The EconomistNovember 30th 2019 Books & arts 732
1traditional base for trade unions, has
shrunk, making it hard to resuscitate or-
ganised labour. Meanwhile, “further mass
expansion of education is impossible
when a country has reached 14 or 15 years of
education on average”.
According to the millennial socialists,
more radical changes are required. Collec-
tively, their manifesto boils down to three
big ideas. First, they want vastly more gov-
ernment spending to provide, among other
things, free universal health care, a much
more generous social safety-net and a
“Green New Deal” to slash carbon-dioxide
emissions. Second, many argue for looser
monetary policy, to reduce the cost of
funding these plans.
The third plank of their thinking is the
most radical. The underlying idea is that
capitalism does not just produce poverty
and inequality (though it does), but that, by
forcing people to compete with each other,
it also robs them of dignity and freedom.
“The power imbalances are obvious when
you enter into your employment contract,”
says Mr Sunkara. For Mr Adler, capitalism
“has sucked the life out of democracy”.
Millennial socialists, therefore, support
the “democratisation” of the economy (or
socialisme participatif, as Mr Piketty puts it),
whereby ordinary people play a greater role
in the production process, the market is re-
moved from as many aspects of everyday
life as possible, and the influence of the
rich is drastically curtailed. Such reforms,
they argue, will create happier and more
empowered citizens.
What does “democratisation” mean in
concrete terms? Some millennial socialists
say everyone should be guaranteed a job;
others want a universal basic income, a
drastic reduction in the working week, or
both. It also means promoting non-tradi-
tional forms of business organisation, in-
cluding co-operatives, which give workers
a decisive role in the day-to-day manage-
ment of their company.
Mr Adler thinks through how such
plans would function. Drawing on his ex-
pertise in management, he explains in de-
tail how firms could be managed along so-
cialist lines. This practical bent also
characterises a new book by Christine Ber-
ry and Joe Guinan, two researchers close to
Britain’s Labour Party. In “People Get
Ready!” they explain what may be required
if a socialist Labour government is to suc-
ceed—from imposing capital controls to
activists keeping up the pressure on elect-
ed politicians if they go soft.Siege mentality
In a few short years socialists have gone
from political and intellectual irrelevance
to sketching out plans for government.
One big question they face, however, is
whether ordinary people have the stomach
for the kind of change they envisage. MsBerry and Mr Guinan appear to accept that a
future Labour government’s fight with in-
ternational finance might turn Britain into
what they call a “siege economy”. This is
“not particularly desirable as a long-term
solution”, they concede; most Britons
might object more bluntly. Mr Piketty’s
proposed wealth tax of up to 90% would
play havoc with incentives to invest, while
under Mr Adler’s vision the “entire appara-
tus of the stock and bond market will dis-
appear”—though, happily, “your phone
will be yours to keep or to trade.”
Mr Milanovic sympathises with the so-
cialists’ yearning for radical change. But ul-timately he finds many of their prescrip-
tions unconvincing. A country which tried
to de-marketise on the scale envisaged by
the millennial socialists would, he says, be
unstable and dissatisfied in other ways.
Shifting towards a much shorter working
week, for instance, would surely leave it
poorer than its neighbours—and for how
long would people put up with that? Capi-
talism is far from perfect, his book shows,
yet after the fall of the Berlin Wall it is hard
to shake the notion that it is the only sys-
tem that broadly works. The millennial so-
cialists are on the up, but they may still
struggle to prove him wrong. 7 I
n the 18th century Augustus the Strong
competed with Louis XIV, France’s “Sun
King”, to assemble Europe’s most extrava-
gant jewellery collection. The elector of
Saxony, who ruled over Poland and Lithua-
nia, probably triumphed in the end: he
gathered multiple sets of exquisite arte-
facts, made of diamonds, rubies, sapphires
and emeralds, a haul that was supple-
mented by his successors. The collection
represents “a kind of world heritage”, reck-
ons Dirk Syndram, director of the Green
Vault treasury in Dresden, a baroque city
on the Elbe, which houses all the gems.
Or, it did until recently. In a swift pre-
dawn raid on November 25th at least two(presumably diminutive) thieves entered
the Green Vault’s jewel room through a
small hole they had made in the iron grille
of a ground-floor window. They had appar-
ently disabled the museum’s alarm system
by setting fire to a nearby electrical-distri-
bution hub. Inside, they smashed a glass
showcase with an axe and grabbed roughly
100 pieces from three of the jewellery sets,
including several diamond brooches, a
string of pearls, a duelling sword with a di-
amond-encrusted hilt (pictured) and the
Star of the Polish White Eagle Order.
Security guards alerted the police, but
by the time they arrived, the thieves had
fled; the presumed getaway car was found
burned out in a nearby underground ga-
rage. One of the collection’s greatest trea-
sures, the 41-carat Dresden Green Dia-
mond, is safely on loan to the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York, for an exhibi-
tion about the splendour of European
courts. But the missing pieces could be
worth many millions of euros. “We are dev-
astated to hear of this theft,” said Max Hol-
lein, the Met’s director.
Rocketing art prices are attracting ever-
more daring criminals. On November 13th
intruders were walking out of the Dulwich
Picture Gallery in London with two Rem-
brandts when they were stopped by police;
they managed to escape, albeit without the
paintings. Four men are currently on trial
for the theft in 2017 of a giant gold coin val-
ued at €3.75m ($4.1m) from the Bode Muse-
um in Berlin.
Even so, the Dresden heist—now being
investigated by a 20-strong team of special-
ists code-named “Epaulette”—stands out.
The late Martin Roth, a former director of
the Dresden State Art Collections (of whichBERLIN
Thieves make off with bejewelled treasures from a storied collectionDresden’s Green VaultOcean’s Eight on the Elbe
Augustus wept