I Was Wrong (Economics and Morality Pt. II)

A few posts ago, I said that capitalism was amoral. That wasn't entirely correct. As a bald friend of mine pointed out to me, economic systems are rooted in morality. They represent how we believe resources should be distributed among people, which certainly falls under the umbrella of morality.

But I believe my mistake illustrates my point. I believe in the modern United States, people are not really raised to see the moral implications of economic systems. As a child of the 80s, I remember capitalism was justified as merely being the opposite of communism. Communism was "evil." And, as it was practiced by the Soviets or, say, the Khmer Rouge, it is difficult to argue that wasn't the case. If your options are only American Capitalism and Soviet Communism, the former is the better answer. 

However, in my experience as an American child, we were never presented with other alternatives. Perhaps it's an American trait that we see things in black and white, right and wrong, taking things to their extremes. That is what I was trying to get at before. We are under such external pressure to believe that capitalism is "right" that many people make economic decisions in a way that ignores their natural moral tendencies. How many people take jobs because they'll make more money even though the job ends up making them miserable?

Due to the competitive nature of capitalism, companies have to make decisions based on their bottom-line, ignoring other moral concerns. Otherwise, they will not be around at all. Of course people can force companies to make moral decisions through coercive measures like strikes and boycotts, but this illustrates the limits of capitalism. Wouldn't it be better if we had a system that rewarded companies for doing what we believe is the "right" thing so we didn't have to resort to these measures?

At this point, you might expect me to say something about the benefits of socialism. And while I have a natural affinity to more socialist policies, I've realized that these are as little justified as capitalist ones. Capitalists and socialists are both often ideologically motivated. Their arguments are often philosophical, and philosophy has no place in real life. It's fun, but what we need is evidence. We have to be willing to try new things and see what actually works.

We are so focused on options A and B, that we've ignored options C to Z. I'm not sure what those options are, but we need people to start thinking about them. To be fair, those options probably already exist and might even be in effect. In discussing economics as a matter left and right, black and white, we are blinded to the ways in which the economy already deviates from either extreme and even in ways that might not even be located on the same spectrum.

We cannot afford to judge economic policy on whether it fits our view of the world or can be "justified." All that matters is whether it works or not. Now, we're still going to disagree plenty on what we think "works" means, but we have to at least acknowledge that it's unrelated to how well it matches some idealized, theoretical economic theory that can never represent our actual complex, nuanced world.

Is there anyone who really believes that our entire worth as human beings can be summed up by our economic success? But if not, why do so many people aspire to a system where all material benefits are distributed according only to this single aspect of human life? Is nothing else we do valuable? At the other extreme, we might say that all people are equally valuable and deserve equal resources, but why do we distribute resources according only to how valuable we believe people to be, at all? Couldn't we distribute them in a way that we believe benefits society the most even if it's unrelated to peoples' perceived worth?

But I'm not here to answer these questions. I'm here to ask them.