Arthur:
Thank you for making "The Threat of Deflation" available to the list. I've
only just read it. I'm still trying to catch up.
Though far less elaborately, the article makes much the same points as
William Greider does in "One World, Ready or Not". The global capacity to
produce has outrun the global capacity to consume, and everything is
connected to everything else, so there are no safe havens. What happens to
the Asian Tigers happens to the rest of us.
Yet in considering both production and consumption, we confine ourselves to
rather narrow definitions. The concern is about the production of goods and
services that are wanted by those who can afford them; that is, goods and
services for the market. Would we really be in a state of oversupply if the
criteria which underlay production were based on needs such as ensuring all
of the world's children an education, good health and a transition into
effective adulthood? I seriously doubt it.
Some on this list have suggested that capitalism is madness. I don't agree.
Capitalism is something that is very deeply entrenched in our culture and,
increasingly, in global culture. It is a product of our culture. But our
culture has also produced other things, including systems of ethics and
values which make us care for one another and be sensitive to the plight of
the poor. What is mad in our society and, increasingly, in global society
is something that might - after Veblen - be termed "emulative and
competitive conspicuous consumption." I know a childless couple which lives
in a house that could easily house five or six third world families. All of
their neighbors, mostly retired, live in similar houses. All of these
people have large cars, and some have two or more large cars. The values at
work here are not necessarily capitalist. They are simply and plainly
emulative, competitive and acquisitive. They are not bound to a particular
economic system. The same thing happened at the social level of the
nomenklatura in communist Russia.
While I feel some dismay that Europe has produced far more automobiles than
it can sell except by greatly lowering prices and perhaps generating the
kind of "beggar my neighbor" trade wars that were instrumental in initiating
the Great Depression, I cannot help but wonder why something more useful was
not produced. Surely there are still some poor in Europe, and if not in
Europe, then somewhere else in the world. Having spent a month in a slum in
Brazil, I know for a fact that housing, schools and hospitals are at least
as badly needed there as are more automobiles.
We do not need to get rid of capitalism. We could not do it in any event.
What we do need, in my opinion, is a change in our values that moves us to a
more caring global society. How this might be accomplished will, I believe,
be one of the largest issues of the coming century.
Ed Weick
