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Rowan's economics for humanity

Rowan Williams' speech on the human dimensions the economy needs is one of the best things he has done in public life

Rowan Williams' speech to the TUC on the economy is a reminder of just how clear and thought-provoking he can be. His particular talent is to overload language, and sometimes it breaks down under the strain. But sometimes he just tenses up and does its job. Here are the first two paragraphs:

'Economy' is simply the Greek word for 'housekeeping'.  Remembering this is a useful way of getting things in proportion, so that we don't lose losing sight of the fact that economics is primarily about the decisions we make so as to create a habitat that we can actually live in. We are still haunted by the dogma that the economic world, 'economic realities', economic motivations and so on belong in a completely different frame of reference from the sort of human decisions we usually make and from considerations of how we build a place to live. And to speak about building a place to live, a habitat, reminds us too that we look for an environment that is stable, 'sustainable' in the popular jargon, a home that we can reasonably expect will be an asset for the next generation.

Economics understood in abstraction from all this is not just an academic error: it actually dismantles the walls of the home. Appealing to the market as an independent authority, unconnected with human decisions about 'housekeeping', has meant in many contexts over the last few decades a ruinous legacy for heavily indebted countries, large-scale and costly social disruption even in developed economies; and, most recently, the extraordinary phenomena of a financial trading world in which the marketing of toxic debt became the driver of money-making – until the bluffs were all called at the same time.  

This may not be original – the subtitle of EF Schumacher's Small is Beautiful is "Economics as if people mattered" – but it's beautifully expressed.

There are good bits later on in the speech, too:

An economic climate based on nothing but calculations of self-interest, sometimes fed by an amazingly distorted version of Darwinism, doesn't build a habitat for human beings; at best it builds a sort of fortified boxroom for paranoiacs (with full electronic services, of course). What is rather encouraging is how few people, faced with this, seem actually to want a society composed of people like this. And, despite the alarms occasionally sounded about younger people's fanatical networking through electronic media, my sense is that this often goes in practice with a genuine desire for friendship and isn't in competition with face-to-face contact. 

But it could have done with one more edit to be great. Immediately after the passage I have just quoted comes this sentence: "We have, to some extent anyway, looked into the abyss where individualism is concerned and we know that it won't do." Eww. Here is the bit where he needs to give a political audience something to bite one, and instead the whole thing, "to some extent anyway", turns to marshmallow. It's not enough to make phrases. You have to throw away the phrases that don't make.

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