Addicted to Profit: Reclaiming Our Lives from the Free Market

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THE PROFIT ADDICTION

By Stuart Sim

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The Montréal Review, August 2012

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"Addicted to Profit: Reclaiming Our Lives from the Free Market" by Stuart Sim ( Edinburgh University Press, 2012)

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It is one thing to strive to make a profit out of your skills and talents, something else entirely to indulge in profiteering or to assume that absolutely every area of your life must yield a financial profit. Unfortunately, profiteering is now rife in the world of business, particularly in banking and the finance industry, and adherents to neoliberal economic theory are adamant that the profit motive should guide all our actions. This is a topic I cover in detail in my new book Addicted to Profit: Reclaiming Our Lives from the Free Market. There, I investigate how, in the wake of the progressive deregulation of the market in the last few decades, the pursuit of profit has been distorting our values of late. Neoliberal economics and globalization have come to dominate the global political scene, and what they demand above all is profit.

It has been one of the most depressing aspects of life in the West in recent years to observe the extent to which politicians have absorbed the neoliberal creed, and how the profit motive has been more and more widely applied to public sector activities. In the UK, for example, it is government policy to open up the education system to the profit motive, on the grounds that this will lead to greater efficiency and a higher level of service being offered to ‘consumers' (as those of us who work in education are constantly being instructed to call our students). So schools are being taken over by ‘entrepreneurs', whose main goal, of course, is to make money out of the exercise. The political class in the UK is obsessed with the profit motive to the extent that they really can be described as suffering from a profit addiction, unable to stop themselves demanding that the profit motive be introduced into every area of the public sector. Most countries in the West have gone down this route to at least some extent recently, being encouraged by neoliberal economists to imitate the American model of a minimal public sector – in areas like health, for example – as much as possible.

Where possible in the UK, the public sector is being broken up and sold to the private sector, again the justification being that this will improve efficiency and service – and will also cost less. It is instructive to note in this respect where this efficiency has landed us with the London Olympics. The company hired to handle security there, G4S, failed to come up with enough staff (despite having years to set up the project) and the army and the police had to be drafted in at the last moment to cover the shortfall – at the taxpayers' expense naturally.

The worst example of the addiction to profit can be found in the credit crisis of 2007-8, which is still with us several years down the line. In order to win the ridiculously high bonuses on offer for increasing their employers' profit margins, traders took more and more risks until the system just collapsed. We're all still suffering in the aftermath of that. The pursuit of profit is also driving the current search for new oilfields in remote locations, as other sources either begin to decline or to be found inadequate to meet an increasing demand for fuel around the world, particularly in up-and-coming economies such as China and India. The more fossil fuel we use, then the worse that global warming becomes, but most of the oil companies are firmly in the sceptic (or ‘denialist' as it has been dubbed), camp when it comes to that issue. Neoliberalism requires constant growth, and constant growth can only mean increasing fuel use. Few governments are brave enough to question this model, or to move significantly into green technology, and the corporate sector is always likely to take up the easiest option and to invest in proven, and still relatively cheap to produce and use, fuel technology – which means oil.

Public service is viewed largely with disdain by the Western political class in general, whose funding comes largely from big corporations they are at pains to avoid upsetting. So markets continue to be deregulated and the public sector to be reduced in line with the principles laid down by the guru of neoliberal economics, Milton Friedman. Friedman insisted that companies existed solely to make profit for their shareholders, and that absolutely anything that militated against that, such as contributing to social causes, was effectively stealing from the shareholders. It is also stealing from the shareholders not to find the cheapest source for the production of your products, hence the mass outsourcing of production to the developing world that has been occurring over the last few decades.

In Addicted to Profit I examine how the profit motive has been allowed to infiltrate a series of areas where it can only cause harm: health, education, the arts, the list goes on. Do we really believe that the American healthcare system is the ideal we should all follow? Do private, corporate-owned, universities really provide a better education and value to the community? Is artistic creation really about producing only what sells and makes large profits? Does an unregulated market really benefit the whole of humankind? I don't believe so in any of these cases, and Addicted to Profit is a call for action to resist the neoliberal juggernaut and to recognize that our lives needn't be all about profit: that indeed they are impoverished if we let ourselves be drawn into the profit addiction.

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Stuart Sim is Professor of Critical Theory, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

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http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Addicted-to-Profit-Reclaiming-Our-Lives-from-the-Free-Market.php

April 26th, 2012 at 9:38 am

Stuart Sim: The Earth and Profit

April 22 was Earth Day, and in honor of the occasion, we will be running a series of posts over the course of this week by authors of our environmental studies titles. These articles will cover a wide range of topics relevant to the study of the earth and the environment, from global climate change to the effects of economic development on the environment in China.

Today’s post in our Earth Day 2012 blog series is an article by Stuart Sim, Professor in Critical Theory and Long Eighteenth-Century English Literature at Northumbria University, and author of (among other works) The Carbon Footprint Wars: What Might Happen If We Retreat From Globalization?, The End of Modernity: What the Financial and Environmental Crisis Is Really Telling Us, and Addicted to Profit: Reclaiming Our Lives from the Free-Market.

The Earth and Profit
Stuart Sim

The advent of the Anthropocene era, when the activities of humankind determine how the environment develops and behaves, has had a very significant effect on our relationship with, and attitude towards, the Earth. Increasingly, the Earth is viewed primarily as a resource to be exploited; an exploitation sanctioned by our commitment to economic growth and material progress. Modernity, the socio-economic system we have developed in the West over the last few centuries, demands that we keep finding ways of improving the Gross National Product year on year. So we are encouraged by politicians, fixated as they invariably are on the necessity for growth, to regard ourselves as essentially machines for the generation of profit, and it has been depressing in recent years to see how the profit motive has been introduced into more and more areas of our lives. In my current book Addicted to Profit: Reclaiming Our Lives from the Free Market, I describe Western society as a ‘profitocracy’ since that seems to sum up how we have allowed the profit motive to become the dominant factor in our existence. No part of the public sector now seems immune from the requirement to turn a profit, and this is having a profound, and I would argue largely negative, impact on our lifestyles.

The relentless emphasis on profit to spur economic growth has had some highly dangerous side-effects, such as various kinds of environmental degradation and, of course, the alarming phenomenon of global warming, arguably the most pressing problem facing humanity today. Yet the campaign for a shift to greener energy sources has had remarkably little impact on national policies around the globe, remaining stuck most of the time at the level of empty rhetoric: every nation makes promises, international conferences are held and protocols put forward for consideration, but little of substance ever really happens. The obsession with growth, and the need for ever-increasing levels of corporate profit, win out, and things go on much as before on the energy front.

Of late, meeting those energy requirements has led to some desperate suggestions on how to stave off the threat posed by ‘peak oil’: drilling under the Arctic Ocean has been mooted, for example, a proposal which, ironically enough, will become easier as a result of global warming since this is reducing the ice cover in the Arctic as temperatures there inexorably rise. Increasing interest is being shown in the technique of ‘fracking’, drilling ever deeper into the Earth to extract natural gas from shale, despite fears of what the effect of this might be on the environment, with earthquakes being a distinct possibility. Some countries have banned the activity, but the UK has recently given it the go-ahead despite public protests. Again, the argument given is that the process will help to ensure economic growth, and of course the corporate sector is only too willing to become involved in something which looks to be a surefire source of profit. The threat posed by global warming has been sidelined in the last few years as governments seek to resurrect their national economies in the aftermath of the credit crunch of 2007-8. So we redouble our efforts to exploit the Earth, regardless of what the eventual cost will be.

The credit crunch ought to have made us reconsider the whole ethos of modernity, but unfortunately we have not shed our belief in the need for economic growth nor our addiction to profit – or at least not enough of us have, despite calls from some quarters for a ‘de-growth’ model of society to be instituted, as well as the continuous campaigning carried out by the Green movement. I’ve explored this problem over the course of three books now: The Carbon Footprint Wars (2009), The End of Modernity: What the Financial and Environmental Crisis Is Really Telling Us (2010), and Addicted to Profit: Reclaiming Our Lives from the Free Market (2012), all of which argue the need of a radical rethink of how we are currently running society, what our goals are, and where we see value to lie. We continue to put economics at the forefront of our lives and to act as if that justified anything we did to the environment to promote growth and profit. Economic crisis simply seems to have reinforced the blind-spot that we have about the effect this might have on the Earth, but we really should start paying more attention to the warning signs that are accumulating around us – warning signs that the Earth can only be exploited up to a certain point, and that we are taking serious risks if we go past that point in the heedless pursuit of profit. Earth Day ought to act as a wake-up call to us that it is time to face up to our addiction and recognise the damage that it is doing.

Posted by Columbia University Press in Author Postings, Current Events, Earth Day, Environmental Studies, Philosophy, Postings by Authors

http://www.cupblog.org/?p=6082