Читать книгу The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley, Matt Ridley - Страница 32

A successful transaction between two people – a sale and purchase – should benefit both. If it benefits one and not the other, it is exploitation, and it does nothing to raise the standard of living. The history of human prosperity, as Robert Wright has argued, lies in the repeated discovery of non-zero-sum bargains that benefit both sides. Like Portia’s mercy in The Merchant of Venice, exchange is ‘twice blest: it blesseth him that gives and him that takes.’ That’s the Indian rope trick by which the world gets rich. Yet it takes only a few sidelong glances at your fellow human beings to realise that remarkably few people think this way. Zero-sum thinking dominates the popular discourse, whether in debates about trade or in complaints about service providers. You just don’t hear people coming out of shops saying, ‘I got a great bargain, but don’t worry, I paid enough to be sure that the shopkeeper feeds his family, too.’ Michael Shermer thinks that is because most of the Stone Age transactions rarely benefited both sides: ‘during our evolutionary tenure, we lived in a zero-sum (win-lose world), in which one person’s gain meant another person’s loss’.

This is a shame, because the zero-sum mistake was what made so many -isms of past centuries so wrong. Mercantilism said that exports made you rich and imports made you poor, a fallacy mocked by Adam Smith when he pointed out that Britain selling durable hardware to France in exchange for perishable wine was a missed opportunity to achieve the ‘incredible augmentation of the pots and pans of the country’. Marxism said that capitalists got rich because workers got poor, another fallacy. In the film Wall Street, the fictional Gordon Gekko not only says that greed is good; he also adds that it’s a zero-sum game where somebody wins and somebody loses. He is not necessarily wrong about some speculative markets in capital and in assets, but he is about markets in goods and services. The notion of synergy, of both sides benefiting, just does not seem to come naturally to people. If sympathy is instinctive, synergy is not.

For most people, therefore, the market does not feel like a virtuous place. It feels like an arena in which the consumer does battle with the producer to see who can win. Long before the credit crunch of 2008 most people saw capitalism (and therefore the market) as necessary evils, rather than inherent goods. It is almost an axiom of modern debate that free exchange encourages and demands selfishness, whereas people were kinder and gentler before their lives were commercialised, that putting a price on everything has fragmented society and cheapened souls. Perhaps this lies behind the extraordinarily widespread view that commerce is immoral, lucre filthy and that modern people are good despite being enmeshed in markets rather than because of it – a view that can be heard from almost any Anglican pulpit at any time. ‘Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves,’ said the Archbishop of Canterbury in 2008.

Like biological evolution, the market is a bottom-up world with nobody in charge. As the Australian economist Peter Saunders argues, ‘Nobody planned the global capitalist system, nobody runs it, and nobody really comprehends it. This particularly offends intellectuals, for capitalism renders them redundant. It gets on perfectly well without them.’ There is nothing new about this. The intelligentsia has disdained commerce throughout Western history. Homer and Isaiah despised traders. St Paul, St Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther all considered usury a sin. Shakespeare could not bring himself to make the persecuted Shylock a hero. Of 1900, Brink Lindsey writes: ‘Many of the brightest minds of the age mistook the engine of eventual mass deliverance – the competitive market system – for the chief bulwark of domination and oppression.’ Economists like Thorstein Veblen longed to replace the profit motive with a combination of public-spiritedness and centralised government decision-taking. In the 1880s Arnold Toynbee, lecturing working men on the English industrial revolution which had so enriched them, castigated free enterprise capitalism as a ‘world of gold-seeking animals, stripped of every human affection’ and ‘less real than the island of Lilliput’. In 2009 Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor argued that ‘capitalism is no system for the kind-hearted. Even its devotees acknowledge this while insisting that, however tawdry capitalist motives may be, the results are socially beneficial.’ As the British politician Lord Taverne puts it, speaking of himself: ‘a classical education teaches you to despise the wealth it prevents you from earning.’

But both the premise and the conclusion are wrong. The notion that the market is a necessary evil, which allows people to be wealthy enough to offset its corrosive drawbacks, is wide of the mark. In market societies, if you get a reputation for unfairness, people will not deal with you. In places where traditional, honour-based feudal societies gave way to commercial, prudence-based economies – say, Italy in 1400, Scotland in 1700, Japan in 1945 – the effect is civilising, not coarsening. When John Padgett at the University of Chicago compiled data on the commercial revolution in fourteenth-century Florence, he found that far from self-interest increasing, it withered, as a system of ‘reciprocal credit’ emerged in which business partners gradually extended more and more trust and support to each other. There was a ‘trust explosion’. ‘Wherever the ways of man are gentle, there is commerce, and wherever there is commerce, the ways of men are gentle,’ observed Charles, Baron de Montesquieu. Voltaire pointed out that people who would otherwise have tried to kill each other for worshipping the wrong god were civil when they met on the floor of the Exchange in London. David Hume thought commerce ‘rather favourable to liberty, and has a natural tendency to preserve, if not produce a free government’ and that ‘nothing is more favourable to the rise of politeness and learning, than a number of neighbouring and independent states, connected together by commerce and policy’. It dawned on Victorians such as John Stuart Mill that a rule of Rothschilds and Barings was proving rather more pleasant than one of Bonapartes and Habsburgs, that prudence might be a less bloody virtue than courage or honour or faith. (Courage, honour and faith will always make better fiction.) True, there was always a Rousseau or a Marx to carp, and a Ruskin or a Goethe to scoff, but it was possible to wonder, with Voltaire and Hume, if commercial behaviour might make people more moral.