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Now if we think of those two goals as having been established since
democracies in the West, from Western perspective, where first developed in
the 17th century. Then we’ve struggled with back and forth until around the
1930s. You had this tremendous problem which did not only afflict the West
but afflicted countries like Thailand as well, as I understand you had the Great
Depression. And the consequence of the Great Depression was you had mass
unemployment. And it was a very insecure time for people because, all over the
world, people were losing their jobs. And you’ve all seen horrible movies of
what happened during those times to people who were looking for work and
couldn’t find it. It was very insecure from what the declaration of human rights
in 1948 called the need for job security.
So, the consequence was that many of the capitalist societies, of course,
were worried understandably that there could be fascism or Bolshevik socialism,
taking away any opportunities or choices that they had. And so, the answer to
that dilemma of how do you maintain some kind of choice without becoming a
more authoritarian country was found in the concept of the welfare state. And
Keynes identified all kinds of, I’m not going to read these out here, but John
Maynard Keynes came up with all kinds of solutions in a book that in essence
boiled down to saying we can have both security and choice if the government
of whatever country actually takes an active role in the economy not by
designing the economy, but by designing the degree to which there is economic
activity, so you have, we often called, pump priming, that a government could
do some public works not only for the benefit of creating the public works of,
whatever product you wanted, to create but also to get some money into the
hands of workers, who are idle, who could then buy goods, then encourage
factories to produce more and so on.
So you had this constant spiral of positive feedback loops that will result
in a more healthy society economically. So that’s what Keynes and others at
that time in the 1930s, to some degree, rationalizing what was already
happening, of course, in major countries like the United States, The New Deal,
and countries in Europe, of course. But they all had this fundamental flaw, from
my point of view, or from today’s point of view, which is they did not think
about the environment. They thought about workers. They thought about
0QFOJOH LFZOPUF BEESFTT environment because who had ever heard of the environment in the 1930s? It’s
factories. They thought about consumers, but they did not think about the
only in 1962 as I understand it, that the environment started to be talked
about much at all, and that was because there’s a book that was written,
“Silent Spring”, which introduced the idea that what we do to eliminate a
problem, like pests of some kind, can result in all kinds of other bad things
happening to the ecosystem.
