy.

Ever since, rightwingers and centrists have caricatured anyone arguing that capitalism should be reined in – let alone reshaped or replaced – as wanting to take the world “back to the 70s”. Altering our economic system has been presented as a fantasy – no more practical than time travel.

And yet, in recent years, that system has started to fail. Rather than sustainable and widely shared prosperity, it has produced wage stagnation, ever more workers in poverty, ever more inequality, banking crises, the convulsions of populism and the impending climate catastrophe. Even senior rightwing politicians sometimes concede the seriousness of the crisis. There is a dawning recognition that a new kind of economy is needed: fairer, more inclusive, less exploitative, less destructive of society and the planet.

“New Thinking” about the economy has been going on since at least the new millennium see, for example the New Economics Foundation which some, however, have seen as a bit too close to corporate power. But, from my position outside the UK, it was the Labour Party manifesto of 2017 that gave the first real sense that things were definitely changing. And last year's Open Democracy’s 190 page New Thinking for the British economy was clear confirmation.

Explaining the genesis of the new collection an excerpt from which was published on CommonSpace yesterday), Macfarlane says: “What we were trying to do with this book is synthesise some of the best thinking out there, across a host of important policy areas. Crucially, we weren’t just looking at the traditional levers of economic policy – trade, finance, industrial policy, although we do look at all those as well. We [also] took a broader approach and asked what are the forces that shape the power dynamics and political economy of the UK today. So, we looked at things like racial inequality, media reform, constitutional issues, our care systems… A broader look than what you might typically get.

“We were asking what is the emerging consensus on what a post-neoliberal economy looks like – a diagnosis of what the problems are today, what the vision for change is, what policies we need to get there, and crucially, some strategic thinking about how we get from here to there. What are the critical paths for the first 100 days of an incoming government? We all know neoliberalism is bust, but then how do we move the conversation forward?”

To the staid Brits, many of the ideas in these texts will be almost revolutionary but are in fact commonplace in France and Germany.
Michael Albert is a name I came across in the 1990s as a celebrant of a “Rhenish capitalism” and reflects in this 2009 piece on post-capitalist alternatives. I’ve just noticed his latest book Practical Utopias – strategies for creating a desirable society; M Albert (2017) which looks to be an update of 3 volumes he wrote a few years back of which this is the first Fanfare for the Future vol 1 (2012)

And this was a useful German briefing from 2010 discussing the “solidarity economy” in Europe as a whole with a rather softer left update more recently

And the Americans are also leaving the Brits behind…The Brookings Institute is a very staid American Foundation but has just produced a fascinating analysis (of 23 pages) challenging the "market paradigm" and suggesting that the country has a choice between 3 models “all of which reject the primacy of the markets” – what the author calls first “Social democracy (or democratic socialism)”; then “democratic liberalism” (a curious term for a slightly more relaxed version of the mixed economy than social democracy; and, finally, “social capitalism”. You can read “Capitalism and the future of democracy” here.

And a few years earlier, The Next System project ran A New Cooperative Economy written by someone I remember from the UK Guy Dauncey

Looking again at the 20 odd titles in last week's table, I notice that the most insightful and best written are those outside what we've learned to call "bubbles" - whether those are academic, political, media or whatever.
Quite frequently in the blog I have emphasised how much I’ve learned from the painful process of straddling boundaries

The lesson seems to be that those who "trespass" (like AO Hirschman) over several borders can definitely see further!

Further reading

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/06/jeremy-corbyn-labour-party-city-of-london

People get ready – preparing for a Corbyn Government; C Berry and J Guinan (2018)

https://newleftreview.org/issues/II90/articles/bhaskar-sunkara-project-jacobin.pdf 2014

http://renewal.org.uk/files/Ren26.2_01GuiganandONeill.pdf

https://www.academia.edu/38315422/Joe_Guinan_and_Martin_ONeill_2019_-_From_Community_Wealth_Building_to_System_Change_Local_Roots_for_Economic_Transformation_--_forthcoming_in_IPPR_Progressive_Review_Spring_2019_pre-publication_version_

What's in a Name??

 “Capitalism”…I started, but the barman hopped out of a pipkin

“Capitalism”, he countered…”That’s a flat and frothless word

I’m a good Labour man, but if I mentioned capitalism

My clientele would chew off their own ears

And spit them down the barmaid’s publicised cleavage”

“All right” I obliged “Don’t call it capitalism

Let’s call it Mattiboko the Mighty

……..

The poem finishes…

This was my fearless statement

“The Horror World can only be changed by the destruction of

Mattiboko the Mighty,

The Massimataxis Incoporated Supplement

And Gumbo Jumbo the Homely Obblestrog Spectacular”

Audience Reaction was quite encouraging

Adrian Mitchell “Come on Everybody Poems” 1953-2008

Some time ago I suggested that all references to words ending in “ism” or “ist” should be banned in discussions – on the basis that they had, these days, become mere insults and likely, as a result, to polarise rather than assist conversation.

It was a serious point I was making – brought home in the current American Democratic party debates for the Presidential nomination. One article suggests that Saunders, to distinguish himself from Warren, needs to clearly name his enemy….capitalism – although it’s not so long ago that Republicans were advised to stop using that particular term.

The Financial Crash of 2008 is still with us and has certainly made it easier to use the word (capitalism) which had been very much celebrated until the new millennium when it started to acquire its current negative connotation

In my youth, I was a Young Socialist ( a member of the Labour party’s youth wing) – but it was not a term I used of myself. I was a “social democrat”…a “Labourite” and very much opposed to the “Hard Left” on the fringes of the party who were always proud to label themselves “socialist”. Of course, if forced to choose between the two extremes, I would have to plump for “socialist” but was happy to occupy the middle ground – even if it meant accusations of being a “mugwump”

I’m currently trying to find a decent readable book to recommend to my readers about the shape of the “better system” we need to replace the offensive thing which currently rules our lives…..and realise how difficult it is to find a term for that “thing”. Paul Collier’s “Future of Capitalism” is one of the contenders – to which I devoted a series of posts last month. He’s very much a pragmatist; is happy to use the “C” word in his title but rarely (if at all) uses the “S” word.

Another contender is Jerry Mander’s The Capitalism Papers – Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System (2012) which I am now rereading for purposes of comparison (As you can also since the book can be read in full by tapping the title).

His opening chapter (pp8/9) tells the story of a friend who said to him “I hope you’re not going to use the “C” word!” which inspired me to this post a few years ago.

Mander goes on to make the important distinction between “Big Capitalism” (the multinationals) and small and medium-sized business – what others (like Geoff Mulgan) call “bad” and Good” Capitalism

I suddenly remembered that the famous playwright GB Shaw had written a book called The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism almost a hundred years ago – and wondered if it might tell me something.

I should warn you that, far from being a short, punchy pamphlet, it runs to more than 500 pages and that its contents sheet alone - normally 2 pages at most – runs to 33 pages. This because of the charming habit of giving the reader a synopsis of each chapter – and there are no fewer than 84 of them!

A modern journalist, in a mercifully short article, suggests some parallels with the post-crash world

But I want to persevere with my question – why do we have so much difficulty finding a word to describe a more sensible and acceptable system than the one which has had us by the throat for so long????

It’s a silly question I know – since the obvious term (“socialism”) has been maligned by the cleverest marketing of the corporate elites..…and that those who continue to use the term do so almost as a virility symbol….

The key question, therefore, is what term should be used to attract the support not only of the activists but of the huge numbers of others who are, very reluctantly, supporting the populist parties???  

Well certainly not “The Third Way” – nor “Diem25”!!

It’s interesting that one of the American websites trying to develop an alternative is called The Next System……..

Paul Mason is by no means the only person who has taken to using the phrase “post-capitalism” but the phrase is no more than a gentle indication we are in a transition phase – it says nothing about where we SHOULD be going….

And few people realise that it was the father of management Peter Drucker who first wrote (in 1993) about The Post-Capitalist Society. I’ve just discovered the full book on the internet – so will have to refresh my memory on its contents but it certainly isn’t about socialism!