| The 21st Century's dividing lines |
| Written by Alex Singleton | |||||
| Wednesday, 09 May 2007 | |||||
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Yesterday's intellectual battles involved left against right. They were between Communists and Anti-Communists; between those who wanted to nationalise the "commanding heights" of the economy and those who wanted to privatise them; between Thatcherites and the likes of Arthur Scargill and Michael Foot. But in today's world, the language of left and right is outdated. We need new terms that more accurately represent today's dividing lines. For us at the Globalisation Institute, the most eloquent examination of the new dividing lines is in Virginia Postrel's book The Future and Its Enemies. Postrel (pictured), who writes for Forbes and is a former New York Times columnist, explains that the new dividing lines are no longer between left and right. They are between how we think of the future. On the one hand there are those who prefer stasis. On the other are those who prefer dynamism. As Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos says: "[The] insight that people divide naturally into stasists and dynamists is important and remarkably practical. If you care about innovation, you'll want to know who's in your next meeting." Stasists prefer a world in which order does not evolve spontaneously. Reactionary stasists look back at the what they see as the quaintness of the past and look in horror at progress. The anti-globalisation New Economics Foundation campaigns against chain stores and favours a return to the barter economy of the Middle Ages. It says we shouldn't buy Belgium chocolates but instead make them ourselves. Reactionary stasists oppose free trade, seeing it as a disruptive force, often preferring self-sufficiency. They regard wealth creation and economic growth as undesirable. Guardian columnist George Monbiot claims that progress is "a delusion". And yet it would be incorrect to simply label reactionary stasists as "left-wing"; after all, there are plenty of right-wingers that hold reactionary views. Technocratic stasists, conversely, do favour progress so long as they can control it. They attack the "postcode lottery" inevitably caused by allowing experimentation and local control, preferring top-down conformity to innovation. They are in favour of trade as long as it can be "managed". Instead of encouraging the "chaotic" bottom-up process that has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty globally, they think the answer to international development is to impose technocratic "Development Goals" and employ more technocrats in London to order development according to econometric models. In 2005, campaigners at Christian Aid opposed the removal of damaging quotas on developing country textiles exports. These quotas massively skewed trade in favour of European producers, but they wanted to retain them because they provided guarantees about how much each developing country would export. They preferred the guarantees of stasis to the increased opportunities of dynamism. And yet the technocratic ideal has been largely discredited in the past 30 years. Governments who tried to apply technocratic planning to industry were left with companies that couldn't compete. This is sharp contrast to John Kenneth Galbraith's 60s book The New Industrial State which argued that the advanced technology of new industries makes the entrepreneur and the market ineffective. In Britain, the desire to centrally-plan schools and hospitals is giving way to new thinking on localism. In big business, conglomerates have demerged and elephants like IBM have downsized. It turns out that big companies have to decentralise and specialise to survive, not rely on technocratic top-down rules. Meanwhile, start-ups provide much of the new innovation. In the 1990s, new businesses like Google, Amazon and EasyJet revolutionised whole industries. It turns out that competition creates innovation and improvement, not top-down planning. Unlike stasists, dynamists are positive about the future that evolves. They see the ability of human ingenuity to solve problems like cancer, AIDS and global warming. They favour experimentation, and competition in rules and business. They see the world as a complex entity - too complex to be controlled from on high - and see that important information is widely dispersed and often tacit. They recognise that poor countries will develop in often unexpected ways and that business will solve problems we don't even know exist. Needless to say, we at the GI are unashamedly supporters of the dynamist vision. Comments (2)
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