Go next to Stop 6 on Tour:
Hamlet: Do you see yonder could that's almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By the mass, it is a camel indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale.
One of the central themes of this project is that a far greater variety of views need to be brought into the debate, listened to, learned from, and eventually integrated as useful into a wider, more complete and more varied whole. The poverty of the present debate stems not so much from the fact that there is a wide diveristy of opinons around, but rather that they represent not so much opening statements in a dialog as hardened opinions and end points.
In this section of the Forum, we intend therefore to try to collect examples of contrasting views of what the basic problem is and how it might best be solved. For the time being -- and certainly reflecting our own views and preferences -- we have created two broad categories for which we should now like to find outstanding examples and content:
- More "Orthodox" Views and Critical Appreciations
- Alternative Perspectives
Exhibit A
Exhibit A moves us from numbers to opinions, in the form of a 1996 newspaper column which provides a fine crisp example of the kind of analysis and recommendations that frequently appears in the business press. In its own way it is just as muddled and semi-informed as the kind of thinking that we have seen all too much of in Europe's sttrong on theory, weak in practice, bureaucratically driven public sector on these same subjects. At the end of the day there is, in fact, little to chose between the two.
There is no ‘Third Path’ for Europe
By Reginald Dale
International Herald Tribune
Washington, 5 April, 1996 — The search for a third way between capitalism and communism in Europe has been about as easy as the quest for the Holy Grail. The Swedes once thought they had found it, with almost half a century of socialism, only to discover that they had not.
Central and East Europeans flirted briefly with the concept after the fall of the Iron Curtain, to no avail. Vaclav Klaus, prime minister of the Czech Republic and the most effective economic leader in communism's aftermath, once pithily described the third way as the fastest way to the Third World.
Now President Jacques Chirac of France is touting a slightly modified version: a "third path" between tough Anglo-Saxon capitalism and the softer continental European variety to confront Europe's unemployment crisis. Delegates attending a jobs conference organized by the Group of Seven leading industrial countries in the northern French city of Lille this week, where Mr. Chirac floated his idea, were understandably unimpressed.
Mr. Chirac will not find his third path, not least because he does not know what he is looking for. What he really wants to find are some as yet undiscovered laws of economics that would give him an easy exit from the hole he dug himself into by promising too much in last year's presidential election campaign.
He wants to find a way to fulfill his pledge to slash unemployment without taking any of the unpopular measures, such as standing up to the labor unions and pruning the welfare state, that will ultimately be necessary to accomplish that goal.
Much the same applies to other Continental European countries, including Germany, which is at least beginning to do better with its labor unions. But there is no easy way out.
Most Europeans now face a hard choice between an entrepreneurial and an interventionist society or - as former president Ronald Reagan once put it, between a society of opportunity and one of guarantee. Both have their drawbacks.
The state-dominated European system provides ample social benefits -. good pay, a large degree of income equality and high unemployment. U.S. style free enterprise offers fewer benefits, less income equality and far more jobs.
But you cannot simply take the best of both and combine them in a third option without any drawbacks, because the good and bad in both systems are indissolubly linked. A big reason America has more jobs is because wages are more flexible and benefits less bloated than in Europe. Europe's high wages and benefits come at the price of fewer jobs. Despite much wringing of the hands, there is no real mystery about what Europe must do. Countless studies, including exhaustive analysis by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, have come to the same conclusion: If Europe really wants to create more jobs, it must become more like the United States. It must free its labor markets, lighten the burden of the welfare state and give freer rein to venture capital. In short, it become more entrepreneurial.
The choice is not as hard as many people think. The latest studies show that the huge numbers of new jobs being created in the United States are as not as undesirable and as badly often made out, and U.S. job in security is greatly exaggerated.
But there are two problems with all this: it cannot be done quickly and it is highly unpopular. European governments may simply give up.
European interventionism could then easily lapse into protectionism - as is already happening with Mr. Chirac's efforts to force the rest of the world jobs to adopt European labor standards and, perhaps, wage levels. If that is what means by the third path, it is high time Mr. Klaus had a word in his ear.
Exhibit A
I felt badly about that article, thinking that it was not only muddying the waters but also that President Chirac was getting a bit of a bum’s rush. It was not that this particular business columnist is altogether uninformed, or particularly stupid or mean. Rather it is clear to a trained eye that he simply does not know enough about the full complexity of the issues to be of much help. Once again that ripe smell of incompetence, but this time around with all the artifices of expertise. As it happened, the day of this article’s appearance and in response to my critique, the financial editor of that same paper asked me to submit a piece setting out my views on the subject. The article I submitted follows.
A Third Path for Europe, or Intimidation of the Timid?
By Eric Britton
Paris, 9 April —
Henry Ford, in his highly original My Philosophy of Industry, wrote that of all the kinds of work he could imagine the hardest work of all was thinking, and that is why people do so little of it. The present half-engaged debate on work and unemployment in Europe and the world takes Ford one further step -- namely that the hardest work of all appears to be thinking about work itself.Not that there is any shortage of opinion. In these pages last Friday, to cite but one example, the business columnist Reginald Dale reports from Washington that all is well in hand on the work front there, and that all that Europe need do is follow America’s lead to create new jobs and thereby spread well-being over the whole continent. Quoting Ronald Reagan, he proposes that Europeans put aside their foolish notion of seeking some sort of "third path", as somewhat hesitantly offered by President Jacques Chirac to the inter-national job conference organized by the Group of Seven last week in the job-troubled city of Lille in the north of France.
Indeed, once you have resolved the problem, why seek elsewhere? The bare bones of the America-triumphant polemic runs like this: The problems that France and Europe face today with their 10% plus unemployment rates can be summed up in a single phrase: they are ‘soft on labor’. The answer: ‘improve the flexibility of the labor force’. Nice word, flexibility!
This reasonable sounding proposition boils down to a triple whammy policy formula: (a) get rid of anything that might keep employers from reducing their wage bills and associated labor costs; (b) make it easier to fire and hire (in that order, incidentally), and (c) cut back on unaffordably extravagant unemployment and other social benefits. By ‘coddling’ its labor force and populations, Europe is losing the international battle of growth, competitivity and job creation. Or so the argument goes.
This is, it must be said, an intuitively attractive proposition in several respects. It is also one with a rich history. The idea of the lower classes enjoying an indolent life while ruminating complacently at the public trough is admittedly a maddening one. It certainly seems to exorcise the indignation of Messrs. Dale, Reagan and their fellow believers considerably more than, say, the situation in the United States today where the CEO’s of a number of major corporations are being handed close to 200 times their workers’ average wage. That, apparently, is not a problem!
* * *
What might be that "third path" that Mr. Chirac had in mind? In truth, he and his government do not yet seem to have much of an idea as to what that might be. But just because they do not have an immediate answer, does that mean that the question itself is stupid or trivial?
Due diligence with the numbers makes the reality painfully clear. The chilling series of investigative articles published recently by The New York Times, "The Downsizing of America", makes it distressingly clear that America itself is far from having dealt with these challenges. Here we have a country with an officially "low" unemployment rate -- which, mind you, still leaves eight million people without jobs, even without considering all those millions who are not officially tabulated -- where average earnings for most workers have steadily decreased over the last two decades. A country where, if the jobless rate should even momentarily dip below that floor deep chills of panic ricochet through the nation’s financial system.
America the model? The country with the Western world’s highest incarceration rate, where most of those millions in prison, awaiting trial, or on parole got where they are for crimes that probably would never have been committed if the perpetrators had been ‘tied into’ society in some way. And what better way to socialize someone than by giving him or her something useful to do and a livable income for it.
Of course new approaches are needed! And of course the search will not be an easy one. Moreover, the odds are excellent that you will not find what you resolutely refuse to look for. So, if it is your convenience to avoid close scrutiny of the existing game plan for work and employment in this troubled fin de siecle society -- avoiding such inspection perhaps because the present arrangements are serving your interests quite well indeed -- what better opening move than to deny flatly that there is any reason to look for a new path?. And yet for many of us, for most of us, some sort new path is sorely needed.
* * *
As we set out on this search we must be humble enough to understand first that we are not dealing here with a known situation. We are indeed in "terra incognita", or as Margaret Mead put it years ago: "we are all immigrants into a new time". And if this is true, if we are entering into a whole new "geography of work", can this really be the time to throw away our compass and abandon the idea of trying to map this wild new territory? There are at least four axial truths in this new geography of work of which we can be pretty certain. Think of them as points on that much needed policy compass:
- North: Those jobs which are being stripped out by the continuing advances in information technologies, robotics and logistics are never going to come back as a result of ‘normal’ market adjustments. The old "economics" will surely not be enough, so we must develop new perspectives and new tools for dealing with the situation.
- South: (And this will assuredly be the most surprising, and discomfiting!) We are somehow going to have to find a way to ensure that absolutely everyone has a ‘job’, if by that we mean something meaningful to do, a place in the community, and full access to the goods and services of our modern societies that they will in any event doubtless end up having, one way or another.
- East: What we call ‘education’ is going to take totally new forms in this rapidly evolving future society. It is going to have as much a place in our daily lives as will ‘the new work’. Indeed we can expect that the two will become inextricably linked, to the point where many of us will be unable at any point in time to be quite sure as to which we are doing.
- West: This new pattern of knowledge, work and society is not going to come about all by itself on some sort of market-delivered platter. It is going to require vision, courage, energy and an entirely new configuration of institutions, habits and relationships. To get there, we are going to have to be prepared to think hard and work hard. To experiment, to innovate, and to dare!
* * *
Perhaps this is what President Chirac was trying to say but unable to get through to the Group of Seven meeting in Lille last week. Perhaps this is what we should all be trying to help Europe’s governments understand and come to grips with. Rather than just giving up and passively waiting for the future to happen to us.
This article served quite nicely the following week as the center piece for a Rethinking Work conference before a group of government officials and the Dutch financial press in Amsterdam organized as a follow-up to the 1995 Doors workshop. The two pieces were targeted and critiqued in the brainstorming session that followed, and eventually were covered at some length in the Dutch press.
The point that I wish to register here is the need for fuller and more balanced debate on these matters in the media in general, including in the business press (which is after all where many policy makers, business leaders and citizens look for informed clues on these matters). And they should be getting the right information, and not simply warmed-over homilies from some life-innocent professional free trade warier!
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