Shape of pervasive system’s future unsure
Most columnists write about things that interest them, about things they hold dear or that they feel qualified to discuss. Many are experts in their field. I certainly am not an expert at anything and, if the truth be told, I have a kind of aversion to experts.
I simply enjoy “the act of writing”. This is something similar to Arthur Koestler’s The
Act of Creation but less formulaic and less predictable. As it goes, I have a greater interest in literary nonfiction, increasingly in essay writing, than I do in the political economy, the area in which I received formal training in higher education. I should probably not have let the editor know this.
Anyway, the first 15 years of my professional life were spent trying to make it as a journalist, and the next 15-20 in and out of academia and public policymaking. I have picked up a few things along the way. So, like most columnists and public intellectuals, I am sometimes asked terribly difficult questions at the most awkward times. The fact is, I work on my columns only on Sunday nights. For the rest of the week I have to go out and earn a living and am obliged not to place the people who pay my contract in a compromising position. The point is, whatever appears in this column I write in my personal capacity.
Then again, when my contract does expire I will continue to write in my personal capacity. Fortuitously, my interests are sufficiently abstruse — though, I want to believe, rarely irrelevant — that the act of writing is as much an adventure as it is voyage of discovery. Franz Kafka once said paths are made by walking. I think that can be extrapolated to writing.
For what it’s worth, the stand-out criticism I get, almost every time the column appears in print, is from the same person, who rather patronisingly tells me I should “read more Marx” or that I did not do enough “class analysis”. He is rather amusing and predictable, in a Pavlovian sort of way.
At any rate, a few weeks ago I faced a bizarre situation. It was suggested by an online journal — the one that aspires, admirably, to combine “academic rigour” with “journalistic flair” — that I submit an essay for consideration only in my area of expertise. I was stumped. Here is a first home truth. I really am not an expert at anything.
Aw, come on, a colleague once said, there has to be something that gets you out of bed every day. My reply was (really), “I have to pay the rent, feed and clothe myself and pay my medical insurance.” Then I said, “capitalism”. Capitalism is what interests me most. I am fascinated by the way capitalism has changed human lives over the last five centuries and how it has altered the way individuals and communities interact with one another. I am also intrigued by where it will go next, and how it will change human relations.
If I am sure about anything regarding capitalism, it is that it is not just about the way we do business, or everyday commercial or productive processes. Capitalism is, in very real ways, a system of organising society; from legal and educational systems to the reasons we go to war. Capitalism includes what the economist Anwar Shaikh suggested was “competition, conflict and crises”.
This means I may, at any time, write about war and peace, crime and punishment or the algorithms that determine the sentencing of criminals or health-care provision or denial. Here, then, I come to two things that are difficult to separate: the future of capitalism and the future role of scientific and technological innovation, artificial intelligence and robotics.
No-one can say with absolute certainty what shape capitalism will take in future.
We know the revolution in information and communications technology (ICT) will play a definitive role in our future. You don’t have to be an expert to work this out, though some have tried. One of liberal capitalism’s great experts, Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman, predicted 20 years ago: “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
About the future, my nonexpert view is this: for all its innovation and novelty, the revolution in ICT — from the first mainframe computer (1942) to the first microprocessor and personal computer (1970s), barcode scanning in the 1990s, and today’s smartphone technologies — has yet to produce anything as socially impactful and life-changing as flushing toilets, sewers, electricity or the Boeing 707 in 1958.
● Lagardien is a former executive dean of business and economic sciences at Nelson Mandela University and has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
THE STAND-OUT CRITICISM I GET … IS FROM THE SAME PERSON, WHO RATHER PATRONISINGLY TELLS ME I SHOULD ‘READ MORE MARX’