http://www.c-spanvideo.org/...
Something that made me feel better and gave me hope for the future.
I have been reading Ha-Joon Chang's book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism and this chapter made me feel a little better about our country and more importantly gave me some hope that we can make things better.
What they don't tell you
Self-interest is a most powerful trait in most human beings. However, it's not our only drive. It is very often not even our primary motivation. Indeed, if the world were full of the self-seeking individuals found in economic textbooks, it would grind to a halt because we would be spending most of our time cheating, trying to catch the cheaters, and punishing the caught. The world works as it does only because people are not the totally self-seeking agents that free-market economics believes them to be. We need to design an economic system that, while acknowledging that people are often selfish, exploits other human motives to the full and gets the best out of people. The likelihood is that if we assume the worst about people, we will get the worst out of them.
snip
Morality is not an optical illusion. When people act in a non-selfish way - be it not cheating their customers, working hard despite no one watching them, or resisting bribes as an underpaid public official- many, if not all, of them do so because they genuinely believe that that is the right thing to do. Invisible rewards and sanctions mechanisms do matter, but they cannot explain all- or in my view, even the majority of - non-selfish behaviors, if only for the simple reason that they would not exist if we were entirely selfish. Contrary to Mrs. Thatcher's assertion that 'there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families', human beings have never existed as atomisitc selfish agents unbound by any society. We are born into societies with certain moral codes and are socialized into "internalizing" those moral codes.
He went on in his Thing 5 Chapter to explain that the free market system assumes that everyone is only out for themselves and that what keeps it working is the competition factor. The so-called "power of the market" He compares examples of companies run under strict rules that assume the worst of their workers and companies that trust and rely on their workers for their input as well as their honesty in work production. Not suprisingly, the latter proves to be a much better model. If you stop to think about it, how many people actually work for an "honest day's pay" compared to the slackers.
His assessment seems to characterize the current Republican party and corporate world perfectly.
Just a brief background. I watched professor Chang give a presentation on his book on Cspan the other day. (I love BookTV) And consequently, requested his book from the library. In my quest to try to understand more about economics, I decided to give him a try because he states that most economic theory is just common sense. He was a little hard to follow on the video because of his accent, but once I adjusted, I picked up on his dry humor and was able to follow him.
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/...