But the New York Times reports today that "Thursday night at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan...the Ivy League professors Simon Schama and Michael Walzer and the Wall Street powerbrokers Mort Zuckerman, Michael Steinhardt and William Ackman gathered to discuss 'Madoff: A Jewish Reckoning.'"
As for moral issues, Mr. Walzer, of Princeton, said, “I’m a moral philosopher, but I don’t think morality is all that important in the way we think about Wall Street and the economy.” The drive to make money is at the root of the business world, he noted: “We have to assume human behavior is what it is, and that’s what you need government for."Is a moral analysis of the credit crisis appropriate?
2 comments:
Professor Walzer added: "As for 'wanton extravagance,' perhaps the medieval idea of sumptuary laws aimed at curbing conspicuous consumption make sense, he said: 'I would pay attention to those feelings and let them grow.'"
Alternatively, it is worth thinking about what role in the crisis is played by the sort of disdain (or disdainful tolerance) that most moral thinkers have for the profit motive, and that is shown in Walzer's remark. What role does a culture that views the motives essential to buisness as morally distasteful play in creating unscrupulous business people. And, anyway, are business people really the ones to blame for this crisis? Granted some of them were corrupt, but there are some corrupt people in every field, how did it come to be that the people at the head of so many of the most powerful companies in the financial sector were both corrupt and ignorant about where the economy was going? Who time and time again in the past bailed these institutions out, thus preventing them from failing as a result of their mismanagement and being replaced by sounder businesses? More generally who created the types of economic conditions in which the sort of speculating that we saw at these failed companies can thrive for a time and stifle the alternatives? Who, on the premise that everyone should be able to get a mortgage and buy a home regardless of their resources, held interest rates artificially low for so long, created and sustained Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack, and set up the conditions for the trading of mortgage-backed annuities? Who licensed the agencies that rated these and all other assets and prevented independent rating agencies from entering the market? Who stipulated what sort of reserve rates banks could have, thus preventing them from keeping a cushion on which to fall back on in bust? Who introduced accounting laws that made it so dangerous for healthy businesses to acquire the failing ones? And what moral premises lie behind all of these actions?
Instead of bringing back medieval laws, perhaps we should consider challenging the medieval ideas about wealth and business that motivate so much of our current thinking about the economy and justify the current laws which played such a large role in producing the mess we now find ourselves in.
Post a Comment