The Future of Capitalism Quotes

“An identity of being ‘on the left’ has become a lazy way of feeling morally superior; an identity of being ‘on the right’ has become a lazy way of feeling ‘realistic’.”
― Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

“Encouraging your firm to have a decent sense of purpose is your contribution to society, but continuing to work for one which lacks purpose is personally soul-destroying.”
― Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

“Governments could recognize the huge value added if the two biological parents choose to live together with the child: a tax-credit bonus could reduce the tax burden for those who are taxpayers, and income could be supplemented by an equivalent amount for those who are not. The commitment of young parents to their children benefits us all, and we should be prepared to pay for it. When parents withhold this commitment, the rest of us pay for it – heavily.”
― Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

“As an economist, I have learned that decentralized, market-based competition – the vital core of capitalism – is the only way to deliver prosperity, but what are the founts of the other aspects of well-being? Whereas economic man is presumed to be lazy, purposive action such as work is important for esteem.”
― Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

“They are the people who currently dominate the media. An identity of being ‘on the left’ has become a lazy way of feeling morally superior;”
― Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

“The distinguished psychologist Martin Seligman has conducted a sustained programme of research on the attainment of well-being. His conclusion is unambiguous: ‘If you want well-being, you will not get it if you only care about accomplishment . . . Close personal relationships are not everything in life, but they are central.’14”
― Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

“The transformation of power into authority is essential for building reciprocity across huge groups of people, such as everyone accepting the obligation to pay their taxes. Leaders are not engineers of human souls, but they can harness our emotions. The dangerous leaders are those who rely only on enforcement. The valuable ones are those who use their position as communicator-in-chief at the hub of their networked group – they achieve influence through crafting narratives and actions. All leaders add and refine the narratives that fit within the belief system of their group, but great leaders build an entire belief system.28”
― Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

“transformation,”
― Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

“Many of the characteristics that are responsible for successful families are not just good for the families themselves, but good for the entire society. Conversely, many of those that are responsible for failing families are not only private tragedies, but social catastrophes.”
― Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

“The radical opposition came from the provinces. The mutinies were age-related, but they were not as simple as old-versus-young. Both older workers, who had been marginalized as their skills lost value, and young people, entering a bleak job market, turned to the extremes.”
― Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

“What is true of asset managers is true of lawyers. Willem Buiter, former Chief Economist for Citigroup, puts it aptly: the first third of lawyers produce the immense social value we know as the 'rule of law'. The next third are working on legal disputes that are essentially zero-sum games: each side over-invests in winning the tournament and so they are socially useless....The final third of lawyers are socially predatory: they are employed in the legal scams that fleece the productive.”
― Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

“By eschewing shared belonging, and the benign patriotism that it can support, liberals have abandoned the only force capable of uniting our societies behind remedies. Inadvertently, recklessly, they have handed it to the charlatan extremes, which are gleefully twisting it to their own warped purposes.”
― Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

“building them is as hierarchies in which those at the top issue commands to those lower down. While quick to build, they are seldom efficient to run: people only obey orders if commanders monitor what subordinates are doing. Gradually, many organizations learned that it was more effective to soften hierarchy, creating interdependent roles that had a clear sense of purpose, and giving people the autonomy and responsibility to perform them. The change from hierarchy run through power, to interdependence run through purpose, implies a corresponding change in leadership. Instead of being the commander-in-chief, the leader became the communicator-in-chief. Carrots and sticks evolved into narratives.”
― Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

“The regrets that fester are overwhelmingly about failures to meet ‘oughts’, when we have let someone down, breaching an obligation.5 We learn from such regrets to keep our obligations. Although our decisions are biased towards momentary folly, when we consider our actions ‘oughts’ usually trump wants.”
― Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

“People were asked to recall and rank those past decisions that they most regret.”
― Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

“Trade does usually benefit each country sufficiently that whoever gets the gains could fully compensate those who lose out. But while economists were vociferous advocates of trade, they kept very quiet about compensation. Without it, there is no analytic basis for claims that society is better off.”
― Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

“Public Choice Theory. This recognized that decisions on public policies are not usually taken by detached saints, but by balancing pressures from different interest groups, including the bureaucrats themselves. The selflessness of the planner could only be relied upon while the people involved in the decision were imbued with a passion for the national interest, as instilled into the wartime generation.”
― Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

“it is an insulting delusion of many people who, like me, have cushy jobs in the public sector to imagine that workers in the private sector are driven by greed and fear. The evidence suggests that job satisfaction is actually considerably higher in the private sector; for example, people are far less likely to use illness as a reason for not going to work.”
― Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

“miracles. My generation grew up through such a period, between”
― Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

“There is no analytic presumption that migration produces gains either for the societies that migrants join, or for those they leave; the only unambiguous gains are for the migrants themselves.”
― Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

“If state tries to impose a set of values different from those of its citizens it forfeits trust and its authority erodes.”
― Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties

“Fortunately, these problems are not inevitable features of capitalism but the results of fixable mistakes of public policy. Public policy has gone wrong because of the trivialization generated by the strident rivalry of antiquated ideologies. The ideology of the right asserts faith in ‘the market’ and denigrates all policy intervention. Its solution is ‘get the government off the back of business: deregulate!’ The ideology of the left denigrates capitalism and condemns the managers of firms and funds as greedy. Its solution is state control of companies, and state ownership of the commanding heights of the economy. Both these fundamentalist ideologies are ill-founded, but between them they have set the terms of public discussion, impeding productive thought. The starting point for a new approach is to recognize that the role of the large corporation in society has never properly been thought through. The boards that run large companies are taking decisions of overarching importance for society. Yet their present structure is the result of individual, unco-ordinated decisions, each of which happened to lead to some further decision that had not been anticipated. The system of corporate governance has lacked any process remotely equivalent to the intense and shrewd public discussion, embodied by the Federalist papers, that produced the American Constitution and its system of national governance. Public policies towards business have been incremental, and so have never properly addressed the fundamental issue of control. Any viable solution must begin with rebalancing the interests in which the power of control is legally vested.”
― Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties