An addenda for anyone whose interest was piqued by that quote -- the book is a truly delightful anthology of pithy/laconic/dire observations, conveniently sorted into alphabetical order -- and related to the above (filed under Bretton Woods) was this gem, under the heading HOLY TRINITY - LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY:
"The main tenet of faith in the last quarter of the twentieth century has been the promise of a rational paradise reached through devotion to competition, efficiency and the market-place. In this fashionable and remarkably intolerant Holy Trinity, the role of the Father is taken by competition, of the Son by efficiency and of the Holy Ghost by the market-place.
"If these three mechanisms could be presented with both their strengths and their flaws, they would be valuable tools in a stable society. Treated as absolutes they quickly drag society into a confused and dangerous state where conventional wisdom is reliant on our denial of what we know to be wrong.As with our earlier worship of saints and facts, there is something silly about grown men and women striving to reduce their vision of themselves and of civilization to bean counting. The message of the competition/efficiency/marketplace Trinity seems to be that we should drop the idea of ourselves developed over two and a half millennia. We are no longer beings distinguished by our ability to think and to act consciously in order to affect our circumstances. Instead we should passively submit ourselves and our whole civilization—our public structures, social forms and cultural creativity—to the abstract forces of unregulated commerce. It may be that most citizens have difficulty with the argument and would prefer to continue working on the idea of dignified human intelligence. If they must drop something, they would probably prefer to drop the economists."
That faith also come with the tendency to see companies as timeless entities which are to be served by people (i.e. gods), instead of being just a mean an end of providing wealth to society (i.e. tools).
"The main tenet of faith in the last quarter of the twentieth century has been the promise of a rational paradise reached through devotion to competition, efficiency and the market-place. In this fashionable and remarkably intolerant Holy Trinity, the role of the Father is taken by competition, of the Son by efficiency and of the Holy Ghost by the market-place.
"If these three mechanisms could be presented with both their strengths and their flaws, they would be valuable tools in a stable society. Treated as absolutes they quickly drag society into a confused and dangerous state where conventional wisdom is reliant on our denial of what we know to be wrong.As with our earlier worship of saints and facts, there is something silly about grown men and women striving to reduce their vision of themselves and of civilization to bean counting. The message of the competition/efficiency/marketplace Trinity seems to be that we should drop the idea of ourselves developed over two and a half millennia. We are no longer beings distinguished by our ability to think and to act consciously in order to affect our circumstances. Instead we should passively submit ourselves and our whole civilization—our public structures, social forms and cultural creativity—to the abstract forces of unregulated commerce. It may be that most citizens have difficulty with the argument and would prefer to continue working on the idea of dignified human intelligence. If they must drop something, they would probably prefer to drop the economists."