Compeerism fails because there is no outside capitalism – globalization ensures other countries will just fill-in

One might agree with the analysis so far and then argue as follows: Isn’t this state of affairs a plea for change in the socioeconomic system? Doesn’t it follow that we should ditch the world of hyper commercialized capitalism in favor of an alternative system? The problem with this otherwise sensible argument is that we lack any viable alternative to hyper commercialized capitalism. The alternatives the world has tried have proved worse—some of them much worse. On top of that, discarding the competitive and acquisitive spirit that is hardwired into capitalism would lead to a decline in our incomes, increased poverty, deceleration or reversion of technological progress, and the loss of other advantages (such as goods and services that have become an integral part of our lives) that hyper commercialized capitalism provides. One cannot hope to maintain these while destroying the acquisi-tive spirit or dislodging wealth as the sole marker of success. They go to-gether. This may be, perhaps, one of the key features of the human condi-tion: that we cannot improve our material way of life without giving full play to some of the most unpleasant traits of our nature. This is, in essence, the truth that Bernard Mandeville gleaned more than three hundred years ago. The attempt to come up with a viable alternative is where many of the recent proposals to mitigate the supposed dark features of commercialized capitalism err. The idea that more leisure would make our world a better place is one of these seemingly reasonable but utterly wrong ideas (see Raworth 2018; Bregman 2017). It assumes that if somehow we could convince a sufficient number of people that they would be better of by working less, the hypercompetitive features of capitalism would be remedied. We would live lives of pleasure, visiting art exhibits and sitting in cafés dis-cussing the most recent theatrical productions. But people who decided to follow this more relaxed way of life would soon run out of money to pursue it (unless they had a sufficient amount of previously acquired wealth). Their children would be angry at them for preferring to lead lives of leisure and idleness rather than making sure that the children had all the gadgets that their peers enjoyed and attended the best and most expensive schools. This is why parents cannot stop climbing ever higher and trying to transmit to their children all the privileges that, as we saw in Chapter 2, lead to the creation of a self-perpetuating upper class in liberal capitalism. This is why Barack Obama, despite all of the rhetorical embellishments about public education in his speeches, sent both of his daughters to an elite private high school and later to the most expensive private universities. Again, we find that a life of leisure is possible only for those who have inherited significant wealth or are willing to retire to communities that are self-contained and largely self-sufficient. Withdrawals from hypercommercialized capitalism are indeed possible, but we can be assured that they will remain very rare. Let us imagine that those who argue for a gentler alternative somehow succeed in convincing an entire nation to change its ways. For example, residents of a rich country in Europe might decide that the level of welfare they enjoy now is exactly sufficient and that it can be maintained thanks to technological progress with a much smaller labor input. They might de-cide to work only fifteen hours per week, the number of hours that John Maynard Keynes, in “The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930), believed would be sufficient to “satisfy old Adam in most of us.” But very soon such a country and its population would discover that they had been overtaken by others. Perhaps, happy in their comfortable lifestyle, they would not worry too much about global economic rankings at first. But people from more successful and increasingly rich countries would start buying properties in that country, moving to the most attractive locations, eating in the best restaurants, and gradually displacing the local popula-tion. That this is not a fantasy can be seen in today’s Italy. Cities like Venice and Florence may, in some not too distant future, be almost entirely peopled by rich members of other nationalities, whether German, American, or Chinese. (This is already largely the case in central Venice and parts of Tuscany.) In a fully globalized and commercialized world, if Italian incomes continued to fall relative to incomes in other countries and regions, the beauty of Italy would no longer be enjoyed by its original inhabitants. And there is no reason why it should be. Everything has a price in a commer-cialized world. If a Chinese person can pay more for a view of the Grand Canal than its current Italian owner can, he or she should have access to that view. We thus reach the conclusion again that the only way to defy the com-mercialized world is by withdrawing from it altogether, either through per-sonal exile in a secluded community, or, in the case of larger groups like nations, by embracing autarky. But it is an impossible task to convince suf-ficiently large numbers of people to withdraw from this world, give up on the amenities of commercialization, and accept a much lower standard of living, if they have been socialized in the acquisitive spirit and have inter-nalized all of its goals. There are some communities, such as the Pennsyl-vania Dutch and Israeli kibbutzim (both of which are in decline), that may not be enervated by the presence of much greater wealth in their neigh-borhood, but very few other groups evince an urgent desire to imitate them.