It is being noticed more and more – President Obama and Pope Francis are currently making it a theme in their speeches – that inequality is growing and that the already rich and powerful are becoming even more obscenely rich (the President and Pope are too diplomatic to use the word obscene but it is the right one) and even more unchallengeably powerful. The richest 85 people in the world own the same amount as the bottom 3 ½ billion people in the world. In the US the richest 1% gained 95% of all the income increase since 2009 while the bottom 90% got poorer. This infamy goes on and on in country after country.
This is an ever-present danger. It constantly lurks in human history
and we should always be on the alert to do battle with it.
Frederick Winslow Taylor, who as a young foreman in a Philadelphia steelworks in 1880 started measuring work performance compared with time taken to do the work, was the first time and motion study expert, the man who pioneered the science of efficiency in management. He was not popular among ordinary workers. It was pointed out, for instance, that Taylor’s showcase labourer, a man called Schmidt, earned 61% more pay, yes, but for that he performed 362% more work. A US Congressional Committee was set up to investigate Taylor’s methods. Taylor himself was questioned and at one point he spoke proudly of how much “the first-class man” profited under his system. The Chairman of the Committee then asked a pointed question about the fate of those who were not first-class. To this there was no very good or exact answer.
It is good to recall this episode as we listen to those commentators who still insist on extolling the virtues of the market-place, remind us of the inevitability of the winnowing process involved in ‘globalisation’ and free trade, and stress the absolute need to become more efficient than others and rise to the top of the list of league leaders in competitiveness. Our own leaders in the Caribbean have too often found themselves numbered among such thoughtless, winner-take-all enthusiasts.
I have not heard such people say what happens to the also-rans, except some particularly frank ones who talk of the inevitability of “failed states.” After all, not everyone can be a winner in competition. In fact there are many more losers than winners are there not? And in any race there are always competitors way down the track and even one, remember, who comes dead last. So in this glorious world order which such commentators extol, or at least accept as inevitable and therefore useless to question, what happens to the losers, especially those really far back in the race? It may not be for want of trying desperately hard to succeed that they fail: every sportsman knows that effort does not always equate with success. So are such losers to be consigned to the scrap heap?
Must life in the real world be organized like a sporting event in which only winners get a prize and the others get nothing? That is what is implied by the market ideologues and their obsequious supporting cast of unquestioning commentators. The line they take is the line taken at the turn of the last century by Jack (Neutron Jack) Welch, Chairman of General Electric in the USA, who closed down dozens of plants and fired tens of thousands of workers in the cause of greater efficiency. As Neutron Jack said at one famous shareholders meeting, “The events we see rushing toward us make the rough, tumultuous eighties look like a decade at the beach. Ahead of us are Darwinian shakeouts in every major marketplace, with no consolation prizes for the losing companies and nations” – or, he probably added under his breath, people.
So what happens when we strive for greater efficiency and get it, when we achieve impressive gains in productivity, when we reduce our unit costs significantly, when we improve our investment climate greatly and perfect our tax laws and other conditions for multinational foreign investment – what happens if we work hard and achieve all these things and still we are not among the winners because, remember, others are striving too and not everyone can come first or even second or third? I wish there was some world Congressional Committee to ask such questions and get some answers. The world, life itself, is made up mostly of the second and third and fourth class and no class at all. How do we cater for them? Are there, indeed, to be no consolation prizes?
What is repugnant in the new dispensation is the way it so barefacedly favours the strong over the weak. If there are competitors in a free market is it not obvious that the competitor with most access to advanced technology, skilled manpower, ample funds for investment and advertising and promotion, superior organization and the backing of a powerful state is going to win? Please tell me what is to prevent this happening. Insisting on reciprocity is the equivalent of insisting that one party, guess which, is going to lose and suffer. And please don’t mention to me “niche markets”, that stock-in-trade of unthinking apologists for the market ideology. A niche market lasts for exactly as long as it takes a stronger competitor to find out about it and move in and in most cases that isn’t very long.
“There is no free lunch” is another favourite mantra used constantly by the market ideologues. Any sensible person understands that there can indeed be no free lunch in the sense that resources for that “free” lunch have to be generated from somewhere. But sensible and reasonably compassionate people also realize that there are countless human beings – the young, the helpless old, the handicapped, the destitute and indeed even those who have lost not for want of trying – who qualify not only for a free lunch but also for a helping hand in any decently organized society or world community. To think otherwise is a negation of our common humanity. Why is this a concept that so many still seem to find it almost embarrassing to enunciate?
We should certainly try to do our very best, as good sportsmen preparing for competition, to make ourselves as fit and as strong and as fast, in other words as competitive, as possible so that we can perform as well as we can. But it does not follow that the real world must be organized as if it was a race or a jungle where the loser’s fate is zero. Surely mankind has come far enough to find that completely unacceptable. Let there be gradations, yes, but gradations from winners who get the most to losers who all get at least enough. I want to hear the ideologues change their stance and all leaders adopt that line so that it becomes the objective of us all and the basis of all our decisions.
