The Locust and the Bee - Predators and Creators in Capitalism`s Future - Updated Edition: Predators and Creators in Capitalism's Future - Softcover

Mulgan, Geoff

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691165742 ISBN 13: 9780691165745

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

The recent economic crisis was a dramatic reminder that capitalism can both produce and destroy. It's a system that by its very nature encourages predators and creators, locusts and bees. But, as Geoff Mulgan argues in this compelling, imaginative, and important book, the economic crisis also presents a historic opportunity to choose a radically different future for capitalism, one that maximizes its creative power and minimizes its destructive force.

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Geoff Mulgan is the author of Good and Bad Power (Penguin) and The Art of Public Strategy, among other books. A globally recognized pioneer in the field of social innovation, he was the founder of the think tank Demos and served as director of the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit and director of policy under Tony Blair. He is currently chief executive of the UK's National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.

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"Geoff Mulgan's extraordinary book strikes a balance between innovative thought and grounded pragmatism and serves as an urgent invitation to discourse--discourse about how we can harness the most inclusive aspects of capitalism and explore new approaches for our shared work of building the common good. Mulgan challenges us to find the best in ourselves and in the systems that provide the hope for human flourishing."--John J. DeGioia, president of Georgetown University

"Geoff Mulgan is a brilliant thinker--lucid, deep, and with a set of clear and progressive values. In this book he brings all his qualities to bear on the question of how we make capitalism productive, responsible, and fair. It should be read by anyone who wants to understand how to create a more equal and just world."--Ed Miliband, MP, leader of the UK Labour Party

"Geoff Mulgan has given us an important book: imaginative, erudite, wise. It answers the question of how capitalism can transform itself to create the kind of value that will be needed and prized by twenty-first-century citizens, a question that is at the root of so many current economic, social, and spiritual ills. Mulgan's vision of a capitalism that maintains and deepens human relationships is enormously attractive and eminently attainable."--Anne-Marie Slaughter, Princeton University

"Can we replace the predatory part of capitalism with something creative and morally uplifting? This book shows us that we can. With daring historical insights, Mulgan shows convincingly that societies can choose their own destiny."--Richard Layard, London School of Economics

"Geoff Mulgan has a disciplined mind and an adventurer's soul, and the result is a clear-eyed tale that brings creativity and courage to our most essential problems. Mulgan has a way of penetrating to the core of a question and then delivering an answer that makes a tremendous amount of sense. As a result, The Locust and the Bee is an inspiring handbook for CEOs and citizens alike. I'm delighted to have it at hand."--Joshua Cooper Ramo, vice chairman of Kissinger Associates and author of The Age of the Unthinkable

"Geoff Mulgan is one of the best theorists and practitioners of social innovation in the world today. In The Locust and the Bee he offers a penetrating account of contemporary market economies from the perspective of the contrast between those who create and those who pillage. He explores ideas, institutions, and practices that can ensure the triumph of the creators over the pillagers. Here is a handbook for practical visionaries, written by one of them."--Roberto Mangabeira Unger

"Geoff Mulgan weighs the creative and destructive powers of capitalism, arguing that these contrary forces can never be resolved; the genius of the system is that it is an endless work-in-progress. Many readers will disagree--I do--but he is unfailingly sensible and often provocative; this adult defense of capitalism deserves to be widely discussed."--Richard Sennett, London School of Economics

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The Locust and the Bee

Predators and Creators in Capitalism's Future

By Geoff Mulgan

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-16574-5

Contents

CHAPTER 1 After Capitalism, 1, 
CHAPTER 2 Barren and Pregnant Crises, 17, 
CHAPTER 3 The Essence of Capitalism, 28, 
CHAPTER 4 To Take or to Make, 52, 
CHAPTER 5 Capitalism's Critics, 79, 
CHAPTER 6 Anticapitalist Utopias and Neotopias, 104, 
CHAPTER 7 The Nature of Change, 116, 
CHAPTER 8 Creative and Predatory Technology, 145, 
CHAPTER 9 The Rise of Economies Based on Relationships and Maintenance, 172, 
CHAPTER 10 Capitalism's Generative Ideas, 198, 
CHAPTER 11 New Accommodations, 230, 
CHAPTER 12 Outgrowing Capitalism, 280, 
Afterword to the paperback edition, 289, 
Notes, 297, 
Acknowledgments, 329, 
Index, 331, 

CHAPTER 1

After Capitalism

ONLY A FEW YEARS AGO the question of what might come after capitalism appeared to have been permanently parked, deemed about as sensible as asking what would come after electricity or after science. Capitalism looked unchallenged. Global markets had pulled China and India into their orbit. The medievalist fringes of Islam and the ragged armies that surround global summits jostled to be capitalism's last, enfeebled, challenger. Multinational companies were said to command empires greater than most nation-states, and in some accounts had won the affiliation of the masses through brands, with Coke, Nike, and Google displacing the red flag and the raised fist. Religious institutions were being transformed into highly profitable enterprises, marketing a flood of multimedia products to the faithful. Communist leaders were mutating into investors and entrepreneurs in the booming cities of Shanghai and Shenzen. Nature was being privatized, whether the DNA of rare insects or the rain forests of South America, and mining was advancing from the land to the oceans, and then to space.

That China had doubled its GDP in ten years, a task that took the United States more than forty years to accomplish in the twentieth century, and Britain more than fifty years in the nineteenth, suggested a global economy undergoing dramatic acceleration, and a system so superior to its competitors that all argument was closed.

There remained no shortage of dissatisfied and skeptical opponents. But the serious dissidents and critics were marginalized. Fidel Castro, embargoed on his island, was growing old, sick, and irrelevant, Ayatollahs in Qom in Iran had tried and failed to export their alternative in the 1980s and were now losing the battle for the hearts and minds of their young people, who were secretly partying in the suburbs of Teheran. The counterculture that had challenged capitalism in the late 1960s, offering love, peace, and authenticity, had been largely co-opted into a business ethic of open shirts and jeans, carefully allied with ruthless attention to the bottom line. It seemed that the war was over, and that capitalism had won.

Yet the lesson of capitalism itself is that nothing is permanent: "all that is solid melts into air," as Karl Marx had put it. Within capitalism there are as many forces dynamically undermining it as there are forces carrying it forward. Creative destruction is its nature, not an unfortunate side effect. We cannot easily predict what capitalism will become. But we cannot sensibly pretend that it will continue forever.

For most of the 170 years that the term capitalism has been in use, it has been accompanied by furious debate about what it might evolve into. Utopians offered elaborate descriptions of what a future society might look like, without money or profit. Theorists showed how capitalism was just a phase in humanity's evolution—like feudalism, a necessary staging post but not one you would want to be stuck in.

That debate went largely silent after 1989. If part of the reason was capitalism's apparent triumph, the other was a failure of theory. The year 1989 marked a victory for economics over sociology and for the claims of the market as a vehicle for human progress. Yet although the intellectual tools of economics are good at explaining how non-market economies might become capitalist, and even better at explaining how change happens within markets through the rise and fall of businesses, sectors, and technologies, they offer little guidance as to how a capitalist market economy itself might evolve into something different.

My aim in this book is to provide tools for thinking about capitalism as a system in motion, rather than one which, in its fundamentals, has come to a stop. I began writing it at the high point of market euphoria in 2007, and continued through the crisis that began the next year and still shows few signs of coming to an end.

My main message is simple. Capitalism at its best rewards creators, makers, and providers: the people and firms that create valuable things for others, like imaginative technologies and good food, cars and healthcare which, at their best, delight and satisfy. Its moral claim is to provide an alternative to the predatory, locust-like tendencies of states and feudal rulers. It rewards the people who work hard and innovate, the human equivalents of industrious bees, and by doing so makes everyone better off, more than any other economic system in human history.

But capitalism also rewards takers and predators, the people and firms who extract value from others without contributing much in return. Predation is part of the everyday life of capitalism, in sectors as mainstream as pharmaceuticals, software, and oil, where people's money, their data, their time, and their attention are routinely taken in fundamentally asymmetrical exchanges. It's commonplace in the behavior of slum landlords and loan sharks, in pornography, and prostitution. Beyond the boundaries of the law, organized-crime syndicates extort hard-earned money and fuel addiction to drugs. Within the law, a large proportion of financial activity exploits asymmetries to capture rather than create value, and over the last twenty years that proportion rose, as capitalism shifted the balance of returns away from production and innovation and toward speculation.

These problems aren't new. The historian George Unwin attributed the failure to turn the dynamic invention and entrepreneurship of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England into an industrial revolution to "the feverish delusions of speculation and the selfish greed of monopoly" that overshadowed honest enterprise and sucked resources away from new technologies and manufacturing. Adam Smith was acutely aware of capitalism's dual character, and wrote extensively about the temptations to collusion and exploitation that can be found in markets. Two centuries later, some of the sharpest thinking in modern economics has grappled with the complexities of "economic rent" and predatory behavior, and why these seem to be amplified in economies based much more on information and knowledge. Political scientists also have shown the ubiquity of predatory behavior, and have shown that the tension between productivity and predation explains much about the uneasy politics that has always surrounded capitalism, and why the liberal dream of markets left to govern themselves turned out to be a chimera.

Yet much writing about the economy, and capitalism, is either ignorant or oblivious of these tensions. The critics of capitalism are blind to its creativity, while its complacent...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691165742
• ISBN 13: 9780691165745
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 360
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland