발췌:// Some readings on The Future of Capitalism

Excerpt 1-- 지은이: Jason Cowley,
자료: “Move left on the economy and talk the language of belonging” New Statesman, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/economy/2018/11/paul-collier-move-left-economy-and-talk-language-belonging

A decade ago, after much tortuous bureaucratic obstruction, Collier and his wife adopted Sue’s grandchildren, a boy and a girl. They were aged one and two and had been taken into care.

There’s a legal category called special guardianship introduced to permit adoption within the family. ( ... ... ) If it hadn’t been for that we would never have got them out. Everyone in the family was in complete agreement, including the natural parents, but it took eight months, thousands of pounds. It was excruciating, shaming… 40 pages of questionnaires. ‘Do you unplug your electric plugs every night?’ We had to replace the glass in our windows, install fire extinguishers all over our house in Oxford. At no stage did anybody actually ask whether we were decent human beings who would love these little children.

( ... ... ) he believes we in Britain are “living a tragedy”. I asked him to explain what he meant by this assertion. He pondered for a while, stirred his tea, and then said: “We have two vicious rifts in our society – one is a spatial rift between newly booming conglomerations and broken provincial cities and towns, exemplified by [the Financial Times commentator] Janan Ganesh’s remark that being in London feels like being shackled to a corpse. That seems to me to be a profoundly desolate view. Spatial divides were getting narrower until about 40 years ago, so this is new. The second rift is the new class divide between the more educated and the less educated.”

For Collier, the period of social democratic hegemony that lasted, broadly, from 1945 to 1970 was “glorious”.  “It was when it all came together,” he said. “We inherited a huge asset – a shared sense of purpose coming out of the Second World War, a sense of common endeavour. But it was a wasting asset that needed to be renewed. And both left and right failed to renew it.”

He rightly values reciprocal obligations – the founding ideal of the welfare state, which was lost when we moved from having a benefits system based on contribution to one based on need – and wants us to transcend our differences and recreate a common sense of national purpose. But is he too nostalgic for the politics of an era that, in this age of globalisation and mass migration, are irrevocable?


Excerpt 2--지은이: Paul Collier
자료: "Welcome to the hard centre – and the future of British politics," The Spectator, https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/09/welcome-to-the-hard-centre-and-the-future-of-british-politics/

The attitude of metropolitan conservatives was perfectly, albeit inadvertently, captured in a phrase that Janan Ganesh used to describe London’s perspective: ‘shackled to a corpse.’ That will take a lot of living down: the regions must converge on the prosperity of London. This is difficult, both politically and technically. The metropolitan elite genuinely believe that they ‘earn’ their high incomes. In fact, they arise from the concentration of activity in a megacity with wonderful public goods. Airports, rail and road hubs, the Underground and less obvious public assets such as government and reliable law courts have been provided by national efforts over generations. The gains accrue disproportionately to skilled Londoners and landowners: they are capturing ‘economic rents’ that belong to all of us. London is the new oil: we should not kill the goose, but we should tax it more heavily.

Excerpt 3-- 지은이: Angus Deaton,
자료:  "What's Wrong with Contemporary Capitalism?" https://cordmagazine.com/comment/angus-deaton-whats-wrong-with-contemporary-capitalism/

Collier tells the same story for Britain, where talent and the share of national income have become increasingly concentrated in London, leaving gutted and angry communities behind. Yet as Janan Ganesh of the Financial Times points out, these metropolitan elites now find themselves "shackled to a corpse."

Excerpt 4-- 지은이: Paul Coller,
자료: "Globalisation made Europe’s cities rich. And then it broke them," https://apolitical.co/solution_article/globalisation-made-europes-cities-rich-and-then-it-broke-them/

The resentful grievances of the provinces have been met by the disdainful confidence of the metropolis: “flyover cities”, the American phrase of disdain, has recently been topped by “shackled to a corpse” from the political commentator of the Financial Times, Janan Ganesh. Where, in these phrases, is empathy? Where is a sense of reciprocal obligation?

They have been brutally dismissed, evaporated with the loss of shared identity that previously united metropolis and provinces. Reflecting this, the metropolis voted heavily against the insurgent campaigns of Trump, Brexit, Le Pen and Five Star, while the broken cities found them appealing.


Excerpt 5--Interview with Paul Collier, ‘We are witnessing a mutiny against the metropolitan elite’, https://www.ips-journal.eu/regions/europe/article/show/we-are-witnessing-a-mutiny-against-the-metropolitan-elite-3298/

In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn has been appealing to notions of self-respect and collective consciousness with slogans like “For the many, not the few”. Is he on the right track?

There's no denying he has a good sense for the things people are anxious about, and he knows exactly how to speak to these anxieties. And yet I regard Corbyn as very dangerous, because unlike populists like Donald Trump he has a concrete plan for the future, one that was formulated a long time ago and has never worked.

What do you mean?

He's a Leninist. He wants to introduce socialism in Britain. It’s a model that has already proved a failure elsewhere, for example in East Germany. Corbyn and his friends would lead us straight into an economic crisis. He’s an ideologue, not the solution to our problems.

There are all sorts of different theories for why Britain voted for Brexit in summer 2016. What do you think the Brexit voters were rebelling against?

Against the city-dwelling elite. After being treated with contempt for over 40 years, the less-educated people living in the provinces finally had the chance to vent their rage. The same factors explain the election of Donald Trump and the current yellow vests protests in France. We are witnessing a mutiny against the metropolitan elite.

How does the elite’s contempt manifest itself?

In their arrogance and inability to empathise. It’s exemplified by the disdainful American phrase “flyover cities”, recently topped by the British political commentator Janan Ganesh when he described England's cities as “shackled to a corpse”. If you said anything comparable about whichever minority is currently “in vogue”, you would – rightly – lose your job within two days. But phrases like “shackled to a corpse” are cruel too; they are contemptuous and have just one message for the people who live in those places: “You have no future.”

How much are the successful city-dwellers to blame for the plight of people in the country?

The metropolitan elites think they’ve “earned” their incomes. But they haven't; mainly, they're just enjoying the agglomeration gains produced by our modern capitalism. Thanks to the influx of people into the cities, new companies and factories start up there, and people get to work in more productive jobs than in the country. So this productivity gain is an agglomeration effect, nothing more. Instead of recognising this, they think it's enough to stand up for minorities, and use that to claim moral superiority. But they’re not the moral elite. On the contrary, many of them owe their prosperity to financial speculation. The dividends they get from their investment funds are often only at the expense of other people’s pension pots.