Greed is Dead review – politics and the dissolution of community

“We live in societies saturated in selfishness. So how can we say that greed is dead?” These sentences are a bit of a downer as a comment on our age and what passes for civilisation today.

They form the opening of the new book from Sir Paul Collier, a world leader in development economics and his colleague John Kay, also of Oxford, Greed is Dead – Politics After Individualism.

The sense that the times, politics and governance are out of joint has been around for some time now. The general unease is indicated by the slew of new books about what is wrong in the way we try to run our lives from Michael Sandel, David Goodhart, Adrian Wooldridge, Carlo Rovelli and Ivan Krastev – to name but a few.

Greed is Dead so far is the pick of the bunch – because it addresses the fundamentals of what has gone wrong with capitalism, and the Potemkin villages of politics and governments in the age of Narcissism and ego.

The book was begun before the Covid-19 plague struck, but the crisis radiates through the discussion of what has gone wrong in the UK. Above all, Paul Collier explained in a follow-up discussion of their book, it shows the flaws in the current government’s top-down approach to managing a major health and social emergency. “It’s a humiliating demonstration to everyone that the top doesn’t know best, embarrassingly so in the case of Britain.”

The authors blame the distortion of capitalism and an excessive self-regarding, materialist cult of the individual for the ills of our society and politics: “It’s a misunderstanding of what capitalism is and what makes capitalism successful. It’s the only system that harnesses human potential in both competition and collaboration. Decentralisation encourages contact with the community, and it is driven by the discipline of cooperation and the dynamics of competition.”

Individual success today is epitomised in the phenomenon of the “Economic man”, whose values and achievements are measured in huge profits, maximum rewards to shareholders and the mantra “greed is good.” This is the distortion of the age, because it leaves behind any sense of the community and service to the customer and client. It is what the Canadian political philosopher CB Macpherson summed up in the brilliant phrase “possessive individualism,” the title of his great study of liberalism from the age of John Locke. It holds that the individual and his property are sovereign. For today, wrote Macpherson, the problem is “the conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them.”

Possessive individuals in contemporary mode are lazy, selfish and greedy, say the authors – and detached from their community. They do not accept the ultra-Libertarian argument that unfettered wealth produces shareholder dividends, and personal reward – all of which in the end benefit the community as a whole. They pillory the libertarian capitalists with the mantra, “I deserve my bonus, I earned it.”

Too many people get left behind in the new capitalism and the new politics. This has led to the new brand of disruptive politics, with different forms of populism across the world – each nation with its own brand, from Brazil under Bolsonaro, Trump’s America, Erdogan’s Turkey, Putin in Russia and Xi’s perpetual dictatorship in China. Some see the left behinds as the casualties of meritocracy – and this is theme of Michael Sandel’s new book this autumn The Tyranny of Merit – What’s Become of the Common Good? and David Goodhart’s Head, Hand, Heart, The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century. Both books are an updated commentary on The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870 – 2033 by Michael Young.

Published in 1958, Young’s book is still an astonishingly good read. It takes a dystopian view on where excess emphasis on career success, especially through university education, leaves too many left out, and under-appreciated. Young had written the Labour Party manifesto for the 1945 election but had come to conclude that the emphasis on educational qualifications and the glittering prizes for which a private education gave a head start, had become unnecessarily wasteful. Undue reward to the best and brightest implied the ditching and downgrading of too much human capital; too many are left behind.

Greed is Dead makes a nod to Young, and leaves him to speak for himself, and addresses the broad question of how to reinvent a way of life that focuses on community. Community is the casualty in the practice of greed capitalism, and too much of our politics. The Labour Party, they argue, has lost its contact with its broad base of the working class, abandoned in a spat over dogma by its London-based hierarchy. Hence the collapse of the “red wall” constituencies across the northern and central England in the 2019 general election.

We need now a renewed approach to local and community association and politics, where human contact and exchange are valued. A new approach to communitarianism and mutuality could and should work with market economics. The authors are clear-eyed about the mixed reputation today of the communitarian politics argued by Elizabeth Anscombe in her article Modern Moral Philosophy of 1958 and in Macpherson’s conclusions in Possessive Individualism.

The brutal realism of this book gives it strength. It is a brilliant primer on community politics and political economy for today – from Aristotle to Greta Thunberg. Anyone interested in community and the fate of this country under Johnson, and America under Trump, should read it – now.

It is particularly good on how and why community and community interests have gone AWOL in so much public life today. For too many, individual rights trump the counterpoint of obligations. We are over-litigious in deed and outlook. The judicial review is an instrument open to abuse – here the authors support Jonathan Sumption, the former UK Supreme Court justice – where lawyers encroach on what should be the area of political action and responsibility. This induces politicians to encroach on the law and rewrite the regulations in their own interest.

Political parties have become machines in their own silos. In England this is aggravated by the over-concentration of power and administration in Whitehall. “We are the most overcentralized state in Western Europe,” says Paul Collier, “only Albania and Moldova are rivals.”

Community ties and loyalties were there from the beginning in both Conservative and Labour. The present dominance of what Italians call partitocrazia (sounds so much better than “partytocracy”) was not written in the stars. The godfather of modern market capitalism, Adam Smith, spoke of the need for community among shopkeepers, artisans and their clients. Edmund Burke, a man beyond his time, and an enduring icon of Conservatism, writes in 1790, “to be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle – the germ as it were – of public affections.” Burke’s view of representative democracy, as he explained to his voters in Bristol, is applauded. Direct democracy in the form of referendum is derided as divisive and destructive – again leaving too many out. Collier and Kay ruefully conclude that the problem with today’s Westminster parliament is that is too full of “unrepresentative representatives.”

The politics of the street and mass demonstrations rarely lead to new synergies, dialogue and the brokering of new ideas. Too much accent goes on activism as an end in itself and the primacy of “feelings” over arguments, say the authors. Social media is too often the occasion for rant and insult, rather than dialectic and debate.  Zoom debate and conferences have their limits, even in the time of Covid, says Paul Collier. “When you have a group of people talking face to face in a room, you nearly always get the element of randomness,” he told me. “You get somebody coming up with an unexpected point or argument – and it opens up the debate. You don’t get that with Zoom.”

The evolution of Covid-19 has produced a crisis in community affairs for this country. We now have to live with the likelihood that the pathogen is endemic – it will repeat for many seasons – and at the end of the summer it is emerging, again, as a national epidemic rather than a cluster of isolated outbreaks.

Once again, this bears heavily on the elderly and sick, those in the care homes and the isolated and infirm in their own dwellings. Isolation and mental health, as well as increasing demand from the destitute on food banks, are fast becoming a national scandal. They are best handled at the local and community level. But Whitehall, especially Downing Street and the Cabinet Office still want to be in charge. The track and trace system is facing yet another nervous breakdown, scientists are blamed, and the health administration and support organisation of Public Health England is to be abolished, denigrated and reformed – all in the middle of the worst public health crisis in a century.

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, not be outdone by the hubris of the Health Department, is now launching an inquiry into a complete overhaul and reform of local government. The powers of local authorities have been steadily reduced for 50 years. Paul Collier, however, does see some hope in new regional and local authorities and mayoralties, such as Manchester under Andy Burnham, West Midlands under Andy Street and South Yorkshire under Dan Jarvis. Each should develop its own identity with its community – a particularly difficult task for Street in the West Midlands.

But the growing need for back up support as Covid continues – from volunteers, charities and professionals is best coordinated at the local and regional level. Paul Collier points to the success in community action in Germany, and Italy. “In Germany the strength of the community is marked by the verein, thousands of clubs and associations that meet for a huge range of causes and interests. They meet, they discuss, are in physical contact, and they act together.” To date there are more than 600,000 registered with the authorities across Germany.

“Italy has a strong tradition of local solidarity – and it seems to have worked after a dreadful first two months of Covid,” Paul Collier thinks. “The cities are proud of their history of acting on their own authority. And the family is very powerful – they take care of the old in their homes.”

I wondered, then, about the neighbours further afield. Addressing one of the UK and Europe’s leading experts on development I had to ask Sir Paul about the debates about merging DFID, the aid department, with the FCO and the need to reduce the UK’s generous aid budget – currently .7 per cent of GDP at around £15 billion? The merging of DFID didn’t bother him, he said, and there was something to the charge of over-generosity, of being “a giant cashpoint in the sky.”

He said he was against cutting the aid budget – it was important for UK presence and influence in the world. But he said he wanted targeting of top tier beneficiaries such as Ghana, Rwanda and Ethiopia. “They need businesses now, firms that will go there and work.” Such countries didn’t need much advice on how to run their countries. But, he added, “we must always look out for the really fragile states – the ones in danger of collapse.”

In summarizing the role of the individual in community, or society, the authors turn to the very beginning of Western political culture and theory outlined in Aristotle’s “Politics”. Here the centre of gravity of community, political debate and commerce is the Agora – or forum – where the citizen would exchange ideas, gossip or goods. He should aim at the “good life”, which means the pursuit of happiness, not in self -indulgence but in the improvement of his abilities and fulfilment in his contribution to the community. Note, I have to say “he” because women, foreigners and slaves are excluded in Aristotle’s rubric. The Aristotelian humanist, pragmatic, approach to concord and harmony informs communal and republican thinking to this day. Notably, it is in the astonishing manifesto mural of “good government” by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 14th century Siena, the declaration of liberation from Spain, the Act of Abjuration by the Union of Utrecht Provinces of the Netherlands in 1581, the Declaration of American Independence of 1776, and many more.

So how does that apply today? Paul Collier summarized his argument as the need for “decentralisation in stronger political and social communities of place. And, stronger communities of work based on creativity, and collaboration as much as competition.”

How this will work out in the flexion of human affairs of the Covid pestilence, who can guess? But it is a prod and stimulus to rethink the way we do ethics and politics. We may not have Aristotle to guide us, but we do have Paul Collier and John Kay. They have written a brilliant and challenging book.

Greed Is Dead – Politics After Individualism by Paul Collier and John Kay. Available now from Peguin Books for £16.99.