As Tonic is the curator of all-things “good,” those of us concerned about the faltering global economy might find a long essay in this week’s Newsweek by Fareed Zakaria entitled “The Capitalist Manifesto: Greed is Good (To a Point)” of interest.
In the article, Zakaria offers a defense of capitalism, even as he pairs it with greed and freely admits that “markets are not about morality.” But Zakaria says capitalism is “the best economic engine we have,” and that the present economic crisis is not about capitalism. He says the current global slowdown “is a crisis of finance, of democracy, of globalization, and of ethics.” He boils it down to financiers messed up, democracy failed, we still don’t understand how to manage globalization and businessmen need to move from a focus on short-sighted, quarterly profit margins to a long-term view because “no system — capitalism, socialism, whatever — can work without a sense of ethics and values at its core.”