I am amused by a headline in the FT this morning that says:
Japan grapples with lack of entrepreneurs
The article is about red tape, but I think that misses the point. The fact is that around the world we don't need vast numbers of new entrepreneurs right now. The fact is that much of what entrepreneurs can make right now is of limited social value, often uses scarce resources in wasteful fashion, and meets artificially generated wants and not fundamental needs.
The last point is, perhaps, the most important. People need healthcare, education for life, homes, flood defences, social safety nets, care and more. Candidly, they need few more phones (at least in developed countries) or many more apps, or gadgets, or even coffee shops in many parts of many cities. Entrepreneurs are, therefore, not what we want.
We need teachers, social workers, carers, librarians, builders working for local authorities to make new homes and repair existing ones, planners, and so on. It is they who are delivering the value in our society now - because they'e fulfilling need, not wants.
We are a society in poverty that the market cannot correct. The sooner we realise it and stop our fixation with market solutions and realise that it is through the community, wioth government as its agent, that most pressing wants can be met the better off we'll be.
Don't get me wrong: I don't want to stop entrepreneurs. But fixating on them is a sign of our problem, not the solution we're seeking and realising that is important.
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Well said Richard – we got ourselves in such a mess becauase our politicians believe that we are here to serve the economy and the rich and their insatiable greed , rather than serve us and our needs.
“…it is through the community, with government as its agent…”
That is the crux of the problem. Government should be the agent of the community, appointed by the community, legitimised by the community, to be the servant of the community.
Until that becomes the reality, all else is patching over what is broken.
Didn’t work very well in Cuba though did it? Lots of government spending on education, health, support for the needy etc etc and entrepreneurship banned. The policy prevented the rise of rich entrepreneurs, and maintained an unbelievable level of income equality. But it failed to deliver prosperity.
Did you notice the trade blockade that may have also had an impact?
And the amazing health care outcomes despite it?
It’s not a simple choice between one extreme and the other; e.g. social support vs prosperity or entrepreneurship vs equality. In the US and the UK the neo-liberal approach delivers a modicum of prosperity and social security (now in steady decline for millions) and obscene levels of inequality.
We need to stop batting simplistic opposites back and forth and start talking about what kind of human society (not just economy) it is that people (not the markets) want and deserve. Tit-for-tat examples of extreme imbalances don’t help in that discussion.
I am all in favour of business – 100%
Saying billionaires harm business is not tit for tat – it’s opening understanding on the required direction of change
Richard,
I didn’t say nor mean to imply that billionaires harming society was a tit-for-tat view. My comment was aimed at jonny maddox. It’s citing Cuba as any kind of useful example that’s tit-for-tat, a cheap, worn out shot. I too support business 100%, but only as part of a fair and just society. Cuba’s brand of socialism has long since been dismissed as any kind of exemplar. But there’s also more to a fair and just society than the sterile neo-liberal fixation with entrepreneurs and money, to the exclusion of any other social and human issues, such as being able to afford librarians and libraries after the billionaires have been allowed to milk us dry, (Mary Snell string).
Ah….I see now….in moderation I curiously have to guess what you are replying to
Richard,
I was replying to jonny maddox, the first post in this string, trying to join in what I thought was a broader discussion, not a two way conversation, and there was nowhere more suitable to put it. Not all posts are sequential replies to your own immediately previous remarks, they may also reply to the original commentator (often, as in this case, made in support of your own views), and I certainly did not intend to require guesswork on your part. I would have thought there was enough from jonny maddox’s comments in my first post, ‘social support vs prosperity or entrepreneurship vs equality’, to indicate clearly who I was responding to and where I was coming from. Evidently not.
With regret, I won’t in future be trying here to ‘contribute to opening understanding on the required direction of change’. The blog format isn’t up to such understanding.
I’m afraid the trade blockade was just used as an excuse for the failure of the socialist economy to deliver the hoped for benefits. Trading with the Soviet Union and with Venezuela more than compensated for the lack of trade with the US.
That is just nonsense
You make good points, if you are talking about Britain. But if you are talking any wider than that, I’m going to disagree on two grounds:
1. If entrepreneurial behaviour equates to running a real business dealing in real products rather than synthetic financial derivatives – I’m in. There are too many places where the understanding of business now equates to playing games with spreadsheets – Jersey is one, you can name others.
2. Small jurisdictions like Jersey are sleepwalking towards a crisis. Practically everything here is imported, and the rising price and increasing scarcity of oil is going to make this impossible to sustain. If the G8 do not regulate the tax havens out of business, the price of living here ultimately will make the banks reconsider.
It needs people with vision and entrepreneurial skills to create a sustainable future. I would rather suspect that Japan has rather similar issues, albeit on a much larger scale.
But in Jersey, entrepreneur means the man who arranges your funeral…
Point taken – most especially about Jersey
The two issues government is avoiding debate on are how foreign policy causes terror risk and how government serves corporations not people. They can’t avoid these much longer. Good news is bright school leavers now know state/corporate system is broken and are up for the challenge. A wind of change with a can-do attitude is coming, but might take a few years.
You make the points with consumate clarity, Richard. The last thirty years has led to equating the ‘entrpreneurs’ with celebrity like figures whose ruthlessness we are suppossed to admire -the Lord Sugar phenomenon represents a certain veiw of the human that will stop at nothing, and has tireless energy for self promotion. Similar to celbrity cooks who put their proteges through hell as if that is reality! You are seen as a lesser being if you don’t have those ‘go-getting’ qualities. This ‘red in tooth and claw’ attitude has been bolstered by neo-Darwinism. Lets hope you are right, Franklin, that our young are able to change this.
Oh dear. Where to start?
How will these “needs” be funded?
Starting from the beginning, not the end is usually the best way.
The idea that the private sector pays for the public sector is nonsense – as Modern Monetary Theory shows that is just a myth
People create value – whoever they work for, and not because they work for another person
So doesn’t this imply the public sector does need the private sector (and its tax contribution) as its self perpetuating if only we had more public sector workers?
If I understood your logic I might reply
I am sorry but that is such an enormous claim would you mind clarifying what exactly you mean?
People create value no matter what they do? So Egyptian peasants forced into building the pyramids for the Pharaohs actually created value? They made Pharaonic Egypt richer by leaving their fields and crops to drag large rocks across the desert?
Perhaps that is not realistic. The costs of conscription on the economies of East Asia is a real issue. Some countries like South Korea and Taiwan take all young men and stick them in the Army for a few years. Hong Kong and Japan do not. North Korean men have to serve something like sixteen years in the military. As they are working for the State, are you claiming that this is not a drag on the economies of South Korea, Taiwan and especially North Korea? That if we took every young man and forced him out of the productive economy and into the military for a decade, this would have no impact on economic production or growth in the UK?
That seems a strong claim.
Could you please cite some authors who write on this modern monetary theory?
MMT is easy to find on the web
People have always found ways to meet needs for thousands of years, long before capitalism came into existence and if it doesn’t manage to destroy us, will do so long after it has ceased exist….
So in your world are you really saying that having,say, a new librarian would be much better than a UK version of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs? That seems to be the implication of what you are saying but it would seem an unusual position.
Yes
Jobs and Gates are bad for economies
They suck income from others and redistribute others – when in both cases much of the technology was anyway stated funded
And we can pay for librarians without them – until we have full employment money is not a constraint – when we have it tax is a necessary constraint condition
So a significant proportion of the world’s computing business adds no value as it’s a zero sum game?
Not at all
You referred to Gates and Jobs
The PC revolution would have happened without either of them is my point – and without them the rewards would have been more equitably shared
Mary – are you implying Bill Gates worked on his own? Ideas don’t evolve in a way that belongs to one person. If you look at history you will see that similar ideas pop up in different places at similar times. The notion that one person does it all and deserves a salary at least 300 times more than the avarage wage of his/her workers is arrant nonsense. They may be more aggressive and quicker at getting the patents out while they ditch their collaborators to cash in on the big money, but in reality we rely on each other.
@Simon Cohen, no I wasn’t implying that. Nowhere did i say they did it on their own. I can still take the view though that a UK Bill Gates or Steve Jobs would be more useful (value) to the UK than a single average librarian. I would go further as well. I think they are worth more to a country than 300 librarians. I am sorry if that makes me a bad person in your view.
It doesn’t make you a bad person
But the fact is that billionaires have destroyed more value than they have created in most countries in the last thirty years – by being the winners taking all
Last November, in the run up to the US Republican Convention and in support of someone called Mitt Romney, I heard a Florida Republican politician say on TV: “A strong economy is the foundation of a strong society”.
It’s that kind of ‘back to front’, ‘cart before the horse’ thinking, people serving money rather than money serving people, prevalent among far too many politicians (elected to serve us, not business), common among many business people (who believe profits are more important than customers), and even expressed by some commentators here, that is at the root of very many current UK and global problems.
I wonder how long it will take them to catch on.
What are you talking about Mary S! Richard is spot on, as usual, about Gates! He is poster boy for Neoliberal Tax Avoiders. Despite being worth over £100bn he has only paid over £6billion in US taxes. Why hasnt he been taxed on the full £100bn! Why would we want such a man in the UK… i cant see an upside! A librarian has to pay tax on his/her full salary (circa £20k), hence less avoidance and better for the UK economy. Simples! There is no other analysis!
Plus Microsoft has yearly net income of £25bn a year, why would we want that headquatered in the UK, can guarantee this would just add to the tax gap.
Finally it is well know that he plans to give his wealth away before he dies! Why do you think he wants to do that…..you guessed it so he doesnt have to pay tax on it!!
Mary Snell’s comments are very revealing and she may have hit on the root of the inequality in our current society.
Too much emphasis is placed on materialism, so much so that it is now used as the only yardstick by which to measure the worth of one human life in comparison to another.
I would be interested to know how Mary values the contributions of say Mozart, Einstein or Crick to our society in comparison with those of Gates or Jobs?
@Theremustbeanotherway. That is a misunderstanding of my comment. It was directed at whether we need more librarian’s as a society or more entrepreneurs. To be clear all human life is equal. Perhaps “worth” in your sentence is also not currently rewarded by just money too but other things were more important to the individuals you mention?
By the way you should really mention Rosalind Franklin when you mention Crick (or Watson)
True, I should have mentioned Rosalind Franklin and we can go further and include Marie Curie.
I don’t worship entrepreneurs. They have their place in society and they make a valuable contribution. Should they be paid 300 times or more than a librarian. No not in my opinion.
Invariably, entrepreneurs rely on others to make, market and sell a product.
Perhaps you would like to read this link on librarians.
http://www.jtillustration.com/rex/library_history.html
With regard to entrepreneurs, this link may be of interest too.
http://www.udibod.com/2012/03/18/genghis-khan-the-ultra-entrepreneur-1162-1227/
Enjoy! 😉