23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

Finance needs to be slowed down. Not to put us back to the days of debtors’ prison and small workshops financed by personal savings. But, unless we vastly reduce the speed gap between finance and the real economy, we will not encourage long-term investment and real growth, because productive investments often take a long time to bear fruit. It took Japan forty years of protection and government subsidies before its automobile industry could be an international success, even at the lower end of the market. It took Nokia seventeen years before it made any profit in the electronics business, where it is one of the world leaders today. However, following the increasing degree of financial deregulation, the world has operated with increasingly shorter time horizons.

Financial transaction taxes, restrictions on cross-border movement of capital (especially movements in and out of developing countries), greater restrictions on mergers and acquisitions are some of the measures that will slow down finance to the speed at which it helps, rather than weakens or even derails, the real economy.

Seventh: government needs to become bigger and more active.

In the last three decades, we have been constantly told by free-market ideologues that the government is part of the problem, not a solution to the ills of our society. True, there are instances of government failure – sometimes spectacular ones – but markets and corporations fail too and, more importantly, there are many examples of impressive government success. The role of the government needs to be thoroughly reassessed.

This is not just about crisis management, evident since 2008, even in the avowedly free-market economies, such as the US. It is more about creating a prosperous, equitable and stable society. Despite its limitations and despite numerous attempts to weaken it, democratic government is, at least so far, the best vehicle we have for reconciling conflicting demands in our society and, more importantly, improving our collective well-being. In considering how we can make the best out of the government, we need to abandon some of the standard ‘trade-offs’ bandied about by free-market economists.

We have been told that a big government, which collects high income taxes from the wealthy and redistributes them to the poor, is bad for growth, as it discourages wealth creation by the rich and makes lower classes lazy. However, if having a small government is good for economic growth, many developing countries that have such a government should do well. Evidently this is not the case. At the same time, the Scandinavian examples, where a large welfare state has coexisted with (or even encouraged) good growth performance, should also expose the limits to the belief that smaller governments are always better for growth.

Free-market economists have also told us that active (or intrusive, as they put it) governments are bad for economic growth. However, contrary to common perception, virtually all of today’s rich countries used government intervention to get rich (if you are still not convinced about this point, see my earlier book, Bad Samaritans). If designed and implemented appropriately, government intervention can increase economic dynamism by augmenting the supply of inputs that markets are bad at supplying (e.g., R&D, worker training), sharing risk for projects with high social returns but low private returns, and, in developing countries, providing the space in which nascent firms in ‘infant’ industries can develop their productive capabilities.

We need to think more creatively how the government becomes an essential element in an economic system where there is more dynamism, greater stability and more acceptable levels of equity. This means building a better welfare state, a better regulatory system (especially for finance) and better industrial policy.

Eighth: the world economic system needs to ‘unfairly’ favour developing countries.

Because of the constraints imposed by their democratic checks, the free-market advocates in most rich countries have actually found it difficult to implement full-blown free-market reform. Even Margaret Thatcher found it impossible to consider dismantling the National Health Service. As a result, it was actually developing countries that have been the main subjects of free-market policy experiments.