The first week of 2010 has brought out the usual clichés of a grid-locked UK ravaged by a couple of INCHES of snow and the first financial services advertising of the traditionally ‘January’ period. Zopa is offering a lenders' bonus to get ready for the officially "most depressing" day of the year and the busiest period for borrowing (something like the 21st Jan when we all get out credit card bills for the Christmas excesses and start really paying for that hangover). I have already seen the first loan advertising although interestingly it was for Nationwide to its own customers offering 7.6% to people they already know!
Financial ‘health checks’ are being offered to shed those excess pounds by cross selling insurance (oh, there goes my new year’s resolution to be less cynical!) and both RBS/ Natwest and Lloyds seems to be competing for ‘friendly face of banking 2010’ with grinning customers and cartoon bank managers reassuring us that they have a ‘mastermind’ qualification in finance. Nice to see that nothing has really changed following the financial crisis then. Further down the rabbit hole we have the starting pistol of the election year being fired and old dividing lines being drawn up between those who believe that we should allow individuals to ‘work themselves out of recession’ or that society should tell individuals how to work themselves out of recession.
Such simplistic debates delivered with such relish by Today never get us very far. Neither side can really prove that they are right – doing something is always going to produce some sort of qualitative and quantifiable effect, but it is very hard to predict whether that effect is sustainable or not. Labour would appear to believe (for the most part) that an unsustainable (in the longer term) level of taxpayer funded stimulus is what the economy needs maintain confidence. The Conservatives seem to be pinning their hopes, behind the scenes at least, on the so-called ‘fourth sector’ (although this message is getting lost in their obsession with telling Gordon that he is wrong). I am with Stumbling and Mumbling’s assessment that the ‘fourth sector’ is nothing new in itself. What the contemporary fourth sector actually means is still being lost in a flurry of RedTory jargon and academic theory, but I think there is some truth in the idea that as individuals we have lost the art and belief needed to start collaborating effectively. And perhaps not surprisingly, I would assert that this comes down to some misconceptions about the nature of money and trust.
For the last 3 decades or so we have been comfortable with the notion that money is the most effective way of making the world go round. Money works as a universal incentive and neutral medium for the exercise of rational self interest which in turn will produce economic and social value through individuals trading off their short term needs with their perception of the wider longer term good. Money in this context is seen as replacing the need for trust or a ‘promise to pay’ between individuals, as it instantly ‘values’ what is contributed and allows instant pay back of what is owed through markets and currencies. Any longer term promises are kept by a central institution underwritten (as it turns out) by the taxpayer in perpetuity.
Money has become a coldy mechanistic enabler of society – generating competition (for the right with whom it seems we feel more comfortable in a world of ‘scarcity’ or ‘austerity’) and choice (the paradoxical euphemism for competition for the left which is what we voted for when money was perceived to be almost infinitely abundant). As a result, rather like banks, politicians now seem to find it hard to tap into new forms of incentive and collaboration which involve money but use it to create trust and cooperation rather than undermine it through individuals seeking to maximize individual returns. What is missing is a rhetoric of sustainability which is progressive rather than conservative and an understanding of money which moves beyond that defined by banks and economists and moves out in the "real economy" where it is trust not money that makes the world go round. Where is Mauss when you need him?
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