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Joe Zammit-Lucia
Joe Zammit-Lucia is a RADIX Co-Founder and board member. He is an entrepreneur and commentator on business and political issues writing in outlets in the UK, US, Germany and the Netherlands. His particular interest is the relationship between business and politics.
“All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)
A couple of weeks ago I had a short and informative exchange on LinkedIn with the great Dr. Jens Hillebrand Pohl. He had posted about free movement of capital across the globe and described it as “a neutral feature of globalization.” That this was at risk of being converted into “a tool of statecraft” following the Trump administration’s Big, Beautiful Bill. My question to him was what does ‘neutral feature of globalisation’ mean? Surely the terms of global trade always were and always will be politically determined – in other words always ‘a tool of statecraft’.
The response:
“Thank you for your question, Joe Zammit-Lucia. Why the politicization of capital mobility comes as a surprise to many is that, for several decades - especially from the 1980s through the 2008 financial crisis, but arguably still today - mainstream economic thought has promoted capital mobility as a baseline good: a necessary condition for efficiency, investment, and growth. This view has been entrenched not only in discourse but in law and institutional architecture - e.g. IMF Article VIII, bilateral investment treaties, investor-state dispute settlement, the OECD Codes - all of which codified capital mobility as a normative standard, giving it the appearance of neutrality and inevitability. Political debate typically framed restrictions on capital as distortions, while liberalization was treated as restoration.”
I am assuming that ‘baseline good’ is technical jargon for what we also call ‘the common good’. The idea that something or some action somehow benefits everyone, is a ‘common good’, can therefore be put beyond any further political discussion, and, instead, handed over to unelected technocratic bureaucracies to codify and impose.
Dr Pohl’s response continued:
“Some voices, including yours, have argued that capital mobility was never neutral, but rather an ideological construct favoring advanced economies and globally mobile capital. While that view was long peripheral to mainstream debates, it is now finally being taken seriously.”
The is no ‘Common Good’
Every policy decision has one inevitable characteristic: it creates winners and losers.
Through that frame, there is no common good. No ‘public good.’ There are just policy decisions that determine which of the many varied and conflicting interests win out and which do not. It is possible that some take the utilitarian view and strive (or, more cynically, pretend) to deliver the greatest good for the greatest number – though whether that translates, or can reasonably be expected to translate, into real world effects is highly questionable.
‘The Common Good’ is about as credible as populist politicians claiming that they speak for ‘the people.’ 🤣
Yet many who put forward policy ideas and work to get them adopted do all they can to present their suggestions as being in the general interest while rarely being explicit about who they are going to harm. Some of us tend to kid ourselves into believing that our own ideologies, our own frameworks, our own views of the way forward is what is best for ‘the common good’ – and try to present it in that light. It makes us feel virtuous while entrenching our own belief system.
A recent example came during a workshop focused on driving change in one industrial system. The pre-read material contained a sentence that claimed that many forces ‘stall progress even when the end goals are clear.’ My suggestion is that this is a mis-framing. It comes across as assuming that the goals being pursued by the initiative should somehow just be accepted by everyone as the right goals.
A more realistic framing is that different players in the system have different goals and different definitions of what constitutes ‘progress’. Each will, legitimately, argue for their perspective, their goals, and their definition of progress. And, ultimately, there will only be one determinant of which view will prevail – power. Political power, financial power, and the interaction between the two.
Of course, governments and politicians understand all this perfectly. They know that politics is about making decisions when every citizen, every pressure group, every industry wants something different from you. They understand that their decisions create winners and losers and that the losers end up shouting louder than the winners applaud – with electoral consequences.
As a result, they try to find compromise approaches that give something to as many groups as possible – while incurring the wrath of the ideologues who scream betrayal of values. They also buy off the losers with subsidies and other compensation mechanisms. That approach contrasts with that of committed activists for whom their own world view is the only virtuous one and a tendency to frame those who have different views and interests as ill-informed, plain wrong or even evil and therefore to be dismissed out of hand.
Nothing is ever beyond debate
Beware of anyone or any group that tries to put any political issue beyond debate.
Speaking for myself, there is nothing that riles me more than when people try to stuff ‘received wisdom’ down my throat as though it is heretical to even consider questioning it. Yet, while accepting that questioning everything all the time is not necessarily productive (and is annoying), we should be suspicious – and resistant – when issues that are clearly political in nature (by which I mean they create winners and losers) get re-framed as purely technical issues that can be delegated to bureaucracies and put beyond public debate.
And for those trying to influence public policy, it is worth remembering that one’s own goals and objectives will not be shared by all. One can try to be flexible and meet as many diverse objectives as possible. Or one can try to bulldoze one’s own views as the only legitimate ones. If the latter is chosen, one had better be realistic as to where the power lies.
This post was originally published in Joe's Random Thoughts newsletter on LinkedIn.