9.

So What’s Stopping You?

‘Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.’

John Maynard Keynes

Swimming against the tide is tiring. Changing the flow of the tide is exhausting. But both are possible, and the world we live in today was, in the most literal sense, shaped by those willing to buck trends, fight City Hall and drive change.

But to change policy in any significant way, you usually have to change the culture first. And as anyone who has ever declared that flared jeans are coming back knows, there is a big difference between declaring culture will change and seeing it actually happen. It takes effort, strategy, determination, allies and usually a bit of luck to change a society. And it takes time.

Just as fish can’t taste the water they swim in, it’s hard for individuals to detect the influence of the culture that surrounds them. It is hard to see how culture shapes our personal choice of which particular necktie to buy. But it’s harder still to detect the role that culture plays in so many people’s desire to wear a superfluous but symbolically important piece of material around their necks in the first place.

It is, of course, possible that hundreds of millions of men have some innate desire to tie nooses around their necks before they head to their offices. But it’s more likely that culture shapes individual choice as much as individual choice affects culture. And what’s with the buttons on the sleeve of a suit jacket? When was the last time you saw someone roll up their jacket sleeve? No doubt the makers of buttons are glad you either haven’t noticed their unnecessary adornments or you’ve been too keen to fit in to voice any objection.

Residents of rich countries spend tens of billions of dollars on buttons, perfume, aftershave, lipstick, teeth whiteners, hair gel, hair dye and myriad other aesthetic modifications whose value, status and necessity are entirely culturally determined. But who determined them? Buttons on jacket sleeves are allegedly there to stop men wiping their noses on them. But some men simultaneously display handkerchiefs in their jacket pocket which they are also unlikely to blow their nose on. Who decided on the significance of these accoutrements and for how many more hundreds of years will their decisions shape our consumption patterns?

Symbols matter. Culture matters. Yet many people determined to build support for a piece of ‘evidence-based policy’ tend to ignore both the cultural tide they are swimming in and the symbolic significance of the change they desire. Those who wish to reshape the world are going to need a lot more than new technologies and new regulations. They are going to need a new culture in which they are confident enough to demand more of the things they want more of and less of the things they want less of – and to stand up against those who are fiercely determined to keep some things the way they are.

THE MARKET DIDN’T DO IT

As we’ve seen, the idea that the market or global corporations are responsible for big decisions about our economy and society is appealing but misleading. It’s always people. A market is simply a place where buyers and sellers come together; it is the people in a marketplace who make decisions. It was a person at Apple who decided to make hundreds of millions of existing phone chargers obsolete. It was a person at Coca-Cola who decided to change the recipe, and a different person who decided to change it back again. It’s not the market or a corporation that decides whether to sack thousands of workers, whether to drill for oil in the Arctic, or whether to dump pollution in a river. All those choices are made by people.

Imagine you are at a fish market. It’s usually a large, cold, smelly building filled with people who want to buy fish and people who want to sell fish. Now imagine someone asks you, ‘What does the fish market want?’ While it makes sense to ask what fish buyers and fish sellers want, it is meaningless to ask what the fish market itself wants. All the fish market does is house the people doing the buying and the selling.

Blaming the markets or big corporations for the ‘need’ to cut taxes – or the ‘need’ to cut wages, reduce public spending on health, or ignore the threat of climate change – is a deliberate strategy to diminish the role of citizens’ voices in shaping their society. It’s a bit like claiming that Zeus, Apollo or God will be angry if a society ignores the advice of its high priests. Or that next year’s crops will thrive if the farmers give enough of this year’s crop to the priests as a sacrifice.

We have built a culture that gives a higher priority to the opinions and desires of some citizens than others. Citizens who can speak confidently about ‘how the markets will react’ are given a much greater say in public debate than those who can speak confidently about what millions of people think is fair or good or important. By talking endlessly about what the market wants or what the global economy needs, we have created a culture in which the voices and desires of rich people who own a lot of shares take precedence over the desires of working- and middle-class people who rely heavily on public services.

This culture of talking about ‘the market’ not only amplifies the voices of the small number of people who own a large share of the national wealth, it also leads millions of citizens to censor themselves and refrain from contributing to democratic debate. Just as middle-class Romans didn’t enjoy the prospect of angering the gods unnecessarily, many middle-class citizens in rich countries seem to fear angering the markets if they demand that wealthy citizens pay more tax so that all citizens can get better services.

Throughout recorded history, stories have been used to persuade large populations that it’s better to stay within the known world and not venture towards the edge of the map, lest they encounter monsters. For too long, the markets and the ratings agencies have been enlisted by the powerful to ensure that public debate about taxes, services and regulation stays within the current Overton window: a culture in which small government is good, lower taxes are better, and public spending is somehow a sign of economic inefficiency.

Deferring to the markets is as irrational as it is undemocratic. And doing so creates fertile conditions for an epidemic of affluenza.

DEMOCRACY CAN DO IT (IT’S DONE IT BEFORE)

To cure affluenza, we will need to rely as much on broad democratic reform as on specific reforms to environmental, workplace or consumer laws. Banning bottled water is, for some, a big ask – but banning corporate donations to political parties would make banning bottled water a lot easier. It would also make reducing fossil fuel use, and many other issues, a lot easier.

It is a lot simpler to invigorate a democracy than it is to drag one into existence, in the face of opposition from kings, generals and tyrants. It is possible to revive a flagging democracy and let citizens know they can influence big decisions about the shape of their society, despite the contempt and hostility of those who profit from the status quo. Those who want to reshape the world will always face resistance. Sometimes it will be fierce, and sometimes brutal. But history says it can be overcome.

Oil is the most profitable commodity in the world and, perhaps unsurprisingly, oil executives have a long history of shaping the culture they operate in to keep the profits flowing. Donating to politicians and funding climate-change sceptics have for decades been ‘core business’ for those in the oil industry. Indeed, in some countries oil company executives have gone much further, funding militias, bribing politicians and even killing community leaders who stood between the companies and ever-larger profits.

It’s not companies that pay bribes or pull triggers – it is individuals. Yet although companies might not be able to think or feel, they are increasingly given the rights of individuals before the law. For example, even though a company has no feelings, it can now be defamed in a growing number of jurisdictions. But one right that companies do not have is the right to vote. And in a democracy the right to vote is a very powerful thing.

As we saw in Chapter 7, at the beginning of the twentieth century legislators in the United States decided to take on J.D. Rockefeller and the other ‘robber barons’ of the era. They won. In the mid-twentieth century the UK government, as it recovered from six years of total war with Germany, introduced the world-class National Health Service, which was entirely publicly funded. There is no doubt that, were such actions proposed today, the markets would be reported to be furious. But luckily for billions of people, this kind of nonsense wasn’t common back then.

When a large proportion of a democracy’s population are determined to see change, and willing to switch their vote to parties or politicians committed to delivering such change, almost anything is possible. Democracy is not perfect, but it has shown itself to be capable of driving large changes over a long period of time. That said, democracy itself is a culture. When people lose faith in democracy, they empower the big companies and billionaires they fear have already accumulated too much political power. When a culture has low expectations of its democratically elected representatives and its democratic institutions, it becomes far easier for the minority to prevail over the majority. The last thing a politician who takes major donations from corporations or who lunches regularly with corporate lobbyists wants is an electorate made up of people who expect to be listened to, and who have a track record of shifting their vote when they are ignored.

Speaking of politicians: while few people praise them as a group, the simple fact is that you can’t have a democracy without them. Similarly, while we might sometimes laugh at the inefficiency of government, our elected representatives can’t turn ideas into actions without a bureaucracy.

But despite the obvious truth that you can’t have a democracy without politicians or bureaucrats, for decades people have been told that ‘all politicians are the same’ and ‘all bureaucrats are inefficient’. Such criticism might roll effortlessly off a tired and cynical tongue, but it helps create a culture that has little faith that citizens can reshape their society.

Only a culture in which we have high expectations – of both our democratic representatives and our democratic institutions – can help turn the hopes of citizens into a reshaped society.

NEOLIBERALISM IS BAD FOR DEMOCRACY

For decades, billions of people have been told by the high priests of economics and finance that greed and selfishness are the dominant human motivators, that rational people think only about themselves, that collective solutions to collective problems are inefficient, and that rising inequality gives people an incentive to work harder. What could go wrong?

Over the same period, faith in democratic institutions around the world has been falling, and cynicism towards politicians has been rising. While there is no one cause of this decline across different countries with different constitutions, it is hard to believe that endless repetition of the argument that governments are inefficient, that politicians are incompetent, and that faith in the goodwill of others is naive has had no effect on our expectations of elected officials.

A culture that glorifies the pursuit of individual goals is a culture that enables the rapid spread of affluenza. If citizens believe their community will do nothing to help those at the bottom, they have a stronger incentive to claw their way to the top – and even to stand on a few other people to get there. To build a strong sense of community, people need to settle down, engage regularly with their neighbours and develop a sense of shared goals. But many of the preferred policy tools from the neoliberal toolbox do not help bring people and communities closer together; rather, they work to drive people apart. For example, the combination of insecure work that is hard to get and harder to keep and punitive approaches to welfare does more to keep people on their toes than to help them put down deep roots in their communities and workplaces.

A culture that links personal security to personal financial prosperity also encourages the acceptance of affluenza. If you believe that the only way to protect yourself, or your community, is to amass financial assets, then it makes sense to favour what is supposedly good for the economy over what you believe is good for your own family, your health, your environment or your community. And a culture that has been trained to see tax as a burden – both on individuals and on the economy – is a culture that (understandably) will struggle with the idea that collecting more money in tax and spending it on high-quality health, education and transport will lighten the load of modern life. Neoliberalism tells us to trust the market but not our elected representatives.

Markets have played a significant role in human societies throughout recorded history. But the idea that the market should shape our personal and cultural values is a very new one, and very inconsistently applied. Try asking a conservative politician if abortion is legitimate as long as the person seeking the abortion and the person offering the abortion can agree on a fair price. Even in notionally communist countries, markets play a role in what, how and for whom things are produced. The question is not whether markets are good or bad at providing services, but whether they are better or worse than publicly funded services, co-operatively funded services or self-funded services.

Neoliberalism has played a powerful role in shrinking the size of the Overton window in most countries. But a society that wants to abandon neoliberalism doesn’t need to invent a new paradigm – it simply needs to restore its faith in the wide range of options, from public provision of services to co-operatives, that neoliberalism has so successfully erased from the policy menu. Similarly, a society that wants to develop an alternative to neoliberalism needs to restore its faith in itself and its institutions, and to develop new ideas, test them, refine them and roll them out over time. It’s been done plenty of times before.

YOU CAN’T RESHAPE A TREE WITHOUT SOMETHING SHARP

‘When the carpenter picks up his saw, if wood could talk, it would scream.’

Robert Schenkkan

If the branches of a tree grew as unevenly as the branches of an economy, the tree would quickly fall over. But those who focus only on the size of economies have become blind to their shape, and therefore to the catastrophic risks such an imbalance can cause.

In rich Western countries, the parts of our economies that generate waste, inefficiency and inequality are bulging while the parts that provide health, education, innovation and a sense of community are withering after decades of deliberate cuts and studied indifference – supposedly all in the name of increasing the efficiency of the economy. Over the same period, the proportion of national wealth held by the nation’s wealthiest has grown as rapidly as the piles of wasted consumer goods that, we are told, are essential for a strong economy. The reshaping of economies and the redistribution of benefits when the neoliberal pruners wield the secateurs is no accident, and it certainly isn’t random.

Gardeners understand that there are many good reasons to prune a tree. Well-aimed cuts can generate new growth. Old branches can overshadow other, more useful plants. Branches can become diseased. Sometimes dead wood simply needs to be removed. While pruning and reshaping reduces the size of a tree in the short term, when done well it ensures that the tree is fit for purpose. Pruning can speed future growth, increase the amount of fruit produced, ensure that the rest of the garden can grow rapidly, or make the tree into a shape that its owners like the look of. It is up to each gardener to decide on both the form and function of the tree.

The same is true of our society. We must collectively decide on our communal goals and the best way to achieve them. We might not always agree whether the purpose of the tree is to produce fruit or to look neat and tidy. And we might not agree about whether cutting a branch will harm or help the tree. But what we should be able to agree on is that it is not up to the saw to decide which branches need cutting.

As Amory Lovins once said, ‘The markets make a good servant but a bad master. And an even worse religion.’ Market forces drove the take-up of the smartphone, which has both been a boon to lost travellers and caused the death of countless distracted drivers. But the fact that the market is an effective tool does not make it an effective designer.

Over the past thirty years, conservative politicians and conservative institutions such as the IMF and World Bank have taken the metaphorical chainsaw of the market to reshape our economies and societies in their preferred image. Based on the belief that the more of our public sector they cut from our society, the faster the rest of the economy would grow, these institutions barracked loudly as politicians around the world cut ruthlessly into the services that lay at the heart not just of many citizens’ lives, but of many communities as well.

Some of those who wielded the chainsaw might have genuinely believed that the benefits of ‘new growth’ would trickle down to those who once clung to the branches they had lopped from the tree. But in reality, as the destruction of whole towns and regions across the world has shown, the reshaped tree is now so unbalanced that it is likely to topple over.

Believing that cutting taxes on high-income earners, cutting public spending on public services and privatising public assets would lead to rapid economic growth that would deliver benefits for all, the proponents of the neoliberal agenda were as confident as they were ineffective. The financial deregulation they championed helped cause the global financial crisis, and their belief that further spending cuts would speed economic recovery only prolonged the pain of hundreds of millions of people who played no role in the banks’ recklessness.

The neoliberal architects of the modern economy are proud of their achievements. They worked hard to cut public spending on essential services, cut income support to vulnerable people and, of course, to cut taxes paid by high-income earners.

They have a vision of the shape of society that they prefer, and they have worked tirelessly, as is their right, to shape it in their preferred image. These people, and the institutions they work for, do not need to be persuaded of the case for a change in direction. They need to be ignored by those who are determined to pursue a different vision.

RESHAPING SOCIETY ISN’T PAINLESS, BUT IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE CRUEL

You can’t end whaling without causing job losses for whalers, and you can’t burn a lot less coal without employing many fewer coalminers. There is no avoiding the fact that any successful effort to reshape the economy will cause pain for some people. But the amount of pain experienced by those who lose their jobs, their identity or their sense of community when a society is reshaping itself is determined by our social decisions, not by economics. Whether those who lose their jobs are eligible for generous unemployment benefits or custom-made retraining – and whether or not they are treated with respect and dignity by their community – is not decided by the market but by our culture.

As we saw in Chapter 4, the invention of the tractor, the shift from steam to diesel to electricity and the rapid roll-out of smartphones have all led not just to massive job destruction, but to massive cultural and community upheaval as well. Given that there is no scenario in which large numbers of people will not be forced to change their jobs in the coming century, it seems remarkable that anyone could argue that a reason to cause climate change is that it will prevent some people from having to change their jobs.

While it might seem logical and politically tempting to delay, for example, the shift away from coal until a plan is developed to re-employ or relocate each affected coal worker, history suggests that reliance on such planning will be far more effective in delaying the necessary change than in helping the affected workers. Just as no one could have foreseen the impact of smartphones on job creation and destruction, no one can foresee the precise ways in which big shifts in energy production will affect jobs, towns and communities.

A more honest and consistent approach to a just transition for those who work in the fossil-fuel sector is to simply stop building new coalmines, oil rigs and coal-fired power stations that we know will not be needed in the future. By preventing the construction of new forms of pollution, the adjustment for those who already work in those sectors can be made smoother and more predictable. Once we’ve abandoned plans to keep going backwards, we can then turn our minds to how to plan the transition as we move forwards. And the best way to protect workers displaced by climate-change policy, changes in technology, natural disaster or even just changes in consumer preferences is to treat all citizens well in their times of need. Put simply, climate change or not, there is no economic reason why all workers and communities shouldn’t have access to the financial, retraining and other support that we would all hope our kids would receive if they ever lost a job through no fault of their own.

CONCLUSION

‘You may resist an invading army, but nothing can stop an idea whose time has come.’

Victor Hugo

There is nothing economically efficient about borrowing money you don’t have, to buy things you don’t need, to briefly entertain or impress yourself or others, before you then throw that stuff away. And there is no evidence that speeding up the rate at which we produce and dispose of things is making us happier, healthier or (for most) better off financially.

The end of slavery was a cultural change that brought enormous economic consequences.

Women’s pursuit of equality in the workplace also had enormous economic consequences.

Similarly, if in the near future billions of people decide to buy less stuff, consume more services, take longer holidays, pay more tax and demand better public services and infrastructure, they will radically alter their communities, their countries and their world.

No doubt some people will declare that individuals preferring time and services to more useless stuff is ‘bad for the economy’, but what they really mean is ‘bad for the people who profit from selling useless stuff’. No doubt some people might argue that unless we all continue to buy things we don’t need, and dispose of them quickly, mass unemployment will ensue.

But the idea that people should keep racking up debt and consuming things made from the world’s scarce resources in order to create jobs for their fellow citizens is merely a bizarre inversion of socialist urgings to sacrifice to make the economy strong. If modern capitalism has reached the point where we are being urged to consume more than we need simply in order to keep the show on the road, then it’s obviously time to stop and think.

Yes, it’s true that a world that buys and discards fewer things will employ fewer people to make them; but wasting less of our time and resources will not make us worse off. On the contrary, the parts of the economy that we don’t really need will inevitably shrink, and the parts of the economy that we want more of will grow. If, collectively, we choose to buy more leisure time and less goods and services, there is no reason to believe we would be collectively poorer – even if GDP were to fall.

There is no silver bullet that will cure affluenza. Cultural change takes vision, resolve, patience and confidence. But there is a poison pill that might stop us from curing ourselves: doubt. Many people seem to have absorbed the idea that while the status quo might seem both undesirable and unsustainable, there is no alternative to such a system. As long as people doubt that change is really possible, they will leave the shape of the future in the hands of those who have so ruthlessly cut away those parts of the economy which many people say they want more of. As Bertrand Russell said, ‘The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.’

Every choice you make reshapes your society and your economy. But the choices made by our democratic leaders can drive big changes, and fast. Some people are going to put their hand up to determine the shape of tomorrow’s society. Why can’t you be one of them?