review of The Economics of Enough

I've reviewed Diane Coyle's Economics of Enough for Open Democracy, which you can read here. The piece concludes:

The inherent uncertainty of the future, and the crisis of risk management, surely invites some less market-based hypotheses and scenarios. The growing investment power of non-liberal or state capitalists (Chinese, Russian and Emirate sovereign powers) in the next fifty years is surely one of the safest bets out there. Rumours abound of public institutions (such as universities) in the West being bought outright by these new, oligarchic investors, just as has already occurred with British football clubs. Perhaps the environmental crisis (whose scale Coyle is entirely aware of) will even require Western states to borrow some tricks from command economies, and simply plan the future economy. None of these propositions is investigated, other than with a retort that we must not return to the 1970s. 

Coyle’s instinct is surely the right one: we cannot continue with the models, economic theories, policies and practices that held sway between 1980 and 2008. Yet the book parades theories, evidence and argument, for instance on the transformative power of ICT and the value of social capital, that have been entirely orthodox for the best part of two decades. At times, this book is deeply and powerfully troubling, especially when reviewing the various promises that are going to be broken, with regards to debt, pensions and future generations. What forms of insurance and mutual reliance will replace (or save) these decaying institutions? What would a financial institution look like, which thought in years and decades, rather than in days and quarters? These, surely, are the sorts of question that need answering, now that we’ve had enough.

Comments

[IanC]

A brilliant review and I could not agree more.
Diane Coyle's bet-hedging is consistent with the prevailing syndrome among Western policymakers. This is the extreme tension between the widely held rhetorical diagnosis of deep structural and ecological problems ahead, generated by the growth model to a large extent, and the actual commitment to policies to promote the growth model. Hence the inability to look climate scientists in the eye or to tell electorates the truth about the possibility of serious looming scarcities; and hence the recourse to phrases such as 'Green Growth', which might turn out to be oxymoronic. The diagnosis of trouble ahead casts extreme doubt on the very economic model being touted as the only possible way of doing things. This is no great surprise: we all change our worldviews with reluctance, if at all, and there are few economic policymakers and gurus around who remember life before neoliberalism or can imagine an alternative to the economics of what I call the Long 1980s (1980-2010 and counting).

[Dick Pountain]

I'm currently reviewing "The Ecological Rift" which covers much of the same ground but from a position of (unorthodox) Marxism. It shares the same ambiguity too, thanks to the vagueness of abstract terms like "associated producers" and "social ownership". It could be used to justify just about anything between Lula and Pol Pot...