Democratic Capitalism at the Crossroads

Technological Change and the Future of Politics

Carles Boix

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780691191843
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Economics

An incisive history of the changing relationship between democracy and capitalism The twentieth century witnessed the triumph of democratic capitalism in the industrialized West, with widespread popular support for both free markets and representative elections. Today, that political consensus appears to be breaking down, disrupted by polarization and income inequality, widespread dissatisfaction with democratic institutions, and insurgent populism. Tracing the history of democratic capitalism over the past two centuries, Carles Boix explains how we got here—and where we could be headed.Boix looks at three defining stages of capitalism, each originating in a distinct time and place with its unique political challenges, structure of production and employment, and relationship with democracy. He begins in nineteenth-century Manchester, where factory owners employed unskilled laborers at low wages, generating rampant inequality and a restrictive electoral franchise. He then moves to Detroit in the early 1900s, where the invention of the modern assembly line shifted labor demand to skilled blue-collar workers. Boix shows how growing wages, declining inequality, and an expanding middle class enabled democratic capitalism to flourish. Today, however, the information revolution that began in Silicon Valley in the 1970s is benefitting the highly educated at the expense of the traditional working class, jobs are going offshore, and inequality has risen sharply, making many wonder whether democracy and capitalism are still compatible.Essential reading for these uncertain times, Democratic Capitalism at the Crossroads proposes sensible policy solutions that can help harness the unruly forces of capitalism to preserve democracy and meet the challenges that lie ahead.

1

Introduction

Politics in democratic countries is today in a state of turmoil. Trust in national institutions has reached a historical low. In advanced industrial economies, slightly over one in three people express confidence in their governments. Only twenty percent of Americans think that politicians care about their opinions—a number sharply down from almost four in five in the late 1950s. In France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, the proportion is even lower, at around ten to fifteen percent. Such a wave of disaffection has, in turn, given way to growing disengagement from traditional party politics. In Western Europe, electoral abstention has doubled since the 1970s, mainly among the youngest cohorts. Among those electors who vote, close to one-quarter are casting their ballots for far-right and far-left parties. Populist and nationalist alliances now govern a handful of European countries. And, in a context of increasingly polarized politics, in 2016 close to half of American voters elected a president intent on challenging, if not overturning, the very liberal democratic order of global cooperation and open economies that the United States designed and built after World War Two.

Not coincidentally, those political trends follow a set of momentous economic transformations across the world. Since the 1980s, the invention of the personal computer and, more generally, of modern information and communication technologies—as well as the globalization of trade and the offshoring of production, which have been fostered by those technological advances—have reshaped both the workplace and the overall structure of the labor market, intensifying the demand for highly educated individuals in the advanced world and the employment of manufacturing workers in emerging economies while reducing the number of blue-collar and white-collar jobs in North America and Europe. Salaries have behaved likewise. Over the two decades preceding the last Great Recession of 2007, the (household) per capita income of the richest ten percent in advanced economies rose more than sixty percent in real terms (that is, once we take into account changes in prices). The urban and rural middle strata of China and Southeast Asia saw their income grow by almost eighty percent in the same period. By contrast, the income of the bottom half of the income distribution in countries like Germany, Japan, and the United States has remained flat for close to four decades.

There is nothing to indicate that those economic transformations or the political turbulence that accompanies them will stop in the near future. If anything, the pace of technological and employment change may accelerate in the next few decades. According to some recent estimates, almost half of all current jobs may end up being automatized in the next twenty to thirty years. Most of that substitution by computer algorithms and robots will first affect the least qualified individuals. But it may not be limited to them, hitting, at some point in time, relatively creative, nonroutine jobs that today still appear hard to robotize.

Unsurprisingly, the extent and consequences of automation have become the object of a heated debate in the academic and political arenas. Technological pessimists foresee a brave new world where, once artificial intelligence makes its final breakthrough into the so-called “singularity moment,” workers will become completely redundant or will draw, at most, a meager salary. Sitting at the top of a mass of unemployed and underemployed individuals, there will be a small creative class—a thin layer of inventors, top managers, and highly educated professionals—enjoying the benefits of automation and globalization. The system of democratic capitalism that has so far prevailed in the advanced world will crumble under the weight of so much economic inequality. Policy makers will not be able to reconcile free markets with representative elections and deliver both economic growth and a generous welfare state in the way they did during the better part of the twentieth century. The new technologies of information and communication invented in Silicon Valley will take us back to the contentious politics of nineteenth-century capitalism, finally vindicating Karl Marx, who, more than 150 years ago, predicted the eventual substitution of machines for workers, the immiserization of the masses, and the collapse of capitalism at the hands of a horde of angry men, armed with pitchforks and torches, marching down on the wealthy few—now huddled in their Manhattan and Bay Area mansions.

On the other side of the aisle, technological optimists concede that automation will disrupt the labor market and hurt the wages of the least educated, alienating them from politics and elections. Yet, they contend, those costs will be temporary—the transitory pangs associated with the birth of any new technological and social order. In due time, an overabundant economy will free the great majority or even all of us from both the bondages of work and ruthless interpersonal competition, and allow humankind to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and read poetry after dinner.

In this book, I take a different approach. The consequences of today’s technological changes, I will claim, are not set in stone. They will work their way into the economy through their direct (although, at this point, still uncertain) impact on the demand for different types of labor and on the cost and ownership of capital. Yet they will also depend on the institutional and political strategies we follow in response to those technological transformations. During the last two hundred years, in their quest for profits and wealth, the entrepreneurs and industrial captains of modern capitalism have always pushed for the rationalization and automation of production. That “process of industrial mutation”, to employ Schumpeter’s renowned words, “incessantly revolutionize[d] the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one”—modifying the relationship between capital and labor, the patterns of employment, and the distribution of income over time (Schumpeter 1950, 83). In doing so, it periodically generated a (changing) number of critical political challenges that were then met with a particular set of policy responses.

The same logic applies to today’s technological innovations. Because they have already heightened economic inequality and may result in an even more extensive robotization of substantial numbers of (low- and semiskilled) jobs, they could put an end to the broad social consensus around democracy and capitalism that prevailed during most of the twentieth century—particularly in the advanced world. That does not necessarily mean, however, that they will—and that they will make us travel back in time to the nineteenth century, when the industrial capitalism invented in Manchester and its cotton factories turned out to be incompatible with the construction of fully democratic institutions. The reason is simple. The growing economic and political tensions we are witnessing today are happening in very affluent societies: their average per capita incomes are more than ten times higher than at the beginning of the first Industrial Revolution. So much wealth, jointly with the presence of stable democratic institutions and relatively well structured bureaucracies, should give us much more maneuvering room than any generations before us ever had to respond to the technological and economic challenges of today. Therefore, the task ahead of us is to think about how to harness those economic and institutional assets to the advantage of the many.

With that goal in mind, we should understand, first, how technology has shaped capitalism and, second, when and how the latter has coexisted, sometimes in a delicate, uneasy balance, with democracy. I explain this, necessarily in a sketchy manner, in this introduction by describing how modern capitalism has evolved in terms of its structure of production (i.e., the level of automation and the role of labor) and its relationship to politics—from the first Industrial Revolution born in Manchester through the twentieth-century capitalism invented in Detroit’s assembly plants up to the new information era that emerged in Silicon Valley. In the rest of the book, I develop that argument more extensively, mainly focusing on the nature of twentieth-century democratic capitalism and, above all, on the challenges and opportunities brought about by today’s technological revolution.

Richard Arkwright

The first Industrial Revolution, set in motion in Manchester by entrepreneurs such as Richard Arkwright, the designer of the spinning frame and one of the first businessmen to set up a modern factory, led to higher rates of economic growth than had been enjoyed by the old agrarian societies it replaced. Nonetheless, the newly generated wealth was anything but equally distributed. Putting an end to a system of production that had taken place in small artisanal shops, British industrialists reorganized the manufacturing process as a sequence of routinized tasks done in large factories, mechanizing them with the aid of a growing number of machines. The preindustrial skilled craftsman, who often made an entire product by hand, was replaced with unskilled individuals who were each in charge of a very specific action in the chain of production. Dragged by low factory salaries, overcrowded housing, and bad sanitation conditions, living standards experienced a sharp decline in the new industrial towns—at least for the first decades of the Industrial Revolution. By contrast, profits rose and capital accumulated steadily.

In that context of growing inequality, labor and the owners of industrial capital were locked in a protracted economic and political conflict. Businessmen as well as conservative and liberal politicians fretted about the potential entry of the masses into the political arena, the triumph of socialism, and the eventual abolition of private property. In the words of John Stuart Mill, Britain’s foremost political philosopher of the nineteenth century, everyone may have had an interest in the “due representation” of the workers, but only “so long as [they were] not admitted to the suffrage so indiscriminately as to outnumber the other electors.” Indeed, the introduction of “equal and universal suffrage” was, he warned, a “violent remedy” because it implied “disfranchising the higher and middle classes . . . who comprise the majority of the most intellectual in the kingdom” (Mill, “Recent Writers on Reform,” quoted in Selinger and Conti 2015, 291). Full democracy, with its strictly egalitarian one-man-one-vote rule, looked incompatible with the philosophy of economic laissez-faire that defined nineteenth-century liberalism and with the inequalities generated by the first Industrial Revolution. At the opposite extreme of the political spectrum, support for some kind of political settlement that could reconcile democracy and capitalism was equally tenuous. Socialist unions and parties, growing in popularity since the end of the nineteenth century and loosely organized in an international cartel, rejected any form of “bourgeois democracy” as a political and economic empty shell. Instead, believing Marx’s forecasts about the eventual collapse of capitalism, many of them advocated assaulting the state through revolutionary means, nationalizing the economy, and establishing a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Henry Ford

As World War One was drawing to a close, one hundred years ago, few observers would have predicted that democracy and capitalism would reign uncontested a few years later. Just before World War One, parliaments elected by male universal suffrage were in place only in a handful of countries—and, even there, they were usually checked by unelected upper houses or powerful monarchs. Then, after the war armistice in the fall of 1918, a revolutionary wave, pushed by militant workers and demobilized soldiers, threatened to engulf Europe. Russia had already fallen under the control of Lenin and the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party a year before. In the first days of November 1918, the German and Austro-Hungarian monarchies collapsed. The Hungarian Communist Party took over the state a few weeks later. In Germany, the Spartacist movement attempted to proclaim a dictatorship of the proletariat in January of 1919.

The latter’s failure, however, marked a political turning point in the industrial world. With the support of a broad coalition including Christian democrats, social democrats, and liberals, Germany enacted one of the most democratic constitutions of the time. At around the same time, Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries conceded the right to vote to all adult men. In turn, Western social democratic parties accepted elections as the means to allocate power and signaled their willingness to respect some regulated version of the market economy. A little over a decade later, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” institutionalized the concept of a “mixed economy,” according to which capitalism was to operate embedded in a regulatory framework aimed at stabilizing the market, and where the state was to protect its citizens from the poverty associated with unemployment, sickness, and old age.

The implementation of that new political and economic blueprint—often met with ideological skepticism, if not downright hostility—was at times riotous. In the United States, for example, Roosevelt threatened an uncooperative Supreme Court with a plan to expand the number of justices to almost double its size only to encounter considerable backlash from public opinion and the Congress. In continental Europe, interwar governments faced business lockouts, general strikes, and military unrest. Democracy collapsed in Austria, Germany, and Eastern Europe in the 1930s. In France, Left and Right came close to clashing violently just before World War Two. Over time, however, the institutional arrangements of democratic capitalism—that is, free markets, full democracy, and a generous welfare state—took root everywhere. After the war, they did in France and Germany under the direct leadership of Christian democratic parties—the Mouvement Républicain Populaire and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), respectively. Four decades later, they came into place in nations formerly controlled by the Soviet Union.

The United States and the United Kingdom extended the same logic of limited public intervention to the international arena after World War Two. In the Bretton Woods Conference, held in a hotel in New Hampshire in the summer of 1944, officials from forty-four nations, led by Harry Dexter White, a senior official at the US Treasury, and British economist John Maynard Keynes, reaffirmed their countries’ commitment to the goals of currency stability and convertibility and to the principle of trade openness that had characterized the international system before 1914. At the same time, however, they agreed to design an international set of rules and institutions that could give enough autonomy to each country to respond to the particular economic and social demands of its voters. After reestablishing an international monetary system of fixed exchange rates, they called for the introduction of capital controls to enable governments to adjust their economies without sacrificing the goals of full employment and growth. In addition, they accepted the possibility of orderly currency realignments and, to minimize economic crises across the world, they provided for direct short-term financial support to domestic authorities from a newly created International Monetary Fund. Last but not least, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs restored a philosophy of open borders, nesting it within a framework of multilateral negotiations in which national governments had de facto veto power over trade policy.

The roots of that new political order, which implied the successful conciliation of the demands of democracy and the logic of capitalism, were economic. By the turn of the twentieth century, a sweeping wave of technical innovations had transformed the production system of Manchester capitalism, with momentous consequences for the economy and the labor market and, eventually, for politics. The invention of the assembly line and of mass-production techniques by Henry Ford and the Detroit car industry and their extension to a broad range of industries, resulting in the automation of whole parts of the manufacturing process, as well as the use of electricity and electric motors to power hauling and conveying operations, generated large productivity gains and fueled a period of unprecedented economic growth.

From 1900 onwards, the economy expanded on average at an annual rate of about 2.5 percent in the United States and almost 3 percent in Western Europe—a pace two times faster than in the previous century. Per capita income doubled in the forty years that preceded World War Two. It then doubled again during the Cold War. More crucially, labor markets changed in two fundamental ways. First, the demand for unskilled workers, whose brawn power had fed the first wave of industrialization, declined sharply. Instead, twentieth-century factories needed individuals capable of reading the operating instructions of machines as well as installing, repairing, and improving them. Second, a secular fall in communication and transportation costs, due to the invention of the telegraph and the railway and the naval application of the steam engine, led to the rise of global markets, the formation of large corporations, and, as a result, the growth of new layers of white-collar jobs needed to manage those firms. As semiskilled and skilled workers became central to the process of production—that is, as they replaced the very unskilled labor toiling in the Manchester factories to become the main type of labor complementary to machines and capital—wages grew across the board, particularly among middle social strata. Accordingly, the general distribution of earnings became more equal.

Growth and the equalization of labor and income conditions gave rise to a relatively affluent working class. The number of working households living under conditions of absolute poverty declined precipitously over the first half of the twentieth century. Buying food and clothing, which had absorbed two thirds of the budget of the average American family just after the Civil War, dropped to about a third of its expenditure on the eve of World War Two. The number of goods (from furniture to phones and automobiles) owned by a growing middle class expanded exponentially. By the 1960s, life expectancy had almost doubled with respect to that of the middle of the nineteenth century. Average height, which is a relatively good proxy of access to food and good health habits, rose by about four inches in Europe over the span of a century. The overall quality of health and lifestyle of seniors became extra-ordinarily high in developed countries. We only have to compare the photographs of forty-year-old men...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Prelude: Manchester
• 3: The Golden Age: Detroit
• 4: Transformation: Silicon Valley
• 5: Dire Straits
• 6: Robots vs. Democracy?
• Notes
• References
• Index
• A Note on the Type