Читать книгу Standing on the Sun - Christopher Meyer - Страница 27

Around the world, there are different species of capitalism and capitalists, displaying myriad mutations of rules, beginning to interact more intensely with new environments and each other. In Israel, the venture capital industry was started by the state and then devolved to private ownership, as an element of economic policy. In India, the partnership of public and private, for-profit and nonprofit, is a major source of growth. In Brazil, private companies are taking responsibility for improving education and for providing the human capital needed for growth. In the United Arab Emirates, the government is pursuing a hybrid of Singapore's strong and enlightened approach to government, with the use of oil wealth to import the expertise needed to train the next generation. In China, energy policy is being used simulta-neously to ensure an infrastructure for growth, to prevent further environmental catastrophe, and to develop a new world-class industry. And in the United States, the digital natives are exploring open source models of collaborative production and the gift economy, while venture philanthropists are propounding theories of patient capital.

In every locale, capitalism exists as a set of rules selected by its practitioners to serve their various interests. As they are confronted by changes in their opportunities and constraints—and by each other's examples—they will begin to choose new rules. This doesn't constitute advice on our part but merely a factual observation: when an adaptive system finds itself in a new environment, it evolves. The new rules need not be chosen consciously, any more than an evolving species chooses its form. Feedback reinforces some rules positively, and others negatively.

We don't anticipate everything's changing; many rules of today's version of capitalism will remain in its genome, reasserting the logic that made them instrumental to its fitness in past eras. But some evidence is emerging that suggests that other rules are changing. These changing rules equip capitalism to perform in a new world of digital abundance, broad value expectations, and constant innovation—and may even spring us from some barreling runaway effects. That's what the next part of the book is about.