Michael Blastland
speaker
745 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2011
last heard Aug 2011
Michael Blastland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
enables one to say there are no moral aspects to it.
One might be repelled by the fact that bankers earn bonuses of tens of millions of dollars.
even if one thought it was efficient, that that was the outcome of a market process.
Whether it is an efficient outcome of a market process is another and secondary question.
But both issues are there.
And you're comfortable with an expression of revulsion about that.
You say that's a legitimate part of an argument, an economic argument about bankers.
Perfectly legitimate.
And it seems to me one of the big questions as a nation we have to answer is that there are corrupting effects on society of this kind of activity and these kind of earnings.
which might lead us perfectly reasonably to conclude that even if there were some other benefits derived from them, we didn't want them to take place.
There's sometimes a view that economics is about self-interested calculus.
Does that make any sort of sense as a description of the way that we conduct our economic lives?
It's true that an awful lot of economic models are predicated on the assumption of self-interest.
And actually, for a lot of behaviour, that's not a bad description.
But it's perfectly obvious that actually economies function only by virtue of a lot of behaviour that certainly isn't narrowly self-interested.
More than that, I think by designing institutions around the assumption of self-interest...
We actually encourage self-interested behaviour.
Before 20, 30 years ago, people used to talk about selfishness in business and finance, and they felt rather ashamed of it.
In the last 20 or 30 years, people have been quite proud of it, to believe almost that the moral virtue of an activity is measured by how much money you make out of it.
I think all this is a terrible misunderstanding of how economies actually work.
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