By Mark Sampson
The Financial Times has recently begun an intriguing series called ‘The Future of Capitalism.’ The vision and purpose of this project is certainly ambitious:
“The credit crunch has destroyed faith in the free market ideology that has dominated Western economic thinking for a generation. But what can – and should – replace it? Over the coming weeks we will conduct a wide-ranging debate on this dominant political issue of the day.”
At the Capitalism Project, we aim to follow this debate and consider the various ideas and opinions from a theological perspective.
It is interesting to compare the FT editorial ‘The Consequence of Bad Economics’ with Professor Paul Williams’ recent reflections on the economic crisis (Part 1 | Part 2). The editorial is a strong indictment of the responsibility of economic policy makers for the current crisis. Policy makers are certainly not blameless and an alternative approach would have at the least lessened the impact of this economic crisis. However, the temptation to point the finger of blame is unhelpful in so far as it distracts from the deeper, more systemic questions that Professor Williams articulates.
Another article of interest is Paul Kennedy’s op-ed piece ‘Read the Big Four to Know Capitalism’s Fate‘ on the need to pay heed to the great political economists – Smith, Marx, Schumpeter and Maynard Keynes – in order to discern the future of capitalism. The article argues that all four key political economists viewed capitalism as essentially self-destructive. To that list could be added Alfred Marshall and Freidrich Hayek who also predicted that capitalism would be it’s own undoing. The article ends with a rather bleak view of the future as one of ever-increasing involvement of the state in the market.
What is apparent in this article, as in most other reflections on the current crisis, is the sterility of imagination as it concerns an alternative way of conceiving an economy. The only real answer that emerges is ‘more state intervention’. How long will it be before that is replaced by ‘less state intervention’ as bureaucratic inefficiency and perceived lack of incentive take its toll?
Walter Brueggemann, the Biblical scholar, has written persuasively about the role of the Old Testament prophets in the history of Israel. Brueggemann argues that Israel’s captivity to Babylon, both metaphorically and literally, is contrasted by the prophets who imagined an alternative way of being Israel. This imagination served both to critique the current state of affairs and also to offer hope for the future. In the same way the prophets functioned for Israel, the church is called to imagine and embody an alternative ‘economy’ as a key part of its mission to the world. Part of the vision of the Capitalism Project is to offer resources to contribute to what Brueggemann refers to as the ‘Prophetic Imagination.’
