A book that is a passionate discussion on the economic and political situation of the West.
Tony Judt, a well known English historian who operates in the US and keeps working undeterred by a disabling illness , has written a new book , a short one, for the English and Americans young generation . He enters with great gusto in the discussion between “ right” and “left”, between the ultraliberals, the enemies of the State , and the social democrats who believe in social solidarity , and in a common approach to politics as an instrument to tackle to-day problems. The title “Ill fares the land “ comes from two 1770 verses of Oliver Goldsmith:
“Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey
Where wealth accumulates , and men decay”,
which immediately state the problem: “private affluence and public squalor”.
It is not a treaty , but rather a passionate discussion on the economic and political situation of the West , and it is therefore not easy to summarize without losing some of its poignancy. It starts with a number of graphs on the incredibly huge income inequality between rich and poor, the US being at the top, followed at a distance by the European countries . Incredibly, the Gini coefficient, which measures the difference in income between rich and poor, has the same value in the USA and in China, that is , in the world’s richest country, and in one just getting out of poverty; and in the US poverty is not only lack of means, but also the stigma, and the feeling of impotence .
There, taxation is perceived as “ an uncompensated income loss” and not as the instrument to reduce inequality; and freedom is increasingly understood as the freedom to make money. This situation is in fact relatively new. In the past century , from the late ‘30s to the ’60s and 70s, the European countries followed the Keynesian recipe and the social democratic doctrine, while US created first the New Deal and then the Great Society . Both influenced the market in order to raise the minimum standard of families and to increase social mobility. The Welfare State protected the weak majority from the strong and privileged minority. “In many respect the social democratic consensus signifies the greater progress which history has seen so far. Never before have so many people had so many life chances” wrote Dahrendorf.
However, that successful system did not last. To day, unskilled and semiskilled labour is fast disappearing not just thank to mechanised and robotised production, but also because the globalization of the labour market . Mass unemployment is beginning to look like an endemic characteristic of advanced society. The working class, the one most interested in social security, is a shrinking percentage of population, while the middle class grows bigger and bigger. It is not surprising that even the left wing got out of the collectivistic view , and concentrated on the “Identity “ and freedom of the single individual. The famous Thatcher phrase “ there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals and families” cancelled with one stroke solidarity and collective interest.
The “Austrians” economists of the '30s –ignored until the seventies- gave their intellectual support with a somewhat simplistic doctrine: taxes reduce growth and the efficiency of the economy , State regulation creates obstacles to free competition; the less the State , the better the economy. Collective services supplied by the State are inefficient and must be privatized. The cult of the “private” brought the liquidation of a large part of public capital, that is, reduced the investment in public services, and increased the profits for the shareholders of the privatized companies. Whatever was run by the State , hospitals and schools, prison even police and the army, and transport services, must become private property. However, private owners cannot run these services according to the interest of the public, and their losses must be paid by the State, which has happened over and over again, in a sort of creeping re-nationalisation . The negative effect of all this has been quite serious. Public services have become private, and the citizen is now tied to the State only by obedience, and no more by the use of public services which reduce the inequality between citizens.
The State has only a ‘punitive’ function, and the people loses interest in politics , which in turn is reduced to “the politics of interest, the politics of envy, the politics of re-election ” .The debate on the way we govern ourselves is left to “policy specialists and think tanks, where conventional opinion rarely finds a place, and public are largely excluded. “ Perhaps too much State is not good, but there is something worse, when there is not enough of it. In the “failed” State, people suffers violence and a lack of justice, and , more over, the services don’t work. On the other hand, capitalism is not a political system, but a form of economic life compatible with many political regimes, democratic or dictatorial; correspondingly, communism, although an enemy of a free market, can be adapted to different economic systems, although it reduces their efficiency. Notwithstanding having been the one that gained most from the welfare state, the middle class or a good part of it, is now more and more sceptic on the welfare state and worried of taxation which it has to pay to maintain at least some economic equality .
The result of all this, says Judt, is that poverty, however measured, is on the increase in the US and in Britain, and in all countries wjich have followed their example. It is therefore necessary to go back to the social question, with a new “moral narrative”. The simple thing that something would be in our direct interest is not enough. We have to find a new way to give our action a scope that may have a general effect. What do we want? We have to reduce inequalities, because they cancel the sense of fraternity, which is a political objective, but also a condition for political efficiency. Inequality is inefficient, and egoism is at the end unpleasant even for those who practice it. Globalisation reduces the economic differences between countries, but increases the inequalities among their citizens.
It is up to the State to mediate between the impotent citizens and the great corporations that do not respond to anybody. Only the Government can deal efficiently with the effects of globalization. In US , the country more critical of the State, the Government has supported and financed a great number of different actors, the railways barons , the grain producers, the car and plane makers etc, but everybody thinks exactly the opposite. We got rid of the idea that the State is always the best solution for every problem , but the fact is that if the State does not regulate the market , somebody else will do it, monopolies, great industrial companies, the unions, making a fiction of the market freedom. Only the State can channel the energy of every citizen into a comfortable collective situation.
The main point is the public services, and Tony Judt writes a short but pregnant story of the English Railways and of the failure of their privatisation. The world is to day dominated by fear, because of terrorism and immigration . If there are no institutions the citizen can trust , every one will look for his own answer, creating a society of closed groups , represented by the closed compounds of the rich, which fragment the urban continuity in so many semi autonomous satellites. Socialism, concludes Judt , wanted to displace capitalism, and it failed, while Social Democracy “succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its founders.” It is therefore the moment to state clearly the social question . The Social Democrats cannot limit themselves to matter of economic efficiency, they cannot ignore the ethic side , and the necessity of collective objectives. To make money is not enough , human society must have an objective that looks just and reachable.
As we can see from this very short presentation ,Tony Judt’s book tells how the present unlimited capitalism has become the norm, and how the human society can correct it. The key point is the moral sense of the people, their desire of living in a pleasant environment , where the obsessive race to riches would not erase what is the centre of the common life , the solidarity between citizens. Judt’s recipe may appear weak , but history tells us that the extraordinary economic and social progress in the last century was produced in fact by a shared moral imperative to contain and reduce the social and economic inequalities. The moral tension in Judt’s book may have led him to avoid attempting a description of the middle class, which is by now the majority of the population, and of its strong feeling of fear, and not only of terrorists and immigrants: above all, fear of loosing the economic improvement that it has reached in recent years, fear of going back to the previous situation, to the misery cancelled by the economic development of the fifties and seventies.
This, I believe , is in fact the obsession of the middle class, which supersedes any political discourse, creating a sense of insecurity , which makes a social group originally not aggressive to fall for drastic solutions , and impedes it to realise that such a society as we have now can progress only through a general consensus, which would free the social energy in all strata of society. There is nowadays a mass culture of TV and , in general, of media, which is the main instrument for trapping the middle class in its foibles. In conclusion, Tony Judt’s book is a vibrant narrative, perfectly suited for the young generation. One can only hope for many translations in the other European languages.