Are We Committing Economic Suicide? by William PPfaff

Columns : Are We Committing Economic Suicide?

on 2011/1/6 http://www.williampfaff.com/modules/news/index.php?storytopic=1

Paris, January 5, 2011 – Is it a case of murder, or has the western economy deliberately, if unwittingly, attempted suicide, and nearly succeeded? John Maynard Keynes was not just talking about defunct economists when he wrote that the world is commonly ruled by dead ideas, its leaders the slaves of the past. He said, “Indeed the world is ruled by little else.” If he were alive today he could add management consultants and business gurus to economists as among those responsible for the economic crisis of the present day. As 2011 begins, people still talk about the crisis of the western economy as though we have been the victims of a blight from nowhere, like Haitians in a hurricane, or blackbirds in Arkansas. No individual is held guilty for anything. Certainly not the leaders of finance or business who insisted that markets know best, or the political leaders who empowered them. Thus my suicide argument. Once the Western nations professed belief in a stakeholder capitalism, which was supposed to benefit nations as a whole, and whose principal actors -- managers, employees, labor force, bankers, and customers – were regarded as a community possessing common interests. This was the “enlightened capitalism” of the post-second world war years in the United States and Western Europe. It was the product of progressive businessmen in the United States, influenced by the two Roosevelt presidencies – Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive movement early in the 20th century, and FDR’s New Deal; by enlightened unionism in the United States, wartime Labour Party and Fabian thinking in Britain, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats on the Continent.

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