impossibility of soc dem in U.S.

DANIEL.DAVIES at flemings.com DANIEL.DAVIES at flemings.com
Fri Sep 17 00:31:00 PDT 1999


This is also the subject of my dear Tess's PhD -- looking at whether the adoption of US-style capitalism in Europe is likely to destroy the social-democratic model.

I'd note that the US really is unique in having such dispersed ownership of companies. In the UK, while we in principle have an "Anglo-Saxon" system, the companies are all really owned by a fairly small group of pension funds, insurance funds and investment trusts. This makes them a bit more susceptible to democratic pressure, IMO.

Michel Albert also writes about this sort of thing in the context of insurance, which would suggest that there's more differences between the two systems than capital-provision alone. He notes that Europe follows an "Alpine" model of insurance, developed from mutual systems of co-insurance between farmers. The UK industry adopts a "maritime" model, developed from the syndicate system of insuring ships. The Alpine system sets one price for everyone and pools the risks together; the maritime systems prices the insurance case by case and sells it for what the market will bear. Albert argues that pooled insurance is inherently more collectivist than maritime.

On the other hand, Albert is known in the insurance industry as "the knacker who broke AGF", so what does he know.

dd

rc-am wrote:


> >"Political Preconditions To Separating Ownership from Control:
> The Incompatibility of the American Public Firm with Social
> Democracy"<
>
>tell me there's something i've missed here, but what do they think
>they've uncovered?

I haven't read the paper yet, but it sounds like an argument I've made myself - that U.S.-style capitalism, with strong pressures coming from impatient stockholders for profit maximization, puts downward pressure on wages, makes life very difficult for unions, and disperses political responsibility for the labor-unfriendly state of affairs. Bank-centered systems, paradigmatically the German, are more stable and more amenable to political pressure to be a bit friendlier to labor. But I haven't read the paper, and abstracts are often a poor guide to what's inside.

Doug

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