He contends that the series impacts of climate change, demographic ageing and population growth kick in around the year 2050… and that “if we can’t create a sustainable global order and restore economic dynamism, the decades after 2050 will be chaos”.
Mason, born in Leigh, Lancashire in 1960, is an
articulate, intelligent and fascinating bloke. He graduated from the University of Sheffield with a degree in music and
politics in 1981 and went on to work as a music teacher and lecturer in music
at Loughborough University. He became a freelance journalist in 1991 and
went on to join BBC2’s Newsnight as Business Editor in 2001. In 2013, he became
Channel 4 News’s culture and digital editor and later became the programme’s
Economics Editor. He left Channel 4 in February 2016 in order to be able to engage more fully in debates on the political
left without the constraints of impartiality placed on UK broadcasters. He’s a
supporter of Jeremy Corbyn and describes himself as “radical social democrat”.
I found the book absolutely absorbing… and decided that I
should jot my thoughts on it in a little more length than my usual one paragraph
book review summary. In the book, Mason describes capitalism as a “complex,
adaptive system which has reached the limits of its capacity to adapt”. He
looks back on the growth of capitalism over the past 200 years or so… and
refers to a whole host of key players who he sees as being influential in the
development and understanding of the subject – the likes of Piketty,
Kondratieff, Nachimson, Slutsky, Schumpeter, Luxemburg, Hilferding, Bukharin
and Varga (no, I’d never heard of them either!).
Even though I
struggled to understand some of the financial complexities, it was all
fascinating stuff!
I stopped scribbling in my books a very long time ago(!),
but I KEPT on coming across interesting/depressing/startling/powerful/frightening extracts and, so, my copy has become absolutely
covered in pencil underlining and notes! These are just a few “tasters” to give
you a (somewhat random) flavour – look, I know this makes it a pretty lengthy
blog post(!)… but I think he makes several important points:
“Neoliberalism is
the doctrine of uncontrolled markets: it says that the best route to prosperity
is individuals pursuing their own self-interest, and the market is the only way
to express that self-interest. It says the state should be small…; that
financial speculation is good; that the natural state of humankind is to be a
bunch of ruthless individuals, competing with each other”.
“…The long-term
prospects for capitalism are bleak. According to the OECD, growth in the
developed world will be ‘weak’ for the next fifty years. Inequality will rise
by 40%. Even in developing countries, the current dynamism will be exhausted by
2060”.
“The main
contradiction today is between the possibility of free, abundant goods and
information and a system of monopolies, banks and governments trying to keep
things private, scarce and commercial. Everything comes down to the struggle
between the network and the hierarchy, between old forms of society moulded
around capitalism and new forms of society that prefigure what comes next”.
“The elite and
their supporters are lined up to defend the same core principles: high finance,
low wages, secrecy, militarism, intellectual property and energy based on
carbon. The bad news is that they control nearly every government in the world.
The good news is that in most countries they enjoy very little consent or
popularity among ordinary people”.
“…Then, through
austerity programmes, they transferred the pain away from people who’d invested
money stupidly, punishing instead welfare recipients, public sector workers,
pensioners and, above all, future generations. In the worst-hit countries, the
pension system has been destroyed, the retirement age is being hiked so that
those currently leaving university will retire at seventy, and education is
being privatized so that graduates will face a lifetime of high debt. Services
are being dismantled and infrastructure projects put on hold”.
Mason frequently refers to the 2008 financial crisis (note:
according to the New York Times, only ONE top banker has ever been imprisoned
in connection with the financial crisis!). The following quote refers to a
Lehman executive running the ‘infamous Repo 105’ tactic in an email:
“The tactic
involved hiding debts away from Lehman’s balance sheet by temporarily ‘selling’
them and then buying them back once the bank’s quarterly report had been
submitted. Another Lehman exec is asked: is the tactic legal, do other banks do
it, and is it disguising holes in our balance sheet? He emails back: ‘Yes, no
and yes’ :)”.
“We have to try to
learn what’s urgent, and what’s important, and that sometimes they do not
coincide. If it were not for the external shocks facing us over the next fifty
years, we could afford to take things slowly: the state, in a benign
transition, would act as the main facilitator of change through regulation. But
the enormity of the external shocks means some of the actions we take will have
to be immediate, centralized and drastic”.
“In this book, I’ve
avoided ‘building in’ the climate change crisis until now… Industrial
capitalism has, in the space of 200 years, made the climate 0.8 degrees Celsius
hotter, and is certain to push it two degrees higher than the pre-industrial
average by 2050… Either we react in time and confront it in a relatively
orderly way, or we don’t – and disaster follows”.
“The lesson is: a
market-led strategy on climate change is utopian thinking. What are the
obstacles to a non-market-led strategy? … Between 2003-2010, climate-denial
lobby groups received $558million from donors in the USA. ExxonMobil and the
ultra-conservative Koch Industries were major donors until 2007, when there was
a tangible shift to funds channelled through anonymous third parties, under pressure
of journalistic scrutiny. The outcome? The world spends an estimated
$544billion on subsidizing the fossil fuel industry”.
“There is, in
short, a rational case for panic about climate change – and it is compounded
when you consider the interrelatedness of climate and the other great
uncontrolled variant: population… demographic ageing is set to make state
finances unsustainable all across the developed world… analysts predict that by
2050, even with a pension cuts, 60% of all countries in the world will have
credit ratings below investment grade: it will be suicidal for anybody who does
not want to risk losing their money to lend to them”.
“We have not yet
considered the impact of migration… By 2050, there will be 1.2billion more
people of working age in the world than today… the population of Niger will
have grown from its current 18million to 69million. Chad… will see its
population treble to 33million. Afghanistan… will rise from 30 to 56million”.
I could go on… and on!
I think Mason is very good in his analysis of what’s “gone
before” and in his assessment of the future alarming dangers we face. Looking
into the future and pointing the way forward represents a truly massive
challenge and he’s brave in his assertions. But, trying to outline these in a
mere 30 pages (out of a book some 300 pages long) is perhaps a little over-ambitious.
Having said that, he does at least TRY and, although I don’t pretend to
understand all the intricacies of his arguments(!), he has thought things
through in impressive detail. To give you just a flavour, these are the sub-headings of his concluding chapter, entitled “Project Zero” (each of these really needs a few lines of explanation… but you’ve probably already lost the will to live!): Five Principles of Transition; Top-Level Goals; Model First, Act Later; The Wiki-State; Expand Collaborative Work; Suppress or Socialize Monopolies; Let Market Forces Disappear; Socialize the Finance System; Pay Everyone a Basic Income; The Network Unleashed; Is This For Real?; and Liberate the One Per Cent.
Whatever your thoughts about Mason’s left-leaning
political stance, this is a powerful, thought-provoking book. I’m sure a
right-wing political thinker could provide an altogether different view, but I
think Gillian Tett (from the Financial Times) sums things up perfectly:
“Even if you love
the current capitalist system, it would be a mistake to ignore this book…
Politicians of all stripes should take note. And so should the people who vote
for them”.A brilliant, brave book in my view.
No comments:
Post a Comment