23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism -0
Page: 39, Location: 596
Note: Immigration controls and high wages in developed countries
More importantly, if we design our economic system based on such an assumption, the result is likely to be lower, rather than higher, efficiency. If we did that, people would feel that they are not trusted as moral agents and refuse to act in moral ways, making it necessary for us to spend a huge amount of resources monitoring, judging and punishing people. If we assume the worst about people, we will get the worst out of them.
Page: 66, Location: 1008-1011
Note: A good counter thought against the adam smith's theory
most countries have introduced free-market policies over the last three decades – privatization of state-owned industrial and financial firms, deregulation of finance and industry, liberalization of international trade and investment, and reduction in income taxes and welfare payments. These policies, their advocates admitted, may temporarily create some problems, such as rising inequality, but ultimately they will make everyone better off by creating a more dynamic and wealthier society. The rising tide lifts all boats together, was the metaphor.
Page: 7, Location: 93-96
Being critical of free-market ideology is not the same as being against capitalism. Despite its problems and limitations, I believe that capitalism is still the best economic system that humanity has invented. My criticism is of a particular version of capitalism that has dominated the world in the last three decades, that is, free-market capitalism. This is not the only way to run capitalism, and certainly not the best, as the record of the last three decades shows. The book shows that there are ways in which capitalism should, and can, be made better.
Page: 8, Location: 108-112
Thus seen, the ‘freedom’ of a market is, like beauty, in the eyes of the beholder. If you believe that the right of children not to have to work is more important than the right of factory owners to be able to hire whoever they find most profitable, you will not see a ban on child labour as an infringement on the freedom of the labour market. If you believe the opposite, you will see an ‘unfree’ market, shackled by a misguided government regulation.
Page: 14, Location: 202-205
If the same market can be perceived to have varying degrees of freedom by different people, there is really no objective way to define how free that market is. In other words, the free market is an illusion. If some markets look free, it is only because we so totally accept the regulations that are propping them up that they become invisible.
Page: 14, Location: 212-215
We accept the legitimacy of certain regulations so totally that we don’t see them. More carefully examined, markets are revealed to be propped up by rules – and many of them.
Page: 15, Location: 222-223
Wages in rich countries are determined more by immigration control than anything else, including any minimum wage legislation. How is the immigration maximum determined? Not by the ‘free’ labour market, which, if left alone, will end up replacing 80–90 per cent of native workers with cheaper, and often more productive, immigrants. Immigration is largely settled by politics. So, if you have any residual doubt about the massive role that the government plays in the economy’s free market, then pause to reflect that all our wages are, at root, politically determined
Page: 16, Location: 244-247
This clash of values also lies behind the contemporary debate on free trade vs. fair trade. Many Americans believe that China is engaged in international trade that may be free but is not fair. In their view, by paying workers unacceptably low wages and making them work in inhumane conditions, China competes unfairly. The Chinese, in turn, can riposte that it is unacceptable that rich countries, while advocating free trade, try to impose artificial barriers to China’s exports by attempting to restrict the import of ‘sweatshop’ products. They find it unjust to be prevented from exploiting the only resource they have in greatest abundance – cheap labour.
Page: 18, Location: 263-267
Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the average work week in the US was around sixty hours. At the time (in 1905, to be more precise), it was a country in which the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a New York state law limiting the working days of bakers to ten hours, on the grounds that it ‘deprived the baker of the liberty of working as long as he wished’. Thus seen, the debate about fair trade is essentially about moral values and political decisions, and not economics in the usual sense. Even though it is about an economic issue, it is not something economists with their technical tool kits are particularly well equipped to rule on.
Page: 18, Location: 272-276
Recognizing that the boundaries of the market are ambiguous and cannot be determined in an objective way lets us realize that economics is not a science like physics or chemistry, but a political exercise. Free-market economists may want you to believe that the correct boundaries of the market can be scientifically determined, but this is incorrect. If the boundaries of what you are studying cannot be scientifically determined, what you are doing is not a science.
Page: 21, Location: 316-319
So, when free-market economists say that a certain regulation should not be introduced because it would restrict the ‘freedom’ of a certain market, they are merely expressing a political opinion that they reject the rights that are to be defended by the proposed law. Their ideological cloak is to pretend that their politics is not really political, but rather is an objective economic truth, while other people’s politics is political. However, they are as politically motivated as their opponents. Breaking away from the illusion of market objectivity is the first step towards understanding capitalism.
Page: 21, Location: 322-327
Before the invention of the limited liability company in sixteenth-century Europe – or the joint-stock company, as it was known in its early days – businessmen had to risk everything when they started a venture. When I say everything, I really mean everything – not just personal property (unlimited liability meant that a failed businessman had to sell all his personal properties to repay all the debts) but also personal freedom (they could go to a debtors’ prison, should they fail to honour their debts). Given this, it is almost a miracle that anyone was willing to start a business at all.
Page: 24, Location: 364-368
even after the invention of limited liability, it was in practice very difficult to use it until the mid nineteenth century – you needed a royal charter in order to set up a limited liability company (or a government charter in a republic). It was believed that those who were managing a limited liability company without owning it 100 per cent would take excessive risks, because part of the money they were risking was not their own. At the same time, the non-managing investors in a limited liability company would also become less vigilant in monitoring the managers, as their risks were capped (at their respective investments).
Page: 25, Location: 369-373
Adam Smith, the father of economics and the patron saint of free-market capitalism, opposed limited liability on these grounds. He famously said that the ‘directors of [joint stock] companies . . . being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected that they would watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery [i.e., partnership, which demands unlimited liability] frequently watch over their own’.[2]
Page: 25, Location: 373-377
in defending the ‘new’ capitalism against its free-market critics, Marx had an ulterior motive. He thought the joint-stock company was a ‘point of transition’ to socialism in that it separated ownership from management, thereby making it possible to eliminate capitalists (who now do not manage the firm) without jeopardizing the material progress that capitalism had achieved.
Page: 26, Location: 395-397
in the 1980s, the holy grail was found. It was called the principle of shareholder value maximization. It was argued that professional managers should be rewarded according to the amount they can give to shareholders. In order to achieve this, it was argued, first profits need to be maximized by ruthlessly cutting costs – wage bills, investments, inventories, middle-level managers, and so on. Second, the highest possible share of these profits needs to be distributed to the shareholders – through dividends and share buybacks. In order to encourage managers to behave in this way, the proportion of their compensation packages that stock options account for needs to be increased, so that they identify more with the interests of the shareholders. The idea was advocated not just by shareholders, but also by many professional managers, most famously by Jack Welch, the long-time chairman of General Electric (GE), who is often credited with coining the term ‘shareholder value’ in a speech in 1981.
Page: 29, Location: 441-448
this unholy alliance between the professional managers and the shareholders was all financed by squeezing the other stakeholders in the company (which is why it has spread much more slowly to other rich countries where the other stakeholders have greater relative strength). Jobs were ruthlessly cut, many workers were fired and re-hired as non-unionized labour with lower wages and fewer benefits, and wage increases were suppressed (often by relocating to or outsourcing from low-wage countries, such as China and India – or the threat to do so). The suppliers, and their workers, were also squeezed by continued cuts in procurement prices, while the government was pressured into lowering corporate tax rates and/or providing more subsidies, with the help of the threat of relocating to countries with lower corporate tax rates and/or higher business subsidies. As a result, income inequality soared (see Thing 13) and in a seemingly endless corporate boom (ending, of course, in 2008), the vast majority of the American and the British populations could share in the (apparent) prosperity only through borrowing at unprecedented rates.
Page: 30, Location: 459-467
The easiest way for a company to maximize profit is to reduce expenditure, as increasing revenues is more difficult – by cutting the wage bill through job cuts and by reducing capital expenditure by minimizing investment. Generating higher profit, however, is only the beginning of shareholder value maximization. The maximum proportion of the profit thus generated needs to be given to the shareholders in the form of higher dividends. Or the company uses part of the profits to buy back its own shares, thereby keeping the share prices up and thus indirectly redistributing even more profits to the shareholders (who can realize higher capital gains should they decide to sell some of their shares).
Page: 31, Location: 476-480
Unfortunately, despite being the legal owners of the company, shareholders are the ones who are least committed among the various stakeholders to the long-term viability of the company. This is because they are the ones who can exit the company most easily – they just need to sell their shares, if necessary at a slight loss, as long as they are smart enough not to stick to a lost cause for too long. In contrast, it is more difficult for other stakeholders, such as workers and suppliers, to exit the company and find another engagement, because they are likely to have accumulated skills and capital equipment (in the case of the suppliers) that are specific to the companies they do business with. Therefore, they have a greater stake in the long-run viability of the company than most shareholders. This is why maximizing shareholder value is bad for the company, as well as the rest of the economy.
Page: 33, Location: 497-503
Being heavily influenced, if not totally controlled, by longer-term stakeholders, companies in these countries do not as easily sack workers, squeeze suppliers, neglect investment and use profits for dividends and share buybacks as American and British companies do. All this means that in the long run they may be more viable than the American or the British companies. Just think about the way in which General Motors has squandered its absolute dominance of the world car industry and finally gone bankrupt while being on the forefront of shareholder value maximization by constantly downsizing and refraining from investment
Page: 34, Location: 521-525
Running companies in the interests of floating shareholders is not only inequitable but also inefficient, not just for the national economy but also for the company itself. As Jack Welch recently confessed, shareholder value is probably the ‘dumbest idea in the world’.
Page: 35, Location: 528-529
The main reason that Sven is paid fifty times more than Ram is, to put it bluntly, protectionism – Swedish workers are protected from competition from the workers of India and other poor countries through immigration control. When you think about it, there is no reason why all Swedish bus drivers, or for that matter the bulk of the workforce in Sweden (and that of any other rich country), could not be replaced by some Indians, Chinese or Ghanaians. Most of these foreigners would be happy with a fraction of the wage rates that Swedish workers get paid, while all of them would be able to perform the job at least equally well, or even better. And we are not simply talking about low-skill workers such as cleaners or street-sweepers. There are huge numbers of engineers, bankers and computer programmers waiting out there in Shanghai, Nairobi or Quito, who can easily replace their counterparts in Stockholm, Linköping and Malmö. However, these workers cannot enter the Swedish labour market because they cannot freely migrate to Sweden due to immigration control. As a result, Swedish workers can command fifty times the wages of Indian workers, despite the fact that many of them do not have productivity rates that are higher than those of Indian workers.
Page: 39, Location: 587-596
there really is no such thing as a free market, but the example of immigration control reveals the sheer extent of market regulation that we have in supposedly free-market economies but fail to see.
Page: 40, Location: 604-606
the boundary of the market is politically determined and that free-market economists are as ‘political’ as those who want to regulate markets.
Page: 40, Location: 610-611
In other words, poor people from poor countries are usually able to hold their own against their counterparts in rich countries. It is the rich from the poor countries who cannot do that. It is their low relative productivity that makes their countries poor, so their usual diatribe that their countries are poor because of all those poor people is totally misplaced. Instead of blaming their own poor people for dragging the country down, the rich of the poor countries should ask themselves why they cannot pull the rest of their countries up as much as the rich of the rich countries do.
Page: 43, Location: 646-650
Finally, a word of warning to the rich of the rich countries, lest they become smug, hearing that their own poor are paid well only because of immigration control and their own high productivity.
Page: 43, Location: 650-652
Warren Buffet, the famous financier, put this point beautifully, when he said in a television interview in 1995: ‘I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I’ve earned. If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you’ll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil. I will be struggling thirty years later. I work in a market system that happens to reward what I do very well – disproportionately well.’
Page: 43, Location: 657-660
What an individual is paid is not fully a reflection of her worth. Most people, in poor and rich countries, get paid what they do only because there is immigration control. Even those citizens of rich countries who cannot be easily replaced by immigrants, and thus may be said to be really being paid their worth (although they may not – see Thing 14), are as productive as they are only because of the socio-economic system they are operating in. It is not simply because of their individual brilliance and hard work that they are as productive as they are.
Page: 44, Location: 661-665
Thing 4: The washing machine has changed the world more than the Internet has
Page: 44, Location: 673-673
In perceiving changes, we tend to regard the most recent ones as the most revolutionary. This is often at odds with the facts.
Page: 45, Location: 688-689
in proportional terms, Brazil has 12–13 times more domestic servants than the US does and Egypt has 1,800 times more than Sweden. No wonder that many Americans think ‘everyone’ has a maid in Latin America and a Swede in Egypt feels that the country is practically overrun with domestic servants.
Page: 47, Location: 710-712
The main reason why there are so much fewer (of course, in proportional terms) domestic servants in the rich countries – although obviously not the only reason, given the cultural differences among countries at similar levels of income, today and in the past – is the higher relative price of labour. With economic development, people (or rather the labour services they offer) become more expensive in relative terms than ‘things’ (see also Thing 9). As a result, in rich countries, domestic service has become a luxury good that only the rich can afford, whereas it is still cheap enough to be consumed even by lower-middle-class people in developing countries.
Page: 47, Location: 720-725
With outside employment opportunities, the opportunity costs of children have risen, making families have fewer children. All of these have changed the traditional family dynamics. Taken together, they constitute really powerful changes.
Page: 50, Location: 756-758
However, in terms of sheer acceleration in speed, it is nowhere near as revolutionary as the humble wired (not even wireless) telegraphy.
Page: 53, Location: 805-806
We vastly overestimate the impacts of the internet only because it is affecting us now. It is not just us. Human beings tend to be fascinated by the newest and the most visible technologies. Already in 1944, George Orwell criticized people who got over-excited by the ‘abolition of distance’ and the ‘disappearance of frontiers’ thanks to the aeroplane and the radio.
Page: 53, Location: 806-809
The fascination with the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) revolution, represented by the internet, has made some rich countries – especially the US and Britain – wrongly conclude that making things is so ‘yesterday’ that they should try to live on ideas. And as I explain in Thing 9, this belief in ‘post-industrial society’ has led those countries to unduly neglect their manufacturing sector, with adverse consequences for their economies.
Page: 54, Location: 817-821
Perhaps giving money for those less fashionable things such as digging wells, extending electricity grids and making more affordable washing machines would have improved people’s lives more than giving every child a laptop computer or setting up internet centres in rural villages. I am not saying that those things are necessarily more important, but many donors have rushed into fancy programmes without carefully assessing the relative long-term costs and benefits of alternative uses of their money.
Page: 54, Location: 824-827
In fact, the world was a lot more globalized a century ago than it was between the 1960s and the 1980s despite having much inferior technologies of communication and transportation, because in the latter period governments, especially the powerful governments, believed in tougher regulations of these cross-border flows. What has determined the degree of globalization (in other words, national openness) is politics, rather than technology
Page: 55, Location: 835-838
Understanding technological trends is very important for correctly designing economic policies, both at the national and the international levels (and for making the right career choices at the individual level). However, our fascination with the latest, and our under-valuation of what has already become common, can, and has, led us in all sorts of wrong directions.
Page: 55, Location: 839-842
Thing 5: Assume the worst about people and you get the worst
Page: 56, Location: 848-848
We need to design an economic system that, while acknowledging that people are often selfish, exploits other human motives to the full and gets the best out of people. The likelihood is that, if we assume the worst about people, we will get the worst out of them.
Page: 57, Location: 866-868
More importantly, they added, even if it were true that the East Asian miracle owed something to government intervention, that does not mean that policies used by the East Asian countries can be recommended to other countries. Government officials who make policies are (like all of us) self-seeking agents, it was pointed out, more interested in expanding their own power and prestige rather than promoting national interests. They argued that government intervention worked in East Asia only because they had exceptionally selfless and capable bureaucrats for historical reasons (which we need not go into here). Even some of the economists who were supporting an active role for government conceded this point.
Page: 58, Location: 877-882
the gentleman chided the economists for misunderstanding the nature of modern bureaucracy, be it in the government or in the private sector. The Kobe Steel manager said (I am, of course, paraphrasing him): ‘I am sorry to say this, but you economists don’t understand how the real world works. I have a PhD in metallurgy and have been working in Kobe Steel for nearly three decades, so I know a thing or two about steel-making. However, my company is now so large and complex that even I do not understand more than half the things that are going on within it. As for the other managers – with backgrounds in accounting and marketing – they really haven’t much of a clue. Despite this, our board of directors routinely approves the majority of projects submitted by our employees, because we believe that our employees work for the good of the company. If we assumed that everyone is out to promote his own interests and questioned the motivations of our employees all the time, the company would grind to a halt, as we would spend all our time going through proposals that we really don’t understand. You simply cannot run a large bureaucratic organization, be it Kobe Steel or your government, if you assume that everyone is out for himself.’ This is merely an anecdote, but it is a powerful testimony to the limitations of standard economic theory, which assumes that self-interest is the only human motivation that counts. Let me elaborate.
Page: 58, Location: 884-894
Free-market economics starts from the assumption that all economic agents are selfish, as summed up in Adam Smith’s assessment of the butcher, the brewer and the baker. The beauty of the market system, they contend, is that it channels what seems to be the worst aspect of human nature – self-seeking, or greed, if you like – into something productive and socially beneficial.
Page: 59, Location: 899-902
Therefore, free-market economists recommend, the portion of the economy controlled by politicians and bureaucrats should be minimized. Deregulation and privatization, in this view, are not only economically efficient but also politically sensible in that they minimize the very possibility that public officials can use the state as a vehicle to promote their own self-interests, at the cost of the general public
Page: 60, Location: 917-920
This is all true. However, we also have a lot of evidence – not just anecdotes but systematic evidence – showing that self-interest is not the only human motivation that matters even in our economic life. Self-interest, to be sure, is one of the most important, but we have many other motives – honesty, self-respect, altruism, love, sympathy, faith, sense of duty, solidarity, loyalty, public-spiritedness, patriotism, and so on – that are sometimes even more important than self-seeking as the driver of our behaviours.
Page: 61, Location: 935-938
Do they say that you have to suspect people and watch them all the time for slacking and cheating? No, they probably talk mostly about how to ‘connect’ with the employees, change the way they see things, inspire them, and promote teamwork among them. Good managers know that people are not tunnel-visioned self-seeking robots. They know that people have ‘good’ sides and ‘bad’ sides and that the secret of good management is in magnifying the former and toning down the latter.
Page: 62, Location: 942-945
Not realizing the complex nature of worker motivation, the capitalists of the early mass-production era thought that, by totally depriving workers of discretion over the speed and the intensity of their work and thus their ability to shirk, the conveyor belt would maximize their productivity. However, as those capitalists soon found out, the workers reacted by becoming passive, un-thinking and even uncooperative, when they were deprived of their autonomy and dignity.
Page: 63, Location: 954-957
The pinnacle of such an approach is the so-called ‘Japanese production system’ (sometimes known as the ‘Toyota production system’), which exploits the goodwill and creativity of the workers by giving them responsibilities and trusting them as moral agents. In the Japanese system, workers are given a considerable degree of control over the production line. They are also encouraged to make suggestions for improving the production process. This approach has enabled Japanese firms to achieve such production efficiency and quality that now many non-Japanese companies are imitating them. By not assuming the worst about their workers, the Japanese companies have got the best out of them.
Page: 63, Location: 959-964
If people look as if they are behaving morally, they argue, it is only because the observers do not see the hidden rewards and sanctions that they are responding to. According to this line of reasoning, people always remain self-seekers. If they behave morally, it is not because they believe in the moral code itself but because behaving in that way maximizes rewards and minimizes punishments for them personally. For example, if traders refrain from cheating even when there is no legal compulsion or when there are no competitors ready to take away their businesses, it does not mean that they believe in honesty. It is because they know that having a reputation as an honest trader brings in more customers. Or many tourists who behave badly would not do the same at home, not because they suddenly become decent people when they go back home but because they do not have the anonymity of a tourist and therefore are afraid of being criticized or shunned by people they know and care about. There is some truth in this. There are subtle rewards and sanctions that are not immediately visible and people do respond to them. However, this line of reasoning does not work in the end. The fact is that, even when there are no hidden reward-and-sanction mechanisms at work, many of us behave honestly. For example, why do we – or at least those of us who are good runners – not run away without paying after a taxi ride?
Page: 64, Location: 971-982
The problem is that rewarding and punishing others for their behaviours costs time and energy only to the individuals taking the action, while their benefits from improved behavioural standards accrue to everyone. Going back to our examples above, if you, as a taxi driver, want to chase and beat up a runaway customer, you may have to risk getting fined for illegal parking or even having your taxi broken into. But what is the chance of you benefiting from an improved standard of behaviour by that passenger, who you may not meet ever again?
Page: 65, Location: 990-994
So, as a self-seeking individual, you wait for someone foolish enough to spend his time and energy in administering private justice to wayward taxi passengers or honest out-of-the-way garages, rather than paying the costs yourself. However, if everyone were a self-interested individual like you, everyone would do as you do. As a result, no one would reward and punish others for their good or bad behaviour. In other words, those invisible reward/sanction mechanisms that free-market economists say create the optical illusion of morality can exist only because we are not the selfish, amoral agents that those economists say we are.
Page: 65, Location: 995-999
Morality is not an optical illusion. When people act in a non-selfish way – be it not cheating their customers, working hard despite no one watching them, or resisting bribes as an underpaid public official – many, if not all, of them do so because they genuinely believe that that is the right thing to do. Invisible rewards and sanctions mechanisms do matter, but they cannot explain all – or, in my view, even the majority of – non-selfish behaviours,
Page: 66, Location: 1000-1003
Contrary to Mrs Thatcher’s assertion that ‘there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families’, human beings have never existed as atomistic selfish agents unbound by any society. We are born into societies with certain moral codes and are socialized into ‘internalizing’ those moral codes.
Page: 66, Location: 1003-1006
Thing 6: Greater macroeconomic stability has not made the world economy more stable
Page: 67, Location: 1015-1016
The enthusiastic proclamations of our success in controlling price volatility during the last three decades have ignored the extraordinary instability shown by economies around the world during that time.
Page: 68, Location: 1032-1033
An excessive focus on inflation has distracted our attention away from issues of full employment and economic growth.
Page: 68, Location: 1035-1035
Despite the assertion that price stability is the precondition of growth, the policies that were intended to bring lower inflation have produced only anaemic growth since the 1990s, when inflation is supposed to have finally been tamed.
Page: 68, Location: 1036-1038
The German trauma from the hyperinflation was such that the Bundesbank, the West German central bank after the Second World War, was famous for its excessive aversion to loose monetary policy. Even after the birth of the European single currency, the euro, and the consequent de facto abolition of national central banks in the Eurozone countries, Germany’s influence has made the European Central Bank (ECB) stick to tight monetary policy even in the face of persistently high unemployment, until the 2008 world financial crisis forced it to join other central banks around the world in an unprecedented relaxation of monetary policy. Thus, when talking about the consequences of
Page: 69, Location: 1057-1062
The experiences of individual countries also suggest that fairly high inflation is compatible with rapid economic growth. During the 1960s and 70s, Brazil had an average inflation rate of 42 per cent but was one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, with its per capita income growing at 4.5 per cent a year. During the same period, per capita income in South Korea was growing at 7 per cent per year, despite having an annual average rate of inflation of nearly 20 per cent, which was actually higher than that found in many Latin American countries at the time.[19]
Page: 72, Location: 1091-1096
Moreover, there is evidence that excessive anti-inflationary policies can actually be harmful for the economy. Since 1996, when Brazil – having gone through a traumatic phase of rapid inflation, although not quite of hyperinflationary magnitude – started to control inflation by raising real interest rates (nominal interest rates minus the rate of inflation) to some of the highest levels in the world (10–12 per cent per year), its inflation fell to 7.1 per cent per year but its economic growth also suffered, with a per capita income growth rate of only 1.3 per cent per year.
Page: 72, Location: 1096-1100
One sense in which the world has become more unstable during the last three decades of free-market dominance and strong anti-inflationary policies is the increased frequency and extent of financial crises
Page: 74, Location: 1132-1133
The fact is that the world has become more stable only if we regard low inflation as the sole indicator of economic stability, but it has not become more stable in the way most of us experience it. One sense in which the world has become more unstable during the last three decades of free-market dominance and strong anti-inflationary policies is the increased frequency and extent of financial crises.
Page: 74, Location: 1130-1133
Another sense in which the world has become more unstable during the last three decades is that job insecurity has increased for many people during this period. Job security has always been low in developing countries, but the share of insecure jobs in the so-called ‘informal sector’ – the collection of unregistered firms which do not pay taxes or observe laws, including those providing job security – has increased in many developing countries during the period, due to premature trade liberalization that destroyed a lot of secure ‘formal’ jobs in their industries.
Page: 75, Location: 1142-1145
In the study cited above, Rogoff and Reinhart point out that the share of countries in banking crises is very closely related to the degree of international capital mobility. This increased international mobility is a key goal for free-market economists, who believe that a greater freedom of capital to move across borders would improve the efficiency of the use of capital (see Thing 22). Consequently, they have pushed for capital market opening across the world, although recently they have been softening their position in this regard in relation to developing countries.
Page: 76, Location: 1164-1168
The free-market policy package, often known as the neo-liberal policy package, emphasizes lower inflation, greater capital mobility and greater job insecurity (euphemistically called greater labour market flexibility), essentially because it is mainly geared towards the interests of the holders of financial assets. Inflation control is emphasized because many financial assets have nominally fixed rates of return, so inflation reduces their real returns. Greater capital mobility is promoted because the main source of the ability for the holders of financial assets to reap higher returns than the holders of other (physical and human) assets is their ability to move around their assets more quickly (see Thing 22). Greater labour market flexibility is demanded because, from the point of view of financial investors, making hiring and firing of the workers easier allows companies to be restructured more quickly, which means that they can be sold and bought more readily with better short-term balance sheets, bringing higher financial returns (see Thing 2).
Page: 77, Location: 1173-1180
Our obsession with inflation should end. Inflation has become the bogeyman that has been used to justify policies that have mainly benefited the holders of financial assets, at the cost of long-term stability, economic growth and human happiness.
Page: 78, Location: 1191-1193
Thing 7: Free-market policies rarely make poor countries rich
Page: 79, Location: 1197-1197
With only a few exceptions, all of today’s rich countries, including Britain and the US – the supposed homes of free trade and free market – have become rich through the combinations of protectionism, subsidies and other policies that today they advise the developing countries not to adopt. Free-market policies have made few countries rich so far and will make few rich in the future.
Page: 80, Location: 1221-1223
Hamilton is there because, unbeknown to most Americans today, he is the architect of the modern American economic system. Two years after becoming Treasury Secretary in 1789 at the outrageously young age of thirty-three, Hamilton submitted to the Congress the Report on the Subject of Manufactures, where he set out the economic development strategy for his young country. In the report, he argued that ‘industries in their infancy’, like the American ones, need to be protected and nurtured by government before they can stand on their own feet. Hamilton’s report was not just about trade protectionism – he also argued for public investment in infrastructure (such as canals), development of the banking system, promotion of a government bond market – but protectionism was at the heart of his strategy. Given his views, were Hamilton finance minister of a developing country today, he would have been heavily criticized by the US Treasury Department for his heresy. His country might even have been refused a loan from the IMF and the World Bank.
Page: 83, Location: 1268-1276
On the $50 bill, we have Ulysses Grant, the Civil War hero-turned president. In defiance of the British pressure on the USA to adopt free trade, he once remarked that ‘within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade’.
Page: 84, Location: 1284-1286
At the time, the existence of almost-free land in the US made it necessary for American manufacturers to offer wages around four times higher than the European average, as otherwise the workers would have run away to set up farms (this was no idle threat, given that many of them were farmers in their previous lives) (see Thing 10). Therefore, Franklin argued, the American manufacturers could not survive unless they were protected from low-wage competition – or what is known as ‘social dumping’ today – from Europe. This is exactly the logic that Ross Perot, the billionaire-turned-politician, used in order to oppose the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) in the 1992 presidential election campaign – a logic that 18.9 per cent of the American voters were happy to endorse.
Page: 84, Location: 1287-1293
Thomas Jefferson may have been against Hamilton’s protectionism but, unlike Hamilton, who supported the patent system, he argued strongly against patents. Jefferson believed that ideas are ‘like air’ and therefore should not be owned by anyone. Given the emphasis that most of today’s free-market economists put on the protection of patents and other intellectual property rights, his views would have gone down like a lead balloon among them.
Page: 85, Location: 1295-1298
Andrew Jackson, that protector of the ‘common man’ and fiscal conservative (he paid off all federal government debts for the first time in US history)? Unfortunately for his fans, even he would not pass the test. Under Jackson, average industrial tariffs were in the region of 35–40 per cent. He was also notoriously anti-foreign. When in 1836 he cancelled the licence for the semi-public (second) Bank of the USA (it was 20 per cent owned by the US federal government), one of the main excuses was that it was ‘too much’ owned by foreign (mainly British) investors. And how much was too much? Only 30 per cent. If some developing country president today cancelled the licence for a bank because it was 30 per cent owned by the Americans, it would send the US Treasury into a fit.
Page: 85, Location: 1298-1303
The dead presidents don’t talk. But if they could, they would tell Americans and the rest of the world how the policies that their successors promote today are the exact opposite of what they used in order to transform a second-rate agrarian economy dependent on slave labour into the world’s greatest industrial power.
Page: 86, Location: 1309-1311
When reminded of the protectionist past of the US, free-market economists usually retort that the country succeeded despite, rather than because of, protectionism.
Page: 86, Location: 1316-1317
It is also said that the country’s large internal market somewhat mitigated the negative effects of protectionism, by allowing a degree of competition among domestic firms.
Page: 86, Location: 1318-1320
But the problem with this response is that, dramatic as it may be, the US is not the only country that has succeeded with policies that go against the free-market doctrine. In fact, as I shall elaborate below, most of today’s rich countries have succeeded with such policies.
Page: 87, Location: 1320-1322
Although Hamilton was the first person to theorize the ‘infant industry’ argument, many of his policies were copied from Robert Walpole, the so-called first British Prime Minister, who ran the country between 1721 and 1742.
Page: 87, Location: 1329-1331
Britain adopted free trade only in the 1860s, when its industrial dominance was absolute. In the same way in which the US was the most protectionist country in the world during most of its phase of ascendancy (from the 1830s to the 1940s), Britain was one of the world’s most protectionist countries during much of its own economic rise (from the 1720s to the 1850s).
Page: 88, Location: 1335-1338
Singapore, which is famous for its free-trade policies and welcoming attitudes towards foreign investors, produces over 20 per cent of its output through state-owned enterprises, when the international average is around 10 per cent. Nor did today’s rich countries protect foreigners’ intellectual property rights very well, if at all – in many of them it was legal to patent someone else’s invention as long as that someone else was a foreigner.
Page: 88, Location: 1342-1345
There were exceptions of course. The Netherlands, Switzerland (until the First World War) and Hong Kong used little protectionism, but even these countries did not follow today’s orthodox doctrines. Arguing that patents are artificial monopolies that go against the principle of free trade (a point which is strangely lost on most of today’s free-trade economists), the Netherlands and Switzerland refused to protect patents until the early twentieth century. Even though it did not do it on such principled grounds, Hong Kong was until recently even more notorious for its violation of intellectual property rights than the former countries.
Page: 88, Location: 1345-1349
those bad policies were in fact good policies, given the stage of economic development in which those countries were at the time, for a number of reasons.
Page: 89, Location: 1354-1355
they would find it mysterious how most of today’s countries could use all those supposedly bad policies – such as protectionism, subsidies, regulation and state ownership of industry – and still become rich. The answer lies in the fact that those bad policies were in fact good policies, given the stage of economic development in which those countries were at the time, for a number of reasons.
Page: 89, Location: 1352-1355
The truth is that developing countries did not do badly at all during the ‘bad old days’ of protectionism and state intervention in the 1960s and 70s. In fact, their economic growth performance during the period was far superior to that achieved since the 1980s under greater opening and deregulation. Since the 1980s, in addition to rising inequality (which was to be expected from the pro-rich nature of the reforms – see Thing 13), most developing countries have experienced a significant deceleration in economic growth. Per capita income growth in the developing world fell from 3 per cent per year in the 1960s and 70s to 1.7 per cent during the 1980–2000 period, when there was the greatest number of free-market reforms. During the 2000s, there was a pick-up in the growth of the developing world, bringing the growth rate up to 2.6 per cent for the 1980–2009 period, but this was largely due to the rapid growth of China and India – two giants that, while liberalizing, did not embrace neo-liberal policies.
Page: 90, Location: 1375-1383
To sum up, the free-trade, free-market policies are policies that have rarely, if ever, worked. Most of the rich countries did not use such policies when they were developing countries themselves, while these policies have slowed down growth and increased income inequality in the developing countries in the last three decades. Few countries have become rich through free-trade, free-market policies and few ever will.
Page: 91, Location: 1389-1391
Thing 8: Capital has a nationality
Page: 91, Location: 1395-1396
The upshot is that a company has no national loyalty any more. A business will do what it has to do in order to increase its profit, even if it means hurting its home country by shutting plants down, slashing jobs, or even bringing in foreign workers. Given this, many people argue, it is unwise to put restrictions on foreign ownership of companies, as many governments used to. As long as the company generates wealth and jobs within its borders, the country should not care whether the company is owned by its citizens or foreigners. When all major companies are ready to move anywhere in search of profit opportunities, making investment by foreign companies difficult means that your country is not going to benefit from those foreign companies that have identified good investment prospects in your country. It all makes sense, doesn’t it?
Page: 95, Location: 1448-1454
In most companies, however transnational their operations may seem, the top decision-makers still remain the citizens of the home country – that is, the country where ownership resides – despite the fact that long-distance management (when the acquiring company does not dispatch top managers to the acquired firm) can reduce management efficiency, while dispatching top managers to a foreign country is expensive, especially when the physical and the cultural distances between the two countries are great.
Page: 97, Location: 1473-1476
In short, few corporations are truly transnational. The vast majority of them still produce the bulk of their outputs in their home countries. Especially in terms of high-grade activities such as strategic decision-making and higher-end R&D, they remain firmly centred at their home countries. The talk of a borderless world is highly exaggerated.
Page: 98, Location: 1488-1491
And insofar as most top decision-makers in most companies are home-country nationals, there is bound to be some home-country bias in their decisions. Although free-market economists dismiss any motive other than pure self-seeking, ‘moral’ motives are real and are much more important than they lead us to believe (see Thing 5).
Page: 99, Location: 1505-1507
For all these reasons, the most sophisticated activities that require high levels of human and organizational competences and a conducive institutional environment tend to stay at home. Home biases do not exist simply because of emotional attachments or historical reasons. Their existence has good economic bases.
Page: 100, Location: 1531-1533
If you put restrictions on what foreign investors can do – for example, by telling them that they cannot invest in certain ‘strategic’ industries, by forbidding them from holding a majority share or demanding that they transfer technologies – foreign investors will simply go somewhere else and you will lose the jobs and the wealth that they would have created. Especially for developing countries, which do not have many national firms that can make similar investments, rejecting foreign investment because it is foreign many people believe is frankly irrational. Even if they get only lower-grade activities such as assembly operation, they are still better off with the investment than without it.
Page: 102, Location: 1554-1559
However, the question that policy-makers need to consider before accepting it is how it is going to affect the future trajectory of their national economy. Different activities have different potentials for technological innovation and productivity growth, and therefore what you do today influences what you will be doing in the future and what you will get out of it. As a popular saying among American industrial policy experts in the 1980s went, we cannot pretend that it does not matter whether you produce potato chips, wood chips or microchips. And the chance is that a foreign company is more likely to produce potato chips or wood chips than microchips in your country.
Page: 103, Location: 1573-1577
In recent years, private equity funds have played an increasingly important role in corporate acquisitions. Even though they have no in-house expertise in particular industries, they may, in theory, acquire a company for the long term and hire industry experts as managers and ask them to upgrade its capabilities. However, in practice, these funds usually have no intention to upgrade the acquired company for the long term. They acquire firms with a view to selling them on in three to five years after restructuring them into profitability. Such restructuring, given the time horizon, usually involves cutting costs (especially sacking workers and refraining from long-term investments), rather than raising capabilities.
Page: 104, Location: 1589-1594
In the worst cases, private equity funds may acquire companies with the explicit intention to engage in asset-stripping, selling the valuable assets of a company without regard to its long-term future.
Page: 104, Location: 1595-1596
Moreover, recently the distinction between industrial capital and finance capital has come to be blurred, with industrial companies such as GM and GE making more profits in finance than in industry (see Thing 22), so the fact that the acquiring firm operates in a particular industry is not a guarantee of a long-term commitment to that industry.
Page: 105, Location: 1601-1604
While a blind rejection of foreign capital is wrong, it would be very naïve to design economic policies on the myth that capital does not have national roots any more. After all, Lord Mandelson’s belatedly found reservations turn out to have a serious basis in reality.
Page: 105, Location: 1610-1612
Thing 9: We do not live in a post-industrial age
Page: 106, Location: 1616-1616
We may be living in a post-industrial society in the sense that most of us work in shops and offices rather than in factories. But we have not entered a post-industrial stage of development in the sense that industry has become unimportant. Most (although not all) of the shrinkage in the share of manufacturing in total output is not due to the fall in the absolute quantity of manufactured goods produced but due to the fall in their prices relative to those for services, which is caused by their faster growth in productivity (output per unit of input).
Page: 107, Location: 1633-1637
This is widely believed to be because, as they become richer, people begin to demand more services than manufactured goods. With falling demand, it is natural that the manufacturing sector shrinks and the country enters the post-industrial stage. Many people actually celebrate the rise of services. According to them, the recent expansion of knowledge-based services with rapid productivity growth – such as finance, consulting, design, computing and information services, R&D – means that services have replaced manufacturing as the engine of growth, at least in the rich countries. Manufacturing is now a low-grade activity that developing countries such as China perform.
Page: 110, Location: 1673-1677
today’s rich countries not only work differently from but are different from their parents and grandparents. In this way, today’s rich countries have become post-industrial societies in the social sense. However, they have not become post-industrial in the economic sense. Manufacturing still plays the leading role in their economies.
Page: 111, Location: 1694-1697
Most estimates show that the rise of China as the new workshop of the world can explain only around 20 per cent of de-industrialization in the rich countries that has happened so far. Many people think that the remaining 80 per cent or so can be largely explained by the natural tendency of the (relative) demand for manufactured goods to fall with rising prosperity. However, a closer look reveals that this demand effect is actually very small. It looks as if we are spending ever higher shares of our income on services not because we are consuming ever more services in absolute terms but mainly because services are becoming ever more expensive in relative terms. With the (inflation-adjusted) amount of money you paid to get a PC ten years ago, today you can probably buy three, if not four, computers of equal or even greater computing power (and certainly smaller size). As a result, you probably have two, rather than just one, computers. But, even with two computers, the portion of your income that you spend on computers has gone down quite a lot (for the sake of argument, I am assuming that your income, after adjusting for inflation, is the same). In contrast, you are probably getting the same number of haircuts as you did ten years ago (if you haven’t gone thin on top, that is). The price of haircuts has probably gone up somewhat, so the proportion of your income that goes to your haircuts is greater than it was ten years ago. The result is that it looks as if you are spending a greater (smaller) portion of your income on haircuts (computers) than before, but the reality is that you are actually consuming more computers than before, while your consumption of haircuts is the same.
Page: 112, Location: 1711-1722
Then why are the relative prices of manufactured goods falling? It is because manufacturing industries tend to have faster productivity growth than services. As the output of the manufacturing sector increases faster than the output of the service sector, the prices of the manufactured goods relative to those of services fall. In manufacturing, where mechanization and the use of chemical processes are much easier, it is easier to raise productivity than in services. In contrast, by their very nature, many service activities are inherently impervious to productivity increase without diluting the quality of the product.
Page: 113, Location: 1730-1734
To sum up, the fall in the share of manufacturing in total output in the rich countries is not largely due to the fall in (relative) demand for manufactured goods, as many people think. Nor is it due mainly to the rise of manufactured exports from China and other developing countries, although that has had big impacts on some sectors. It is instead the falling relative prices of the manufactured goods due to faster growth in productivity in the manufacturing sector that is the main driver of the de-industrialization process. Thus, while the citizens of the rich countries may be living in post-industrial societies in terms of their employment, the importance of manufacturing in terms of production in those economies has not been diminished to the extent that we can declare a post-industrial age.
Page: 114, Location: 1748-1754
Unless the exports of manufactured goods rise disproportionately, the country won’t be able to pay for the same amount of imports as before. If its de-industrialization is of a negative kind accompanied by weakening international competitiveness, the balance of payments problem could be even more serious, as the manufacturing sector then won’t be able to increase its exports.
Page: 117, Location: 1781-1784
As for the developing countries, it is a fantasy to think that they can skip industrialization and build prosperity on the basis of service industries. Most services have slow productivity growth and most of those services that have high productivity growth are services that cannot be developed without a strong manufacturing sector. Low tradability of services means that a developing country specializing in services will face a bigger balance of payments problem, which for a developing country means a reduction in its ability to upgrade its economy. Post-industrial fantasies are bad enough for the rich countries, but they are positively dangerous for developing countries.
Page: 120, Location: 1837-1841
Thing 10: The US does not have the highest living standard in the world
Page: 121, Location: 1845-1846
the same dollar buys more things in the US than in most other rich countries mainly because it has cheaper services than in other comparable countries, thanks to higher immigration and poorer employment conditions. Furthermore, Americans work considerably longer than Europeans. Per hour worked, their command over goods and services is smaller than that of several European countries. While we can debate which is a better lifestyle – more material goods with less leisure time (as in the US) or fewer material goods with more leisure time (as in Europe) – this suggests that the US does not have an unambiguously higher living standard than comparable countries.
Page: 122, Location: 1863-1868
In the early nineteenth century, US per capita income was still only around the European average and something like 50 per cent lower than that of Britain and the Netherlands. But poor Europeans still wanted to move there because the country had an almost unlimited supply of land (well, if you were willing to push out a few native Americans) and an acute labour shortage, which meant wages three or four times higher than those in Europe (see Thing 7). Most importantly, the lack of feudal legacy meant that the country had much higher social mobility than the Old World countries, as celebrated in the idea of the American dream.
Page: 123, Location: 1878-1882
In other words, things such as taxi rides and meals are expensive in countries such as Switzerland and Norway because they have expensive workers. They are cheap in countries with cheap workers, such as Mexico and Thailand. When it comes to internationally traded things such as TVs or mobile phones, their prices are basically the same in all countries, rich and poor.
Page: 125, Location: 1917-1919
Second, the very fact that its PPP income is more or less the same as its market exchange rate income is proof that the higher average living standard in the US is built on the poverty of many. What do I mean by this? As I have pointed out earlier, it is normal for a rich country’s PPP income to be lower, sometimes significantly, than its market exchange rate income, because it has expensive service workers. However, this does not happen to the US, because, unlike other rich countries, it has cheap service workers. To begin with, there is a large inflow of low-wage immigrants from poor countries, many of them illegal, which makes them even cheaper. Moreover, even the native workers have much weaker fallback positions in the US than in European countries of comparable income level. Because they have much less job security and weaker welfare supports, US workers, especially the non-unionized ones in the service industries, work for lower wages and under inferior conditions than do their European counterparts. This is why things like taxi rides and meals at restaurants are so much cheaper in the US than in other rich countries. This is great when you are the customer, but not if you are the taxi driver or the waitress. In other words, the higher purchasing power of average US income is bought at the price of lower income and inferior working conditions for many US citizens.
Page: 128, Location: 1955-1964
In other words, per unit of effort, the Americans are not getting as high a living standard as their counterparts in competitor nations. They make up for this lower productivity through much longer hours.
Page: 129, Location: 1972-1974
Higher inequality in the US means that its average income is less indicative of the living standards of its citizens than in other countries.
Page: 130, Location: 1991-1992
There is no simple way to compare living standards across countries. Per capita income, especially in purchasing power terms, is arguably the most reliable indicator. However, by focusing just on how many goods and services our income can buy, we miss out a lot of other things that constitute elements of the ‘good life’, such as the amount of quality leisure time, job security, freedom from crime, access to healthcare, social welfare provisions, and so on. While different individuals and countries will definitely have different views on how to weigh these indicators against each other and against income figures, non-income dimensions should not be ignored, if we are to build societies where people genuinely ‘live well’.
Page: 131, Location: 1996-2001
Thing 11: Africa is not destined for underdevelopment
Page: 131, Location: 2005-2005
Moreover, all the structural handicaps that are supposed to hold back Africa have been present in most of today’s rich countries – poor climate (arctic and tropical), landlockedness, abundant natural resources, ethnic divisions, poor institutions and bad culture. These structural conditions seem to act as impediments to development in Africa only because its countries do not yet have the necessary technologies, institutions and organizational skills to deal with their adverse consequences.
Page: 132, Location: 2024-2027
The real cause of African stagnation in the last three decades is free-market policies that the continent has been compelled to implement during the period
Page: 133, Location: 2027-2028
During the 1960s and 70s, per capita income in Sub-Saharan Africa grew at a respectable rate. At around 1.6 per cent, it was nowhere near the ‘miracle’ growth rate of East Asia (5–6 per cent) or even that of Latin America (around 3 per cent) during the period. However, this is not a growth rate to be sniffed at. It compares favourably with the rates of 1–1.5 per cent achieved by today’s rich countries during their Industrial ‘Revolution’ (roughly 1820–1913). The fact that Africa grew at a respectable rate before the 1980s suggests that the ‘structural’ factors cannot be the main explanation of the region’s (what in fact is recent) growth failure
Page: 137, Location: 2094-2099
During the 1960s and 70s, per capita income in Sub-Saharan Africa grew at a respectable rate. At around 1.6 per cent, it was nowhere near the ‘miracle’ growth rate of East Asia (5–6 per cent) or even that of Latin America (around 3 per cent) during the period. However, this is not a growth rate to be sniffed at. It compares favourably with the rates of 1–1.5 per cent achieved by today’s rich countries during their Industrial ‘Revolution’ (roughly 1820–1913). The fact that Africa grew at a respectable rate before the 1980s suggests that the ‘structural’ factors cannot be the main explanation of the region’s (what in fact is recent) growth failure. If they were, African growth should always have been non-existent.
Page: 137, Location: 2094-2100
Since the late 1970s (starting with Senegal in 1979), Sub-Saharan African countries were forced to adopt free-market, free-trade policies through the conditions imposed by the so-called Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the World Bank and the IMF (and the rich countries that ultimately control them). Contrary to conventional wisdom, these policies are not good for economic development (see Thing 7). By suddenly exposing immature producers to international competition, these policies led to the collapse of what little industrial sectors these countries had managed to build up during the 1960s and 70s. Thus, having been forced back into relying on exports of primary commodities, such as cocoa, coffee and copper, African countries have continued to suffer from the wild price fluctuations and stagnant production technologies that characterize most such commodities.
Page: 138, Location: 2109-2115
So, the so-called structural factors are really scapegoats wheeled out by free-market economists. Seeing their favoured policies failing to produce good outcomes, they had to find other explanations for Africa’s stagnation (or retrogression, if you don’t count the last few years of growth spike due to commodity boom, which has come to an end). It was unthinkable for them that such ‘correct’ policies could fail. It is no coincidence that structural factors came to be cited as the main explanations of poor African economic performance only after growth evaporated in the early 1980s.
Page: 139, Location: 2126-2131
Natural resources allow poor countries to earn the foreign exchanges with which they can buy advanced technologies. Saying that those resources are a curse is like saying that all children born into a rich family will fail in life because they will get spoilt by their inherited wealth. Some do so exactly for this reason, but there are many others who take advantage of their inheritance and become even more successful than their parents. The fact that a factor is structural (that is, it is given by nature or history) does not mean that the outcome of its influence is predetermined.
Page: 140, Location: 2143-2146
Let us first take the case of the climate. Tropical climate is supposed to cripple economic growth by creating health burdens due to tropical diseases, especially malaria. This is a terrible problem, but surmountable. Many of today’s rich countries used to have malaria and other tropical diseases, at least during the summer – not just Singapore, which is bang in the middle of the tropics, but also Southern Italy, the Southern US, South Korea and Japan. These diseases do not matter very much any more only because these countries have better sanitation (which has vastly reduced their incidence) and better medical facilities, thanks to economic development.
Page: 141, Location: 2149-2154
So blaming Africa’s underdevelopment on climate is confusing the cause of underdevelopment with its symptoms – poor climate does not cause underdevelopment; a country’s inability to overcome its poor climate is merely a symptom of underdevelopment.
Page: 141, Location: 2158-2160
People say that bad institutions are holding back Africa (and they are), but when the rich countries were at similar levels of material development to those we find in Africa currently, their institutions were in a far worse state.[35] Despite that, they grew continuously and have reached high levels of development. They built the good institutions largely after, or at least in tandem with, their economic development. This shows that institutional quality is as much an outcome as the causal factor of economic development.
Page: 144, Location: 2193-2198
In that sense, culture is more of an outcome, rather than a cause, of economic development. It is wrong to blame Africa’s (or any region’s or any country’s) underdevelopment on its culture.
Page: 144, Location: 2205-2206
Thus seen, what appear to be unalterable structural impediments to economic development in Africa (and indeed elsewhere) are usually things that can be, and have been, overcome with better technologies, superior organizational skills and improved political institutions.
Page: 144, Location: 2207-2209
Moreover, despite having these impediments (often in more severe forms), African countries themselves did not have a problem growing in the 1960s and 70s. The main reason for Africa’s recent growth failure lies in policy – namely, the free-trade, free-market policy that has been imposed on the continent through the SAP. Nature and history do not condemn a country to a particular future. If it is policy that is causing the problem, the future can be changed even more easily. The fact that we have failed to see this, and not its allegedly chronic growth failure, is the real tragedy of Africa.
Page: 145, Location: 2210-2214
Thing 12: Governments can pick winners
Page: 145, Location: 2218-2218
there are ways for the government to acquire better information and improve the quality of its decisions. Moreover, decisions that are good for individual firms may not be good for the national economy as a whole. Therefore, the government picking winners against market signals can improve national economic performance, especially if it is done in close (but not too close) collaboration with the private sector.
Page: 146, Location: 2236-2239
Even in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when government industrial policies were much less organized and effective than in the late twentieth century, virtually all of today’s rich countries used tariffs, subsidies, licensing, regulation and other policy measures to promote particular industries over others, with considerable degrees of success (see Thing 7).
Page: 153, Location: 2337-2339
Yet another method is to rely on informal networks between government officials and business elites so that the officials develop a good understanding of business situations, although an exclusive reliance on this channel can lead to excessive ‘clubbiness’ or downright corruption. The French policy network, built around the graduates of ENA (École Nationale d’Administration), is the most famous example of this, showing both its positive and negative sides. Somewhere in between the two extremes of legal requirement and personal networks, the Japanese have developed the ‘deliberation councils’, where government officials and business leaders regularly exchange information through formal channels, in the presence of third-party observers from academia and the media.
Page: 154, Location: 2357-2362
However, it is more than that. Government attempts to pick winners have failed even in countries that are famous for being good at it, such as Japan, France or Korea. I’ve already mentioned the French government’s ill-fated foray into Concorde. In the 1960s, the Japanese government tried in vain to arrange a takeover of Honda, which it considered to be too small and weak, by Nissan, but it later turned out that Honda was a much more successful firm than Nissan. The Korean government tried to promote the aluminium-smelting industry in the late 1970s, only to see the industry whacked by a massive increase in energy prices, which account for a particularly high proportion of aluminium production costs. And they are just the most prominent examples.
Page: 156, Location: 2378-2383
The reality is that winners are being picked all the time both by the government and by the private sector, but the most successful ones tend to be done in joint efforts between the two. In all types of winner-picking – private, public, joint – there are successes and failures, sometimes spectacular ones. If we remain blinded by the free-market ideology that tells us only winner-picking by the private sector can succeed, we will end up ignoring a huge range of possibilities for economic development through public leadership or public–private joint efforts.
Page: 157, Location: 2397-2401
Thing 13: Making rich people richer doesn’t make the rest of us richer
Page: 157, Location: 2405-2406
Unlike today’s liberal economists, the Classical economists did not see the capitalist economy as being made up of individuals. They believed that people belonged to different classes – capitalists, workers and landlords – and behaved differently according to their classes. The most important inter-class behavioural difference was considered to be the fact that capitalists invested (virtually) all of their incomes while the other classes – the working class and the landlord class – consumed them.
Page: 162, Location: 2479-2483
This is where ardent free-marketeers like Ricardo meet ultra-left wing communists like Preobrazhensky. Despite their apparent differences, both of them believed that the investible surplus should be concentrated in the hands of the investor, the capitalist class in the case of the former and the planning authority in the case of the latter, in order to maximize economic growth in the long run. This is ultimately what people today have in mind when they say that ‘you first have to create wealth before you can redistribute it’.
Page: 163, Location: 2486-2490
Of course, trickle down is not a completely stupid idea. We cannot judge the impact of income redistribution only by its immediate effects, however good or bad they may look. When rich people have more money, they may use it to increase investment and growth, in which case the long-run effect of upward income redistribution may be the growth in the absolute size, although not necessarily the relative share, of income that everyone gets.
Page: 167, Location: 2556-2558
in countries with a strong welfare state it is a lot easier to spread the benefits of extra growth that follows upward income redistribution (if it happens) through taxes and transfers. Indeed, before taxes and transfers, income distribution is actually more unequal in Belgium and Germany than in the US, while in Sweden and the Netherlands it is more or less the same as in the US.[40] In other words, we need the electric pump of the welfare state to make the water at the top trickle
Page: 167, Location: 2561-2565
in countries with a strong welfare state it is a lot easier to spread the benefits of extra growth that follows upward income redistribution (if it happens) through taxes and transfers. Indeed, before taxes and transfers, income distribution is actually more unequal in Belgium and Germany than in the US, while in Sweden and the Netherlands it is more or less the same as in the US.[40] In other words, we need the electric pump of the welfare state to make the water at the top trickle down in any significant quantity.
Page: 167, Location: 2561-2565
Thus seen, there is no reason to presume that upward income redistribution will accelerate investment and growth. This has not happened in general. Even when there is more growth, the trickle down that occurs through the market mechanism is very limited, as seen in the above comparison of the US with other rich countries with a good welfare state. Simply making the rich richer does not make the rest of us richer. If giving more to the rich is going to benefit the rest of the society, the rich have to be made to deliver higher investment and thus higher growth through policy measures (e.g., tax cuts for the rich individuals and corporations, conditional on investment), and then share the fruits of such growth through a mechanism such as the welfare state.
Page: 168, Location: 2573-2579
Thing 14: US managers are over-priced
Page: 169, Location: 2583-2583
In other words, worker pay in the US has been virtually stagnant since the mid 1970s. Of course, this is not to say that Americans have not seen any rise in living standards since the 1970s. Family income, as opposed to individual worker compensation, has risen, but that is only because more and more families have both partners working.
Page: 172, Location: 2637-2639
Thus seen, US managers are over-priced. The American workers get paid only 15 per cent or so more than their counterparts in competitor nations, while the American CEOs are paid at least twice (compared to the Swiss managers, excluding stock options) and possibly up to twenty times (compared to the Japanese managers, including stock options) that of what their counterparts in comparable countries are paid. Despite this, the American CEOs are running companies that are no better, and frequently worse, than their Japanese or European competitors.
Page: 175, Location: 2679-2682
This seems plausible. The competitive process works to eliminate inefficient practices, be they obsolete textile technologies or biased executive pay schemes. And the fact that American and British companies have been losing to foreign companies, which on the whole have better managerial incentives, is a proof of it.
Page: 176, Location: 2699-2701
When the managerial classes in the US and, to a lesser extent Britain, possess such economic, political and ideological power that they can manipulate the market and pass on the negative consequences of their actions to other people, it is an illusion to think that executive pay is something whose optimal levels and structures are going to be, and should be, determined by the market.
Page: 179, Location: 2730-2733
Thing 15: People in poor countries are more entrepreneurial than people in rich countries
Page: 179, Location: 2737-2737
What makes the poor countries poor is not the absence of entrepreneurial energy at the personal level, but the absence of productive technologies and developed social organizations, especially modern firms.
Page: 180, Location: 2753-2755
The problem is that there is only a limited range of (simple) businesses that the poor in developing countries can take on, given their limited skills, the narrow range of technologies available, and the limited amount of finance that they can mobilize through microfinance. So, you, a Croatian farmer who bought one more milk cow with a microcredit, stick to selling milk even as you watch the bottom falling out of your local milk market thanks to the 300 other farmers like you selling more milk, because turning yourself into an exporter of butter to Germany or cheese to Britain simply isn’t possible with the technologies, the organizational skills and the capital you have.
Page: 188, Location: 2869-2873
If effective entrepreneurship ever was a purely individual thing, it has stopped being so at least for the last century. The collective ability to build and manage effective organizations and institutions is now far more important than the drives or even the talents of a nation’s individual members in determining its prosperity (see Thing 17). Unless we reject the myth of heroic individual entrepreneurs and help them build institutions and organizations of collective entrepreneurship, we will never see the poor countries grow out of poverty on a sustainable basis.
Page: 190, Location: 2909-2913
Thing 16: We are not smart enough to leave things to the market
Page: 191, Location: 2917-2918
The world is very complex and our ability to deal with it is severely limited. Therefore, we need to, and usually do, deliberately restrict our freedom of choice in order to reduce the complexity of problems we have to face. Often, government regulation works, especially in complex areas like the modern financial market, not because the government has superior knowledge but because it restricts choices and thus the complexity of the problems at hand, thereby reducing the possibility that things may go wrong.
Page: 192, Location: 2934-2937
can at least point out that the problem with the free market does not end with the fact that individually rational actions can lead to a collective irrational outcome (that is, market failure).
Page: 194, Location: 2961-2962
As Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, had to admit in a Congressional hearing, it was a ‘mistake’ to ‘presume that the self-interest of organisations, specifically banks, is such that they were best capable of protecting shareholders and equity in the firms’. Self-interest will protect people only when they know what is going on and how to deal with it.
Page: 196, Location: 2991-2994
According to Simon, we try to be rational, but our ability to be so is severely limited. The world is too complex, Simon argued, for our limited intelligence to understand fully. This means that very often the main problem we face in making a good decision is not the lack of information but our limited capability to process that information – a point nicely illustrated by the fact that the celebrated advent of the internet age does not seem to have improved the quality of our decisions, judging by the mess we are in today.
Page: 198, Location: 3026-3030
For certain things, we can reasonably calculate the probability of each possible contingency, even though we cannot predict the exact outcome – economists call this ‘risk’.
Page: 198, Location: 3031-3032
Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary in the first government of George W. Bush. In a press briefing regarding the situation in Afghanistan in 2002, Rumsfeld opined: ‘There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know.’
Page: 199, Location: 3038-3041
Unless we deliberately restrict our choices by creating restrictive rules, thereby simplifying the environment that we have to deal with, our bounded rationality cannot cope with the complexity of the world. It is not because the government necessarily knows better that we need regulations. It is in the humble recognition of our limited mental capability that we do.
Page: 202, Location: 3087-3090
Thing 17: More education in itself is not going to make a country richer
Page: 202, Location: 3094-3094
But an influential Marxist school of thought argues that capitalists deliberately ‘de-skill’ their workers by using the most mechanized production technologies possible, even if they are not the most economical, in order to make the workers more easily replaceable and thus easier to control.
Page: 211, Location: 3227-3229
A large part of this is due to the simple fact that mechanization is the most important way to increase productivity. But an influential Marxist school of thought argues that capitalists deliberately ‘de-skill’ their workers by using the most mechanized production technologies possible, even if they are not the most economical, in order to make the workers more easily replaceable and thus easier to control.[58] Whatever the exact cause of the mechanization process, the upshot is that more technologically developed economies may actually need fewer educated people.
Page: 211, Location: 3227-3231
How is it possible that Switzerland has stayed at the very top of the international productivity league despite providing much less higher education than not just its main competitors but also many economies that are much poorer?
Page: 212, Location: 3249-3251
The main explanation for the ‘Swiss paradox’ should be found, once again, in the low productivity content of education. However, in the case of higher education, the non-productivity component is not so much about teaching people subjects that will help them with things such as personal fulfilment, good citizenship and national identity, as in the case of primary and secondary education. It is about what economists call the ‘sorting’ function.
Page: 213, Location: 3255-3259
By hiring you as a university graduate, your employer is then hiring you for those general qualities, not for your specialist knowledge, which is often irrelevant to the job you will be performing.
Page: 213, Location: 3265-3267
So, people go to university, fully knowing that they will ‘waste time’ studying things that they will never need for their work. With everyone wanting to go to university, the demand for higher education increases, which then leads to the supply of more university places, which raises university enrolment rate further, increasing the pressure to go to university even more. Over time, this leads to a process of degree inflation. Now that ‘everyone’ has a university degree, you have to do a master’s, or even a PhD, in order to stand out, even if the productivity content of those further degrees may be minimal for your future jobs.
Page: 214, Location: 3272-3276
this still means that at least half of university education in countries such as the US, Korea and Finland is ‘wasted’ in the essentially zero-sum game of sorting. The higher education system in these countries has become like a theatre in which some people decided to stand to get a better view, prompting others behind them to stand. Once enough people stand, everyone has to stand, which means that no one is getting a better view, while everyone has become more uncomfortable.
Page: 214, Location: 3279-3282
What really distinguishes the rich countries from the poorer ones is much less how well educated their individual citizens are than how well their citizens are organized into collective entities with high productivity – be that giant firms such as Boeing or Volkswagen or the smaller world-class firms of Switzerland and Italy
Page: 215, Location: 3296-3298
Education is valuable, but its main value is not in raising productivity. It lies in its ability to help us develop our potentials and live a more fulfilling and independent life. If we expanded education in the belief that it will make our economies richer, we will be sorely disappointed, for the link between education and national productivity is rather tenuous and complicated. Our overenthusiasm with education should be tamed, and, especially in developing countries, far greater attention needs to be paid to the issue of establishing and upgrading productive enterprises and institutions that support them.
Page: 216, Location: 3303-3308
Thing 18: What is good for General Motors is not necessarily good for the United States
Page: 216, Location: 3312-3312
In the end, what matters is not the quantity but the quality of business regulation.
Page: 218, Location: 3331-3332
So, without the industrial might of the US, represented by Detroit, the Nazis would have taken over Europe and at least the western part of the Soviet Union.
Page: 218, Location: 3341-3342
The story of GM teaches us some salutary lessons about the potential conflicts between corporate and national interests – what is good for a company, however important it may be, may not be good for the country. Moreover, it highlights the conflicts between different stakeholders that make up the firm – what is good for some stakeholders of a company, such as managers and short-term shareholders, may not be good for others, such as workers and suppliers. Ultimately, it also tells us that what is good for a company in the short run may not even be good for it in the long run – what is good for GM today may not be good for GM tomorrow.
Page: 223, Location: 3412-3416
Sometimes regulations help business by limiting the ability of firms to engage in activities that bring them greater profits in the short run but ultimately destroy the common resource that all business firms need. For example, regulating the intensity of fish farming may reduce the profits of individual fish farms but help the fish-farming industry as a whole by preserving the quality of water that all the fish farms have to use.
Page: 225, Location: 3439-3442
Karl Marx described the government restriction of business freedom for the sake of the collective interest of the capitalist class as it acting as ‘the executive committee of the bourgeoisie’. But you don’t need to be a Marxist to see that regulations restricting freedom for individual firms may promote the collective interest of the entire business sector, not to speak of the nation as a whole. In other words, there are many regulations that are pro- rather than anti-business. Many regulations help preserve the common-pool resources that all firms share, while others help business by making firms do things that raise their collective productivity in the long run. Only when we recognize this will we be able to see that what matters is not the absolute amount of regulation, but the aims and contents of those regulations.
Page: 226, Location: 3455-3461
Thing 19: Despite the fall of communism, we are still living in planned economies
Page: 226, Location: 3465-3465
Many capitalist governments plan the future shape of individual industrial sectors through sectoral industrial policy or even that of the national economy through indicative planning. More importantly, modern capitalist economies are made up of large, hierarchical corporations that plan their activities in great detail, even across national borders. Therefore, the question is not whether you plan or not. It is about planning the right things at the right levels.
Page: 228, Location: 3482-3485
Given the political commitment to high equality, there was a clear cap on how much a business manager, however successful, could get. This meant that there was only a limited incentive for business managers to turn the advanced technologies that the system was clearly capable of producing into products that consumers actually wanted. The policy of full employment at all costs meant that managers could not use the ultimate threat – that of sacking – to discipline workers. This contributed to sloppy work and absenteeism; when he was trying to reform the Soviet economy, Gorbachev frequently spoke of the problem of labour discipline.
Page: 229, Location: 3501-3505
Under central planning, the economy will produce only exactly what is needed. No resource will lie idle at any time, since there will be no economic crisis. Therefore, the central planning system, it was argued, will manage the economy much more efficiently than the market system. That, at least, was the theory.
Page: 230, Location: 3527-3529
By the time communism started unravelling in the 1980s, there was so much cynicism about the system that was increasingly incapable of delivering its promises that the joke was that in the communist countries, ‘we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us’.
Page: 231, Location: 3540-3542
Even in a capitalist economy, there are situations – a war, for example – in which central planning is more effective.
Page: 232, Location: 3553-3554
Unlike under central planning, these targets are not legally binding; hence the adjective ‘indicative’. However, the government will do its best to achieve them by mobilizing various carrots (e.g., subsidies, granting of monopoly rights) and sticks (e.g., regulations, influence through state-owned banks) at its disposal.
Page: 233, Location: 3558-3560
Businesses plan their activities – often down to the last detail. Indeed, that is where Marx got the idea of centrally planning the whole economy. When he talked about planning, there was in fact no real-life government that was practising planning. At the time, only firms planned. What Marx predicted was that the ‘rational’ planning approach of the capitalist firms would eventually prove superior to the wasteful anarchy of the market and thus eventually be extended to the whole economy. To be sure, he criticized planning within the firm as despotism by capitalists, but he believed that, once private property was abolished and the capitalists eliminated, the rational elements of such despotism could be isolated and harnessed for the social good.
Page: 236, Location: 3613-3618
It is what the appropriate levels and forms of planning are for different activities. The prejudice against planning, while understandable given the failures of communist central planning, makes us misunderstand the true nature of the modern economy in which government policy, corporate planning and market relationships are all vital and interact in a complex way. Without markets we will end up with the inefficiencies of the Soviet system. However, thinking that we can live by the market alone is like believing that we can live by eating only salt, because salt is vital for our survival.
Page: 238, Location: 3635-3639
Thing 20: Equality of opportunity may not be fair
Page: 238, Location: 3643-3643
When you reward people the same way regardless of their efforts and achievements, the more talented and the harder-working lose the incentive to perform. This is equality of outcome. It’s a bad idea, as proven by the fall of communism. The equality we seek should be the equality of opportunity.
Page: 238, Location: 3649-3651
Equality of opportunity is the starting point for a fair society. But it’s not enough. Of course, individuals should be rewarded for better performance, but the question is whether they are actually competing under the same conditions as their competitors. If a child does not perform well in school because he is hungry and cannot concentrate in class, it cannot be said that the child does not do well because he is inherently less capable.
Page: 239, Location: 3660-3663
Unless there is some equality of outcome (i.e., the incomes of all the parents are above a certain minimum threshold, allowing their children not to go hungry), equal opportunities (i.e., free schooling) are not truly meaningful.
Page: 239, Location: 3664-3665
In Latin America, people frequently use the expression that someone is ‘more Catholic than the Pope’ (mas Papista que el Papa). This refers to the tendency of societies in the intellectual periphery to apply doctrines – religious, economic and social – more rigidly than do their source countries.
Page: 240, Location: 3671-3673
This point is powerfully illustrated by the fact that even the notoriously racist apartheid regime in South Africa had to designate the Japanese ‘honorary whites’. There was no way the Japanese executives running the local Toyota and Nissan factories could go and live in townships like Soweto, where non-whites were forced to live under apartheid law. Therefore, the white-supremacist South Africans had to swallow their pride and pretend that the Japanese were whites, if they wanted to drive around in Japanese cars. That is the power of the market.
Page: 243, Location: 3721-3724
The point is that, in order to benefit from the equal opportunities provided to them, people require the capabilities to make use of them. It is no use that black South Africans now have the same opportunities as whites to get a highly paid job, if they do not have the education to qualify for those jobs. It is no good that blacks now can enter better (former white-only) universities, if they still have to attend poorly funded schools with underqualified teachers, some of whom can barely read and write themselves.
Page: 245, Location: 3751-3755
Equality of opportunity is meaningless for those who do not have the capabilities to take advantage of it.
Page: 246, Location: 3772-3773
Of course, in an idealized free market, this should not be a problem because the American steelworkers and the British shipbuilders can get jobs in expanding industries. But how many former American steelworkers do you know who have become computer engineers or former British shipbuilders who have turned themselves into investment bankers? Such conversion rarely, if ever, happens.
Page: 248, Location: 3798-3801
Excessive equalization of outcomes is harmful, although what exactly is excessive is debatable. Nevertheless, equality of opportunity is not enough. Unless we create an environment where everyone is guaranteed some minimum capabilities through some guarantee of minimum income, education and healthcare, we cannot say that we have fair competition. When some people have to run a 100 metre race with sandbags on their legs, the fact that no one is allowed to have a head start does not make the race fair. Equality of opportunity is absolutely necessary but not sufficient in building a genuinely fair and efficient society.
Page: 249, Location: 3814-3818
Thing 21: Big government makes people more open to change
Page: 250, Location: 3822-3823
So, one of the freest labour markets in the rich world, that is, the Korean labour market, is spectacularly failing to allocate talent in the most efficient manner. The reason? Heightened job insecurity.
Page: 254, Location: 3888-3890
The weaker welfare state in the US has been one important reason why trade protectionism is much stronger there than in Europe, despite a greater acceptance of government intervention in the latter.
Page: 256, Location: 3915-3916
The point of all the above examples is that, when people know they will have a second (or third or even fourth) chance, they will be much more open to risk-taking when it comes to choosing their first job (as in the Korean example) or letting go of their existing jobs (as in the US– Europe comparison).
Page: 257, Location: 3928-3930
In the same way that bankruptcy laws encourage risk-taking by entrepreneurs, the welfare state encourages workers to be more open to change (and the resulting risks) in their attitudes. Because they know that there is going to be a second chance, people can be bolder in their initial career choices and more open to changing jobs later in their careers.
Page: 258, Location: 3943-3945
Thing 22: Financial markets need to become less, not more, efficient
Page: 260, Location: 3982-3983