The Rules of Capitalism

by Allister J. Marran

The philosophical theologian Paul Tillich once wrote, ‘The fundamental virtues in the ethics of a capitalist society are economic efficiency, developed to the utmost degree of ruthless activity.’

The rules of capitalism put profit over everything else. Everything else. Nothing is sacred or taboo.

It is a complex man-made set of rules, it does not exist in nature, and requires its servants to ignore common sense and its obvious dangers and pitfalls.

It is a giant pyramid scheme of investors and producers at the top, and consumers down below, that requires the base to constantly grow, which is why we now have eight billion plus people on a planet that has very limited resources. It demands infinite growth cycles when raw materials are in short and finite supply.

To ensure its ongoing sustainability, we have constantly to create hype about new products that nobody wanted or asked for in order to make another sale, with built in obsolescence so that we can sell a new model again tomorrow.

Marketing costs for products and services often far exceed R&D and cost-of-production budgets, in order to convince you to fill your house to a large degree with, call it ‘trinkets’, ‘junk’.

The over-mining, over-fishing, over-production, and mass pollution is not sustainable. That's simply a fact.

While every scientist on earth is predicting doom and gloom for future generations, the economist disagrees, and tells us to put out heads in the sand, and ignore the signs. Keep calm and keep spending.

There is another thing. In its appetite to compete, capitalist economics has now become the science of scarcity.  In order to compete, we need to optimize—and optimize everything we possibly can. We strive for less wastage, smaller margins of error, faster turnover.

This means that we sail ever closer to the wind. Let one thing go wrong—a computer hack, a bacterial contamination, a military invasion in a faraway place—and millions of people’s livelihoods and even lives may be imperilled.

As capitalism multiplies the dangers, so it multiplies our vulnerability.

This generation, our generation, the ones who were told by the scientists and experts to just look around and heed the obvious warnings, will be known as the idiots who could have stopped it but chose greed over life, profit over common sense.

We have no water where I live, because the rains haven't come for nearly 10 years. The world is cooling where it's hot, and heating up where it's cold. Smog sits over the cities, and poison infects our water sources. Landfills are full, and growing fuller every day. Our oceans are being fished to extinction, and good farming land is being paved over and cleared for urban development and new roads and highways.

Having stuff, and being able to read and write, and exploit a man-made system, does not make a person smart. If people can't see beyond their basic, immediate, satiating needs and zoom out to see the bigger picture of an exhausted ecosystem with resources heading to zero, and the only world we will ever have struggling to cope, then perhaps we were never that smart or evolved in the first place.

We do not have a divine right to rule this planet. We are just the next animal to over-evolve and get to the top of the food chain. It's an awesome responsibility which sees us on a perilous perch which can be toppled if we do not proceed with caution and humility.

Just ask the previous mantle holders, those fearsome and magnificent dinosaurs, how tenuous that grip on the top dog spot is.

We can’t ask them, of course. They are extinct.

Thought Experiment: How do you Price the Office Parlour Palm?

Posted by Martin Cohen

Here's one of a collection of short puzzles that might be considered an A-Z of the tricks of high finance: Not so much 'P is for Parlour Palm' though as 'C is for Cheap Collateral'.

This is the idea that if a bank agrees to loan the office parlour palm to the next door bank for a million dollars, and in return to rent their aspidistra for a million dollars, they both can update their asset sheets accordingly!

Now that's magic. But it was also the basis of the B for Bubble that brought down most of the world's banking system in 2008!

Of course, banks don't do silly stuff like buy each others' pot plants. But they do buy each others' packaged securities. And for many years, these packages became more and more complex, and thus more and more about buyer and seller agreeing on what mysterious qualities made the deal realistic. We know where that ended up: with thousands of dodgy loans to people who had no income or maybe had even died being bundled up and sold as top quality assets. Banks are plagued by problems with so-called ‘ghost’ collateral that disappears or is pledged to several lenders at the same time! After the crisis, the European Central Bank looked at the use of such devices and in a discussion paper wrote:

"the use of collateral is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for financial stability."*

The logicians could not have put it better!

---

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecb.wp2107.en.pdf

On Classism and Inequality

Posted by Keith Tidman

In various forms, and to many degrees, classism, meaning prejudice against people belonging to a particular social class, and social inequality are pervasive, pernicious, and persistent. And they are unbreakably bound: classism and inequality engage one another in a symbiotic, mutually reinforcing relationship. The two phenomena are therefore best explored together.

The casualties of classism, predominantly poorer, less educated, working-class people, not uncommonly internalise the discrimination, resenting and yet accepting censure at the same time. The victims may find it difficult to dismiss the opprobrium as unjust — they might, in resignation, wrongly see it as fitting to their station in life. The 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche attempted to rationalise why, dismissively stating that: 

 “The order of castes is merely the ratification of an order of nature.”

At the same time, class has appeared hard-wired across generations within families. For many, there are no or few available strategies to exit the cycle they’re caught up in. Measures of influence, power, wealth, job status, and knowledge — along with verdicts about decency, heritage, behaviours, habits, and who deserves what — are the filters through which stereotypes and biases pass. Identity, labels, entitlement, and rationalisation are among the tools instigators use to perpetuate classism. Their claim to merited privilege becomes the normative standard. That standard, however, can run into the immorality of social and economic inequality that’s arbitrary, often non-merit based, and stems from self-indulgence.

Appropriately, the 18th-century Scottish social philosopher Adam Smith pushed back against Nietzsche’s dismissiveness, laconically offering the optimistic, affirmative view that:

 “... the  difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of.” 

A notion that all people, of all classes, can build on. 

Yet classism and inequality aren’t figments; they are real social constructs that bear concretely on citizens’ lives. Certain groups, believing their economic and sociopolitical advantages endow them with higher class rankings, enjoy yet another consequential privilege: they get to pull the levers on how government, the law, institutions, entitlements, and cultural foundations are designed and operate, and whom those levers favor. This instrumentalist perspective serves as a means to acquire additional benefits. The privileged are adept at influencing the running of nations and leveraging the hand they get to play. They project their influence on society in ways that primarily attend to self-interests, with modest resources to be shared among the rest.

The effect of those residual resources doesn’t make inequalities right, or more bearable or fixable; the effect is duplicitous. In a paradoxical way, the privileged exert a powerful, dominant grip, while dexterously advancing their interests. The exercise of power often happens veiled — though it needn’t always do so, as out-in-the-open brazenness is no barrier to political manipulation. An offshoot among the privileged is increased self-determination and sovereignty over choice — their own and their nation’s. Distrust of the financially oiled powerbrokers — among those who feel disenfranchised and denied fairness and opportunity — emboldens disunity and strident polarisation. Sometimes the outcome is the rise of extreme factions on both the left and right of politics, clashing over matters of both policy and heart-felt beliefs.

The underprivileged classes see that, in an increasingly and perhaps irresistibly and irreversibly globalised world, there’s merely a larger platform on which those already holding capital, and the levers of influence that accompany it, extend their gains all the more. The so-called common good isn’t always seen as an enlarging, sharable pot — where zero-sum resources go only so far and are seen to be acquired at the expense of other groups. The less-advantaged members of society might question whether equality and merit really matter, as opposed to an unfair 'legacy' grip on claims to influence, wealth, and power. 

Liberal economics promises the opportunity to rise among the ranks, though serving as more an aspirational, albeit elusive, brass ring. Identity — such as race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, language, and history — is integral. Identity serves as a means to decide how to share access to rights, choice, fairness, justice, goods, safety, and well-being — and ultimately recognition and legitimacy in the marketplace of ideas — according to the governing arrangement. Yet inequality endangers these benefits.

As an ideal, the observation by the 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau is still highly relevant to the debate — duplicated around much of the world — over class, inequality, the public good, sociopolitical advantage, and nations’ responsibility to rectify egregious imbalances:

“It is therefore one of the most important functions of government to prevent extreme inequality of fortunes; not by taking away wealth from its possessors, but by depriving all men of means to accumulate it; not by building hospitals for the poor, but by securing the citizens from becoming poor.”

Yet, the reality — whether in liberal democracies or in patriarchal autocracies, and most systems of governance and social philosophies in-between — has seldom worked out that way. Classism and inequality continue to march conspicuously in unison and without remedy, their rhythms bound irremediably together, each still used to justify and harden the shape of the other.

The Unelected Super-Rich Showing Brits to the Exit

Posted by Martin Cohen

On the 23rd of June 2016, the UK votes on whether or not to 'leave' the European Union and regain full control over its own affairs instead. At least, that's how the argument is put by those in favour of the move. 

For humdrum workers in industries that actually import or export products or materials to the EU, it only means higher tariffs and complicated paperwork. For bosses it means increased costs and uncertainty – and reduced investment. But for one group, it does indeed promise a splendid new dawn of 'freedom'. This group is the super-rich, and they work in financial services in the City of London.

For them the battle lines with the EU were drawn after the crash of 2007/8 which so nearly collapsed the entire Western banking system. The response, apart from pouring billions of taxpayer dollars, euros and yes, British pounds into the pockets of the injured speculators, was increased regulation.

And so the dirty secret, as I see it, of Brexit is the financial services industry jockeying for 'lighter touch' regulation. But this issue has not been given prominence - instead we have talk about conventional business, trade flows, workers rights and currency rates. A constant complaint has been that EU laws are made by people who are unelected – which is simply not true. The real levers of power in the EU remain firmly in the hands of the national governments. But no one is interested in how the EU really works, they just want to stop the 'migrants'.

The UK is obsessed with keeping out migrants. Indeed, waves of Somalis, Afghans, Iraqis and now Syrians are rather alarming – and certainly include a whole host of issues about conflicting social values. But what people mean by this is fellow Europeans. People who are better educated that the average Brit, and far more cultured, all they want to do is work hard and be useful members of the community. But many British resent or even hate them in just the same irrational way as uneducated whites hate people of colour. Because they're 'different'. This is why the British are such poor members of the Union, and if they vote themselves out of it in June, it will be this kind of nationalism that will have won it for 'Leave'.

But giving 'the great unwashed' – the lower classes – this power is not usually done. Indeed the UK is primarily voting in a rare referendum because for decades leading the (ruling) Conservative party has been impossible without assuaging the demands of a noisy Europhile group. Even now, if the UK Parliament had an unencumbered vote, they would not hesitate but to continue working within the EU. In this way, the unelected bosses of the hedge funds and spread-betting firms who have been backing the 'Leave' campaign  are driving the British where they want.

These are people like Richard Tice, co-chair of Leave; Crispin Odey, Peter Cruddas, a former Conservative Party Treasurer; Stuart Wheeler of IG; Michael Hintze, Conservative donor; not to entirely forget Edi Truell, Brexiter and again a major Conservative donor.

For these city speculators – 'value trashers', in City jargon – the possibility of the pound plummeting, of share prices collapsing, of market and political dislocations with dire and unpredictable consequences – all represent big opportunities and easy money.

Market disruption is excellent news for them, and so will any longer-term  post-Br exit dislocation.

And so, to sum up, the 'real story', as I see it, of Brexit is the worst elements of the financial services industry jockeying for 'lighter touch' regulation. It's the poachers tricking the rabbits into letting them be the gamekeepers.

Brexit? What's really been going on in Brussels

Posted by Martin Cohen

What’s really been going on in Brussels? On the face of it, the UK Prime Minister, Mr Cameron, has taken Britain to the brink of rupture with the European Union over the issue of child support payments to EU citizens working in the UK, but whose children live at home. The arguments over this raged for two nights and two days, as Mr Cameron pounded the table and wagged his finger and threatened to pull the whole EU house down. Official European plans for a post-discussion English dinner, and then - even more sacrosanct! - English Breakfast were left in tatters.

And that means something serious is going on. Eventually the ‘migrants’ as apparently fellow EU workers are now to be called, lost the right to the full child support benefit, but retained the right to a miserly version phased on the cost of living in their home country.

You’d have to be either pretty stupid, or very ignorant, like the vast majority of English people itching to unshackle themselves from the world's largest free trade area, to think this issue really was what the best minds of the Tory party were concerned about.



No, the real issue going on in the ‘renegotiation’ concerned the City of London. The amounts riding on the child benefit wrangle amounted - at most - to a few tens of millions of euros. EU leaders were baffled at why the UK had dragged them to an Emergency summit. However, the amounts involved in the City’s ability to continue to act as the EU’s financial centre (despite the UK government not being part of the actual Europe currency) are rather more serious. Even the strident ‘vote Leave’ campaign estimate them at 10 billion euros a year.

What Cameron and the Conservative government demanded was that the City be protected by changes to the EU’s core Treaties enshrining the right of the UK government to decide which financial regulations and standards to follow - and which to ignore or water down. In effect, to allow the City to undercut the rest of the European banks by being allowed to offer dodgier financial deals. The City of London represents an obscene 20% of the UK GDP these days. Augmenting this would have been a prize worth having.

And it almost worked! The ‘migrants’ talk and the bluster about not wanting to be part of a ‘political union’ distracted most of the other European leaders. Only, as far anyone can tell, the French really dug in, insisting on the principle of the ‘level playing field’ between financial institutions in Europe. Victory would have been well worth the loss of breakfast.

It seems an initial draft even conceded the right to the UK government to let the City of London run rampant, but this, as Reuters put it very discreetly ‘raised concern’ in France that different banking regulations in London and the euro zone might unfairly benefit the former.

This is no small matter. Had the UK ‘won’, a repeat of the 2008 banking crisis would have been not merely more likely but flat inevitable. As it is, Europe’s banks remain in a fragile state, with their assets largely imaginary and their potential debts dwarfing the entirely ‘real’ economies of their host countries. Iceland learned what happens when the banking bubble bursts, as to a lesser extent the world did in 2008.

This is the key passage:

“The single rulebook is to be applied by all credit institutions and other financial institutions in order to ensure the level-playing field within the internal market. Substantive Union law to be applied by the European Central Bank in the exercise of its functions of single supervisor, or by the Single Resolution Board or Union bodies exercising similar functions, including the single rulebook as regards prudential requirements for credit institutions or other legislative measures to be adopted for the purpose of safeguarding financial stability, may need to be conceived in a more uniform manner than corresponding rules to be applied by national authorities of Member States that do not take part in the banking union.”

(for full test see here )

So, at the end of the day, (apart from that newly defined right to deprive Europeans working in the UK of child benefit) all that the UK has won is a chance to complain about financial regulation. This is The Financial Times’ solemn take on the matter:

“The City of London will also be poring over the small print to see whether the “emergency brake” intended to protect Britain from intrusive, Eurozone-inspired financial regulation will actually work in practice. For all the talk of non-discrimination and “mutual respect” between the Eurozone and non-euro countries such as Britain, will Mr Cameron’s right of appeal to his fellow EU heads of government necessarily produce a different result?”

It won’t, and slightly to my own surprise, it seems that the EU has once again - Houdini like - escaped diabolical perils. Until the next time!

Brexit? What's really been going on in Brussels

Posted by Martin Cohen

What’s really been going on in Brussels? On the face of it, the UK Prime Minister, Mr Cameron, has taken Britain to the brink of rupture with the European Union over the issue of child support payments to EU citizens working in the UK, but whose children live at home. The arguments over this raged for two nights and two days, as Mr Cameron pounded the table and wagged his finger and threatened to pull the whole EU house down. Official European plans for a post-discussion English dinner, and then - even more sacrosanct! - English Breakfast were left in tatters.

And that means something serious is going on. Eventually the ‘migrants’ as apparently fellow EU workers are now to be called, lost the right to the full child support benefit, but retained the right to a miserly version phased on the cost of living in their home country.

You’d have to be either pretty stupid, or very ignorant, like the vast majority of English people itching to unshackle themselves from the world's largest free trade area, to think this issue really was what the best minds of the Tory party were concerned about.

No, the real issue going on in the ‘renegotiation’ concerned the City of London. The amounts riding on the child benefit wrangle amounted - at most - to a few tens of millions of euros. EU leaders were baffled at why the UK had dragged them to an Emergency summit. However, the amounts involved in the City’s ability to continue to act as the EU’s financial centre (despite the UK government not being part of the actual Europe currency) are rather more serious. Even the strident ‘vote Leave’ campaign estimate them at 10 billion euros a year.

What Cameron and the Conservative government demanded was that the City be protected by changes to the EU’s core Treaties enshrining the right of the UK government to decide which financial regulations and standards to follow - and which to ignore or water down. In effect, to allow the City to undercut the rest of the European banks by being allowed to offer dodgier financial deals. The City of London represents an obscene 20% of the UK GDP these days. Augmenting this would have been a prize worth having.

And it almost worked! The ‘migrants’ talk and the bluster about not wanting to be part of a ‘political union’ distracted most of the other European leaders. Only, as far anyone can tell, the French really dug in, insisting on the principle of the ‘level playing field’ between financial institutions in Europe. Victory would have been well worth the loss of breakfast.

It seems an initial draft even conceded the right to the UK government to let the City of London run rampant, but this, as Reuters put it very discreetly ‘raised concern’ in France that different banking regulations in London and the euro zone might unfairly benefit the former.

This is no small matter. Had the UK ‘won’, a repeat of the 2008 banking crisis would have been not merely more likely but flat inevitable. As it is, Europe’s banks remain in a fragile state, with their assets largely imaginary and their potential debts dwarfing the entirely ‘real’ economies of their host countries. Iceland learned what happens when the banking bubble bursts, as to a lesser extent the world did in 2008.

This is the key passage:

“The single rulebook is to be applied by all credit institutions and other financial institutions in order to ensure the level-playing field within the internal market. Substantive Union law to be applied by the European Central Bank in the exercise of its functions of single supervisor, or by the Single Resolution Board or Union bodies exercising similar functions, including the single rulebook as regards prudential requirements for credit institutions or other legislative measures to be adopted for the purpose of safeguarding financial stability, may need to be conceived in a more uniform manner than corresponding rules to be applied by national authorities of Member States that do not take part in the banking union.”

(for full test see here )

So, at the end of the day, (apart from that newly defined right to deprive Europeans working in the UK of child benefit) all that the UK has won is a chance to complain about financial regulation. This is The Financial Times’ solemn take on the matter:

“The City of London will also be poring over the small print to see whether the “emergency brake” intended to protect Britain from intrusive, Eurozone-inspired financial regulation will actually work in practice. For all the talk of non-discrimination and “mutual respect” between the Eurozone and non-euro countries such as Britain, will Mr Cameron’s right of appeal to his fellow EU heads of government necessarily produce a different result?”

It won’t, and slightly to my own surprise, it seems that the EU has once again - Houdini like - escaped diabolical perils. Until the next time!

What Would Happen If 3-D Printers Could 3-D Print Themselves?

Posted by Matthew Blakeway

“In the future, [the human species] will refuse to put themselves at the service of pirates. They will become what I call transhumans – who will give birth to a new order of abundance” ―Jacques Attali.

The French philosopher and economist Jacques Attali* predicted in the 1970s that the music industry would collapse. Within twenty years, he was basically proved right. If something is freely or cheaply replicable, then economic theory predicts that its value will trend towards zero. Ever since we were able to record our friends’ vinyl LPs on cassette, the ability of musicians to earn a living from recorded music was doomed – and so it turned out to be. Musicians today earn less and less from selling recorded music. I myself, as a writer, am acutely aware that it is getting harder to make a living, even in a world where people are reading more.

Now Attali is making the same predictions about manufactured goods. 3-D printing, while it still is a relatively new technology, opens the door to being able to scan a wide variety of objects into a 3-D printable file and e-mail it. Many manufactured products may become infinitely reproducible, their value trending towards zero. It has already been done, if only experimentally. We already have 3-D printed musical instruments, camera lenses, weapons – even 3-D printed refrigerators and cars. It isn’t inconceivable that we all will be able to upload 3-D printable files for such items which we can print at home and assemble Ikea-style. We could then tweet the link so that everybody else can have one.



At first glance, this all sounds as though it represents an impressive technological advancement. But actually, in an important sense, it is anti-technological – just as music streaming is anti-creative. The incentive to invent a better refrigerator or car is to make money. But if, as soon as you have done so, the value of the inventor’s work trends towards zero, then all hope that the inventor has of making money evaporates. So what is the point of innovation?

We like to think that people will continue to create and to innovate for the love of it – like inventing a new music genre. But I remember a time (not so long ago) where all waiters and bar tenders in New York City were aspiring actors, musicians, or artists. They could survive on three shifts a week and devote the rest of their time to their creative pursuits. But today, it takes six shifts to support subsistent living in a dingy bed-sit – so all those creatives have disappeared. I would like to think that they went to another, better place, but I see anecdotal evidence instead that many of them were forced to take menial office jobs.

If most forms of creative output (artistic or manufactured) will eventually become valueless in economic terms, then the economic constraints upon consumption will evaporate – as has already happened with music. But then so will all the manufacturing jobs that create that stuff, and so will the artists and inventors. In fact if we look at what is going up in value, not down, it is mostly what is not infinitely replicable, like land. The cost of education is currently going up, but this could sharply reverse through the rise of Internet education. Fossil fuels were becoming cheaper as we became more effective at extraction, but this already is understood to be a passing phase.

There is something else on planet earth that is infinitely and cheaply replicable – and that is humans. During my lifetime, the population of humans on this tiny planet has doubled. And if I survive into my eighties, it will treble. If something is freely and infinitely replicable, then in purely economic terms its value will trend towards zero. And that is precisely what is happening across the world.

The value of unskilled labour is trending towards subsistence wages – and in a globalised world, nations that value human rights are powerless to protect unskilled workers from the market forces of labour in countries far away, that have too many people doing jobs of declining worth. Real wages, even of American workers, have declined as their productivity has increased**. And this divergence of wages and productivity started in the 1970s, just as economists started preaching the value of globalisation. In the developed world, we have been trying to resist this trend, by pouring resources into education – attempting to ensure that we have no unskilled workers. But this post started by explaining why the value of the output of skilled creatives, too, is trending towards zero. This strategy only seems to defer the inevitable.

The logical conclusion is that, while people's labour will have little value, there will be few economic constraints on the consumption of products which cost little to produce. And while increased productivity should reduce the need to work, that is not the experience of the workers, who everywhere are working harder just to stand still. Even if – playing devil’s advocate – we argue that goods cost little to produce but that the cost of raw materials will offset this, it so happens that commodity prices are universally declining too.

We need to ask what this means for the future of humankind. But first, we need to ask what it means for the future of economic theory. It occurs to me that most economic theory doesn’t work in a world where there is an infinite supply of everything and therefore everything costs nothing. And if everything costs nothing, money no longer works as a means of allocating access to resources. This sort of argument isn’t trivial, and economists are currently debating different forms of the same thing: they worry about what happens when the conventional tools of economic management (among them, fiscal and monetary policy) simply stop having the effect that they used to have. Some governments have already tried negative interest rates after an interest rate of zero was found not to be low enough to stimulate growth and recovery from recession.

One way to escape this death spiral, where ultimately the planet may have billions of economic migrants, is to abandon the idea that all decision-making should revolve around money. We need to stop thinking about the monetary value of labour, and start thinking about the intrinsic and emotional value of a human life, and how this may be safeguarded and guaranteed. A good place to start is to consider how much consumption would optimise a human life. Bearing in mind that the advertising industry has been pummelling us with propaganda as to how consumption enhances our emotional wellbeing, it seems likely that we need a lot less consumption in reality than most of us think. Then we can start to consider how much consumption this planet can support. And then it becomes easy to compute how many humans we can fit on this planet before it bursts.

If economics is going to have any role in working this all out, then it is going to have to go cold turkey on its addiction to converting everything to monetary value before it can even think about it. Interestingly, we have seen powerful trends in this direction, reflected no less in the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

* Sam York. The Pop Star and the Prophet.bbc.com. 17 September 2015.

** Gillian White. Why the Gap Between Worker Pay and Productivity Is So Problematic. The Atlantic. 25 February 2015.

A Liberation Economics

Image courtesy of liberation blog

Posted by Thomas Scarborough 

We no longer live in a state of nature. Over the course of centuries, our vocations have become more specialised, and more distanced from our roots.

Our workplaces now at a distance, our knowledge contained in isolated pools, our tools manufactured by others, our potential curbed by managers, and our recovery-time limited by numbers on a wall – among other things – the question is pressing as to how we should best accommodate vast changes as we move through time and through history.
 
We tend to underestimate the hapless way in which we have managed the change, and the burdens we have brought upon ourselves. Consider the word 'employment' – derived from the Latin implicare, to enfold. We may thus be seen to be enfolded by employers: surrounded, enveloped, even engulfed. The consequences need no introduction: traffic jams, night shifts, equipment malfunctions, red tape, even surrendering our children to strangers. Fatigue, oppressive environments, unrealistic targets, and demands beyond our ability to cope. Nor are we free to be excused: to the point, sometimes, of exhaustion, depression, road rage, divorce, even suicide.



It is the selling of oneself and being sold, judged Karl Marx. In fact long has the debate raged as to whether we merely are marketable goods. However, while there is little doubt that this is so in the case of slavery and forced labour, in the best of situations we may be confused. If we are commodities, we are surely cherished commodities: valued colleagues, graciously accommodated, and thoughtfully motivated. Yet even so, in view of the heavy burdens which most of us bear, it seems hard to deny that we are in fact held – in many respects, at least – in bondage.

But things have been changing. The tide has been turning. Since the advent of modern economic theory, a simplistic view of employment has given way to a far more holistic view – and on this basis I shall, in a moment, suggest a way forward.

Economic theory, in its infancy, assumed that the goal of economics was growth of income per head. While there was growth indeed, there was, too, deepening poverty, social disintegration, and environmental destruction, worldwide. The sums did not translate into general well-being. This led then to much revision – welfare economics being the result. The welfare of individuals now moved to centre stage – where 'welfare' is defined as our being provided with adequate goods and services.

Yet we know that we need more than that. We need freedom, happiness, entertainment, rest, and so much more. The welfare model was (and is) inadequate. With this in mind, a more holistic successor emerged, although this is not yet widely applied. Called the Capability Approach, this blended economic theory aims to maximise workers' capability. That is, economics ought to assist us in becoming rounded human beings in a healthy society.

Let me now combine these thoughts. We see the tendency towards greater holism in economics. Put this together now with the bondages we have described. What is suggested is liberation from these bondages, in a holistic environment – above all, as affects our working lives. Yet how may this be done? Having created the monster, are we able to escape it?

Let us try a bold thought experiment – and turn current economic theories on their head. Supposing that we ought not to work, but to be set free from work – to follow a vocation – where 'vocation' is derived from the Latin vocare, to call. We are called, not driven. Supposing then that, in keeping with this, employees are rewarded with the purpose of releasing them from employment, into their vocations. The same has been practised for centuries by religious movements, which through a stipend set their clergy free from secular pursuits.

The goal of society, then, would be to remove impediments to its citizens' callings. Any number of impediments may (again) be named: traffic jams, red tape, unrealistic targets, as well as many further burdens which lie beyond the workplace. And for a moment thinking more broadly: it is not hard to see that the liberation of the individual may further release an entire population: from gridlock, bureaucracy, or disorganisation, to name but a few examples.

'Freedom' is the watchword – in this case freedom to work Yet unlike other economic theories, such as the Capability Approach, where freedom tends to be seen as extraneous to one's work, freedom in this case is central. Call it a Liberation Economics. The worker is no longer enfolded by an employer. And the individual's ability to serve a vocation to their full potential should permit – even encourage – service outside the confines of a particular working relationship, company, or state – to work for the benefit of the world.

Notice, too, a radical implication. In the workplace, and its environment, not only do we fight for something now. We fight against it. This gives such a Liberation Economics a revolutionary edge – if not a religious edge, with the suggestion of sin, and justice.

Finally, (post) modern economic theories are no longer self-adjusting, as the political economist Adam Smith once envisaged: namely, leave people to themselves, and the rest will follow. Holistic economic theories require the support of the society of which we all are a part.

The Capability Approach, as an example, presupposes constitutional guarantees, human rights legislation, and development policy, among other things. It need hardly be said that a Liberation Economics, here described, is in one sense idealistic. It will only survive in an economic environment which sustains it. In a selfish, competitive environment, it will die. Its principles would need to be protected by legislation which is written into the very groundwork of society.