B A R B I C A N L I F E


perhaps. He also illustrates how lack of trust leads to paralysis in economic life, as well as in politics. Turf wars arise out of acts of mutual mistrust, and solidify in time into fanaticism. But enough of generalisations - I


economics, politics and economic history of the past 50 years. He includes in it an examination of trust, and its role in financial markets; apparently only 18% of those surveyed in the USA in 2010 said that they trusted bankers – not surprising,


turned back, and picked up some milk. Here in this fine metropolis, there is a plethora of other things to think about. Art flourishes here, museums hold exceptional exhibitions, and dancers from Russia and Boston come here on tour - it is a hub of Western civilisation. I wonder why I recalled definitions of civilisation which led me back to the chaos of today: From Freud ‘It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct’. (Civilization and Its Discontents) to Einstein ‘We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive’ we seem to be surrounded by dystopian definitions of what we have become. If we look to writers we see apocalypse: ‘The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization’ - Ralph Waldo Emerson. But why in the face of our arts and


our cultural life, the marvellous Promenade concerts and vibrant Summer Exhibition, does this still feel like chaos? Reading increasingly about the Renminbi, and the City’s attempt to trade them here first, I looked to a Chinese sage, Confucius – We take a simple life, he says, and we complicate it. I cannot but agree. We have stopped using simple words to describe everyday ideas, and we have stopped telling stories. The most important thing is the narrative we make within our heads; it keeps us sane, connected to the real world, and it gives us a coherent reason as to why we should be happy or sad, despondent or triumphant. When we look at the way one of our main institutions has failed, (say, a large bank) we say, in excuse, well, the drive for ever increasing profits is due to ‘shareholder pressure’. But we fail to tell ourselves the whole story. Why did the shareholder pressure accumulate? Well, as I have said before in this column, most of us are retiring, and our pension funds are the main shareholders in the market- place. They ask for an ever higher return, because we expect to get our


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pensions on time, and inflation protected. We need to adjust our expectations, says SDK. I recall the government’s blatant


robbing of our pension funds under Gordon Brown, in some of his tax reform, but in principle, I am with him. We have lied to ourselves – sorry, been ’economical with the truth’. ..as if sounding clever excuses the dangerous error of self-deception. What SDK says in his book


resonates for two reasons – we forget that the economic boom of the twentieth century was fuelled by an enormous injection of NEW workers into it, which could only be a one off – women entered the workforce and gradually some of them made their way to the top whilst protesting loudly the glass ceiling which still apparently holds some of us back. That can only happen once – there


isn’t another segment of the population in the western world which is waiting to be allowed into the workforce, unless the West brings back child labour, or systematically opens its doors to young new entrants. In the East, this ingress of women is happening slowly. In India, most of my cousins now work in offices. When this trend takes off amongst the whole of the middle classes, India will have some fantastic expansion of GDP not to mention a redistribution of power first in bedrooms, and eventually in boardrooms. We also have a hugely powerful,


quiet, and unelected nexus of rule- makers. Civil servants with years of experience are making significant decisions which are being fed as ‘policy amendments’ to an increasingly inexperienced cohort of politicians. So many of them haven’t worked in the real economy, and many of them have never left school, returning as professionals to the same institution they left briefly. They all are given media training which instructs them on what to say in pubic, and gives them the tools and rules for obfuscation: ‘Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony’said Mahatma Gandhi – Media training has one aim – to legitimise insincerity by teaching a set of techniques for becoming ‘media savvy’. The West’s move away from truly


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