IPPR's Commission on Economic Justice has issued its interim report this morning. It's attracting some welcome publicity, largely because the Archbishop of Canterbury, who sits on the Commission, has been willing to write in support of it.
There are a number of reasons to welcome the report. First that's because it includes some useful new data, especially on inequality, which is a major theme of the work. As this table shows, incomes have not yet got anywhere near recovering their pre-2008 crisis trend:
And as this table shows, this is not quite unique to the UK, but we're an exception for being in this situation:
Second, this is because the report is saying something that the left (and I am putting IPPR in that category) needs to reiterate often, which is that the broken economy we have was created by choice. There is nothing inevitable about neoliberalism, austerity or policy that has created a divided country. That may be a familiar theme on this blog but far too many in the country still think Thatcher's TINA - There Is No Alternative - is true. Ministers and their loyal media supporters pump that out as if austerity is an inevitable fact of life when it is not.
Third, the report suggests that seventy years after the post-war transformation of the economy and thirty five years after Thatcher changed it again this is the tme for the next major change to the economy. I do, of course agree, but this is where the report runs into trouble which it will have to address before the final version is out next year, complete with recommendations.
As it is the report is clear that we need greater economic justice; a better sharing of rewards; measures to tackle the gross economic inequality in the UK; a fairer and more progressive tax system; a new industrial strategy; better institutional cooperation, and more besides, but what it also makes clear is that this transformation has to take place without a guiding philosophy to direct it. 1945 had Keynes. 1980 had Hayek and Friedman. 2017 has no equivalent: no description and no recognisable ethos apart from social justice around which to cohere.
The question I have is whether that matters? Or, is it a strength and not a weakness? Can change only happen if there is an 'ism' attached? Or can a principle guide a process that will have, by definition, to be broad based when experience has shown that dogma divides, come what may? In the absence of an alternative it may have to, but what I suggest in that case is that this be positively embraced. This requires care, but it's possible.
I think it is possible to want a strong state and believe that the private sector, if properly regulated, has an enormously important role to play in the economy.
I do believe that there is little merit in polarity for the sake of it: indeed, one of my great frustrations with some commentators on this blog and in social media more generally is their apparent conviction that the world is black and white when every experience I have of it suggests that this is only rarely the case. Most of the time compromise is essential to make life work. Usually there are multiple solutions to problems that might work and we cannot know which will be best in advance. And closed mindedness as often ignores another person's humanity; certainly as often, if not more often, than it is a defence mechanism against the risk of abuse.
The whole IPPR report is premised, even if it does not explicitly say so, on the idea that abuse has taken place, and I do not dispute that. Of course it will take robustness to address that. But I seriously doubt the alternative requires a robustness that means nothing we recognise will be left behind. What is required is transformation. In the absence of an 'ism' this needs to be guided by simply expressed themes. And from my brief reading this is where I think the report does not work. It does not say in sufficiently direct terms what those themes are. It describes the basis for process. It suggests reforms, like necessary attention to the tax system, well. But it has to be clear that if it is to succeed in narrative building why these pragmatic exercises that recreate and reform many ideas that have worked but which require re-nuancing now become something greater than a set of admin reforms.
Justice, fairness, equality, sustainability and the right to a life free from the oppression of excessive debt and rents should motivate ths work.
So too should a focus on the meeting of the need we all have for supportive communities that encourage people to flourish.
But what hangs all this together? It has to be the principle that we care for one another that is so alien to neoliberalism.
So I get to an 'ism' after all. This report is about caring, in all its meanings. Maybe Careism is what it's about. And maybe that is the 'ism' that we need to challenge neoliberal philosophy that has so obviously been built on the idea that no-one should care a damn about anyone else.
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Of course I welcome the IPPR report, just as I welcome this post, Richard. After all I spend time promoting Equality North West, a part of the Equality Trust so fairness, reducing inequality and working against neoliberal economic dogma is what we do.
And ‘Of course’ I agree with everything you and the report says here, especially this; ‘we need greater economic justice; a better sharing of rewards; measures to tackle the gross economic inequality in the UK; a fairer and more progressive tax system; a new industrial strategy; better institutional cooperation, and more besides’. Spot on.
But it’s here that I suspect your problem starts; ‘if it is to succeed in narrative building ..’
because the unspoken premise is ‘to cause change to happen one needs an over-arching narrative’ which channels the activity involved in the appropriate direction. This is, I venture to suggest, a mistaken assumption about the nature of the change in question.
With hindsight we can identify ‘neoliberal economic dogma’ as the cause of monetarism, austerity economics and the global financialisation agenda which has prevailed for the last 35 years BUT that’s just a convenient label we apply for understanding post facto, it does NOT describe how it came to ascendancy in dominating economic thought. That’s not how the change happened.
It happened on the ground; it happened as the confluence of a smallish number of people (in global terms, 1% is a small number) swimming in a small pool and reaching a number of tentative then increasingly strong and confident monetarist policy positions which pointed in roughly the same direction in opposition to the prevailing Keynesian paradigm. They funded an array of think-tanks, used an array of captured media and swayed political and policy opinion to their way of thinking with funds in a host a different ways but, importantly for us to understand, did so individually for much of 2 decades and only towards the end in increasing cases collectively. No overarching plan or narrative was needed or existed; this is where the conspiracy-theorists jump the shark. The Bilderberg Group, Soros, whoever they aim their tin-foil hat attention towards, never did set this out as a plan then execute it; it developed organically not directedly. This is most often how long-term and substantial social change occurs.
The balance of influences on certain players at certain times, the conditions in other words, prompted a series of reactions and responses in a narrow subset of the population which resulted in a growing movement. Systemic conditions create the backdrop for behaviour responses not any ‘ism’.
I would venture to suggest that trying to adopt an ‘ism’ is, as you suspect, counter-productive because it will alienate as many as it gathers. It has the added disadvantage, as you guess again, that it provides a convenient point of attack for your opponents (‘smear the label, smear the movement’ in one easy step; why bother dismantling the component arguments and detailed policies when you can achieve just as much damage by smearing the label?). And of course an ‘ism’ only adds to the damaging black-and-white simplicity of debate; you’re either in or out of that box. So I’d argue that there is not much going for adopting an ‘ism’, no matter how carefully constructed in this case.
I’d also point to the lack of need. The systemic conditions are already generating responses, already growing counter-veiling examples to the prevailing ideology and therefore I see no need to generate artificially an ‘ism’ banner under which to ride into battle. It is not that label (that ‘ism’) which will prompt people to join or fight, they react to conditions not labels at this moment.
The particular learning-point I’d highlight is that a broad-based, bottom-up, organic change is most powerful when it avoids labels, it avoids at this early stage particular leaders, it avoids easy stereotypes; we weaken it by trying to put it in any box. Because the stimulus to join a part of this movement, to contribute time of money or ideas to any specific change agency or vector of the response should not be limited at this early stage by needing to adopt a manifesto or agree with a label definition or subscribe to a defined dogma. It will be most effective in the long term if it is a visceral, personal response to the actual injustice, inequality and unfairness which exists and is created by the current ideology. And to seek to channel (top-down) or limit (label) such genuine social responses will only dampen the momentum building up.
It’s a real temptation for people in the media, academia and policy discussions to be ‘the first one’ to provide the narrative description for such a social change that is now going on but it’s a mistake, in my view. Let’s just stoke the fires of indignation, contribute fuel to the multitude of fires starting against the existing conditions and promote every example we can see which aims in the same direction in order to raise the tide of this movement not seek to limit it at this stage.
I am not sure I agree with you on this occasion: neoliberalism was a very carefully created narrative by a few but it was a narrative nonetheless and not a chance. And they did build it as a narrative.
I do believe this is how change happens
It was certainly how tax justice happens. It was not an accident: I know, I was one of the two who write the first narratives
I’ll try to keepthis short-ish. I think both you and AllanW are correct in different ways, and therein possibly lies the way ahead. Neo-liberalism (neither neo nor liberal!) certainly has its roots in a quite specific economic doctrine. In fact I believe the term was already in use in between the two world wars. Its evolutionary development towards becoming the prevailing dominant economic ‘ideology’ has been the subject of a library-full of books, essays etc. So no point in going over all that again (however for anyone interested, this Salon article is informative: http://www.salon.com/2013/03/09/the_world_according_to_milton_friedman_partner).
As Allan comments, once neo-liberalism was seen as the ‘ideal’ economic weapon with which to counter State-led Keynsianism, it was fed into the mainstream via a number of very skillful tactics – such as changing the economic syllabus in universities, setting up think-tanks globally, making full use of the captive PR industry, etc. Money certainly buys influence and the neo-liberals have never been short of cash. The rest, as they say, is history, especially since Reagan and Thatcher colluded to give it free-rein and ‘credibility’.
(As an aside, having recently watched ‘Inside Job’ – the 2010 docu about the GFC – I was shocked as to the extent to which big name main-stream economists were in collusion with the industrial-scale criminality. They were heavily incentivised. So much for academic rigour!)
Both Noam Chomsky & Bernie Sanders (et al.) emphasise the necessity of building a bottom-up grass-roots base from which to ‘extrapolate’ a socio-political idea /movement. But this can take forever. Note how long it has taken the Green movement to reach where it is today. It’s almost exactly 55 years since ‘Silent Spring’ was published. Time is not on our side. Although I’m no authority on the political structure of the US, it seems to me that its regionalism (from state Senators, Representatives, Governors down to town Mayors) is more conducive to building from the bottom up (inspite of overt & covert corruption) than in our much more centralised system.
So – what can we do, here and now, to effect the change discussed? I suggest the way ahead is a pincer movement from the top to the bottom and vice versa. A meaningful label is probably necessary in this age of minimal attention span. None of the suggestions that I’ve thus far read carry much appeal for me and I’ve not got the time now to come up with alternative suggestions. But one will eventually emerge from some quarter. Historical lessons from the neo-liberalism and the Green movement should be coalesced and translated into a Social Marketing Plan to achieve the desired objectives.
Apologies if all this sounds pretty obvious but it’s surprising how unstructured so many ‘movements’ are. Even commercial enterprises! Simple it isn’t. But achievable it certainly is. From all that I’ve ever read on this blog there’s no shortage of skilled professionals from many disciplines who share the same vision. Maybe ‘Murphyism’ isn’t such a bad idea after all – not as a handle for the new economics but as an umbrella term under which like-minded people could pool their technical skills and wisdom. The $64,000 question is who will be the leaders? I need a strong coffee ……
So do I
Very welcome to see this IPPR work and I agree with your comments. Careism does not quite work for me but not sure I have a better suggestion. I will have a go anyway.
1. We should use median income* rather than GDP as a measure of how well a government is doing and on this measure the UK has not done well. One might call a focus on the median, medianism – if the median is not doing well we are failing. It will also include other measure show as how well is the median doing in terms of education and health, etc.
2. For me the modern equivalent of a Keynes is Piketty. He did one very important thing which was to say lets get back to looking at the data and see what we learn. He showed us that capitalism is unstable and told us what do we need to do is to stabilise it. Either we chose capitalism+capital taxes and more progressive taxation (Pikettyism) or we regress into a cycle of continual economic and political crises.
* Medium is a better measure than average as it reflects where most people are in a highly skewed distribution.
Charles
I am not sure it works for me: it’s a discussion point and not a solution
Re your point 1, I agree entirely.
Re 2, I see Piketty as powerful and important but not as the promulgator of a fledged alternative.
Tremendous stuff!
May I suggest that what seems to be being advocated here is a form of ‘holism’ centred on people’s ability to take part in and benefit from the economy.
The neo-liberal’s money blindness does not care if the economy is driven by big financial transactions when the real economy is tanking because they just like to see the headline figures. Progressives think that is wrong – and rightly so. It is not healthy to have economic activity operating in such a narrow channel as it will only benefit those in that channel.
I know that Cameron completely devalued the statement but ‘We are all in it together’ is true upon reflection (although he used the phrase to support his lies). The ‘ism’ needs to reflect this in my view.
The economy as a concept is a wealth distribution tool for me. And anything that contributes to wealth distribution (including Government investment and benefits and say UBI) should be welcomed and seen as part of an economy that distributes wealth.
‘Fairism’?
‘Distributionism’ (lets get rid of the term ‘re-distribution’ as it infers taking to give to someone else. Wealth Distribution should be the first principle of anything purporting to be a successful economy):
‘Shareism’?
‘Togetherism’?
‘Murphyism’ (sorry playing to the crowd here).
‘Humanised capitalism’
‘Social capitalism’ (not new really – it’s how capitalism should be and was a for a bit)
‘Distributional capitalism’?
‘Joyful Capitalism’ (based on an obscure book about the benefits of tax I once read)
Oh dear – I’ve failed already!! I think that we may have the concept but giving it a funky, understandable label that the bod in the street can get is going to be a challenge. Well to me at least!
Why not ‘holism’?
My worry with holism as a concept is that it is found in other disciplines. But fair enough.
Everything I have learnt about economics (including learnt here) points to it being a system where parts of it have effects on other parts (for better and more notably of late, worse).
The thing to overcome first is to get progressives to agree what a sound economic system should look and perform like. Then the holistic ethos can kick in.
That all sounds nice Richard, but “Justice, fairness, equality, sustainability and the right to a life free from the oppression of excessive debt and rents..” are about as far away from British values as it is possible to get.
I do not believe for one second that the people of this country will accept them.
I’d say they are exactly what are British values
What do you think British values are?
I was born in Britain 27 years ago, and can only state what I have seen and heard in that time.
The values of Britain before I can say nothing about as I was not there.
The only values I can attribute to the average British person are three fold:
Money is a moral good. More if it is always moral, less of it is always immoral.
Care only for yourself. To help someone without being paid is sick and something to feel shame about.
Work is a moral good. To want to do anything that is not paid work is mental illness.
It is clear that you, and many others, do not think like this.
However these attitudes are those that seem to be the loudest and most numerous, at least to me.
Wow
I don’t meet such cultures often
I do, but not often
When I do it tends to be amongst those with a great deal of money
Charles’ medianism is pretty clever. But it may be difficult to add other ideas to it…
I’d like to put in a vote for distributism which already exists of course http://www.progressivepulse.org/economics/why-distributism-is-good-for-us/ and I think it is difficult for neolibs or the Daily Mail to argue that widespread and diverse ownership of things is NOT a good idea. And distributism cannot be achieved when a society distributes its rewards so unequally or indebts so many of us that widespread ownership cannot be achieved.
A new word altogether would be Commensurism, (which would allow for the definitive book to be written!) and which I think suggests fairness and worth.
“2017 has no equivalent”
Yes it does, it has Murphy-ism! It seems only you has the unique, outlier, controversial, earth shattering, criticized economic viewpoint today that you seem to say those other economists were leaders in their time. I don’t qualify for a vote at the Nobel committee, but there must be a reader here who does!
I beg to differ
I have some ideas
I’m not in any of the leagues mentioned
Is neoliberalism an economic theory – the market knows best, let ‘laissez faire’, free trade and capital, minimal State intervention – or is it a political agenda? It has certainly been captured by politicians and many of the rich and wealthy for whom the libertarians among them saw an ideal peg on which to hang their belief that they should be allowed to do as they pleased untrammelled by legislation and taxes. Hence the money poured into think-tanks and the like, the takeover of media channels to promote their vision. And many ordinary folk have bought into it, or rather borrowed their way into it and scarcely noticed the assaults on collective action -unions-, the welfare state, deteriorating infrastructure, the emasculation of democracy, seemingly happy to be kept quiet by vanity projects and promises of never-ending growth and rampant consumerism.
Turning back this tide, won’t be easy, Cnut.
Neoliberalism is political economy
Neoliberals take the view that what we’ve had isn’t real neoliberalism, and in fact neoliberalism has never been tried in our lifetimes.
Takes something that should be uncontroversial like the removal of farm subsidies – no published economist has managed to show that what New Zealand did was disastrous.
Or something as uncontroversial as sticking £6/week on pensions and abolishing the winter fuel allowance – no published economist can show this would lead to bad outcomes
Or liberalising the planning system in the UK so that all intensely cultivated or grazed agricultural land with no public access or amenity value is treated as brownfield in the same way as other industrial land.
But at every step it is the Conservatives and their pensioner and Nimby voter base that prevent these changes.
So those who despise neoliberalism , and those who want some actual neoliberalism have a common enemy in Conservative voters. How can these two groups be reconciled against the common enemy?
My enemies enemy is not necessarily my friend
‘Neoliberals take the view that what we’ve had isn’t real neoliberalism, and in fact neoliberalism has never been tried in our lifetimes’.
It’s funny – that’s what they say about communism too.
Maybe this suggests that Communism and neo-liberalism are two extremes of thought maybe, whose adherents insist on the existence of their ideology as a mono culture?
Both have certainly been tried and they have failed. Communism abroad and Neo-liberalism here. The local Tory District Council where I live now wants to start charging people to use the toilet in a busy tourist area. So the locals (who already fund it through their Council Tax no doubt) have to pay too. That’s great for the elderly and young isn’t it?
By the time these market fundamentalists have finished they will be charging us for the very air that we breath. Rent extraction gone mad.
PSR – so true. Ive always felt that the two extremes meet round the back in the grubby ‘bike-shed’ of totalitarianism
If you’ve not read it already, Michael Sandel’s book on markets was excellent in distinguishing between areas where markets are and are not appropriate. Ive used his arguments in debate with people who see everything as best served by markets. The two political extremes are unfortunately incapable of accepting and dealing with that nuance, and its fuzzy and changing nature
Ive often thought that the opposite of socialism might be anti-socialism which does rather sum up todays neo-liberal conservatism, but as Richard says, socialism in political terms tends to focus on the ownership of production.
In darker moments I do worry that the model in Corbyn’s head and Seumas Milne’s, is that of Democratic Socialist East Germany, which for those of us old enough to remember was a very dark place. The recording of Milne chatting to George Galloway is not encouraging.
Regardless of labels, Im not hearing any of the parties really articulate a vision of society, economy and the environment that tackles today’s problems and let alone be fit for the future. I follow this blog closely because I feel that Richard, some of his network and contributors her, are making a valiant effort to tackle that challenge
Careism is, unfortunately, a neologism which doesn’t trip off the tongue. IMO.
Isn’t the issue ‘fraternity’? Liberty, equality and …, i.e. care for the other.
Of course, the term a) hasn’t taken off, historically; and b) is gendered disastrously.
Phrases like ‘people-based society’, as opposed to market society, scarcely trip off the tongue and confirm why a noun, an ism, is needed.
And so we return to terms we are presumably seeking to avoid, like communitarianism, socialism, collectivism, social nationalism. And yet, isn’t the term socialism being revalorised, ‘re-understood’, especially among younger generations? So perhaps reclaiming ‘socialism’ as being precisely about caring is the key?
It is unfortunate that ‘caring socialism’ invokes uncaring socialism/Stalinism/Pol Pot etc., et al.
Socialism focuses on the ownership of production
That is my problem with it: it is materialistic in outlook and we need something much bigger than that
Richard, What do you make of Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, Seven Ways to Think like a 21st-Century Economist?
I like it, a lot
I see many similarities with my Ciurageous State
I worked on Green Economy whilst at a large NGO, with countries North and South, and through that know Kate a bit and followed her book from gestation. Im a fan though with a few criticisms.
Whilst Green Economy can mean many different things for people, what struck me then was the much broader meaning of ‘sustainability’. I’ve worked in different business sectors, for public organisations, and for NGOs in the environmental and development sectors. For many/most, sustainability is only thought of in environmental terms. A break through in thinking for the group I was working with was to see it as being about society and wealth generation as well. Im using wealth generation to encompass business, finance and the associated aspect of economy.
The insight was to see that the model we have today is unsustainable not just in environmental terms, but is creating unsustainable societies (inequality et al) and using unsustainable models of wealth generation (neo-liberal version of capitalism). Social ‘capital’ and financial capital are being abused and destroyed in a similar manner to natural capital.
Im not suggesting another ‘ism’ but this might be a helpful way of linking some of the different themes together