I have just taken part in a rather frustrating remote discussion on BBC Radio 4′s Sunday programme. Frustrating only because (I think) Ed Stourton was in Manchester, Eric Lonergan was in London, Professor John Milbank was in Nottingham and I was in Bradford – so, none of us could see each other… which makes interruption, eye contact and real engagement rather difficult.
Naturally, the theme arose from the events in London and elsewhere and the questions raised by the Occupy movement. Away from the heat of the particular (how St Paul’s Cathedral was handling the ‘crisis’, for example), it was possible to take a step back and ask some of the important questions about money, markets and morality. The programme can be located here, the particular discussion coming over half-way in.
It seems to me that the key to discussing these issues lies in nobbling the assumptions behind the language we use. Markets are never ‘free’ in the sense that they are neutral: they are shaped by human choices, values and priorities. The question is: which choices, according to which priorities, derived from which values, shaped by which assumptions about who we are and how the world should be?
John Milbank spoke of the ‘disconnect between the City and real people’, but this disconnect also exposes the vacuum in identifying and shaping the moral framework within (and from) which our financial business should be done. This is not anti-capitalist. Rather, it is a recognition that capitalism needs effective regulation, a shared set of moral values, a framework of mutual accountability and honest language.
City workers were asked if there is a moral framework within which the City or the markets operate. Odd question. Of course, there is – there is no neutral space shaped by value-free (or self-evidently noble) morality. The question simply has to do with the questions I cited above. I was a little unnerved to hear City workers saying things like, “We work incredibly hard” and “We are just doing a job”. I can think of other (incomparable) circumstances in history where such disclaimers are disallowed.
Anyway, I have to go to work on the sabbath. There clearly needs to be a more general debate within society about who shapes the moral framework for our business and economic life and how we better engage wider society in ownership of those choices. But, for this there has to be a growing experience of mutual responsibility at every level, reduced abstraction of economic life, a rehumanising of business, and a re-definition or re-articulation of public economic morality.
And we need to re-examine the connection between individual moral choosing and the common moral framing of our common life. After all, the economy exists not for the sake of the market, but in order better to shape our common life for the common good.
November 6, 2011 at 9:44 am
Completely agree with your introduction. It was just as frustrating for us listeners. Everyone talking over each other. This is an incredibly important and interesting subject and this morning’s debate was not the right forum. How about inviting Messrs Lonegran and Milbank to a debate with you in Bradford cathedral?
November 6, 2011 at 9:50 am
You were quite good, but one of the others tried to monopolise the conversation.
The Church, and religion and ethicists too, have a lot to say on the subject of an ethical and moral economic system. I fear that the bankers and stocktraders will drown out those voices and monopolise the conversation just as what happened on the program.
We need to pray for the ability to shout out the Good News and thus make ourselves heard over the din. Thank you for being a clear and forceful communicator.
November 6, 2011 at 10:23 am
Great blog – and I love your last sentence. “After all, the economy exists not for the sake of the market, but in order better to shape our common life for the common good.” – a point that, sadly, often seems to be lost…
November 6, 2011 at 12:01 pm
May have been frustrating for you, but was well worth the listen for those of us tuned in: thank you.
I find the way “the markets” tend to be treated by the media as some sort of amoral self-existent entity bizarre: the markets are people interacting, and any attempt to divorce those interactions from that basic reality is folly. Market forces are human choices and we must never forget that: why else do so many supermarkets now stock fairtrade products? Because people have stepped up and declared this is what they want: that’s market forces working for the good; and long may that market force continue!
November 6, 2011 at 1:12 pm
Plainly moral choices are part of the market system: I can choose or not choose to buy shares in defence industries or tobacco, but there is also an involuntary component. If the wheat crop fails, the price will rise in response to a natural phenomenon. We can’t ” vote” for more wheat in such circumstances. I am tweaking your proposition a bit so we can work on the problem with precision. There are quasi- moral- neutral elements within the mathematics of how these structures work.
November 6, 2011 at 4:57 pm
Great blog, and once again you rightly point out the absence of any ethical or moral “neutral”. City workers, as everyone, must know and be comfortable with the moral framework they work within. Or to challenge it.
If the moral framework is simply to make money at any cost, it’s working. For a few.
November 6, 2011 at 6:30 pm
I doubt you often read the scurilous website of Guido Fawkes but he has just posted an excellent piece on the Banking crisis: I had not recalled that he was an investment banker and knows wherof he speaks. He is emphasising that much of the problem arises out of the divorcing of risk and reward. I highly recommend it.
November 6, 2011 at 9:32 pm
#7: yes, I second that suggestion. I think Guido Fawkes aka Paul Staines is of Irish Catholic stock (well, he would be, wouldn’t he?). His focus on the morality question (as a free marketeer) is
(1) the necessity for truth telling (e.g. what happens when companiies or govt’s distort the real value of corporations or the true price of things;
(2) the immorality of gambling with other people’s money (risk divorced from reward), along with the ‘too big to fail’ assumption, e.g. banks getting bailed out by the taxpayer.
Very clearly there has been a serious breach of trust by many in financial institutions, driven by a culture of unrestrained greed and the wll-founded belief that if they failed, someone else would pay.
But a bigger question to throw into the picture: as well as the greed of bankers on commission, and top executives awarding themselves salaries way out of line with the worth of their companies, has not something similar happened with the top ranks in local government and in universities? – where salaries of £150-200K are not uncommon?
Or how about the BBC, which is funded by the TV tax – where newsreaders (!) can command £100k and many others or on over £200K?
The gap between the richest and the poorest keep yawning in Britain.
November 7, 2011 at 9:09 pm
Basically, are we not looking for bankers with the ethics of George Bailey rather than Clarence Potter?
November 8, 2011 at 3:53 pm
This is a sensible POV:
http://johnredwoodsdiary.com/2011/11/08/the-markets-moral-slide/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+JohnRedwoodsDiary+%28John+Redwood%27s+Diary%29
November 9, 2011 at 12:02 pm
On your programme last Sunday you set about discrediting the financial markets and its operators – particularly ‘bankers’! – and their immoral ways.
The whole process was to isolate this sector of our society as if it were working in a vacuum. Our whole society is basically immoral. We live in a culture of self-interest. We are largely a mass of individuals, particularly among the under-35s, with little coherence in our society or awareness of the ‘greater good’. We loved the banks when they were lending us lots of money, we relished the ever-rising prices of our properties, we fall at the feet of vastly overpaid ‘celebrities’. Where is the outrage at the corruption of sport by money or the ‘obscene’ amount of money that the likes of Jonathan Ross was paid by the BBC (I’m told Jeremy Paxman gets £60000+ for hosting “University Challenge” !?).
The values peddle by the media, newspapers, magazines, films, TV etc., are appalling. Concepts of self control, moderation, respect for society’s fast-fading ethics, respect for people, manners, and so on, have largely gone. We live in an uncouth, ignorant, yobbish, aggressive, self-gratifying culture with little respect for our history and heritage. Bankers just fit into this, in order to survive.
It is disingenuous to lay all our woes on the financial sector. Indeed much of it works for our material good; investment and pension planning, lending money (yes it still does this – whatever you read in the press), promoting business, supporting enterprise etc..
Our parlous financial situation is much more to do with an inept government and the huge national debt. The ‘ bankers’ did not spend too much on the Welfare State or on the NHS without getting value for money. The Bankers did not launch a war in Iraq. The crash of a number of banks (just 3 by the way – Lloyds was forced by the Government to absorb HBOS’ losses, without that it would be a thriving bank today) was inevitable in the atmosphere of uncontrolled borrowing, at all levels.
Of course the bankers make an easy scapegoat and overblown salaries are a convenient target but the sums of money they earn are a pinprick in the general economic chaos in which we now find ourselves.
None of the anti-capitalists can offer any creditable alternative. Few of the benefits we now expect as a ‘right’ would exist without it. The trouble is it has got too big as an unstoppable global phenomenon. We simple cannot get off the treadmill. One day it will all collapse and the consequences will be awful – there are just too many people on our planet.
November 9, 2011 at 12:10 pm
Alan, I did not ‘set about’ discrediting anybody. In fact, I was at pains to keep insisting simply that the markets are not neutral, that people cannot shed responsibility for them. I totally agree about the culture promoted by politicians in which my student kids, already up to their necks in debt and overdraft, would be repeatedly offered credit cards, loans, etc. when it was obvious this was insane and unsustainable.