Reading Will Hutton on inequality and the over-empowered and overpaid corporate and financial elite, I can’t help thinking that we are really failing these people (“For capitalism to survive and prosper it must reinvent itself”, Comment). For any other addiction: alcohol, drugs, gambling, etc – addicts are never treated by getting ever more and more and more quantities of whatever it is they crave.
Isn’t it time avarice was recognised as the mental disorder it surely is and these people were given adequate counselling? If enough is as good as plenty and “he for whom enough is too little, nothing is ever enough”, then those receiving six- or seven-figure salaries with bonuses will be forever wanting more.
Couldn’t some body of economists draw up advisory salaries to ensure a sufficiently impressive lifestyle enforced by law and then make intensive therapy mandatory for anyone who thinks they want/need/deserve more than that? Incidentally, this could create jobs for counsellors.
Siobhan O’Tierney
Paisley
Saker Nusseibeh seeks to gild the problems of capitalist investment by outlining the aspiration of an investment strategy not founded on short-term returns (“All economic activity needs a moral compass”, Comment). But he only skims the surface of the tasks such as remedying the distortions of personal expenditure priorities imposed by the current national housing market.
If the bill for housing benefit is to be reduced and houses are to become affordable it can only be by a massive investment in building enough houses to meet the need from whatever source: government, pension funds or private investors. This would be an ethically founded investment decision that would considerably reduce the price of, and “value” of, the housing stock that is currently subject to mortgage debt.
Banks and building societies would be confronted with negative equity that would demand a write-off. It is because this cannot be faced that investment in housing cannot be incentivised and will not be promoted even by “ethically motivated” investment funds. This illustrates the weakness of his presentation of an acceptable face to capitalism.
Neil Leighton
Totnes
Devon
Will Hutton, in the extract from his latest book, criticises Britain for “… the unwillingness to find ways of investing in ourselves…” (New Review). In his Q&A, he praises Britain’s universities and then suggests that, if he could go shopping, he’d take a bit of Silicon Valley, elements of German banking, Nordic corporate ownership, the Dutch and Danish welfare system and the Swiss approach to lifetime learning. The rest of Hutton’s sentence reads: “… while we look so regularly to foreigners to revive our industries or build our infrastructure”.
Britain’s shortcomings in all these areas arose and have been maintained under a succession of governments of both major parties, with cabinet ministers and with the assistance of a civil service educated by these “excellent institutions”. A prescient text reads: “A fish rots from the head.”
Hutton accurately identifies Britain’s principal weakness. We all know the nation is failing its own population. We all know inequality has grown to an unsustainable level. We all know we need to change our existing structures. But the response is always the same. What we do works; you change what you do! In Britain, the resistance to change starts at the head; intellectually, politically and economically. Socially, the resistance to change is driven by fear.
Martin London
Henllan
Denbighshire
North Wales
