The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

by Paul Collier

A corollary is that one of the highly labour-intensive sectors that will need to expand massively is the training sector.

Economists such as myself have been too keen to defend globalization against its critics. The net effects are positive, but globalization is not a unified phenomenon that has to be adopted wholesale or rejected in its entirety. It is a ragbag of economic and social changes each of which is potentially separable. The task of public policy is to encourage those components that are unambiguously beneficial; to arrange compensation for those that are predominantly beneficial but which inflict significant losses on identifiable groups; and to limit those that cause redistributions that cannot readily be compensated.

Pragmatism has two enemies: ideologies and populism, and each seized its opportunity.

Training is worthless unless it is tied to the specific requirements of such firms and preferably co-managed by them. Reversing

I have proposed a strategy of social maternalism: intensive practical assistance and mentoring for young families at risk of breaking up, followed by mentoring for children during their school years. Mentoring is to social maternalism what monitoring is to social paternalism. But reversing the divergence is not only about enabling the less educated to succeed.

But above all it is strengthened by supportive political narratives of belonging. Communicating such narratives is a core role of our political leaders: by forsaking narratives of belonging based on place and purpose, they have created an opening for the divisive narratives of belonging that claim national identity for some to the exclusion of others.

Nations and their citizens are the essential frame for public policy and will remain so for the foreseeable future. The foremost political function of shared identity is to make nations work as vehicles for a growing web of reciprocal obligations.

Reduced to a sentence, shared identity becomes the foundation for far-sighted reciprocity. Societies that succeed in building such belief systems work better than those based on either individualism or any of the revivalist ideologies. Individualist societies forfeit the vast potential of public goods.

The centre-left will recover as it returns to its communitarian roots, and to the task of reconstructing the web of trust-based reciprocal obligations that address the anxieties of working families.