What do we want to see emerge from this greatest crisis of capitalism in 70 years?

Excerpts from a recent article published in Guardian, UK by Timothy Garton Ash ...

"What do we want to see emerge from the greatest crisis of capitalism for 70 years? If I had to answer in a single phrase, I would say: new models for a sustainable social market economy. This requires us to change as well as our states.

Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, has observed that today's big private banks are global in life but national in death. When it comes to the bailout, it's the national government most directly concerned that takes the lead. And that means us, national taxpayers, picking up the bill.

Yet all this talk of states and systems is only half the story. It was the conduct of individual human beings that led us into this mess, and it is the behaviour of individuals as well as the structuring of systems that has to change.

Bottom line :

"More than 30 years ago, Daniel Bell explored in his Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism the paradox that the dynamism of capitalism depends on individuals living by somewhat different values in their personal lives as producer and as consumer.

Extending Max Weber's famous argument about the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, he suggested that the production side depends on people harking to values such as hard work, punctuality, discipline and a readiness to accept deferred gratification.

The demand side, by contrast, depends on them being self-indulgent, expansive, pleasure-seeking and given to living in the now. Add to this the new constraint that the planet will not sustain more than 6 billion people enjoying constantly rising living standards achieved by the methods of production and consumption so far used. Complicate matters further by the moral argument that the world's rich have no right to deny the world's poor a materially better life, which would still be a fraction of the affluence we ourselves enjoy.

What you end up with is not just a systemic conundrum but also a personal challenge to every one of us. The challenge is to find a new balance in our double-lives as producers and consumers, at the same time consciously contributing to a larger set of new international balances between economy and environment, oversaving east and overspending west, rich north and poor south. That, too, is what I mean by a sustainable social market economy."