Criticism of Rory Sutherland's comments about capitalism

If he's stepping out beyond advertising, there's a question to be answered.

Ostensibly, Rory Sutherland is a purveyor of popular useful ideas - which is why I’m mentioning him here.

He’s an ad-man, Vice Chairman at Ogilvy UK and self-proclaimed conservative. He’s also an entertaining anecdotalist and conversationalist. Within the marketing industry he has a useful function. For many years, he’s encouraged that sector to be more mischievous, to be more thoughtful. His talks are peppered with counter-intuitive stories about how the world really works.

His themes, broadly, are: humans are weird, irrationality is important and traditional economics is insufficient. Eye-opening stuff for the boardroom. Ruffles some feathers, but doesn’t scare the horses (in the field next to the duck pond).

In a recent interview with the influential music producer Rick Rubin, Sutherland is reaching a wider audience.

In the interview, Sutherland is more expansive than I’ve heard him before. He makes his points about reductionist mainstream economics then touches on his concerns about free market capitalism.

He outlines a “useful idea”. He says:

”What worries me about free market capitalism is that economists and management consultants like it for entirely the wrong reason… I would argue that most of the appreciation of capitalism is driven by the idea of its efficiency, not its inventiveness… What we should have been doing is optimising capitalism for inventiveness.”

and:

“It's exactly that point about I make about capitalism, which is that we've been encouraged to view it as an efficiency mechanism where it's really an exploration mechanism.”

But. Rubin doesn’t ask: “Rory, why is capitalism being driven by the idea of its efficiency, not its inventiveness?”

Maybe I’ve missed it, but nobody ever seems to ask Sutherland why capitalist efficiency is being prized over inventiveness. Sutherland’s statements are just accepted. And it slightly irritates me.

What would happen if conservative Rory did join the dots?

Would he conclude that the idea of capitalist efficiency is politically expedient for the rich and powerful (when expressed as austerity, for example), as it helps to maintain inequality, social hierarchy, social control and elite status quo?

That a capitalist system that emphasised inventiveness is not broadly encouraged as it might lead to more social mobility?

Perhaps we’ll never know.

See also

Rick Rubin and Rory Sutherland - Tetragrammaton podcast

UK social mobility at its worst in over 50 years, report finds

This website has a page on Rory Sutherland, it says: “Sutherland is one of the founding members of the The Common Sense Alliance, a lobby group for the tobacco industry.” The Common Sense Alliance was funded by British American Tobacco.