The Economics of Enough_ How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters - Diane Coyle [12]
THE CULTURAL SUSPICION OF CAPITALIST GROWTH
In recent times in the richest economies, the pendulum has swung away from economic growth, and what’s seen as its moral consequence, greed. There is a widespread sense that the Western economies during the financial bubble went from enough to excess. This has manifested itself in countless magazine articles and books, analysing and commenting on the financial crisis. It is hard to single out some examples from the crowd but one title makes the point: All Consuming: How Shopping Got Us into This Mess and How We Can Find Our Way Out, by Neal Lawson, is a typical example. Others are more thoughtful. The writer James Meek, in a British newspaper feature on the economic crisis, put it this way:
The worst enemy most of us are being presented with by politicians and the media is the loss of a prosperity few of us believed we had. . . . We feel we’ve fallen from something and it hurts; but the rise to whatever that something was was not as pleasurable as the fall has been painful. . . . The struggle we are engaged on now seems to be the struggle for Britain to be prosperous enough. But until we decide what “enough” means, we’ll never know whether we’ve won or not; we’ll never be happy.6
There have been significant social reactions to the widespread sense of excess. One example is the Slow Movement. This began as Slow Food, an Italian protest against the fast food exemplified by, of course, McDonalds, already the target of other protests like those led by farm activist José Bové in France. Over time an array of dispersed “slow” organizations have emerged, described by writer Carl André in his book In Praise of Slowness. André describes the Slow Movement as a cultural revolution, a philosophy, and places it in the tradition of the nineteenth-century Romantics or the 1960s hippie movement. Slow means a rejection not of all that is modern—its adherents have no hesitation in using the web and mobiles to communicate and organize—but rather a rejection of what are understood to be the mainstream values of modern societies. Slow is obviously intended to oppose the “fastness” of the modern economy; I return to this question of time later, as it hints at the key question of giving the future due importance in today’s decisions, although the issue is more of time horizon than being fast or slow. Beyond that, the emphasis is on community, relationships, and the environment, things that unfold and evolve over long periods of time, all of which are felt to be threatened by the relentless push for more growth, more productivity.
This triad—community, relationships, environment—has been identified as the victims of economic growth ever since modern capitalism began in the Industrial Revolution. As André indicates, the Romantics were swift to identify the cultural and social costs of the changes driven by economic imperatives, and to contrast the values of nature and industry. William Blake famously wrote of the dark satanic mills. John Ruskin, better known now for his artistic criticism, wrote a bestseller on “political economy” called Unto This Last, which was one of the most impassioned and articulate blasts against the turmoil created by industrialization. The drive to get rich, he argued, ignored the social relationships involved in the movement of money: if your neighbour doesn’t want money, it has no value to you. The “mercantile economy” centers on money, whereas genuine “political economy” includes the social context. True riches, Ruskin said, sounding like an early prophet of the Slow Movement, lie in:
The farmer who cuts his hay at the right time; the shipwright who drives his bolts well home in