The most important statements are often those that are left unsaid. Among the millions of words spoken at last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, the comment that nobody quite dared to utter was clear. After the crisis of 2007-09, the global capitalist system is in a period of transition, comparable to the great transitions of the 1930s and 1970s.
The question that nobody wants to raise is whether the new model of capitalism that emerges to dominate the world will be a radically reformed version of the Western democratic system or some variant of the authoritarian state-led capitalism favoured in China, Russia and many other emerging economies.
As a leading US diplomat told me: “Since the crisis, developing countries have lost interest in the old Washington consensus that promoted democracy and liberal economics. Wherever I go in the world, governments and business leaders talk about the new Beijing consensus — the Chinese route to prosperity and power. The West must come up with a new model of capitalism that’s consistent with our political values. Either we reinvent ourselves or we will lose.”
There are several ways of dealing with, or dodging, this challenge. The easiest way, most in evidence last week at Davos, is plain denial. Instead of thinking about the future, it is easier to focus on the past, to quibble about regulations and argue about who is to blame.
Another more insidious form of denial is to pretend that the Chinese and Western models of capitalism are not really very different. Everyone, after all, is in business to make money, so on the issues that really matter, there is no great rift. This is the standard view among all businessmen with big investments in China, especially those like Bill Gates, of Microsoft, who enjoy seeing their rivals politically squeezed by Beijing.
It is also the official line of Chinese and Western governments. Our two models can prosper in peaceful co-existence and mutual respect.
This is an illusion, as was evident from the background chatter in Davos. Whether we look at business practices, economic policies, political and human rights or geopolitical interests, it is clear that China and the West are on a collision course. Serious collisions may not occur for decades, but the two models of politico-economic development are incompatible in the long term.
In business practice, China unambiguously favours domestic industries over Western exporters and investors. China’s determination to run huge export surpluses and maintain an undervalued exchange rate gives America and Europe cheap consumer products; but it also means lost jobs and the accumulation of ever-more foreign debts. On human rights, far from confirming the naive slogan of the Thatcher-Reagan period that free markets create free people, China is becoming more adamant in its rejection of Western-style democracy. Perhaps most seriously, China’s growing confidence in its authoritarian politics and government-led economic development is creating inevitable frictions with the West, from Korea, Iran and Tibet to Sudan, Zimbabwe and Venezuela.
We in the West have a choice. Either we concede the argument that China, in the 5,000 years of recorded human history, has been a much more successful and durable culture than America or Western Europe and is now reclaiming its natural position of global leadership. Or we stop denying the rivalry between the Chinese and Western models and start thinking seriously about how Western capitalism can be reformed to have a better chance of winning.
We must stop pretending that minor reforms to banking will restore the performance of the Western system, and focus on the deeper lessons from the financial crisis and the years before. Outside the echo chambers of Washington and Westminster, it is obvious that what went wrong in 2007-09 was not just a lapse in bank regulation. It was a failure of the entire market fundamentalist model of capitalism created in the Thatcher-Reagan period, which assumed that the market is always right.
That this version of capitalism ultimately failed in 2007-09 does not mean that the reforms were wrong. Their reforms were essentially and entirely appropriate for the period. The free-market system created from 1979 onwards represented a necessary evolution after the failure of the previous government-led, union-dominated Keynesian model. In the same way, this Keynesian version of capitalism, created in the 1930s, was a necessary evolution from the classical laissez faire capitalism destroyed by the Great Depression.
The challenge for Western thinking now is to create a fourth version of capitalism that builds on the best elements of the classical, Keynesian and Thatcher-Reagan models, but adapts to the needs of the 21st century and specifically to the rivalry with China’s dynamic and self-confident authoritarian system. Whether this is possible is very much an open question, which I try to examine in a book on the new model of capitalism, which I call Capitalism 4.0, to be published in the spring.
Some of the changes required are obvious, and are happening already. For example, governments and central banks are accepting much more explicit responsibility for managing economic growth and employment, as well as inflation.
Others are more controversial. For example, do Western political systems need to be reformed to make them more conducive to compromise and rapid, consensual decision- making instead of the political paralysis that now threatens the US? Do we need an economy in which government plays a bigger role in finance, energy, environment and strategic infrastructure investment, but actually reduces public spending and taxes by backing away from some of its traditional, and ruinously expensive, responsibilities for health, pensions and education?
These are the sort of questions that the movers and shakers ought to have been discussing last week in Davos. Maybe they will face up to them next year.
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