|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Introduction: Capitalism: Promise and Pitfalls
| Article
# : |
19564 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1991 |
981 Words |
| Author
: |
Editor
|
Many observers, probably beginning with Max Weber, have recognized that capitalism is far more than an economic system; it is actually an enormous, productive "tree" whose roots are a society's moral and religious values--values such as industry, honesty, selfless service, temperance, humility, generosity, and respect for individual initiative and private property. Just as the roots convey nutrients to the bole and boughs above, so do a nation's values vitalize its business culture.
But it's not a one-way street. As in a tree, where the leaves and trunk return vital carbohydrates to the roots, there is a feedback loop in the public affairs of a country: the business culture in turn strengthens the nation's fundamental values, or "civil religion," in Robert Bellah's phrase.
Capitalism is not invulnerable. Indeed, it is prone to breakdown--usually because of a failure of the values that are its roots. When acquisitiveness becomes valued over charity, when dishonest dealing becomes a source of pride and near virtue, then a society's economy is gravely imperiled.
With the demise of Soviet communism this year and the accompanying discrediting of socialist economic worldwide, capitalism has now taken the center of the world's political-economic stage, emerging as the economic system nonpareil. Capitalism has proved to have the seemingly magical ability to generate wealth and to satisfy public needs, justifying Adam Smith's claim about an "invisible hand." And it seems finally to have caught the attention of economists and government bureaucrats across the globe--even in the recalcitrant, socialist-minded areas of the Third World.
In Benin, Vietnam, India, and Peru, many a technocrat's admiring gaze is now fixed as if for the first time on the manner in which the free market weaves an intricate, self-propagating web of supply and demand relationships, similar to the bewildering array of cybernetic feedback loops that sustains a healthy biological ecosystem. (For more on this analogy, see the work of Michael Rothschild, especially his Bionomics: The Inevitability of Capitalism.)
This month's Currents in Modern Thought symposium examines how free market capitalism has the potential to be the source of economic progress in the post-communist world, and the ways in which that progress might be sabotaged by degradation of the capitalist value system.
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
