When More Is Not Better Quotes

“I suppose can be seen as our manifesto for what it will take to save democratic capitalism from itself. The marriage of democracy and capitalism has been arguably the greatest force for good in history, giving the creativity and enterprise of talented individuals the freedom to generate value in which all of us can share. History also shows, however, that its continued survival cannot be guaranteed, if we do not show the system our respect. I hope this book will help save democratic capitalism from itself.”
― Roger L. Martin, When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession with Economic Efficiency

“Perhaps more worrisome, while government policies should be intended to serve the many for the long term, they are being gamed by interested parties to ensure that they serve the few in the short term, with damaging impact over the long term. The Persona Project respondents could feel this. To them, they were outsiders and others were playing the game to their own advantage, and to the respondents’ disadvantage. These outcomes are systemic, and without a fundamental shift in how we manage the economy, they will get only more out of alignment with our hopes and assumptions. I believe that this shift needs to start with abandoning the perfectible-machine model of the economy. We should instead understand the economy in more natural terms, as a complex adaptive system—one that is too complex to be perfectible, one that continuously adapts in ways that will almost certainly frustrate any attempts to engineer it for perfection. In addition, rather than striving singularly for ever more efficiency, we need to strive for balance between efficiency and a second feature: resilience.”
― Roger L. Martin, When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession with Economic Efficiency

“But this time, if and when discontented Americans like Amy and Sarah do reengage with democracy, it’s by no means clear that they will vote to stick with the capitalism part of the American model. The 1970s represented the first protracted stumble after the recovery from the Great Depression, with two oil-price shocks and a nasty recession mid-decade. Had recovery from those challenges been as strong as that in the late 1930s and 1940s, no doubt faith in the system would once again have been vindicated. Instead, as the data shows, the post-1970s decades have been, for Americans like Amy and Sarah, a slow drip feed of disappointment and frustration. In this environment, a more sinister narrative about capitalism has been taking root. Capitalism is no longer unambiguously about everybody working hard and getting ahead—it is about the benefit of overall economic growth flowing so disproportionately to rich people that there just isn’t enough left for average Americans to consistently advance. If the little that does trickle down isn’t enough to keep Amy and Sarah afloat, then sooner or later they will wonder why they trust the management of the economy to Wall Street CEOs and Beltway politicians and policy wonks. And then they will surely reengage with the democratic part of the US system—probably with dramatic and potentially harmful results. To be sure, it is always tempting to look for a clear, easily identified whipping boy—a bad president, an atrocious piece of legislation, callous Wall Street, venal hedge funds, the unfettered internet, runaway globalization, or self-absorbed millennials. While no one of these can be held responsible for the yawning inequality of the US economy and the alienation that it engenders, many actors have played a role. It has taken almost half a century of both Democratic and Republican presidents and houses of Congress to get us to the current point. And if numerous actors are in part responsible, then we have to ask—given all that the data shows—whether there may be a fundamental structural problem with democratic capitalism. If so, can we fix it?”
― Roger L. Martin, When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession with Economic Efficiency

“Other data confirms this pattern, and perhaps there is no better illustration of how the average workers are losing out than the dramatic shift in the relationship between productivity growth and wage growth of nonsupervisory workers—the regular Americans we interviewed. Historically, up through the mid-1970s, there was an extremely tight relationship between productivity growth and wage-compensation growth. If workers were more productive, their pay went up proportionately, an outcome that spread the rewards of growth broadly, because economic growth and productivity growth are tightly coupled. For example, between 1948 and 1972, productivity grew 92 percent and wage compensation 88 percent—and they tracked each other closely each year. That meant that if workers produced more economic output for their employers, they were compensated with increased wages mirroring almost exactly the increase in output—fairness in the extreme. In 1972, however, that relationship broke up, and between 1972 and 2018, while productivity grew by 84 percent, growth in wage compensation barely budged, growing just 13 percent, or 0.25 percent per year for forty-six years (see figure I-2).”
― Roger L. Martin, When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession with Economic Efficiency