From Capitalism, Alone (Branko Milanovic, 2019) p196-7
Therefore, as we live in an increasingly commodified environment where interactions are transitory and discrete, the space where we can exercise “nice” cooperative behavior shrinks. When we get to the point where we have all become just agents in one-off deals, there will no longer be any place for freely given niceness. That end point would be both a utopia of wealth and a dystopia of personal relations.
Capitalism has successfully transformed humans into calculating machines endowed with limitless needs. What David Landes, in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998), saw as one of the main contributions of capitalism, that it encourages better use of time and the ability to express everything in terms of abstract purchasing power, has now moved into our private lives. To live in capitalism, we do not need the capitalist mode of production in factories if we have all become capitalistic centers ourselves.
5.2c The Dominion of Capitalism
The domination of capitalism as the best, or rather the only, way to organize production and distribution seems absolute. No challenger appears in sight. Capitalism gained this position thanks to its ability, through the appeal to self-interest and desire to own property, to organize people so that they managed, in a decentralized fashion, to create wealth and increase the standard of living of an average human being on the planet by many times — something that only a century ago was considered almost utopian.
But this economic success made more acute the discrepancy between the ability to live better and longer lives and the lack of a commensurate increase in morality, or even happiness. The greater material abundance did make people’s manners and behavior to each other better: since elementary needs, and much more than that, were satisfied, people no longer needed to engage in a Hobbesian struggle of all against all. Manners became more polished, people more considerate.
But this external polish was achieved at the cost of people being increasingly driven by self-interest alone, even in many ordinary and personal affairs. The capitalist spirit, a testimony to the generalized success of capitalism, penetrated deeply into people’s individual lives. Since extending capitalism to family and intimate life was antithetical to centuries-old views about sacrifice, hospitality, friendship, family ties, and the like, it was not easy to openly accept that all such norms had become superseded by self-interest. This unease created a huge area where hypocrisy reigned. Thus, ultimately, the material success of capitalism came to be associated with a reign of half-truths in our private lives.
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