I’ve mentioned the Bill Gates/Mike Kinsley/Conor Clarke creative capitalism project before. A new highlight on the site is a piece by my esteemed colleague Martin Wolf. (This is what Martin does on his holidays.) I’m not entirely sure what Martin’s note has to do with “creative capitalism”–the idea is mentioned and dismissed in the last paragraph–but he has written the best short essay on the political preconditions for capitalism I have ever read.
Consider a society in which everybody was a profit-maximizer. What would it be like? It would be one in which rulers, soldiers, judges, bureaucrats would take whatever they could. It would be one in which bribery and corruption were the norms. It would be one in which market capitalism of the kind Professor Landsburg (and I) extol would be impossible. It would be one in which almost everybody would be poor. And because it would be one in which almost everybody was very poor, it would also be one in which the only way to obtain wealth would be to join in the race for political power. This would be all too natural. It would also be a negative-sum society, in which life tended to be nasty brutish and short.
See full Article.
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