This book is a journey of unfinished exploration by someone who has spent much of a working lifetime with money, commerce, and economic development. It begins on a weekend at the Villa d’Este on Lake Como in the beautiful Italian spring of April 2008, against the background of an unfolding global financial crisis. It became a time of reflection—about a system that suddenly seemed to be built on sand instead of rock, about the whole direction of human economic and social development, about the ambiguity of the human experience of it all.
The questions all this poses were never more important than they are now. We are at one of those moments in history when it seems as if the tectonic plates are shifting. We are living through years in which a crisis has overtaken our increasingly globalized world, such as most of us have not seen in our lifetimes. The questions strike at the root of what we have taken for granted for at least a quarter of a century. There has been a massive breakdown of trust: trust in the financial system, trust in bankers, trust in business, trust in business leaders, trust in politicians, trust in the media, trust in the whole process of globalization—all have been severely damaged, in rich countries and in poor countries alike.
And if trust has been broken in this way, where do we go from here? Questions arise about the system. How to fix it? Should we or can we turn the clock back? What are the alternatives? Questions also arise for us as individuals. What part did we play in what went wrong? What do we do in the future? And, beneath it all, what have we learned about ourselves as human beings? About what constitutes good business and a good life? About what our values are? About what the common good is?
To face these questions, we have to begin with recognition. There are lessons to be learned, both collectively (globally) and individually. Renewed progress depends on our being willing to learn; hope depends on a determination to gain in wisdom through it all; and wisdom will be found to depend on an honest search for the good. But this is not a book about economics or policy. It is not a recipe for the reform of the global economic or financial system. It is about the other kinds of issues that arise from a global crisis of historic proportions: questions about who we are, about how we have changed, about our beginnings and ends. It is an exploration that is topical now, but is in fact always necessary, in all times and places. We are, however, more conscious of the questions when times are stressed—as they have been of late. We need to take time to face them, face up to them.
Such an exploration inevitably has to start with taking stock of where we have come from. The first part of this book therefore reflects on the astonishing impact of globalization on human history and consciousness. We cannot understand our present dilemmas except in this context. The second part of the book seeks to look forward and inward (and I believe we cannot do the one without the other). Since it has to look inward, the exploration is therefore inevitably both personal and provisional. Each person’s journey is incomplete, and it is his or her own, of course—and yet we have so much in common, too. The questions resonate widely: What is happening to our world? What’s the point of the work I spend so much of my creative energy on? What do I want to leave behind? Is there anything more to it all than “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”?