In an excerpt from his new book, "The Magic of Dialogue: Transforming Conflict into Cooperation," Yankelovich argues that America can embrace the visions of both a free market and a civil society.
Though a lot of us are free-market nuts, and others yearn to build a community that takes care of its members, there's no good reason America can't have free markets and a civil society
The name Yankelovich inevitably brings to mind public-opinion surveys. It was more than 40 years ago that Daniel Yankelovich founded his first research firm; he's been monitoring changes in American public opinion and culture ever since. He has served on the boards of several corporations, including CBS, the Meredith Corp., and U.S. West, and today is chairman of DYG Inc., in New York City.
Yankelovich, who is trained as a social scientist, notes, "We are becoming a society where impersonal economic transactions dominate. In a market economy, impersonal transactions are always important. Our society could not function without them. But increasingly, my firm's surveys of the public show that Americans crave something more satisfying to the spirit. And they know that impersonal transactions cannot substitute for the deeper relationships for which people yearn, relationships based on mutual understanding." His new book, The Magic of Dialogue, from which the following excerpt is taken, is a practical guide to reaching mutual understanding in complex situations, from one-on-one business meetings to the sorts of cultural splits that have been revealed by Yankelovich's decades-long tracking of Americans' opinions and values. It was recently selected by Common Ground as its Book of the Year. --The editors
The nation now finds itself in the early stages of a struggle for the soul of America. It is a struggle between two equally legitimate but one-sided visions of our future: the Vision of the Free Market and the Vision of Civil Society. Underlying the first vision is the conviction that in the new global economy, the free market, driven by technology and entrepreneurship, will shape a more prosperous democracy and a more secure world than we have known before. The conviction supporting the second is that to renew our society and halt the moral decline we must find a way to strengthen the values of community, faith, responsibility, civic virtue, neighborliness, stewardship, and mutual concern for one another.
Those distinct visions, each with its own mix of the positive and the negative, are engaged with each other in epic combat. Choosing one or the other would lead to a dead end. What is needed instead is a way to forge a new vision that transcends the limits of each.
The Vision of the Free Market
"The Long Boom," an article that appeared in Wired magazine in the late 1990s, is a highly idealized expression of the Vision of the Free Market. It conjured up the vision of a United States-led sustained economic boom of 25 years' duration destined to usher in a new golden age of freedom and prosperity for the entire globe--eradicating poverty, stimulating social mobility, reducing crime and violence, reviving family values, easing ethnic rivalries, educating the unskilled, and "forming a new civilization, a global civilization, distinct from those that arose on the planet before."
Despite its utopian tone, the article captures the strand of optimistic idealism that often underlies the gruffest of bottom-line voices. Many of America's leading business executives and political leaders believe that the free market has moral virtues beyond its pragmatic advantages in allocating resources efficiently. It is those moral virtues that give the Vision of the Free Market its ideological and political power.
The most probable scenario for the near future is that some form of that free-market vision will prevail. At the moment, it dominates the American climate of opinion.
No one should minimize the appeal of that vision to the American people or its importance in making the promise of the American Dream a reality. The prospect of greater material well-being serves a purpose that goes far beyond materialism: the American Dream depends on an economy that can deliver rewards for hard work and self-improvement.
But the Vision of the Free Market has its dark side. The late economist Joseph Schumpeter, a strong supporter of free-market capitalism, underscored capitalism's power of creative destruction, with its tendency to act as an uncontrollable force of nature: impersonal, implacable, and in the short run radically disruptive of jobs, skills, and older enterprises.
In addition to those familiar negatives, the market economy has a more subtle drawback. Visionaries of the free market stress individualism, freedom, democracy, choice, flexibility, creativity, openness, adaptability to change, self-improvement, self-discipline, leadership, and responsibility. Somehow they assume that those moral virtues are inherent in the practices of a free market. But I believe that is a fallacy. Economic ideas always come embedded in a matrix of social values. The long-term success of the economy, as well as the well-being of the larger society, depends utterly on those values. But the values themselves do not come from the market economy, and they are not self-sustaining. They need constant reinforcement. If they don't get it from some source other than the market, they wither and die.
It is that false assumption that makes the Vision of the Free Market incomplete. The harsh reality is that the free market is not endowed with those moral virtues. In the end, the market is just a practical mechanism for allocating resources. Some individuals, companies, and governments that wield market power use that mechanism wisely and compassionately. Others use their raw economic power mindlessly and couldn't care less about its human consequences.
Civil Society as a countervision
The vision of civil society arises from different sources. Since the late 1980s, in meetings and conferences throughout the nation, leaders from the worlds of politics, religion, local communities, foundations, and universities have engaged in a lively conversation about how to renew the bonds of civil society. The conversation is just beginning to clarify what is meant by civil society, how we can strengthen it, and how in doing so we can confront the threat to our nation's social morality.
