Most journalists have spoken of the financial crisis as evidence of a failure of capitalism. But is it? Or is this kind of reversal in fact necessary if capitalism is to work at all? After all, a free-market economy doesn’t do a perfect job of rewarding success. It may pick better winners than, say, governments, but it is still largely arbitrary. Even relatively worthy successes such as Google’s or Microsoft’s may be as much the result of lucky timing as anything else.
Instead, capitalism is at its indisputable best not when picking but when picking off. In unerringly killing off the bad: the inefficient, the redundant, the outdated or the needlessly complex.
Along with great increases in wealth and industry, the last 15 years of growth have seen a steady accumulation of pointless and unproductive forms of human activity: witless expenditure, insane trends and bizarre herd behaviours. Their disappearance will be welcome — not only to people who were forced to watch them, but even more to those many people who felt driven to participate. Already, there are signs some people are quietly welcoming the slackening off as the recession provides them with a welcome excuse to live less intensely.
1. The Organic Movement
Vegetables, fruit, meat and fish simply weren’t expensive enough as they were. They had to become ‘organic’, produced without the use of certain pesticides and antibiotics, using the power of love alone to fend off whitefly and foot rot and in turn separate the classes: the poor eat the drug-pumped battery-farmed thighs and the rich feast on the organic, massaged-before-bedtime fillets. The reality is that most organic produce tastes the same, if not decidedly worse than the evil GM variety.
2. Property porn
The unquestioned assumption, widely propagated in countless television programmes, that home improvement is the highest form of self improvement. If we never again see another programme in which some vapid idiots mince around redecorating a house, our lives will have gone up in value by over 30 per cent.
3. Holidays in far-flung places
In an effort to upstage each other, rich people were obliged to visit increasingly far-flung and dangerous parts of the world on holiday. Machu Picchu is, in truth, a collection of ruined buildings that would be fairly irritating to visit even if you weren’t forced to suffer altitude sickness in order to do it. As Dr Johnson said of the Devil’s Causeway, ‘Worth seeing, but not worth going to see.’ The same could be said of those luxury safaris in the middle of civil wars. There’s nothing six-star or bespoke about gangs of machete-wielding cannibal rebels hiding in the bushes.
4. Watches that cost more than a car
A £30 watch will answer your timekeeping needs perfectly — anything else is simply jewellery for men, and mostly of quite spectacular hideousness.
5. Restaurant deadlines
It is simply impertinent to tell you when you must finish your meal.
6. Coffee mania
Sometimes we like our coffee skinny, extra hot or tall — sometimes we just want it fast. Can espresso bars start serving just espresso again? Or failing that, Nescafé — especially at railway stations.
7. Skiing holidays
A ski trip is not a holiday. It is an exhausting, expensive, dangerous activity that consists of a week or two, or if you’re particularly unlucky an entire season, of falling off drag lifts, sliding face-down across patches of ice at speed, knocking people over while trying to get off chairlifts, followed by inedible meals, sleep depravation, a spot of frost-bite and never-ending family rows.
8. Insane working hours
The introduction of the American work ethic to the UK has had appalling effects on quality of life, and may be a welcome casualty of the recession. We have no particular urge to return to an age where the very act of working is seen as slightly vulgar — but the opposite is worse. And long work hours are dangerously self-reinforcing. As Joseph Stiglitz observed recently, the great problem destroying leisure today is the problem of co-ordination. In other words, there is no point in knocking off at 6 p.m. when you know all your friends will be working until 8.30 p.m. Before we adopt US working practices, we should remind ourselves that the white American genetic make-up is exclusively drawn from the most restless, obsessive, zealous, neurotic and friendless 5 per cent of the European population. The reason the Pilgrim Fathers were forced to leave these shores had little to do with religion — it was because nobody liked them.
9. The veneration of financial services
For the last decade the assumption was that London’s sole destiny was to become a vast banking capital — a kind of bloated version of Frankfurt. No one was allowed to question whether this was desirable, or whether other industries where Britain has a comparative advantage (technology, in particular) were neglected in the process. And Tony Benn is right: there is no need for mainstream news programmes to report the hour-by-hour behaviour of the FTSE.
10. Women’s clothes
How many clothes and shoes do women need? The growth of this area of retail is malignant. On many streets in England now perhaps 80 per cent of the shops are selling ugly women’s fashion. In a really deep recession they will be forced to reopen as pound-shops, off-licences or tobacconists. Much better.
11. Second homes
A second home is not a necessary investment. For 15 years, everyone who somehow hadn’t bought a place in Devon, Cornwall, Italy or Spain felt they were missing out. And yet who really wants these encumbrances now they are no longer rising in value? Do you want to spend your precious fortnight’s holiday practising the Italian for ‘My septic tank appears to have exploded,’ or swerving pastel-coloured rugby shirt-wearing loons driving Range Rovers at high speed around Salcombe? Surely the point of being rich is that you can go anywhere you want when you want to — rather than feeling obliged to revisit the same place every year, and be confronted with the kinds of people that you spend your time in London attempting to avoid.
12. The reporting of rising property prices as though this is universally good news
For most people (those at the stage of their lives when their next move is upwards) it is good news when property prices fall. The same applies to stock prices. Why the BBC reports all financial events from the standpoint of rich, retired shareholders owning large homes, we despair.
13. Champagne cocktails
A glass of champagne cannot be improved upon by adding fruit purée, sherbet around the rim, or an indoor sparkler, and then charging £15 plus 15 per cent service for the privilege.
All these things — and the ones that you add — form part of a wider economic question. To what extent are our wants and desires shaped contextually by the lifestyles of those around us, rather than by any absolute need? As Robert H. Frank, professor of economics at Cornell, asserts, ‘Local context shapes perception of quality, the demand for which knows no limits.’ Or, in layman’s language, ‘When you’re surrounded by rich gits, it’s hard not to act like a bit of a git yourself.’ When just a few of those gits lose their jobs, the rest of us, perversely, may become a lot better off.
Tell us what you won’t miss at new.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse.
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