John’s article on: Evolving economies

This article was originally published in ‘Onward’.

For hundreds of years, businesses have transformed our lives for the better by creating wealth, improving living standards, creating jobs, and inventing cool gadgets that make life easier, more interesting and fun. But they can create problems too; if we don’t set things up properly, it’s easy to leave the door open for monopolies, rip-offs and scams to flourish. And if they do, then citizen-consumers will start to tread a lot more warily, distrusting the system and feeling like we’ve got to check everything because we aren’t sure if it’s really on our side.

And that’s a serious problem. Partly because all that checking and distrust slows everything down; high trust societies and economies work faster, better and more productively than low ones. And partly because if we think the system is set up for bosses or bureaucrats or cronies rather than us, then we won’t care if it crumbles and is replaced by something else. There are plenty of competing creeds that would love to brand profits and businesses as inherently bad or evil activities that constantly have to apologise and atone for some indelible, original sin.

And if they succeed, the legitimacy of our entire liberal, democratic, freemarket society is undermined. So it’s essential for us to set the system up properly in the first place so it’s clearly on the side of the many. That means being clearly and unapologetically on the side of consumers, with strong rules to protect us from scams, cons and rip-offs, plus lots more choice so that we can all find what we want, rather than what some politician or bureaucrat has decided for us instead.

The latest challenge comes from digitisation. It’s creating all sorts of brilliant, amazing new things that we all love, but it is also giving fresh legs to neweconomy versions of the old scams and rip-offs too. That means we need a new, re-tooled Competition Act so we can deal with digital dodginess just as easily as the more traditional analogue versions, and updated regulators to apply the new laws too. The world won’t stop moving and improving, so we can’t either.