Yesterday, I read on here another in the series of recommended diaries under the strangely xenophobic title of "The Anglo Disease". My heart sank as commentator after commentator propounded economic theory in the tired rhetoric of the extreme left-wing that I last heard in the UK in the 1970’s. Throwing off the yoke of this enabled the British economy to become the largest in Europe, to the chagrin of many of its continental competitors.
What this language of socialist economics does is promote the real and unreal virtues of its philosophy whilst ignoring the fact that we progressive capitalists equally recognise not just the benefits of our system but also the abuses that can, and have, brought it into unwarranted disrepute..
Having a swipe at Ronnie Reagan and Maggie Thatcher doesn’t bother me in what was written. Only partly satirically, but certainly with some satire, I admit that what really bugged me about hearing the attacks on even a Democratic president like Clinton, in that thread, is that the thoughts on which these were based seemed so utterly dreary, uninviting and ...well, unexciting.
Today, the BBC provides a neurological reason why I may find this so.
Under the title Men motivated by 'superior wage' , the BBC article explains:
On receiving a paypacket, how good a man feels depends on how much his colleague earns in comparison, scientists say.
Scans reveal that being paid more than a co-worker stimulates the "reward centre" in the male brain.
Ignoring the chauvinism of the headline writer, the article explains how this fascinating piece of science challenges a basic tenet of that most unscientific of arts called economics:
"Traditional economic theory assumes the only important factor is the absolute size of the reward.
But researchers in the journal Science have shown the relative size of one's earnings play a major role."
It can all be seen in the ventral striatum, a region of the brain in which is located functions related to 'reward systems' illustrated in the brain scans that they provide:
So being rewarded along with everyone else creates a hot spot but being rewarded more than your fellows creates an even bigger hot spot. Not greed necessarily. Just that competitiveness that helped get mankind out of the cave and play with a round object it called a wheel.
That is the problem with Marxist dialectics about economics, then. It creates some warmth but no hot spots. Earnest, sincere but dreary. No wonder it has been thrown out by most of Europe and only in one or two Dkos diaries does it still resonate.
Nothing Anglo about the alternative at all. The alternative economics to that of the left is about excitement, passion and the generation of real heat. Mediterranean Economics is a better description for what the USA and the UK enjoy.
It explains why the French rail unions have made such an untimely and ill-judged stand against Sarkozy. It was the threat of the removal of an advantage in pensions that few other workers enjoyed. This loss of their previously unknown hot spot represented by this extra reward over their fellows went to their head, metaphorically and neurologically, and overcame better and more considered judgement.
Now if we can get a Democrat appointed so that there is more effective and enforceable regulation of the current abuses, capitalism will still remain the most dynamic system for human progress yet invented. We will retain our hot spots and economists will start to look to science to explain human behaviour rather than their error prone models. More importantly, socialist economists will slink back under their pile of rubble left after the Berlin wall was torn down.