Now, this is often given as a panacea by right-wingers of the Mitt-Romney-knows-how-to-fix-economies-cos-he's-rich school. I distrust it normally, but the fact is that I simply can't think of any other prominent left wing voices talking about business, and so I am left with Hutton to fill what is frankly quite a massive gap in the market. Thing is, there are practically no mainstream leftwingers remaining who favour a socialist economy. What is remaining, hardly anyone bothers to remind us, is a capitalist one. It seems to me grossly irresponsible to be embarrassed by the fact of capitalism if you don't have a better solution. You can look across the web and find thousands of blogs excoriating the government for its destruction of the benefits system or the encroaching privatisation of the NHS or what have you.
This is good and important work. But if you accept the capitalist system, even grudgingly, it can only be half the equation. Half of it must also be looking for ways to create the wealth necessary to support the benefits system being defended. To leave wealth creation to the greedy is to let capitalism run amok as you are meant to oppose. You don't think capitalism can be restrained? Fine, then campaign for a socialist economy. But if not, you really have no excuse not to be interested in the business of economics and the economics of business.
My feeling is that the Left feels betrayed by the academic subject of economics. The Marxist stuff all sounds a bit tired now, and since the fall of the Old Left the movement has been much more comfortable with the language of victimhood and identity (most people use these words pejoratively, I, on the other hand, think them vital subjects of study even if, again, only half the battle). They have never by nature been very interested in business studies, because they've accepted that business is something greedy right-wingers do.
This is why Huttonism should be a thing, even if Hutton isn't the best commentator, or, indeed, the best economist in the world. There should be more progressive talk about what a productive economy looks like. The irony is that if evidence from Scandinavia and various US States is anything to go by, it's quite left-wing. Hutton's column on Sunday makes this point very clearly. The point, it seems, is that as trade unions have weakened and employment flexibility increased along with a failure of wages to keep up with growth, money in businesses and the economy in general has been moving into shareholders. Shareholders and the shareholder class are able to reward themself more and more at the expense of any entrepreneurial activity. Money quote:
Entrepreneurs are the engine room of a capitalist society, at best making fortunes on the back of genuine risk-taking, usually when they bet their assets and reputation on some innovation. They can also lose everything. But as companies found their profits rising sharply, executives at the top sold the unwarranted proposition that it was because they too were entrepreneurial, rather than the beneficiaries of weakened trade unions. They should, they claimed, receive entrepreneurial returns , even if they risked nothing.
The Right is capable of all the bitching about entrepreneurship and free enterprise they want, but it won't change the fact that their economic policies hinder both things. A large and wealthy middle class that actually buys things companies make, shareholders hungry for increased productivity rather than greater cash prizes for themselves, R&D departments with more priority than the marketing or equity departments - these are things that will drive a modern capitalist economy, and they are precisely the things discouraged by the most enthusiastic capitalist reformers of the last 30 years. The play-it-safe management class we have now are utterly useless as boosters of capitalism, and those who want redistributionist tax policy, strong housing and employment rights, tax-funded higher education and a bunch of other left-wing wish-list items actually are cheerleaders of capitalism. Because capitalism works best in an equitable society.
There's much more to say about this, chiefly about the fact that modern technology growth simply isn't capable of supporting the kind of capitalism our grandparents profited from, but the main point is this: the acquisition of money and profit, as long as it's done supporting greater productivity and isn't merely a reward for more acquisition, is not a dirty idea. Well, it might be, if you're a socialist and don't like the idea of profit. But if you're not, then you'd better get interested in the subject of how businesses make money, because currently conversation on the topic seems to have been left to people who look like they know what they're doing and are actually incompetent.
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