Morality in the 21st Century: Noreena Hertz

BBC Radio 4 - Morality in the 21st Century, Episode 3: Noreena Hertz

"‘You've been doing research on generation K. Kids born after 1995. And you found something stunning about them. That their trust in institutions has dropped from a previous generation 60% to a mere 6%. Tell us something about how generation K or iGen is thinking.’

‘So I think one of the things that we sometimes get wrong about this generation is we think of them as the selfie generation. And we take that to mean that they're selfish, but actually encouragingly, what my research has found is actually this generation cares desperately, about morals, about ethics about right and wrong. 92% of this generation, and this is from surveys that I've done in the United States and the United Kingdom, believe that helping somebody in need is the right thing to do. And 70% of this generation, worry intensely about inequality. In fact, inequality is the thing they worry about the most, as much as they worry about terrorism. So that's the encouraging’

‘So why the loss of trust?’

‘But at the same time, they're very distrustful of big business. So only 6% trust big corporations to do the right thing. That compares to 60% of our generation who trust big corporations to do the right thing. But it's not just big corporations they distrust. They also distrust in government. Only 10% trust governments to do the right thing. And that's half the percentage of millennials, the older millennials, that trust in government. So what's happened is that the social contract between this generation and big business and government has broken down. They don't believe believe that capitalism has delivered a fair outcome.’...

‘Have we yet worked out a way of defining responsibility for a global world?

‘We haven't, and even Adam Smith, I mean, alongside the Wealth of Nations, he wrote the Theory of Moral Sentiments. Even Adam Smith realized that markets wouldn't deliver necessarily moral outcomes. Even he talked about the need for a night watchman, to look over the market.’

‘Of course, he believed and that we do have a genuine feeling for other people's welfare, and that we're able to stand outside our circumstance and be an impartial observer. Trouble is of course, everyone read his Wealth of Nations and very few people read his Theory of Moral Sentiments and they forgot that he believed that markets need morals and morals aren't themselves produced by the market. Are they eroded by the market?’

‘I think of the market as amoral rather than immoral.’

‘Let me give you an example. We sort of think as a virtue, loyalty. Now the market must undermine loyalty because you will always go for the best deal, the lowest price’…

‘I think the market undermines morality in another key way too. It undervalues those in society who choose as a job to do the good thing. I'm thinking about, for example, teachers, nurses, people who care. I mean, this constituency is consistently undervalued by the market, in fact, in real terms they've teachers and nurses have, earn less today than they did a decade ago. So the market can undermine morality.’...

‘One supplier of entertainment of films and programs, was once recently asked, what is your biggest competitive, thinking they would answer in terms of other suppliers and the head of this very famous corporation said our biggest competitor is sleep. So they're actually going out of the way, their way, some of these, well known, web, corporate, international corporations to make their products addictive to young people. That's really what social networks are about, am I right?’...

‘I think what is disturbing is that the quid pro quo wasn't made explicit.’

‘So it's a bit like those complicated financial instruments. An awful lot can go wrong, before we're even aware of it.’

‘Yes. And have you ever tried to even read the terms and conditions on any of these sites? They're almost unintelligible. But what's, what's interesting is that even in the wake of the Facebook privacy scandal, at least according to Facebook, they've seen no change in users. Do people care? Do people care enough? Should people care?’

‘So could we have reached the stage in which rather than markets serving us, we are serving them? And that must be an upside down world, isn't it?’

‘Oh, yes, we're past that’...

[On companies] ‘'We insist that you behave morally towards a workforce?' Can't they just shift to somewhere else?’

‘Oh, absolutely. There's a race to the bottom and there has been a race to the bottom for decades where companies have been chasing the best tax regime, the lowest cost labor. And that looks likely to persist. I was speaking to one of the leaders, titans of Silicon Valley the other day, discussing this desire in Europe now to tax tech companies on their revenues in Europe, rather than their profits. And he was absolutely aghast and he said here the mentality is we eat what we kill. You in Europe are not innovating. You in Europe don't have big successful tech companies. So you shouldn't be taking home any tax take.’

‘So this is pretty scary. We have devolved responsibility to the market and to governments. But it turns out that the markets aren't very good in teaching any of, any of us to be responsible. And so we rely on governments. But government now are disempowered because they’re national, and the corporations are global... Hasn't the time come to bring morality back again?’

‘Of course it has. But will we as a society, reinstate morality into the market? Will we choose tolerance and pluralism and equity over narrow interest of particular groups and self interest? I’m not sure’"