How to Reform Capitalism

Alain de Botton, Alain de Botton

• Publisher: The School of Life
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781999747169
• Topic: Développement personnel
• Subtopic: Amélioration personnelle

A hopeful, revolutionary blueprint for a better kind of capitalism. When faced with the sorrows and frustrations of modern capitalism, it can often seem
like alternatives are utopian and out of reach. But capitalism is inherently designed to be altered and improved upon. The problems of capitalism, this book argues, stem not from money, law, and politics, but rather from human psychology.In this practical and insightful essay, the path to a better version of capitalism starts with a clear-eyed understanding of our psychological and emotional functioning.

• A REVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO CAPITALISM
• ROOTED IN HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY
• FULL COLOR ILLUSTRATIONS THROUGHOUT

6
The Depression
of the Business
Community

Throughout history, when business has been harshly judged, criticism has focused on the idea of greed; business is bad because it is an activity driven by greed.

However, this badly misses the point. If one were to accuse business of any single flaw, it should not be greed but pessimism. Business has been surprisingly pessimistic about how money can be made. Hard-headed managers have rarely been outright corrupt or unnaturally avaricious: but they have very often suffered from a curious kind of melancholy, a distinctive sadness about the world and its inhabitants. This sadness shows itself in six major assumptions that operate beneath the workings of modern business:

1. Customers will never care about workers

A great many businesses employ the very cheapest labour they are able to locate on the planet. They negotiate contracts that mean that millions of people have to work in dangerous or at least uncomfortable factories and warehouses until their premature deaths.

It is tempting to assume that pure nastiness drives these mean-minded decisions: employers must be screwing their workers because they are greedy. But the truth is far stranger: they are pessimistic and uncreative about the mindsets of their customers.

Capitalists have a primordial need to stay in business and must be ready to do whatever is compatible with this aim. If it turned out that paying staff extremely well was in line with this ambition, they would do so at once without rancour or qualm.

They don’t, because they have made some dark assumptions about these customers. They are bleakly sure that few customers will ever care much about the wellbeing of workers; they won’t give a damn how many eight-year-olds are making their trousers or how much suffering went into harvesting their tea leaves – and therefore, for businesses to start caring about such issues will simply lead to a decimation in profits.

It is not a personal longing on the part of businesses to have people work for as little as possible. The low salaries stem from the assumption that unless businesses stick to rock-bottom wages, customers will go elsewhere and their enterprises will fail.

2. Customers have low appetites that can’t be improved

There is a deep belief in many areas of business that high-mindedness, sincerity and complexity are fatal to sales and that any attempt to ‘raise’ the aspirations of consumers in these directions is guaranteed to lose money.

There is, for example, rampant pessimism around what would happen if you used less salt in a restaurant, or made certain magazines a little more thoughtful or produced a car that was gentle on its surroundings. As the business community is fond of rehearsing: no one ever failed to make money underestimating the tastes of the public.

3. The only way to sell is through deception

There is a painful background belief that in order to thrive, a business must make enormous claims for its products, and ideally create semi-conscious associations between what is sold and success, fun, love and sex.

The people behind adverts don’t themselves believe that buying a certain perfume, car or phone will be closely connected to physical intimacy or popularity. But they are confronted with some gloomy facts about human nature: that people do seem to buy such items if you skilfully make airy promises about them.

Few businesses can possibly believe that advertising in its current state is admirable. If they resort to it, it is just from a desolate conclusion seemingly drawn from experience. A company can of course choose to be above such things but sales will fall, profits will drop, salaries will be cut; they won’t be able to raise capital and the whole venture will eventually fold. You can participate in a charade – or you can be poor.

4. You can only make big money from the bottom of the pyramid

As we have established, most of the big and most profitable corporations on the planet address needs grouped at the lower levels of Maslow’s pyramid. These businesses efficiently target the basic needs: for shelter, security, communication and energy. They are engaged in real estate, mining, oil, insurance or transport. None of these industries are currently focused in any ambitious way on what happens around their products. The oil company doesn’t care much what your journey is about, so long as you travel a lot; the real estate corporation isn’t concerned with the kind of life you live in your apartment, so long as you pay the rent.

It’s not that people in business don’t care about meaning, creativity and the pursuit of self-knowledge. It’s just that they have a pessimistic conviction that it is impossible to make money from concerns that will always remain elusive and private.

5. You can’t afford to care about the psychology of your staff

This is no reflection of personal indifference to the inner lives of others; it’s just (many in business will feel) a crucial fact about running an enterprise: if you start getting concerned about the people who work in an organisation, focus will be taken away from the harsh task of turning a profit. Then it won’t matter how kindly you feel towards your people, as you won’t be able to give them the one thing they actually want from you: a job. Business requires the softer or more generous aspects of one’s nature to be held in check.

6. The only legitimate role for surplus wealth is philanthropic donation

Successful capitalists can be extremely generous. The arts have been noted beneficiaries of their largesse; scientific organisations too. Yet the area that tends not to benefit so much is the core activity: the profitable business itself. This is generally run with extreme rigour and no eye towards the finer more meaningful element. The higher things are what you commune with on the weekend and give away money to on your retirement; they can’t be part of your core activity. You squeeze margins, shave quality and bat away riskier projects for 40 years, and only then help to fund the opera house.

It is these pessimistic ideas about commerce and work that lead many companies – and the people who run them – to make very poor decisions. What is really at play is a pained vision of life in which any higher aspiration seems condemned to failure.

The big claim here is that this pessimism is not always warranted and that in order to overcome it, business should look to an unusual source for inspiration: culture. It is culture that possesses a welter of antidotes to much of the underlying despair about humanity evident in commerce.

If this antidote has never been explored, it’s because business understandably has some deep suspicions of its own when it comes to culture. The whole field seems negligible. When you look at what really counts in the world, none of it seems to have much to do with culture. The big corporations are concerned about millions of things – drilling rights, exchange rates, employment laws, tax credits, regional instability, technological advances. Culture appears marginal to this. It is just an upmarket area of entertainment; a hobby. You might know of a CEO who paints watercolours to relax, or a wealthy family that subsidises a ballet company. This is delightful, but it shows where the arts fit in – you become involved in the arts once you have made money. The arts use up money; they don’t make it. In essence, for business, culture looks like something you might become interested in once you have succeeded, but it can’t help you to succeed.

But in this arena too, there has be...