Читать книгу Standing on the Sun - Christopher Meyer - Страница 22

Did a less punitive stance toward capital squanderers mean they got off scot-free? Ideally, no. Easing up on bankrupts threatens to create what economists call moral hazard—a situation in which someone has an incentive to make bad choices because others will pay for them. For the rules to serve society well, they must achieve a careful balance that encourages reasonable risk taking while discouraging recklessness and free riding. And note that some of that balance can be achieved by rules other than laws. For most of the twentieth century in the West, moral hazard was contained by the social stigma of bankruptcy; debtors' prison or not, “going bust,” becoming a “deadbeat,” and declaring financial failure were sufficiently painful that no non-sociopath would choose them.

But after leniency regarding bankruptcy became the norm, some borrowers responded to that change with new behaviors. A century without debtors' prison eroded society's aversion to bankruptcy, and it became a tool of management. Frank Lorenzo, former CEO of Continental Airlines in the United States, embraced bankruptcy in the 1980s to restructure its labor agreements, even though Continental was not in such dire balance sheet straits that Chapter 11 was necessary. Lorenzo shocked business commentators but also earned their admiration for the creative use of the law. In that case, moral hazard was not an issue: there's no suggestion that Lorenzo's predecessors considered the bankruptcy strategy when negotiating raises with pilots in earlier years. But when Lorenzo didn't burn in business opinion hell, it inspired a truly bankrupt use of bankruptcy law: land speculators in the 1990s observed that in Florida and Texas, the law allowed them to walk away from deals gone bad, and thus they began buying high-risk properties. The deals looked bad to anyone who feared bankruptcy, but to those immune to its stigma, it was an attractive “heads I win, tails my creditors lose” opportunity. Since then, Florida has evolved its bankruptcy statutes to close this loophole, as community shunning was no longer a sufficient deterrent. Indeed, according to the Web site of a Florida bankruptcy lawyer, “There are no good or bad reasons to file for bankruptcy … There is no shame, stigma or embarrassment in filing bankruptcy anymore.”

Yes, this should put you in mind of bailouts, whether in the context of AIG or Greece, and yes, it's been a similar story: Anglo-American capitalism has so strongly rewarded financial innovation, and has been so averse to letting financial institutions take their lumps, that moral hazard has moved from a curiosity of economists to the editorial page. And yes, we have lawyers, in many cases holding public office, who defend those institutions as doing their jobs as society needs them to. But that's not our point here.

Our point is to introduce you to the key concept of coevolution. This is the phenomenon by which changes in one species spur reciprocal changes in another, in a sort of arms race of adaptation. As computational biologist Stuart Kauffman says, “When the frog gets a sticky tongue, flies get Teflon feet.” The growth of digital networks and the changes in the music distribution industry are an economic example. The rules and technologies beget innovations in behavior; the new behaviors induce changes in the rules (in this case, both social and legal).

The behavior of capitalists coevolves with social values and the law. A qualifiying phrase we used earlier—“in a society that prized innovation …”—speaks to the reciprocality involved. Society's needs and values, and the conditions created by current technology, constitute the environment in which competing rules are judged. When one set of rules replaces another, it's a matter of fitness for that environment.