Guardian UK: The moral dimension of boom and bust

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The moral dimension of boom and bust
What has got us into this global financial mess is the false belief that market economics is a purely technical business

Robert Skidelsky
guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 23 2008 12.00 GMT


After the first world war, HG Wells wrote that a race was on between morality and destruction. Humanity had to abandon its warlike ways, Wells said, or technology would decimate it.

Economic writing, however, conveyed a completely different world. Here, technology was deservedly king. Prometheus was a benevolent monarch who scattered the fruits of progress among his people. In the economists' world, morality should not seek to control technology, but should adapt to its demands. Only by doing so could economic growth be assured and poverty eliminated.

We have clung to this faith in technological salvation as the old faiths waned and technology became ever more inventive. Our belief in the market – the midwife of technological invention – was the result. We have embraced globalisation, the widest possible extension of the market economy.

For the sake of globalisation, communities are denatured, jobs offshored, and skills continually reconfigured. We are told by its apostles that the wholesale impairment of most of what gave meaning to life is necessary to achieve an "efficient allocation of capital" and a "reduction in transaction costs". Moralities that resist this logic are branded "obstacles to progress". Protection – the duty the strong owe to the weak – becomes protectionism, an evil thing that breeds war and corruption.

That today's global financial meltdown is the direct consequence of the west's worship of false gods is a proposition that cannot be discussed, much less acknowledged. One of its leading deities is the efficient market hypothesis – the belief that the market accurately prices all trades at each moment in time, ruling out booms and slumps, manias and panics. Theological language that might have decried the credit crunch as the "wages of sin", a comeuppance for prodigious profligacy, has become unusable. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/23/economics-economy