FINAL PRELIMINARIES
Who am I and why do I write this book? I am a professor at the University of Chicago, and I have spent time as the Chief Economist and head of Research at the International Monetary Fund, where we gave advice to a variety of industrial and developing countries. I also was the Governor of India’s central bank, where we undertook reforms to improve India’s financial system. I have experience working in both the international financial system and in an emerging market. In my adult life, I have never been more concerned about the direction our leaders are taking us than I am today.
In my book Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, published in 2010, I worried about the consequences of rising inequality, arguing that easy housing credit before the Global Financial Crisis was, in part, a way for politicians to deflect people’s attention from their stagnant paychecks. I was concerned that instead of drawing the right lesson from the crisis—that we need to fix the deep fault lines in developed societies and the global order—we would search for scapegoats. I wrote:
“The first victims of a political search for scapegoats are those who are visible, easily demonized, but powerless to defend themselves. The illegal immigrant or the foreign worker do not vote, but they are essential to the economy—the former because they often do jobs no one else will touch in normal times, and the latter because they are the source of the cheap imports that have raised the standard of living for all, but especially those with low incomes. There has to be a better way . . .”10
The search for scapegoats is well and truly on. I write this book because I see an increasingly polarized world that risks turning its back on seventy years of widespread peace and prosperity. It threatens to forget what has worked, even while ignoring what needs to change. The Populist nationalists and the radical Left understand the need for reform, but they have no real answers as they resort to the politics of anger and envy. The mainstream establishment parties do not even admit to the need for change. There is much to do, and the challenges are mounting. The state, markets, and the community can be brought into a much better balance. We must start now.
The rest of this book is as follows. I start by describing the third pillar, the community. To some, the community stands for warmth and support. To others, it represents narrow-mindedness and traditionalism. Both descriptions can be true, sometimes simultaneously, and we will see why. The challenge for the modern community is to get more of the good while minimizing the bad. We will see how this can be obtained through the balancing influence of the other two pillars—the state and markets. To continue our exploration, we must understand how these pillars emerged historically. In Part I, I trace how the state and markets in today’s advanced countries grew out of the feudal community, taking over some of its activities. I explain how a vibrant market helped create independent sources of power that limited the arbitrary powers of the state. As the state became constitutionally limited, markets got the upper hand, sometimes to the detriment of communities. The extension of suffrage reempowered communities and they used it to press the state to impose regulatory limits on the market. People also demanded reliable social protections that would buffer them against market volatility. All these influences came together in the liberal market democracies, which emerged across the developed world in the early twentieth century. However, market downturns, especially following technological revolutions, were, and are, disruptive. The Great Depression, followed by the Second World War, seemed to sound the death knell of liberal market democracies in much of the world, and the ascent of the state.
In Part II, I describe how the United States shaped the postwar liberal order, and how both the state and markets grew once again. Democracy was given firmer roots. The thirty years of strong postwar growth, however, were followed by years of relative stagnation as developed countries struggled for new ways of reviving growth. In response, the Anglo-American countries empowered the markets at the expense of the state, while continental European reforms favored the superstate and the integrated market. Both sets of reforms came at the expense of the community. These different choices left countries differently positioned for the ICT revolution, the subsequent Global Financial Crisis, and the backlash against the global order. I describe the reasons for the rise of populism and trace related developments in China and India.
I turn to possible solutions in Part III. To strengthen the chances that society will stay liberal and democratic, we need profound changes that rebalance the three pillars in the face of technological change. We need more localism to empower the community while drawing on the state and markets to make society more inclusive.
Finally, some caveats. I intend this book to be comprehensive, but not exhaustive. Therefore, I illustrate the course of history with examples from prominent countries, but it would tax the reader’s patience (as well as my editor’s) if I substantiated points with the detail that specialists require. This book offers a broad thesis of its own, and draws on much academic work, but it is aimed at a wide audience. I also offer policy proposals, not as the final word but to provoke debate. We face enormous challenges, to which we need not just the right solutions but also ones that inspire us to act. It is worth recalling the words of Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized.”11 I hope this book stirs your blood.
INTRODUCTION
THE THIRD PILLAR
Why do our neighbors matter when we can reach people across the world with a click? What role do proximate communities play today in an advanced country that has both a well-functioning state and vibrant markets? Despite the state and markets having taken up many of the early community’s functions, the proximate community still performs important ones. It helps define who we are. It gives us a sense of empowerment, an ability to shape our own futures in the face of global forces. It also offers us help in times of adversity when no one else will. Of course, the community can also be narrow-minded, traditional, and resistant to change. A successful modern community supports its members even while being more open, inclusive, and dynamic. We will see why it is difficult for a community to do all this, but also why it is necessary if the community is to address the problems we face.
THE PROXIMATE COMMUNITY
We are shaped by the people who surround us. Our joys are more pleasurable when they are cherished by our friends, our successes more enjoyable when they are applauded by those whose opinions we care about, our protests are less lonely and our indignation less unsure when shared by our supporters, our hatreds more corrosive when goaded by fellow zealots, our sorrows less burdensome when borne with our family. Moreover, we gauge our actions based on how they affect people near us, on the indentations our actions make on their lives. Without such effects, we would be ephemeral passersby, with little evidence of ever having existed. Each one of us draws from multiple overlapping communities that help define who we are, that give us identity over and above the core we think is uniquely us.
There are varieties of communities, some more tightly bound than others. A community could be a group of people who are linked together by blood (as a family or clan) or who share current or past physical proximity (as people in, or having emigrated from, a village). A community could be those who have a common view on how to live a good life (as in a religious sect), share a common profession (as in the movie industry), or frequent the same website or chat groups (as in my college alumni group, where everyone seems to have a different opinion on everything that they absolutely must express). Each one of us has multiple identities, based on the groups we belong to.1 Moreover, some of us have virtual identities in addition to real ones.
As communication has improved, and transportations costs have come down, more distant communities have gained importance. For some of us, these communities may be much more important than our neighborhood. Indeed, a central concern in this book is about the pass
ions that are unleashed when an imagined community like the nation fulfills the need for belonging that the neighborhood can no longer meet.
Nevertheless, we will focus on the proximate community for much of the book for a variety of reasons. Through most of history when distances really mattered, it was the only kind of community that had a serious influence on most people’s lives. Even today, it is where much economic activity is centered. For most of us, the neighborhood is still what we encounter every day, and what anchors us to the real world. It is where we participate as sociable humans, not as clan members, coreligionists, professionals, or disembodied opinions on the web. It is where we have the best chance of persuading others that our humanity unites us more than our ethnicity, profession, or national origin differentiates us. It certainly is where we debate and persuade as we elect officeholders and participate in the governance of the local public services that affect us. It is where we congregate to start broader political movements. As we will see later in the book, a healthy, engaged, proximate community may therefore be how we manage the tension between the inherited tribalism in all of us and the requirements of a large, diverse nation. Looking to the future, as more production and service jobs are automated, the human need for relationships and the social needs of the neighborhood may well provide many of the jobs of tomorrow.
In closely knit communities, a variety of transactions take place without the use of money or enforceable contracts. One side may get all the benefits in some transactions. Sometimes, the expectation is that the other side will repay the favor, but this may never actually happen. In a normal family, members typically help one another without drawing up papers and making payments. In many societies, friends don’t really care who pays the bill at dinner, indeed the ability to not keep count is the mark of true friendship.
Contrast transactions within a community with a typical market transaction. I just bought a bicycle tire tube. I searched for one of adequate quality at a reasonable price through an online platform, paid by credit card, and the tube was delivered within the time promised. Even though this transaction took little time, there is an elaborate explicit understanding or contract behind it. If the tube is not delivered or it proves defective, I have contractual remedies. The transaction is arm’s length and one-off. Neither the seller nor I know each other. Each one of us is satisfied we are better off from the transaction even if we never transact again. We do not look for further fulfilment through a continuing relationship.
The more explicit and one-off the transaction, the more unrelated and anonymous the parties to the transaction, and the larger the set of participants who can transact with one another, the more the transaction approaches the ideal of a market transaction. The more implicit the terms of the transaction, the more related the parties who transact, the smaller the group that can potentially transact, the less equal the exchange, the broader the range of transactions and the more repetitive transactions are over time between the same parties, the more the transactions approach a relationship. The thicker the web of relationships tying a group of individuals together, the more it is a community. In a sense, the community and the market are two ends of a continuum.
In his magisterial work, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (“Community and Society”), nineteenth-century German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies argued that in a community tied together by strong relationships, individual interests are suppressed in favor of the collective interest whenever these interests diverge. By contrast, in a market transaction, “nobody wants to grant and produce anything for another individual, nor will he be inclined to give ungrudgingly to another individual, if it not be in exchange for a gift or labor equivalent that he considers at least equal to what he has given.”2 In this sense, only individual interests matter, and they have to be met transaction by transaction.
In this chapter, we will examine what makes communities useful.3 Those hearkening to the past, as in many a fantasy novel, often invoke an idyllic view of the community. Typically, this is a village—an arcadia where simple honest people look out for one another, offering goods and services without demanding prompt or equal compensation. The village community can be warm and supportive. Yet, it can also be small, closed, and intrusive. We will see how a community facilitates economic and social transactions, but we’ll also recognize there are limits to community effectiveness, and indeed situations where a community may be harmful to its members’ interests. That will be why a community works best as part of the balance.
THE POSITIVE ROLES OF THE COMMUNITY
Evolutionary psychologists argue that we help others who are related to us or look like us because it is genetically hardwired into us—to the extent altruism toward kin is a genetic trait that helped its own survival in the Stone Age, when much of our evolution happened, it helped itself be passed on.4 Similarly, we may be genetically evolved to help others, provided they reciprocate the favor, and we are programmed to have a strong distaste for freeloaders who do not. Since evolution is slow, we are fully adapted to the challenges of the Stone Age, and we continue to retain such propensities, even if no longer critical for survival. In other words, we are predisposed to be social.
We have built on this predisposition. People have always banded together because a group is better at defense (or attack) than an individual. In modern society, healthy communities continue to police themselves and their surroundings to ensure safety for their members. They do more, though—much more.
They offer their members a sense of identity, a sense of place and belonging that will survive the trials and tribulations of modern life. They do this through stories, customs, rituals, relationships, and joint celebrations or mourning so that when faced with a choice between self-interest and community interest, or between community members and others, members are more inclined to put their own community first. Often, communities inculcate shared values and goals in members, as well as imbue in them a sense of personal utility from various actions that benefit the community.
The community also monitors economic transactions as well as noneconomic “favors” within the community, and it sees that everyone delivers their promised part fairly, if not immediately then over time. It assists those falling behind, as members contribute to those in need. It also aggregates the capabilities of all its members and brings them to bear to enhance collective well-being. Let us examine all these roles in greater detail.
SURVIVAL: TRAINING AND SOCIALIZING THE YOUNG
A community needs to train its young to be productive, to take over from current adult members as they age. Equally important, the values of the young members have to be shaped to protect the well-being of the community. Most communities train their young through apprenticeships, where they are taught skills and learn to internalize the norms and values of the community.
Apprenticeship often ends with a rite of passage that signals the coming of age of a youth into adulthood. In a number of tribes such as the Aborigines in Australia or the Papuans of New Guinea, the rites were so physically brutal that those up for initiation occasionally died.5 Not only did the ordeal prevent those who did not have the requisite tolerance for pain, or desire for greater power and responsibility in the tribe, from achieving full manhood, but those who did survive it also would likely be even more committed to the tribe. Modern communities like fraternities at colleges, law firms, research universities, or the military have their own rites of passage, differing only in the degree of physical or mental pain from tribal initiation ceremonies.
The community plays a very important role in supporting education, even in modern schooling systems. As Chicago Nobel laureate economist James Heckman emphasizes, a child’s attitudes toward learning, as well as her future health, are shaped in the critical preschool years where the family and community matter far more than the formal education system. Moreover, even after children enter the formal schooling system, the community determines whether they make use of it to the full
est extent. Whether children are given the time, encouragement, and the support to do homework depends on the environment at home and the attitude of their friends toward academic effort.
Linkages between the school and the community are also important. Parents will be more eager to monitor and support teaching if they feel they can influence how the school is run—many successful schools draw on parents for school boards, for staffing and supporting extracurricular programs, as well as for providing funds for equipment that is not accounted for in the normal budget. Communities help the young outside schools, whether it is through preschool learning, summer jobs, or watching out for, and counseling, teenagers who might stray. Equally, teachers, coming from the community, can work to build alternative local social supports for students whose families are broken. Schools are also an important focal point for parents to build mutual friendships, as they are drawn together in a common endeavor.
The community shapes the views of its members about one another, so as to encourage mutual support. The elderly are a store of knowledge and have experiences and wisdom that can be very important in guiding the community. Nevertheless, in environments where reproductive capabilities matter enormously or much of the work is physically taxing, the elderly may be a dispensable burden. To give the elderly an incentive to share their wisdom, even while protecting their position, the socialization process often inculcates respect for age. In modern South Indian Brahmin marriages and coming-of-age ceremonies, the elderly have an important position as they guide the young on the specific rituals to be followed. The young signal their acceptance of the natural order by repeatedly prostrating themselves before anyone older, asking for their blessings. Rank or position in the outside world is immaterial in determining who prostrates themselves before whom—all that matters is age. More generally, communities may allocate authority and power in ways that have nothing to do with economic capability, but help keep the community together.
The Third Pillar Page 3