Vikas Shah, Thought Economics, September 2011
Vikas Shah, Thought Economics, September 2011
In any iteration of human civilisation, the primary 'mode of operation' of society often impacted the 'mode of thinking' of the time. This can be seen in the spirituality and 'reverence for nature' held by agricultural and pre-industrial societies- and can also be noted in the rather more 'material' thinking (held in esteem within mercantile civilisation) and the 'mechanical and scientific' mode of thinking we saw during our industrialisation, which has persisted through to the present day. These 'modes of thinking' also influenced what we (as a species) were capable of achieving. As individuals and small family units, while reasonably successful- our actions provided little more than secured food and shelter. When we began 'group think'- however- things became interesting. Religion and culture provided us with a uniquely shared mode of thinking which mobilised tens of millions of individuals (who shared that religion or culture) to perform astonishing feats of success (e.g. building pyramids, cities, and more), and to perform astonishing feats of evil (e.g. engaging in war, committing genocide).
Economically, this mass-mobilisation of individuals, resource and capital into action (capitalism) has persisted for hundreds of years. Capitalism is, "the dominant economic system in today's world, and there appears to be no alternatives in sight..." (Richard Swedberg, Cornell University, 'The Economic Sociology of Capitalism'). This system has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of subsistence and- in a relatively short space of time- has allowed society to perform miraculous feats of innovation and development ranging from dramatic improvements in our lifespan, to the development of mass-communications, the internet, financial markets, and technologies which have sent members of our species to view Earth from other worlds while others send sensors deep into the planet, and far into space- probing the origins of man, and the origins of the universe itself.
In the past century, as our civilisation embraced technology and transportation, we globalised- connecting the dots in capitalism to create a profoundly powerful economic civilisation. Our understanding of this phenomenon, explains Swedberg, has been largely been based on, "...the proposition that interests drive the actions of the individuals, and that interests [in capitalism] come together in a very specific way. The actors in society are driven by a variety of interests – political, economic, legal and so on. The plurality of [these] interests make the analysis realistic as well as flexible. Interests of the same type, as well as of different types, may reinforce each other, counterbalance each other, block each other, and so on. Interests, very importantly, are what supplies the force in the economic system – what makes millions of people get up in the morning and work all day. Interests also explain why banks, financial markets and similar institutions are so powerful: they can mobilize and energize masses of people into action through their control over economic resources."
As the blinkers of egoism have been lifted, we (as a society) have realised that capitalism- while ostensibly responsible for the vast majority of our civilisation's advances in the past quarter millennia- has also been responsible for creating vast inequality, conflict, and potentially irreparable damage to our planet. With no viable alternative to capitalism, however, the time has come to discuss "What happens next?...."
In this exclusive interview, we speak to Nobel Prize Winning Economist, Edmund Phelps (the McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University and Director of the Columbia University Center on Capitalism and Society). We look at the story of modern capitalism, the benefits it has brought, and the challenges it has created. We explore the 'post crisis' economy, the role of government in society, the relationship between capitalism and conflict, the role of oil in our society and look at what needs to be done to 'fix' our global economy, and the science of economics itself.
Edmund Phelps is both the Director of the Center on Capitalism and Society and McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University. He is the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics. His career began with a stint at the RAND Corporation. Back east in 1960, he held appointments at Yale and its Cowles Foundation until 1966, then a professorship for five years at Penn. In 1970 he moved to New York and joined Columbia in 1971. Phelps's work can be seen as a program to put 'people as we know them' back into economic models - to take into account the incompleteness of their information and their knowledge and to study the effects of their expectations and beliefs on the workings of markets. He has adopted this perspective in studying unemployment and inclusion, economic growth, business swings and economic dynamism. Phelps was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Science in 1982 and made a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association in 2000. In 2008 he was named Chevalier of the Legion of Honor and was awarded the Premio Pico della Mirandola for humanism and the Kiel Global Economy Prize. In the same year the University of Buenos Aires Law School established the Catedra Phelps for Programs on Dynamism and Inclusion. He also holds many honorary doctorates and several honorary professorships. An extraordinary tribute occurred when scholars came from around the world for a large Festschrift conference in his honour just three weeks after 9/11.
Q: What is capitalism?
[Edmund Phelps] As a matter of history it's crucial to distinguish between what I have taken to call 'mercantile capitalism' and what I like to call 'modern capitalism'. Mercantile capitalism I think of as prevailing in Britain, Holland, Spain and elsewhere from around 1500 to 1800 or so. The American colonies were, of course, part of that. Following this, thanks to a number of antecedent developments; political and economic- by the early years of the nineteenth century, Britain was able to put all the 'bricks in place' for a prototype of modern-capitalism that launched with the end of the Napoleonic wars in around 1815. Then I see America as joining that list in around 1830... and one must give recognition to France within this story- even though they never became as strong an example as Britain and America. In the 1860's and 70's, Germany joined the group- and things began to become complex.
Fundamentally, modern capitalism was a system for indigenous innovation- while mercantile capitalism didn't have much innovation at all. Perhaps more importantly- the innovations that did occur during the mercantile period were, in essence, applications of scientific and navigational discoveries outside the economic system. What was striking about the modern economies is that they were internally creative. I don't just mean creative in the sense that you may refer to an individual's potential creativity before they have done anything... I mean that they [participants in modern capitalism] actually delivered. They delivered new products and new methods with stunning frequency- ultimately every day! This occurred right through the early nineteenth century, and some countries went through this journey again- the United States, for example- during the inter-war period between around 1921 and 1941- it was an extraordinary time. This happened again between 1955 and 1975 and then disquieting things began to develop.
Q: What are the key problems with modern-capitalism?
[Edmund Phelps] I think there are some very worrying developments.
If we start with demographics- we have the huge wave of retirement coming up in the next ten years. The United States will be, to an appreciable extent- much more than before- a country of older people. These people will be drawing on retirement and medical benefits. More than that, they will be withdrawing their labour services from the economy, and they're not being replaced by a new-wave of young people coming up. Capital is going to find itself with less labour to work with so I'm afraid business investment activity is going to be weak ten years from now... and is weak already in anticipation of that. The decade beginning around 2020 will not be a good time for capitalism.
Next, if we turn to innovation. there's been a tremendous slow-down in productivity, beginning in the 1970's. Economists all knew about that- many wrote about it. As recently as the late 1990's I realised that the slow-downs of productivity had a lot to do with the rise of unemployment. I had thought, until then, that it was just bad-economics... that some people were just too feeble-minded to separate the level of economic activity from the growth of the output produced by the economic activity. It turns out the man on the street was right, and I was wrong... there is a very close link between productivity growth and unemployment. Primarily, the massive productivity slow-down in Europe accounts for the fact that the German unemployment rate barely budged from 0.8% from around 1960 to 1973. And now? it's around 8%. A spectacular rise in unemployment.... So why has productivity slowed down? I think there has been an underlying decline in the rate of innovation in the economy. There's not as much tinkering... not as much dreaming... not as much conceiving new-ways to do things... If we go a level below this and look at the cause of that. We see that a huge amount of short-termism which has crept into the system. CEOs routinely devote their lives to hitting the next quarterly earnings targets... and that doesn't leave very much time for thinking about the medium term future. This creates a number of mysterious questions. Taking Silicon Valley, which is so famous and so admired... why didn't all those venture-capital firms multiply and sweep through the world? You have a small number a small number of venture-capital firms which tend to operate in Shanghai and other places, but you have not had an explosion of venture capital... There are a lot of very worrisome questions about what has happened to the dynamism of modern economies such as Britain, America, France and Germany. We did, of course, have the internet revolution... but that too was in just a pretty small sector of the economy. I'm worried that a lot of that innovation is not very job-creating... and to the extent that it is also job-creating, those jobs can be done perfectly well by production workers in China... maybe it doesn't need the loving attention of craftsmen (for example).
Q: Are there any specific areas of additional dynamism needed in our economies?
[Edmund Phelps] I don't think there was ever a specific need for dynamism... Dynamism is the elixir of life. We need to have new challenges! We need to have new ideas! If we don't have new ideas, and we don't the opportunity to work on ideas, develop them, test them, try them out in the market, use them, take them home.... if we don't have that, we're going to be zombies. I think this is a very serious thing. I'm not saying that there's some problem out there which means that some particular innovation is needed for an un-met need... although a cure for cancer would be nice. The NIH actually undertook to do this, around twenty or thirty years ago, and it was an amazing thing- around a year ago- when they made a public statement confessing to failure. They confessed that they had been unable to do it.
Q: Are we facing a "new-normal"? What can we do to secure our economic future?
[Edmund Phelps] I think we are facing a new normal. This new-normal will have a higher natural rate of unemployment... like seven percent rather than five and a half that it was in the 1990's. Slower growth is also part of it.. maybe at two percent per annum instead of three percent that we have seen in more recent decades, and four that we saw in the 1950's and 1960's. This, of course, raises the question... "Oh my god, what can we do about this!?"
Sure, we can do some things that would be good to do in response... It would be good to get rid of this short-termism... some of which is coming from the financial sector. These financial guys are putting a lot of pressure on the CEO's to be short-termist... to deliver short-term results. We do need a reform of the financial sector, and we do need more ways of nurturing venture capital. I've been advocating a first-national bank of innovation. America is a country that has subsidies for almost everything.... education, farming... and hidden subsidies for manufacturing and exporting... you name it! There is very little subsidy, however, for work - and almost no subsidy for innovation. There is a tax-credit and some tax-deductibility for research and development expenditures, but research and development expenditures are confined to a small number of industries- and that's not a huge amount of money. We have to make it easier for a young entrepreneur to start a company... to start his innovative project. We have to make it easier for an established company to start a new innovative project.
I know there are a lot of scientists out there who say, "you dummies out there in economics, you don't realise that science is the fountain of all progress... and we'd have more technical progress if we had more scientific activity..." and then of course, the green people say, "...yes, we ought to set-up national institutes for reduction of carbon-use, solar, and so forth...". The trouble is... those science projects will not create a lot of jobs for ordinary people. It may create some jobs for scientists and engineers... We're not going to get back to the dawning of the modern age from 1815 to 1870, where everybody and his brother was running around trying new ideas.... we're not going to get there by having some grants for research projects. We have to get back to our roots... get back to the old spirit of experimenting, exploring, trying things out, discovery... on a broad scale. Every company would, ideally, be doing a lot of this all the time
Q: What are your thoughts on the role of government in inspiring ideas (for example, using the space programme and lunar missions)?
[Edmund Phelps] The programme to go to the moon and explore space was a wonderful expression of modernism... but I'm afraid it would be disastrous if we made that a recipe to be used all-over the economy... we wouldn't want the whole economy to be under the direction of a bunch of NASA's. This has to be at a grass-roots level.... I think Buzz-Aldrin was right that the lunar missions were inspiring... they intended to be inspiring... but maybe it's a mark of the change in our times, that nobody even thinks of proposing something new like that, they don't care anymore.
Q: What have been the benefits of, and challenges brought by, capitalism?
[Edmund Phelps] There's no question, anymore, that the material benefits of capitalism were phenomenal- almost from the get-go around 1815. There was a tremendous pick-up in the growth rate of aggregate output and standards of living were increased tremendously. That resulted in huge increases in public-health with a corresponding reduction of disease- and the emergence of all-kinds of comforts...
Modern capitalism ought not to be viewed as merely a system for producing goods (more or less the same goods that had been produced during the mercantile period). It was a system that stimulated the production of new commercial ideas- and stimulated the development of those new commercial ideas by entrepreneurs. It also stimulated the development of a crude financial system- that lent some support to entrepreneurial activity- and this system led many producers to spend time or hire people with expertise in evaluating new products and new methods of production. Consumers also came to have a new way of life! Consumers would go to the mall on Saturday morning to look at the new stuff on display! More generally, though, western society went from a life in which ordinary people were not much involved in the economy, to one where people were engaged in conceiving new ideas, experimenting, tinkering, exploring new possibilities, experiencing the 'new' - this was an intellectual revolution. I like to amuse myself by pointing out that the arts changed alongside. Music became completely different two or three times after 1815- the visual arts such as painting followed the same trend. Modern capitalism offered a new way of life, not just a higher standard of living.
The downside? Well.. of course there's always a downside to everything. Modern capitalism is a system in which some people are very lucky- they just happen to be at the right place at the right time... and can cash in big-time; while other people aren't! Some people are very unlucky- they make decisions which turn-out to be ill-fated. That could, of course, have been true to some extent in mercantile times also. With the transformation of capitalism from mercantile to 'innovational', however, there was a tremendous increase in uncertainty. The future became anyone's guess... In that sort of a world, you can find yourself on a very bad path- or you can find yourself on a marvellous path which you had never dreamed of! So there's just naturally a considerable amount of inequality that this system generates.
Q: Why do poverty and inequality exist on such a large scale?
[Edmund Phelps] As I just said, there is naturally a huge amount of inequality in modern-capitalism. Capitalism can, to a degree, address that inequality by subsidizing- in one or more ways- the employment of workers at the bottom... low wage workers. It also helps to pull up their wages. This helps increase economic inclusion and reduce inequality so that low-wage participants in an economy can feel that they're not receiving unnecessarily low-wages and low-rewards... that society has addressed their situation and done something about it. We could interpret John Rawls book, 'A Theory of Justice' as- essentially- being an argument for low-wage employment subsidies up-to the fullest level- as far as society will allow. A crude translation of Rawls would be, "maximise tax revenue in order to maximise the money the state has to put into things like low-wage subsidies."
That will, of course, leave the Bill Gates' of the world who are very rich because, besides being very bright and driven, they got extraordinarily lucky. Wealth inequality of that sort doesn't cause me concern- It doesn't matter to me that the Rockefeller's may own half of Maine (for example) or that Ted Turner may own half of Montana... What does it matter? I think Ted Turner did a great thing with CNN and he's very rich! so what? I just don't get it. I just never understood why there was such an aesthetic revulsion to outsized rewards for people who had a big idea and- generally speaking- worked their heads off to develop that idea. I don't have any problem with it. I understand, though, that some very rich people use their wealth to get involved in politics- and I find that a little bit ugly. It's important to say that this is on the 'left' and the 'right' - there are plenty of leftist billionaires, and even more right-wing billionaires around.
Q: What do you feel is the social context of capitalism?
[Edmund Phelps] I think modern-capitalism has given a huge breadth of people a range of opportunities that could not have been imagined in 1750 or earlier. Ordinary people have opportunities (at least in the more capitalist economies of the western world) for meaningful careers- careers of problem solving, venturing into the unknown- and in the course of that not only experiencing the development of their capabilities but also self-discovery- discovering who they are. More than that... it's about having an adventure that leads them to become something that they didn't know they could be... to become something way beyond what they could have been had they not taken that adventure. This development is not something you can do on an island alone (although even Robinson Crusoe could come out of his journey almost disbelieving what he had been able to do!) ... The social-interactions are an important part of this. The interactions you have with other people lead you to become a different person. A person you could not have become had you not had them.
Money culture has really taken-over to excess... In the nineteenth century, people were on a tremendous adventure. They didn't know what the future held. They were meshed in a colossal discovery process which was enormously exciting! Now it seems that people are in business just to make money. They want to take the adventure out of everything, they want to mechanise things as much as possible... they want to take the business of making mortgage loans to home-buyers, for example, and turn that into some sort of standardised packaging... so that nobody ever sees the home-buyer or even the house... people just enter a code into a system and get the terms of a loan.
Q: What do you feel is the relationship between capitalism and conflicts (such as the Arab Spring)?
[Edmund Phelps] As I see it... and I feel pretty-sure after talking with experts, that I'm right about this... The revolt of the urban youth in Tunisia and Egypt is all about wanting to have careers... wanting the ability to start your own business... wanting the ability to enter an existing enterprise without benefit of connections (i.e. solely on your CV to date and the people you or your family know).
I think Egypt and Tunisia were examples of yet-another economic system... namely the system which, for a lack of a better word, we call 'Corporatism'. This system has private ownership... one of the things that Egypt did, for example, in the last ten or fifteen years was privatise a lot of enterprises. Those enterprises became owned by people in the military. Corporatism doesn't mean social-ownership... that's socialism. Corporatism means that there is a great deal of central control, directed by the government, of the private sector. A great deal of regulation... a great deal of two-way communication occurs with the private sector seeking favours from the government and the government seeking the same from the private sector.... In Egypt and Tunisia, you had a very rudimentary corporatist system which was being exploited all-out by the rulers who took advantage of their powers to put their cronies in place as managers and owners of various enterprises. The bulk of the population, many of whom who- by this time- have college or university degrees of some sort.. cannot break into the system! They can't get jobs in those enterprises.. they are strictly for the insiders. They can't even sell their fruits on the streets without a license- and there aren't very many of those [licenses] distributed. It's a very closed system... a system that's about as far from modern capitalism as you can get! Well functioning modern capitalism allows anybody to start-up a company, to go into business for himself, and start coming up with new ideas, and working on their development.
In the European corporatist model, you have giant employer-federations and you have giant labour-unions... and so you have a tri-partite system of economic power. In Tunisia and Egypt I think it's fair to say that the labour-leg of the tripod isn't there. It's just the businesses and the government.
Big corporations are highly politicized and have close relations with their national governments... Corporatism has always been around... there were certainly corporatist strains in Bismarck's capitalism. The government was pretty-cosy with a lot of big companies. Companies were going in and out of government offices trying to get contracts, trying to get favours.
Q: Is there a relationship between Oil and the well-being of economies?
[Edmund Phelps] This is a question which has been debated for a long time... You certainly can see that in some countries in the Middle East (excluding North Africa) that the government acquires the ownership and possession of the oil- and then uses the oil to spread money around the country... not only to keep itself in power, and prevent political competition- creating an absence of new ideas, new energy and so forth... but also the whole population can live off these stipends, subventions, emoluments... this flow of money that comes to them without having to lift a finger. This is tremendously damaging to whatever curiosity, drive and zeal the individuals were presumably born with.. and becomes very damaging to these economies.
It's very dangerous to generalise though. If you look at Norway, for example, it's done a pretty good job of not throwing-around the oil wealth in a way that would be a 'death-knell' to society. They recognise that oil will not last forever, and place their oil revenues into a sovereign wealth fund. Then, of course, you have to determine what you do with the income from the sovereign wealth-fund! The returns on sovereign wealth can, of course, be used for various purposes to better society. Maybe Norway is saved by the fact that their oil-wealth is not so colossal that it puts the whole rest of the advanced economy in the shadow- so that it doesn't matter anymore. Maybe also good sense and propriety combined with prudence and abstemiousness... avoiding 'blowing' all that money day by day has also contributed.
Q: Has globalisation and the advent of multi-nationals impinged on competition and innovation?
[Edmund Phelps] Is the pharmaceutical industry more nearly-monopolised or more nearly under the control of a small oligopoly now that many companies have become globalised? It seems the case in pharmaceuticals that they have all become globalised- so they all compete with one another as before, but they're all global now- rather than national. I would suppose that there's more competition now of American pharmaceuticals, for example, with pharmaceuticals in Switzerland and Germany and so forth- than there was in the 1920's or the 1890's! A large company now has to answer to a whole-lot of governments whereas previously it only had to answer to one- or one central government, one state government and one local government. That's not only a distraction, but introduces significant red tape (getting permissions from a number of governments for example).
Q: What is the future of economics as a discipline?
[Edmund Phelps] Economics is in a tremendous crisis... especially since it doesn't know it's in a crisis.
This may sound funny... but it didn't damage me (personally). I spent most of my career trying to put people back into economics! The day I won the Nobel prize, I was asked at a press-conference to encapsulate my life's research in one sentence. I said, "...in my work, I've tried to put the people back into economic theory..." Some of my earliest work looks at a farmer considering new seeds and fertilisers... contemplating whether or not he can take the risk of trying any of these new things.... and whether he should adopt them. The answer depends on his educational background.... his willingness to bear some uncertainty... and so forth. Later on, when I was working on unemployment and inflation- I asked myself... What would I do if I was a company? I realised I would be worried about what other companies were doing about their wages! In the process of increasing their wages, to the extent that they are, I must increase mine too in anticipation. I then introduced wage-expectations and price-expectations which were not talked about before. Later on, around 2000- I started talking about the visions of entrepreneurs... those are real life people who have visions! People who from any walk of life can have an idea.... A truly modern economy is all about ideas and people!
Economics has contributed to the march away from these principles by reducing economies to 'stochastic steady-state models' in which prices are the entire interest. Prices, in these models, 'vibrate' in some way. I find this incredible.... This thinking began seeping into the financial sector so then the banks started importing French mathematicians to work out how to price various assets as if anyone could possibly know what these assets are worth? We live in an uncertain world... not just a vibrating one! Economics will (and should) always have a scientific side... but it has to remember that no piece of evidence is ever decisive on its own... we have to understand that our subject is human creativity. That will be a very different kind of science from what we have had before. There hardly is any science of creativity yet- yet alone a science of individual or societal creativity which understands the interactions of people- that's the next giant-step.
"Economists..." wrote Sendhil Mullainathan in his 2004 paper, 'Psychology and Development Economics', "...often study scarcity, yet their conception of decision-making assumes an abundance of psychological resources. In the standard economic model, people are unbounded in their ability to think through problems. Regardless of complexity, they can costlessly figure out the optimal choice. They are also unbounded in their self-control able to costlessly implement and follow through on whatever plans they set out for themselves. Whether they want to save a certain amount of money each year or finish a paper on time, they face no internal barriers in accomplishing these goals. Furthermore, they are unbounded in their attention. They think through every single problem that comes at them and make a deliberative decision about each one. In this and many other ways, the economic model of human behaviour ignores the actual bounds on choices(Mullainathan and Thaler 2001). Every decision is thoroughly contemplated, perfectly calculated and easily executed."
The reductivist fallacy behind this 'rational economic agent' is similar to the paradox in thinking described by the British Philosopher Karl Popper, in his seminal lecture "Of Clocks and Clouds" (1966) where he makes the distinction (as summarised by David Brooks) between clocks as, "neat orderly systems that can be defined and evaluated using reductive methodologies..." and clouds which are, "irregular, dynamic and idiosyncratic." Brooks describes how Popper felt Clouds were, "...Hard to study because they change from second to second.." and can, "...best be described through narrative not numbers...". Popper himself wrote, "...according to what I may call the commonsense view of things, some natural phenomena, such as the weather, or the coming and going of clouds, are hard to predict: we speak of the `vagaries of the weather'. On the other hand, we speak of clockwork precision' if we wish to describe a highly regular and predictable phenomenon."
He elucidated his concept looking at the paradigm of a cloud or cluster of small flies or gnats. "...Like the individual molecules in a gas, the individual gnats which together form a cluster of gnats move in an . astonishingly irregular way. It is almost impossible to follow the flight of any one individual gnat, even though each of them may be quite big enough to be clearly visible." Likening this to our own society, he continues, "...the cluster does not dissolve or diffuse, but it keeps together fairly well. This is surprising, considering the disorderly character of the movement of the various gnats; but it has its analogue in a sufficiently big gas cloud (such as our atmosphere, or the sun) which is kept together by gravitational forces. In the case of the gnats, their keeping together can be easily explained if we assume that, although they fly quite irregularly in all directions, those that find that they are getting away from the crowd turn back towards that part which is densest. This assumption explains how the cluster keeps together even though it has no leader, and no structure-only a random statistical distribution resulting from the fact that each gnat does exactly what he likes, in a lawless or random manner, together with the fact that he does not like to stray too far from his comrades. I think that a philosophical gnat might claim that the gnat society is a great society or at least a good society, since it is the most egalitarian, free, and democratic society imaginable."
If we compare our economy to this 'cluster of gnats' we see a range of (disorderly) economic actors ranging from central banks, to financial institutions, investors, businesses, consumers and more. Each actor appears 'unpredictable' yet the cloud (the economy) "keeps together fairly well.." If any economic actor strays too far from the crowd, the gravitational pull of capitalism- where the human system is at its most dense (the need to work, access capital, be part of the group to flourish- manifested perhaps best in cities) quickly causes the actor to return to the core. This 'core' gives the economic system a perceived order (which we misinterpret quantitatively and reductively) and gives it a sense of arrogance claiming it is a good society, a free society, and (perhaps most arrogantly) a democratic one.
"Everyone agrees that people have reasons for what they do..." wrote H. Simon in his 1986 essay, 'Rationality in Psychology and Economics', "...they have motivations and they use reason (well or badly) to respond to these motivations and reach their goals. Even much, or most, of the behaviour that is called abnormal involves the exercise of thought and reason. Economics sometimes feels called on to defend the thesis that human beings are rational. Psychology has no quarrel at all with this thesis. If there are differences in viewpoint, they must lie in conceptions of what constitutes rationality, not in the fact of rationality itself. The judgment that certain behaviour is "rational" or "reasonable" can be reached only by viewing the behaviour in the context of a set of premises or "givens." Economics without psychological and sociological research to determine the givens of the decision-making situation, the focus of attention, the problem representation, and the processes used to identify alternatives, estimate consequences, and choose among possibilities-such economics is a one-bladed scissors. Let us replace it with an instrument capable of cutting through our ignorance about rational human behaviour."
In Simon's assessment (above) lies perhaps the biggest clue in answering "..what follows capitalism?". As society progressed through industrialisation- it was unsurprising and (largely) appropriate that our thinking became reductivist, we made machines- and those machines, in turn, made us... The world has, though, evolved and modern civilisation- in its highly globalised form, is as much a knowledge economy as a mechanical one. This is an iteration of civilisation which can leverage the power of capitalism to ensure the billions living in poverty 'join the economy'. This is an iteration of civilisation which has the innovative power to create solutions for ecological problems our predecessors have created, and the power to create economic entities which provide opportunity for a huge number of people to generate wealth in a democratic fashion.
We have had mechanical-capitalism. Now it's time for human-capitalism.
Click to read full article...