Thus, when he considers Asia's leading economy, Japan, he admits that it has been a "no-growth economy" for the better part of a decade. Indeed, he even tries to make a virtue of the fact by saying, "Perhaps in Japan's uniquely mature industrial society the collapse of economic growth could be an opportunity to reconsider the desirability of restarting it." Gray can't make up his mind whether Asia is outgrowing or out-stagnating us.
Is there anything solid in all this murk? Well, yes--Gray is consistently unambiguous in his cartoonish, over-the-top anti-Americanism. Through all his zigs and zags, he is steadfast in his loathing of American-style capitalism as it has emerged during the past couple of decades.
Gray argues that in the United States during the 1980s and '90s, "market utopianism" has displaced "Rooseveltian liberalism" and "gone far towards establishing itself as the unofficial American civil religion." Hyperbole aside, Gray is correct that American capitalism has undergone a fundamental shift in recent years. What is today called the "American model"--i.e., the absence of price and entry regulation, flexible labor markets, return-driven (as opposed to relationship-based) allocation of capital--is indeed a relatively recent phenomenon. In Gray's eyes, its advent is a catastrophe of the first order.
Predictably, he repeats the usual canards about rising economic inequality. Here is my favorite line from the book on that score: "The middle classes [in the United States] are rediscovering the condition of assetless economic insecurity that afflicted the nineteenth-century proletariat." That Gray could make such a statement--when an all-time record 66 percent of American families own their own homes, and an all-time record 52 percent of Americans own stocks--is a telling indicator of his regard for the facts.
For Gray, though, the supposed economic failings of American-style capitalism are only the beginning. "In the United States," he warns, "free markets have contributed to social breakdown on a scale unknown in any other developed country. Families are weaker in America than in any other country. At the same time, social order has been propped up by a policy of mass incarceration....Free markets, the desolation of families and communities and the use of the sanctions of criminal law as a last recourse against social collapse go in tandem."
Let us stipulate that broken homes and bulging prisons are serious social pathologies. But to blame these ills on the economic deregulation of the past 20 years is nothing short of ludicrous. After all, divorce, illegitimacy, and crime rates began soaring in the 1960s, when "Rooseveltian liberalism" was still in full flower.
As an alternative to the "global free market," Gray upholds Isaiah Berlin's vision of "a world which is a reasonably peaceful coat of many colours, each portion of which develops its own distinct cultural identity and is tolerant of others." But it is the proponents of economic liberalization, not Gray and his reactionary confreres, who are the true partisans of Berlin's pluralist and tolerant vision. For at the core of Gray's snarling rejection of free markets is intolerance--intolerance of the millions upon millions of individual choices that make up the marketplace.
John Gray disapproves of free markets on the ground that they give short shrift to "social cohesion." Yes, stability and belonging and tradition are certainly "vital human needs." But so are freedom, experimentation, and creativity. Gray regards these as dangerous and supports coercive policies that would suppress them. Supporters of liberalization, on the other hand, celebrate the dynamic virtues, while recognizing that they entail tradeoffs. In the liberal system, these tradeoffs are made by individuals according to their own individual and subjective preferences. Which approach is more likely to produce a vibrant "coat of many colours," and which a dull gray jacket of stagnation and repression?
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