The gorge rises

Writes the economist, Paul Collier:

Overwhelmingly, the answer to why poor societies are poor is that they lack the organizations of modern capitalism. Capitalism has created organizations that harness the productivity potential of scale and specialization without triggering the alienation predicted by Marx. Marx thought that large-scale production inevitably separated enjoyment from labour, and that specialization “chained [man] down to a little fragment of the whole”. Ironically, the consequences of alienation were most devastatingly revealed by industrial socialism. Modern firms maintain motivation by a judicious combination of incentives and a sense of purpose: workers internalize the objectives of the firm. From the entrepreneur to the car park attendant, people get job satisfaction from what they do, not just from what they earn. Being subject to the discipline of the market, firms that fail to create such work environments go bankrupt.

Oh, and then he adds, “The Achilles heel of modern capitalism is the financial sector.”