1Today, pretty much every economy in the world is organized along capitalist lines
2but at the same time, capitalism is almost everywhere regarded with disappointment, frustration and suspicion.
3Interestingly, none of the criticisms are new.
4They've been dogging capitalism since its inception.
5So let's look back in time to figure out how capitalism got its bad name
6and what might be done to improve it.
7Padua, Italy, 1304.
8On the wall of a church in Padua near Venice, the painter Giotto makes a fresco:
9Jesus and the Money Lenders.
10It restates for his own times an idea that had by then already been well established for centuries in the West:
11the notion that a good spiritual life and the pursuit of business and money are sworn enemies.
12Jesus goes to the temple in Jerusalem, sees merchants and small-time bankers crowding the forecourt and gets furious.
13This sacred place is not a fitting arena for the polluting activities of buying and selling.
14The Christian attack on the immorality of money is deeply influential and severely holds back the development of capitalism for centuries.
15Venice, 1450.
16A Franciscan friar, Luca Pacioli, publishes the first ever book on accounting: Summa de arithmetica.
17It's the single most important capitalist invention until the birth of the joint stock company and the modern factory.
18In the book, Pacioli introduces the principle of double-entry bookkeeping,
19which gradually become standard practice in all companies.
20Pacioli's textbook proposes that dealing well with money doesn't depend on faith anymore.
21Money isn't a divine punishment or reward;
22it's a kind of science that can be learnt through patience, reason and hard work.
23Geneva, 1555.
24In powerful sermons to his congregations in Geneva,
25the Protestant theologian John Calvin emphasizes to his Swiss audiences the importance of what have become known as the Protestant virtues:
26hard work, self-denial, patience, honesty and duty.
27These will turn out to be extremely useful qualities for capitalism.
28Calvin along with many other preachers who share his outlook explains that you must never indulge yourself not spend money having a lavish life.
29You must simply put any surplus income back into your business as an investment.
30Calvin adds that being good at business is far more pleasing in the sight of God than being an aristocratic warrior or even a monk.
31Perhaps more than technology, it's this new mindset that will accelerate the progress of capitalism.
321670, Delft, Dutch Republic.
33The newly independent Dutch Republic is the world's first explicitly capitalist nation
34where lazy aristocrats are looked down upon and hard-working merchants revered.
35In the churches, Protestant sermons about thrift and hard work are heard.
36In the arts outgo glorifications of kings and queens.
37Johannes Vermeer finishes painting The Lacemaker,
38a depiction of the intricate careful and homely tasks of manufacturing lace.
39In his painting The Little Street, the suggestion is that living peacefully and quietly in your own home,
40running a business is far more glamorous and noble than fighting in a war or going to a monastery.
411776. 141, the Strand, London.
42These are the offices and shops of Strain & Cable, publishers who have a big success with a new book:
43an inquiry into the nature and causes of The Wealth of Nations
44written by a Scottish philosopher called Adam Smith.
45Smith demystifies wealth creation by explaining how capitalist economies grow.
46He reaches several important conclusions.
47Slavery is remarkably inefficient.
48Violence is less of an incentive than money for a worker
49and the cost of buying and maintaining slaves far exceeds the cost of wages.
50Capitalists will make far more money by treating their workers legally and humanely.
51It's by specializing that economies grow, says Smith.
52Smith focuses on the pin making industry and concludes that while one worker could make up to 20 pins a day,
53a team of 10 workers well arranged could make not 200 but 48,000 pins,
54thanks to what Smith terms the Division of Labour.
55Smith also tells us that capitalism is guided by an invisible hand.
56By maximizing one's own profit, individuals inadvertently benefit society providing goods that people want and need.
57As Smith puts it: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner,"
58"but from their regard to their own self-interest."
59These ideas further remove the moral suspicion that once surrounds capitalism.
60But not all will be won over.
611854, London.
62The British economy is now the largest in the world thanks to its enormous industries of cotton, shipbuilding, steel and coal.
63Vast cities have chewed up the countryside of the Midlands and northern England.
64Merchants and the newly rich capitalist class have triumphed.
65But many are furious.
66Charles Dickens, one of Victoria England's most passionate critics of unrestrained capitalism publishes a novel: Hard Times.
67Set in the fictional town of Coketown, a version of Manchester,
68it takes aim at heartless capitalists like Mr. Gradgrind who abuse their workers,
69exploit young children in mines and chimneys and use their relentless capitalist logic
70to blind them to their desecration of nature and human life.
71Here is Dickens' writing on Coketown:
72"It was a town of red brick, or a brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it;"
73"but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage."
74Dickens argues that capitalism is evil because it encourages appalling conditions for the producers.
75Under the sway of capitalist logic otherwise quite nice people will keep coming up with reasons why it's okay to employ a child in a factory
76or to let poor people starve once they've reached the end of their working lives.
771860, London.
78The English reformer John Ruskin publishes Unto This Last, a furious track against capitalism
79that takes aim not so much at the production side of capitalism as the area of consumption.
80Like Dickens Ruskin is incensed that people are being exploited and the environment ruined.
81But he asks a further question: In the name of what?
82Ruskin notes that large capitalist fortunes are built up on selling people absurd things:
83knick-knacks, fancy plates, embroidered napkins, bonnets carved sideboards.
84The whole of the suffering of the cotton factories of Manchester are being fed by our appetite for very cheap shirts with delicate collards.
85We are ruining our lives for trinkets,
86whereas for Ruskin money shouldn't only be made morally,
87it should be spent morally on the truly noble and beautiful things that humans need.
88He contrast the beauty of Venice with the ugliness of modern Britain to make his point.
89Berlin, 1963.
90The leader of communist East Germany, Walter Ulbricht launches an ambitious new scheme:
91the Neues Ökonomische System or NÖS.
92It aims to solve for East Germans the two major failings of capitalism in his eyes.
93One: It will guarantee workers good conditions with a huge expansion in the number of state schools, housing blocks and holiday camps.
94And secondly: It will focus not on the fripperies of capitalist production like blue jeans and pop music;
95it will give people the works of Plato and Marx and uplifting television programs about track to production.
961976, Dresden, East Germany.
97The fatal flaws of communism come to a head in January with a massive riot about the unavailability of coffee.
98East Germans love drinking coffee
99but a huge rise in global prices means that the German Democratic Republic can no longer afford to import it in the necessary quantities.
100The Politburo decides to remove all coffee from shops and replaces it with "mich Kaffee",
101mix coffee which is 51% coffee and 49% a range of fillers including chicory, rye and sugar beet.
102Dissatisfaction with this eventually has to be quelled with the use the Stasi or secret police.
103It's an inadvertent tribute to capitalism
104which is especially good at providing us with life's little luxuries.
105Edeka hypermarket near Hamburg, November, 1989.
106East Germans who have recently breached the wall head straight for West German supermarkets like Edeka near Hamburg.
107They marvel at the productive capacities of capitalism
108and the ability that it has to provide such modest but very important things as olive oil, party hats, ice spuns and coffee.
109The old East German elite who had believed that the people could be satisfied with philosophy, athletics, sauerkraut and TV programs about farming are hounded out of office.
1101999, Seattle, USA.
111The World Trade Organization, a capitalist body dedicated to removing protection from industry and liberalizing markets gets together for its next round of talks,
11210 years since the fall of communism and after a decade of unprecedented economic growth.
113But though the mood of politicians is upbeat,
114out in the streets, hundreds of thousands of anti-capitalist protesters have gathered to call an end to the iniquities of global capitalism.
115The complaints are strikingly similar to those made by Jesus Christ.
116Capitalism doesn't look after the producers
117and capitalism downgrades the important spiritual ends of life for the sake hamburgers, unsustainably cheap clothes and garish distracting mass media.
118With their beards and gaunt figures many of the protesters look a little like Renaissance's renditions of Jesus.
119The police take a very heavy hand, fired tear gas into the crowds, arrest 2000 and call in the National Guard.
120The protest remind the world that besides the winners of capitalism there is an enormous army of the disenfranchised and the angry
121who see more sense in Jesus, Dickens and Ruskin than in Adam Smith and Bill Clinton.
1222015, Cupertino, California.
123Apple Computers officially becomes the largest corporation in the world.
124It's a giant success story.
125But the very same challenges remain.
126It turns out that Apple are indirectly responsible for the suffering and abusive of workers in the supply chain in China via the Foxconn corporation
127and with the launch of the Apple watch, a gadget that seems to have no particularly urgent purpose,
128questions are once again raised about why we are exhausting ourselves and the planet
129for ends that are so out of proportion with the costs they impose on all of us.
130To generalize: Capitalism is amazingly productive but it has two big flaws.
131Firstly, it systematically inclines to ignore the sufferings of workers unless regularly prodded not to.
132And the wealth of companies is often built up on satisfying what are not the essential needs of human beings.
133Fortunes are made on making unhealthy food or bad television programs.
134The challenge for the future is how we might be able to make money humanely by treating people and the earth well
135and also make money through activities which address the more noble end of human needs.
136Till then, the rage of Jesus in the temple will periodically always go on.