7.
There Are Many Alternatives
Deciding what you want your country to do more of is one thing; knowing how to track progress towards it is another thing entirely. But actually making it happen? Driving social change, even when opposed by powerful people? That’s crazy talk. The market won’t allow it. The system can’t be changed. Don’t you know there is no alternative?
Except, of course, there are countless alternatives. And many of them are already working well in parts of the world. The future is already here; it just hasn’t been widely copied yet.
Canberra, Australia’s capital city, will operate on 100 per cent renewable energy by 2020. Half of Copenhagen’s commuters ride their bikes to work, and the city is now building a bike ‘superhighway’. Towns in Canada, Australia, the United States and India have introduced a variety of bans and limitations on the sale of bottled water, plastic shopping bags and other products the world once lived without. Volunteers built (and continue to build) Wikipedia, and in doing so made information freely available to billions of people and saved millions of tonnes of paper that would once have filled bookshelves with out-of-date facts. Swedish workers have five weeks of paid holidays each year. Credit unions and co-operatives have, for more than a century, provided all of the services of global banks, usually at lower prices – and with any surplus invested in their communities. Cuba has a poor economy and a great health system.
You don’t need permission, or global consensus, to change the world. Indeed, changing the world doesn’t even require co-ordinated global action. There was, for example, no United Nations resolution to roll out smartphones across the world, to move from horses to cars, or to make QWERTY keyboards the norm. While global agreements to encourage things, or to ban things, play an important role in shifting norms, cultures and expectations, they don’t always work. The fact that there is an international ban on whaling has not stopped the Japanese from whaling, and the fact that there is a global non-proliferation treaty on nuclear weapons has not stopped a number of countries from seeking or developing them. Most international agreements, by design, lack enforcement mechanisms. Their main strength is that they can help to change culture – but international agreements are by no means the only way to do so.
UNTHINKABLE THOUGHTS
The US health system is based on private funding, while in the United Kingdom it is almost entirely publicly funded. In Australia there’s a bit of both, but the system is much closer to the UK’s than the US’s. The United Kingdom instituted its National Health Service in 1948; Australia’s publicly funded Medicare system was introduced in 1984. In each case, five years earlier a public health system was inconceivable. While Obamacare in the United States is not a publicly funded health model, it did help millions of low-income earners afford private health insurance. Its repeal by President Trump in early 2017 was considered inevitable – right up until the Republicans in Congress failed to do so.
History suggests that no one can predict what in the future will stop seeming a totally crazy idea. Certainly the notions that the United Kingdom would vote to leave the European Union, that a US president would be elected on a promise to remove the country from the North American Free Trade Agreement, or that bottled water might outsell Coca-Cola were unthinkable only a decade ago. But all have come to pass.
During the last thirty years, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and many Western governments told billions of people that free markets were good, that protecting industries was bad, and that bailing out failing companies was an ineffective way to help workers, consumers or the economy as a whole. Until, that is, the biggest banks in the world needed a bailout. Then, of course, voters learned that there were alternatives. Much of the so-called populism that has emerged around the world in recent years – movements that support subsidies and trade barriers – has been a direct reaction to the obvious willingness and ability of governments to bail out the banks that nearly failed in the global financial crisis. If we can support the banks, billions of people realised, why can’t we support local manufacturing? It’s a fair question, and one for which the spokespeople for the ‘There Is No Alternative’ bloc – sometimes known as TINA – have absolutely no answer.
Intriguingly, not all countries bailed out their failing banks after the global financial crisis. Iceland’s banks, like those in the United Kingdom, the United States and elsewhere, made lots of bad loans to lots of people who had no real prospect of repaying them. And like in most other countries, the owners of Iceland’s banks argued that if they weren’t bailed out by taxpayers, the whole economy would collapse. But unlike in most other countries, Iceland’s governments ignored these pleas. While the bank’s shareholders lost a lot of money, Iceland’s economy is still with us. Indeed, because Iceland’s taxpayers didn’t spend billions bailing out their nation’s banks, Iceland’s economy recovered from the global financial crisis more quickly than most.
The strongest and most stable era of economic growth in developed economies occurred after World War II. Then, there were virtually no free-trade agreements between nations, the finance sector accounted for a tiny proportion of national economies, and real wages grew steadily for low- and middle-income earners. Corporate tax rates were high by today’s standards, and governments provided a wide range of services directly to citizens.
The idea that there is no alternative to free-trade agreements that undermine national regulatory standards, to corporate tax cuts and to lower wages is clearly contradicted by the recorded history of every developed country. Similarly, the fact that the most prosperous countries in the world have some of the largest public sectors, some of the highest tax rates and some of the highest wages in the world tends to confirm not just the existence of alternatives, but their success.
WHAT’S ON THE POLICY MENU? AND WHO’S ORDERING?
‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.’
Mahatma Gandhi
Australians are unique in their willingness to eat both the animals that appear on the national coat of arms. This hasn’t been the case for very long, however. While Indigenous Australians had always eaten kangaroo and emu, most immigrants to Australia chose to stay away from the native fauna, preferring domesticated cattle, sheep, pigs and chicken as sources of animal protein. But cultures change all the time.
Some visitors to Australia are shocked to see kangaroo on restaurant menus, while others go out of their way to taste it. From time to time consumers in various countries embrace the novelty and supposed health benefits of kangaroo meat (which is high in protein but low in fat), while others protest what they perceive as the cruelty of hunting and butchering wild animals for human consumption.
Both eating meat and choosing which meats are acceptable to eat are entirely cultural decisions. Some cultures love bacon; others see the pig as a filthy animal. Some cultures eat dogs and cats; others do not. Certain cultures are strongly vegetarian; in some, people don’t consume much meat due to the fact that, without refrigeration, fresh meat is difficult and expensive to come by.
Every few years, a scientist looking for publicity will release research suggesting that world hunger can be addressed if more people were willing to eat maggots, crickets and cockroaches. But while most of us recoil in horror at the thought of eating insect protein, anyone who thinks bugs are gross should have a close look at a prawn or a lobster before it’s cooked. There’s a good reason prawns are sometimes called the cockroaches of the sea.
Whether it is a restaurant menu or tax rates, culture plays the dominant role in shaping not just the choices that we make but also, and more importantly, the choices that we are offered. This is as true for individuals shopping for groceries as it is for politicians shopping for ideas.
The length of the menu of policy ideas that politicians feel they can draw from is heavily influenced by the temper of the times. The passage of the Patriot Act in the aftermath of the horrific events of September 11, 2001, is a good example. Before the attacks, the idea of giving police unfettered powers to surveil citizens would have seemed more than a little radical, but a month after the attacks the US Senate voted by a margin of 98 to 1 in favour of a bill that did exactly that. An extreme event shifted the way a culture viewed surveillance: less emphasis was placed on citizens’ privacy and more on their need for security. The fact that every country strikes a different balance when trading off privacy against security is proof that there is no right answer here. Not only do different countries with different cultures strike different balances, but as cultures change within countries, so too do citizens’ perceptions of the right balance change over time.
The concept of the ‘Overton window’ is sometimes used to describe the range of ideas deemed to be politically acceptable in a particular time and place. According to Joseph P. Overton, after whom the effect is named, only ideas that are considered politically acceptable in the current climate of public opinion can be recommended by a politician if he or she wants to gain or retain public office. While the position of the Overton window can be shifted gradually through public debate or rapidly through significant events (such as the September 11 terrorist attacks) to propose an idea that is outside of the current Overton window is to reveal yourself as radical and, more importantly, unelectable. Expanding on Gandhi’s observation, the political commentator Joshua Trevino spelt out the path an idea follows as it moves from outside the Overton window to its centre as:
1. Unthinkable
2. Radical
3. Acceptable
4. Sensible
5. Popular
6. Policy
It was once unthinkable for politicians to propose that black people or women might have the vote. It is currently radical to suggest that fifteen-year-olds should vote, and unthinkable to suggest that 99-year-olds should not. Women in Saudi Arabia first cast their votes in 2015. In Australia it is radical to propose that people should be able to buy machine guns and armour-piercing bullets. In the United States it is unthinkable – at least, for those seeking to hold public office – to suggest that all private gun ownership be banned. The majority of Australians support exactly such a position. Culture drives policy.
When mobile phones first came into common use, it was unheard of for someone to maintain a phone conversation while engaging with shop assistants. When email first came into common use you could opt to receive correspondence electronically; now many firms charge extra, or simply refuse, to send information by ‘snail mail’. Culture shapes expectations.
Culture doesn’t change like the seasons; it is changed by the actions of people within it. In turn, when people say that there is no alternative to the current health system – or no alternative to the way that cities are designed around cars, or no alternative to the way that income generated through profits is taxed at lower rates than income generated through working all day – what they really mean is: ‘I like things the way they are.’
Many people believe that the United States could never introduce effective regulation of large corporations, make share-owners pay more tax, or invest any extra tax revenue in high-quality health, education and infrastructure services. Perhaps they don’t understand that things were not always this way and that the US was once far more ‘progressive’ than Europe. As Don Watson observes:
the New Deal . . . made the US more socially progressive than any country in Europe. For half a century after Roosevelt’s election, tax on incomes over a million dollars averaged 82 per cent. US estate taxes of 70–80 per cent were twice those in Germany and France. Wisconsin was a state as progressive as any in the world, and the South aside, the US did not lag so far behind. Yet by the mid-1980s it had been decided that these rates and a federal minimum wage which had co-existed with the most sustained era of prosperity and social mobility in US history were an unbearable burden on free enterprise and the American way.38
In 1910 it was unthinkable that a government would seek to break up J.D. Rockefeller’s company Standard Oil, at the time the most profitable firm in the world. But the temper of the times changed, and after a 1911 Supreme Court case ruled that Standard Oil should be broken up, by the beginning of World War I the unthinkable had become policy. The Overton window can open faster than those who profit from the status quo, and those who want change, often realise.
But the fact that the window can be flung open does not mean that it can’t be slammed shut or, more likely, slip down quietly over time. The laws that reined in the ‘robber barons’ of the early twentieth century were steadily eroded and circumvented over the next eighty years, so that by the end of the century the scene was set for a repeat performance. It may seem unlikely that the United States is set to return to the culture, and the policies, that delivered the incredible period of economic growth and redistribution from 1945 to 1970, but unlikely doesn’t mean impossible. It might be just another court case away. No wonder judicial appointments have become so political in the United States.
History is full of stories about how leaders such as Roosevelt, Gandhi and Churchill each changed their nation’s culture, and in turn their nation, through force of will. So we know it can happen; we just can’t be sure when it will happen next. But history is also full of more complicated stories, such as the centuries it took for women to get the vote, a project completed only recently and already in need of significant preventive maintenance. Similarly, the abolitionists fought for hundreds of years to end slavery; despite their obvious success in some countries, it is estimated that between 21 million and 46 million people, mainly women, are today held as slaves.
The world is full of alternative ways to structure our lives, our communities and our countries. We can learn from the past, learn from other countries or think up new ways of doing things ourselves. Collecting the evidence that a problem exists and that solutions can work is sometimes an important part of driving policy change, but there is no evidence to support the view held by many progressives that ‘evidence-based’ policy is a good way to drive change in a democracy. There is also no strong evidence that causing climate change is a good way to help create jobs and there is no strong evidence that corporate tax cuts are a good way to create jobs. But powerful voices not only hold these views strongly, they have also managed to turn them into policy.
Those who want to solve their community’s problems, or the world’s problems, should draw on the best evidence available to help them choose among existing alternatives or design new solutions. But those who want not just to imagine alternatives, but to drive them, should never believe that once they have presented the evidence for change, powerful interests who benefit from the status quo will simply step out of the way. As Michel Foucault observed, ‘Where there is power, there is resistance.’
DO WE NEED TO SMASH CAPITALISM?
The term capitalism isn’t very helpful anymore. Capitalist used to refer to someone whose income came from the capital they had accumulated. Workers got income from their work, and capitalists got income from their capital. Now the term capitalist is often embraced by people who work for a living but like the idea of free markets. But a lot of the biggest capitalists – that is, those who have the most capital – accumulated their wealth specifically because regulations have protected them from the competition that comes with free markets. Media barons are a case in point: their most valuable asset is a broadcasting licence that prevents new competitors from entering the market without first compensating the incumbents.
Not only is capitalism used in contradictory ways by different people, the idea of reforming or even smashing capitalism means different things to different people. When it comes to the goal of smashing capitalism, for example, should the small farmers selling their organic produce to the locals be destroyed first? Or the giant multinationals such as Tesla, which is disrupting the global oil and coal industry with its mass production of batteries? Maybe the artists selling their work direct to customers on eBay should be the first target? Or perhaps Facebook, which among other things allows community groups to organise far more quickly than ever before?
While there are plenty of reasons to think that in a hundred or a thousand years’ time there might be economic systems that do not rely on the generation of private profit from privately owned property, there are also plenty of reasons to think that the path from the status quo to a fundamentally different culture might be more incremental (and hopefully more peaceful) than the kind of revolution that so many communists hoped was just around the corner.
The idea that capitalism can be tamed, and the profit motive directed towards the collective good, is long-standing but widely mocked in some circles. Since Engels in 1893 some communists have argued that it is naive to think you can simply knock the sharp edges of capitalism through ‘reform’. Such incrementalism is often portrayed as false consciousness and its proponents accused of propping up the status quo by damping down revolutionary tendencies.
Maybe they’re right. But whether people believe that the revolution is coming, the revolution will never come or the revolution is already happening every day, they should at least be able to agree that it is beneficial to help individuals, communities and countries understand the vast array of alternative forms of production and economic organisation that already exist around the world. Surely those who want to smash capitalism and those who want to reform it would both benefit in the short term from helping billions of people understand that we do not all owe our jobs, our happiness or our health to the big corporations that we hear so much about. There are alternatives.
Far more people play for local sporting teams than for the national sporting teams that dominate the sports coverage on the nightly news. Indeed, if you only relied on the national media, you could be forgiven for assuming that nobody played amateur sport. The same is true of small business. While far more people work in small business than in the big companies that dominate media coverage of the economy, you could be forgiven for thinking that nearly everyone owes their jobs to the handful of big companies that attract the vast majority of attention. But they don’t.
BIG COMPANIES AREN’T THAT BIG A DEAL
Four of the five biggest companies on the US stock market didn’t exist in 1975, and none of them was in the top ten even twenty years ago. In 2006 the three biggest companies in the world were ExxonMobil, General Electric and Gazprom. In 2016 the biggest three were Apple, Alphabet (the owner of Google) and Microsoft. ExxonMobil has grown rapidly in the last fifty years and is now the biggest oil company in the world, but it has shed half of its workforce over that time. Growth in the value of a company is in no way linked to growth in the number of people it employs.
The fact that there are big companies in the world doesn’t mean that change is impossible, or even hard. In fact, big change is often driven by big companies. As we have seen, J.D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil grew so big at the beginning of the twentieth century that new laws had to be created to control the power he wielded. But the reason that Standard Oil grew so big so fast was that it was helping the world move through one of the biggest economic transitions it has ever seen: the transition from steam engines to internal-combustion engines.
The incredible growth in the use of smartphones, not just as a means for people to call each other but as a way to book hotels, buy groceries and find our way around cities, would not have occurred as rapidly as it has without Apple, a company that was nearly broke in 1997. In fact, without Apple and the smartphone it is highly unlikely that Uber, Google, Amazon and Facebook would have grown so fast either.
Of course big companies can, and do, use their shareholders’ and customers’ money to shape both the culture and the laws of the countries they operate in. ExxonMobil, for example, has spent tens of millions of dollars funding climate sceptics, in a deliberate attempt to undermine any sense that we need to use less fossil fuels. Such manipulation of culture is neither new nor confined to the fossil-fuel industry. In addition to funding scientists to dispute the health risks of smoking, the tobacco industry engaged in a decades-long culture war to undermine the evidence of the harm its products caused, while simultaneously working hard (and spending harder) to depict smoking as something done by rugged individuals who were proud of taking risks.
One of the clearest and longest-lasting efforts to reshape culture was undertaken by the De Beers diamond company. After watching the demand for, and price of, diamonds collapse during the Great Depression, De Beers wrote to an advertising company, N.Y. Ayer & Sons, asking whether ‘the use of propaganda in various forms’ might increase demand for its product. Market research confirmed that a large proportion of American women saw diamonds as ‘money down the drain’. Undeterred, the advertising company set out to ‘create a situation where almost every person pledging marriage feels compelled to acquire a diamond engagement ring’. Needless to say, it worked.
But the fact that the owners of big companies have managed to bend culture and laws to suit their own interests does not mean that they always can, or indeed that they will always be able to. The very fact that large companies, churches, political parties and others set out to shape culture is, for others who wish to change the world, proof of the importance of actively doing so.
It is not as easy for individuals, small businesses or non-government organisations to shape culture as it can be for companies that stand to make billions of dollars if their efforts succeed. But it’s not impossible to win an uphill battle. And the fact that the playing field isn’t level now doesn’t mean that it won’t ever be level. There is, for example, nothing but culture to stop a country from banning some or all forms of advertising, banning corporate donations to politicians, preventing former politicians from working as lobbyists, or requiring our elected representatives, who are of course employed to make decisions on our behalf, to provide real-time updates on who they are meeting (on our behalf) and what they are discussing (on our behalf).
While such changes may be outside the Overton window in most countries at the moment, one thing that is certain is that the window will shift in the coming decades. But which way will it shift? As former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel once said, ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste.’
BIG COMPANIES AREN’T EVEN THAT BIG
As discussed above, far more people work in small businesses than in big businesses. While it serves the interests of those who own lots of shares in big companies for the public to believe that what is good for big business is good for the economy, in fact there is little overlap.
A lot more people in most nations work for themselves than for the biggest companies in their country. In the United States, for example, 53 per cent of people work for organisations with fewer than ten employees.39
Some small businesses are well run, have loyal and well-paid staff, and offer both job security and flexibility to their workers. And some are terribly run, underpay their staff and exploit the vulnerability of their workers. Some medium-size and large businesses sit across both these categories. Many people who work for themselves love the freedom and flexibility of it, while many others are self-employed out of necessity.
It’s impossible to say what size businesses are the best employers, and the academic literature on what makes for good workplace culture is as diverse as it is voluminous. But a good workplace culture includes strong legal protections, good alternative job prospects, and trust between managers and workers. Put simply, culture is more important than size.
IF ONLY THERE WAS AN ALTERNATIVE TO CORPORATE CAPITALISM
The first customer-owned ‘credit unions’ started taking deposits and making loans in Germany in the 1850s. In Italy, the People’s Bank of Milan opened in 1865, and in 1872 the Co-Operative Wholesale Society formed in England. Credit unions, building societies and mutually owned banks now employ hundreds of thousands of people and hold billions of dollars in deposits.
Yet during the GFC, many people expressed frustration at the lack of alternatives to the multinational banks, which care only for their shareholders, often at the expense of their customers and communities. Member-owned and not-for-profit banks, by contrast, are generally required to reinvest any surplus they generate back into their communities.
While not-for-profit organisations don’t (of course) announce large profits each year, that does not mean that they do not make a large contribution to economic activity and community wellbeing. In the United States, for example, the YMCA employs more than 20,000 full-time staff and has 600,000 volunteers. In Australia, the Uniting Church–owned aged-care provider UnitingCare employs over 35,000 people. This ‘charity’ and the Anglican Church’s aged-care provider, Anglicare, together employ more than 60,000 people – more than total employment in the Australian coal industry.
Charities, not-for-profits, co-ops, member-owned corporations, partnerships and a wide range of other legal and economic structures employ a large proportion of the workforce in all developed countries. They provide everything from health and education to transport and tourism. They produce and sell food, and they provide crisis support. Quite literally, they are vital in the provision of ‘essential services’. And if you want them to play an even bigger role, there are several things you can do about it: use more of their services, lobby your employer or your local government to use them more, or set up a new organisation to do something new.
I know, I know: we can’t all work in aged care or help the homeless. That’s true. But it is also true that we can’t all work in ballpoint pen factories and we can’t all work as corporate lawyers or merchant bankers (whatever that means). Arguments of this sort (‘We can’t all sell each other coffee!’), which are used to trivialise the economic contribution of both not-for-profits and the service sector more generally, have no economic foundation. Indeed, there are whole economies where almost ‘nothing real’ is produced, such as the economy of Wall Street, or the economy of some Caribbean tax havens. Services, whether they are provided by tax lawyers or charities, are as real a form of economic activity as the production of food that gets thrown in the bin.
THE PUBLIC SECTOR HAS ALREADY BEEN INVENTED
No one having a heart attack would think that health services aren’t a real part of the economy. Of course it’s true that we can’t all work in hospitals, but no coalminer or merchant banker having a cardiac arrest is likely to wish we all worked in coalmining or merchant banking. While capitalism is often defined as the pursuit of self-interest, the fact is that, even in a ‘free market’, we’re all in this together; we just can’t quite agree on the shape of ‘this’, or what a fair distribution of ‘this’ would look like.
Almost all of a society’s most important services are provided by the public sector. Some countries have experimented with private police forces, private fire brigades and even private water suppliers, but the overwhelming majority of communities have settled on a preference for ‘socialist’ provision of essential services. While the principle of ‘the user pays’ is present in most countries – even when it come to some state services – few societies have opted for a user-pays model when it comes to access to sewerage. Most people really, really want their neighbours to dispose of their waste properly – and that usually means a sewer. Communities that don’t publicly fund the disposal of human waste generally face outbreaks of cholera from time to time.
Publicly provided services don’t just make our societies function well, they also drive economic activity. Publicly funded research around the world has given us everything from radar and GPS satellites to Wi-Fi and the Google algorithm. The idea that only private-sector activity ‘creates’ wealth or jobs is as ridiculous as the assertion that the ratio of public-sector spending to GDP is, in any sense, a meaningful indicator of economic efficiency.
Despite the rhetorical aspiration to get government ‘down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub’, there is no country in the world that does not have a public sector.40 In fact, it is only possible to have some form of capitalism after the state, and its public servants, have come into existence. You can’t have property rights without judges and police; you can’t have judges and police without taxes; and you can’t have taxes without an army of public servants to collect them.
The fairytale version of free-market economics found in most textbooks starts with the market forces of supply and demand living peacefully in a Garden of Eden until the snake of the public sector shows up to ruin the ‘equilibrium’. But any historical study of how markets came about makes clear that it was the snake that built the garden. Long before there were free markets, there were bandits and thieves who discouraged people from producing and selling large quantities of anything, out of fear that their wares would be stolen long before they were sold. When unelected tyrants began to offer secure property rights in exchange for tax on trade, merchants flocked to the heavily taxed marketplace rather than take their chances in the tax-free but dangerous wilderness.
In both Austria and Sweden, the public sector accounts for more than half of GDP. That is, more than half of all the goods and services in those countries are produced by entities owned by the state. But these nations still have capitalist economies. People are free to own private property and to profit from its use. Indeed, despite what many would describe as its high taxes, Sweden boasts one of the world’s best-known transport companies (Volvo) and one of the world’s best-known home goods companies (IKEA). It has also given the world Electrolux, Ericsson and Spotify. It’s almost as if having a large public sector doesn’t prevent the private sector from innovating, exporting, employing people or anything else . . .
NORTHERN EUROPE DOES EXIST
Any new society or new economy will be built by the one we already have. A new economic system, complete with new rules, new norms and new infrastructure, will never appear out of thin air, complete and ready for use. Just as the Industrial Revolution was built with the tools of an earlier era, the economy of the late twenty-first century will be built with the tools and structures we have today.
It’s hard to reform capitalism, or smash it, if you can’t be sure exactly what it is and which bits of it are failing and which bits of it are worth keeping. If capitalism is supposed to mean ‘a society with no government’, well, that dream died long ago. Conservative politicians are very happy for governments to regulate people’s sex lives, marriages, recreational drug use and the movement of people across borders. They might want to see less public money spent on health, education and welfare, but they have no apparent desire for governments to stop regulating our behaviour or spending our money on defence. Rather, as we should expect, there is an ongoing democratic debate about what kind of governing our elected representatives should do.
Capitalism is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It includes countries such as Madagascar, where the public sector employs only 2 per cent of the workforce, but it also includes Sweden. That both these economies can be described as capitalist points to either the adaptability of the term or its meaninglessness. Either way, for those who wish for an alternative to capitalism, could an achievable goal, in the short term at least, simply be to strive for a public sector as large and vibrant as those of the northern European countries? Indeed, even Swedes looking for alternatives to capitalism could pursue a public sector that accounts for 60 per cent of GDP, or even 70 per cent.
The flexibility of the term capitalism has made it virtually impossible to have a constructive democratic debate about what a country should do more of and what a country should do less of. Proponents of taxing polluters and spending more on education are typically accused of ‘abandoning free-market capitalism’, wanting to turn their country into ‘Communist China’ and so on.
While the idea of capitalism is often linked in the public debate to free markets and small governments, the reality is that capitalism, in all its diverse forms, relies on the existence of regulation, and governments to enforce those regulations. As we have seen, many of the enormous banks that many people associate with free-market capitalism only survive today because governments were willing to bail them out. More broadly, without a complex regulatory structure and government guarantees, much of the banking system of capitalist economies would not exist in the first place. Virtually everyone accepts that governments have an important role to play in regulating behaviour, collecting taxes and providing public services. A phoney debate about whether capitalism is good or bad crowds out room for a more useful public debate about which kinds of regulation and services we want more of and which we want less of. The fact that so many Northern European countries collect so much more tax than most developed countries, while still falling into the category of capitalist countries, is clear proof that those who want to significantly reshape the US, UK, Canadian or Australian economies can do so with ease. While debating the theoretical merits of capitalism and socialism might be fun for some, the simple fact is that you can radically change the shape of an economy without having to change the label you attach to it.
REVOLUTIONS NEED CLEAR GOALS, NOT CLEAR LEGISLATIVE AMENDMENTS
Just as the fight about whether GDP growth is good or bad has distracted people from conversations about which aspects of society they would like to see grow and which decline, debates about whether the market or the government is best placed to produce all goods and services have got in the way of a more important enquiry: which goods and services are best provided by the public sector, which goods and services are best provided by the private sector, and what kinds of regulation do we want to impose on private producers?
The world is full of alternatives to corporate capitalism. But just as restaurants don’t offer their diners every possible dish, politicians don’t present all possible options for economic and social reform to the voters who elect them.
Those who wish to cure the world of affluenza need to feel confident that myriad options exist, that social and economic change is the one thing that is certain, and that a quick look at other countries is all the proof you need to know that there are always alternatives.
But the fact that options exist does not mean they will be easily or effectively applied in new settings. As a country’s laws both reflect and reshape a country’s culture, it can sometimes be impossible to predict how and when change will occur. For example, in 1964 the US National Bureau of Standards stated that it would embrace the metric system. In 1968 the US Congress authorised a three-year study into the feasibility of metrification, which concluded such a shift would be beneficial. In 1975 the US Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act. And today in the US nearly all road signs express distance and speed limits in miles, not kilometres. Success in changing the law is quite different from success in changing behaviour.
Similarly, Australia has committed to the Paris objectives of reducing global greenhouse-gas emissions, but the Australian government continues to subsidise the construction of new coalmines; Canada has made similar commitments while encouraging the extraction of enormous amounts of oil from its tar sands.
Sometimes it is easier to change the law than it is to change the culture and sometimes it is easier to change the culture than it is to change the law. Those who want to reshape the economy need not divide on the issue of whether it is better to change laws or change behaviour, communicate evidence or communicate messages, or work at the community level or the global level. On the contrary, those who can agree on the direction of change that is necessary should also agree that work in all those domains is necessary and important. While there is no silver policy or political bullet that can change the world, there is a single poison pill that can kill any movement: the idea that there is only one thing that needs to change in order for everything to change.
No one ‘invented’ the national or global economies we interact with today: they evolved slowly out of the past, as millions of people made millions of choices and decisions. Those who want major change do not have to take responsibility for designing utopia; they only need to pursue the changes that they believe will make things better, steer away from those they think will make things worse, and work with others who share their goals even if they don’t share their priorities. The future is full of alternatives we haven’t yet rolled out – the only thing up for grabs is who will choose them.
Leanne Minshull
Last year, for the first time in human history, more people lived in cities than outside them. I grew up in the inner-city of Sydney and by the time I started commuting to work, all the transport options that I had to choose from were either expensive, stressful, slow, over-crowded or a combination of all four. It wasn’t until I moved to Amsterdam that I discovered I had been forced to choose from a poor set of options. I soon realised that people who had shaped different cities had made radically different choices to the ones made by those who shaped Sydney. I also quickly realised what an impact such choices can have on you personally, and on the character of the city itself.
Growing up in Australia I heard stories of Nordic cities where earnest northern Europeans whizzed about on their pushbikes in the depth of winters, but it wasn’t until I moved to Amsterdam that I understood what made them so happy with themselves. Riding my bike around my new home made me richer, healthier and less stressed, but even more than that, I felt like a kid again, master of my own destiny, ready for adventure and beholden to no one. Spontaneous invitations from friends across town became an opportunity for a catch-up rather than an insurmountable logistical challenge. I felt like someone who had found religion or discovered Tupperware and I wanted everyone in Australia to experience what it felt like to live in a city where people, not cars, were king.
Then I started to feel angry about why the choices offered in the country of my birth were so expensive and inconvenient. Cities don’t just happen; they are shaped by people, ideas, history, money and power. I began to wonder how it was that Amsterdam had ended up so people-friendly, and which people I should be thanking for it. The answer was as liberating as my bike.
I soon discovered that in the 1950s and ’60s Amsterdam, like many industrialised cities, was being transformed by people who made money from making and selling cars. Car ownership increased, roads were hastily constructed and in 1971 more than 400 children were killed in traffic accidents across the Netherlands. People – particularly mothers – organised and agitated. They took direct action by holding dinner parties in the middle of roads, claimed part of the road for bicycles by painting lanes overnight and holding mass demonstrations. Many of the police, cyclists themselves, were sympathetic to the cause. Councils instigated car-free Sundays and constructed curvy roads with multiple bumps, designed to make driving slow.
Fast-forward four decades and the Netherlands is the undisputed cycling centre of the economically developed world. Over one-third of all trips made in Amsterdam are made on a bike and the country has over 30,000 kilometres of bike paths.
Bikes aren’t convenient for everyone, but neither, of course, are cars. As more of us live in cities it’s more important than ever that we demand that those cities work for all of us. We don’t need ‘bike-friendly cities’, we need bike-friendly city residents who demand that their elected representatives offer their citizens a broad range of choices. If it was made safe and convenient to ride bikes around Sydney, it is hard to believe that fewer people would choose to ride a bike in Sydney’s spring than choose to ride a bike in Amsterdam’s winter.
Leanne Minushull grew up in car-centric Australia but lived for four years in Amsterdam, working for Greenpeace International. She is the director of the Australia Institute Tasmania.