3 posts tagged “heilbroner”
In four respects Today stands in contrast to Yesterday (about 1750 – Today). First, the future has regained some of the inscrutability it possessed during the Distant Past (up to about 1750). Second, the marriage of science and technology has revealed dangerous and dehumanizing consequences that were only intuitively glimpsed, not yet experienced, by our forbears of Yesterday. Third, the new socioeconomic order proved to be less trustworthy than when it appeared during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And last, the political spirit of liberation and self-determination has gradually lost its inspirational innocence. Hence the anxiety that is so palpable an aspect of Today, is sharp in contrast with both the resignation of the Distant Past and the optimism of Yesterday.
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During this long, slow, and often errant march I think we can gain strength by reflecting on the Distant Past. For countless millennia humanity found courage to persist, the inspiration to produce extraordinary works of art, the will to create remarkable civilizations, the strength to endure miseries, and the appetite to savor triumphs, all without the support of the vision of a living future that would be superior to the past. There is no reason why the same resilience should not support humankind if it now sets its sights on the Distant Tomorrow of our imagination.
It is enough that we can see the future as containing such imaginable possibilities. Openness and potential, without assurance of outcomes, are substitutes for Yesterday’s bright hope for Progress and our consolations for Today’s more knowing anxieties. These words may reflect easily trivialized sentiments, but I put them forward at the conclusion of this very short, extremely long survey of how the future has appeared and now appears, as a salutation to my fellow voyagers who wonder, along with myself, what humankind can accomplish.
Robert Heilbroner in Visons of The Future, 1995
All this has a moral for our tale and provides a proper ending to it. In much of the West, and especially in our country, government is today much criticized and denounced. There is often good reason for the antipathy: governments can be – and perhaps always are – bureaucratic, slow-moving, inefficient, and irritating. They are not repositories of unsullied virtue, exemplary foresight, stirring vision.
What they are however, is the only means by which a body of people can provide itself with what it cannot obtain elsewhere: foreign policy and defense, law and order, the provision of public capital, and – crucial for our purpose – a counterforce against the unwanted effects that emerge from the private sector. That counterforce may not always be effective – there are plenty of unsolved problems in capitalism – but it is the only such capacity that exists.
In a word, no complex society can exist without government. That is why the public sector is as much a part of a capitalist order as is the private sector, which could not longer exist if government were somewhere to disappear. We should not forget, moreover, that he functions of government under capitalism are not only to provide defense and public capital and law and justice, but also to act as a kind of gyroscope or a steering mechanism when the nation needs a balancing counterweight or a hand on the steering wheel. (Where is the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith? Ed. comments) There will assuredly be such situations in the years ahead, as globalization and then global warming become even more insistent problems that require powerful guiding and containing forces.
Here, as so often, economic analysis goes just so far. In the end, large-scale changes require not just an adaptive revolutionary capitalism, but the elusive contribution of things that lie outside that framework, such as collective temper of peoples and the wisdom or folly of their leaders. Hence it seems proper to end this book with the admonition that we must come to understand our subject, not to achieve a Good Society, but to prepare ourselves for the really difficult problems that we will still face after economics is understood.
Robert Heilbroner and Lester Thurow in Economics Explained, 1982/1998
Thus I come again to the only prediction I have allowed myself to make, and that I must now iterate one last time. The twenty-first century capitalism will be dominated by a spectrum of capitalisms, some successful, some not. The crucial question for Americans, and perhaps for the world as a whole, is where our own nation will be located along that spectrum. I have preciously spoken of “slightly imaginary Sweden” as one end of a range of capitalist societies. I now add that it is equally possible to speak of not-so-imaginary America as another. In the context of twentieth-century realities, Sweden proved to be unworkable. In the context of twenty-first century realities, America may prove to be the same, unless it changes mightily.
A last word seems necessary. I am not so foolhardy as to believe that a framework of uncertain analysis and personal vision will enable us to circumvent Kliuchevsky’s admonition (“History teaches nothing, but only punishes for not learning its lessons.”) Perhaps history’s punishments are its lessons. Nonetheless, it is my hope that some grasp of what the twenty-first century holds in store for capitalism may enable us to avoid at least some of the punishment we will otherwise have to endure.
Robert Heilbroner in 21st Century Capitalism, 1993
