… or why it’s important to understand one’s implicit beliefs
If you are between 30 and 50 and you work in business or management, there is a good chance you were raised inside a belief system nobody ever told you the name of.
I was, too.
It runs roughly like this.
Open the borders.
Free the capital.
Let goods, money, and talent flow to wherever they are most efficient, and prosperity and peace will follow, because countries that trade together do not fight, and a rising tide lifts all the boats it does not quietly capsize.
The belief system wasn't only an economic theory. It was also a political justification for almost anything.
These markets, left alone, were the answer to most of humanity's problems, if only we had the nerve to let them work.
Professor Abby Innes, in her book Late Soviet Britain, calls this belief, and I'm simplifying her excellent work, a secular theology. Something we accepted about as seriously as earlier generations accepted whatever conversation with a higher power they had inherited.
This idea even has a triumphant birth slogan — Francis Fukuyama called an alternative acceptance of the new economic order "the end of history."
The French economist Alain Minc gave it a warmer name in 1997: la mondialisation heureuse, happy globalisation.
If you trained as an economist, you would roughly call it neoliberalism.
If you are from a younger generation, you wouldn’t call it anything, because it arrived pre-installed. From your first job. The MBA. The unspoken assumption beneath every decision you were ever praised for making.
Now the bad news.
What is that low-grade anxiety a lot of you are carrying around when reading socio-economic and political news?
It is the sound of our economic belief system dying.
Happy globalisation is dead, and there is already a queue of economists performing the autopsy.
Worry not, half the world survived the death of the planned economy.
We will survive this one, too.
Branko Milanović, the former lead economist of the World Bank's research department, one of the world's foremost scholars of inequality, describes it better than anyone, partly, probably because he helped build it from the inside, hehe.
Neoliberalism, he writes in a recent essay, was so obvious, its lessons so clear and common-sensical, that it became the best kind of ideology there is: the kind a person defends and implements without ever realising he is doing so.
He is blunt about what that resembles.
To many economists, he writes, neoliberalism seemed like a religious faith, the very quintessence of reasonable, common-sensical ideas.
Abby Innes takes the knife further.
Neoliberalism and Soviet Leninism, supposed opposites, fail for the same reason: both are closed systems, so confident in their own completeness that they stop checking themselves against reality, and both end up breaking the institutions they were built to perfect.
A theology, unlike a hypothesis, governs behaviour. And this one governed ours.
Completely.
Happy Globalism told companies what was virtuous. Outsource the factory; geography is just a cost to be arbitraged. Building the global talent pool and loyalty is inefficient. Move the money to wherever the tax is lowest, and the return is highest. Capital has no homeland and should feel no shame.
The mark of a modern, serious, well-run organisation.
A manager who questioned it was not making an argument. He was revealing that he didn't quite understand economics — the Happy Globalism.
Happy Globalism told people how to live. Borrow against the rising asset, because assets rise. Treat your career as a portfolio and your city as a layover. Trust that the system, left alone, would deliver, the pension funded, the house appreciating, the next role paying more, the long arc of the market bending… eventually… toward you.
For a while, for some of us, it even did.
Then the believers started to recant and feel anxiety.
But we cannot live in an ideological vacuum.
We, people, require meaning beyond pure materialism; we need to believe, contrary to most of the evidence, that our economic and social behaviour is more than consumerism, that it is leading somewhere better. And God forbid, of course, that we turn to religion.
It is psychology, in the end.
We need to feel good about ourselves. It is rather our thing.
So, unable to sit in the vacuum, we are already substituting happy globalisation with something new… techno-optimism. But why and how it happens is a subject for the next letter.
For now, back to the lesson.
And the lesson, for those of us who are not ideologues, is simple.
Always study and understand your implicit assumptions, the things you believe not because you examined and chose them, but because they were handed to you by your upbringing, your education, your culture, your experience.
Understand the lens you are looking through. The moment the lens stops describing the world as it has actually become, you start making mistakes.
And those mistakes cost money and, more importantly, they cost people their well-being.
Talk soon,
Sultanbek
