What ‘lemonade-gate’ says about our society

With ‘lemonade-gate’ one week old, we might reflect on what the story means, and what it says about our society. For instance, that Tower Hamlets council fined a five-year-old girl for selling lemonade without a trading license is no surprise. That people blame her father, the council officers, and even the girl herself comes as no revelation. That the story represents a battle between the nanny state and economic freedom shocks no one. But perhaps what is surprising is our reluctance to ask the real question: Why is entrepreneurship our highest good?
We now urge children to be ‘little capitalists’. They need delicate preparation for what Germans call an Ellbogengesellschaft — literally an ‘elbows society’ — where those with the sharpest elbows push out the weak. And part of this preparation demands that they adopt a new mindset, and new habits. Know your customer. Stand out. Develop a niche market. Put some mint in your lemonade. All things business professor André Spicer’s daughter did with gusto.
But what’s the problem? It’s just the magic of money-making; what Joseph Schumpeter named ‘creative destruction’; what Keynes called the ‘animal spirits’ of business people. Children need to learn the ways of the world — to succeed in the world.
Right?
Venture capitalist Georges Doriot once said: ‘Someone, somewhere, is making a product that will make your product obsolete.’ Yet with the wholesale adoption of entrepreneurship we’re making childhood obsolete. Comics now teach children how to be business superheroes. The Irish government is bringing ‘entrepreneurial education’ into the classroom, with more governments following suit. And a company called Pitch-a-Kid even arranges for businessmen to pitch their ideas to an ‘unbiased, receptive, and inquisitive audience’.
So childhood becomes a business, and the earlier you start business the better. Little Davy forgot his lunch money? Offer him a loan — 20% interest, with marbles as part payment. Pam hasn’t done her homework? Do it for a fee — £10 a page, double for maths. Sue’s 100-metre dash? She can buy a runner to take her place. Want someone to carry your tuba? Sharpen your pencil? Think about it. The market is huge.
Children will learn that society spins on a market axis; that everything has its price, especially failure. And the reason for failure is not being entrepreneurial enough, because in a society stripped of all social protection, it follows that the only safety net left is entrepreneurship.
Yet at my school I don’t remember ‘selling’ or ‘entrepreneur’ being important words. The only selling ordinary people did was at jumble sales to raise money for a good cause; the sharpest elbows belonged to the pensioners you stood next to in the post office. We attended ‘comps’, or comprehensive schools — perhaps the biggest education experiment in British history. The roll-out of comprehensives removed the principle of selection from mainstream education by removing the divisive eleven-plus exam—doing away with competition. (The same principle Theresa May recently tried to re-introduce as Tory policy. But then scrapped.)
We didn’t worry about selling things because the foundation stones that post-war consumerism was built on — health, education, social services — were provided by the state or the local council, those social-democratic goliaths. (The state wrote you a letter every few years and gave you a passport; the council were people you half knew providing local services, and many of them had beards.) Yet Margaret Thatcher’s counter-revolution brought the elbow society within reach; and former education minister Michael Gove’s reforms-by-stealth, with schools opting out of local control and setting their own curricula, bring us to an ideological tipping point. Because with an increasing number of schools introducing private sector policies (like slashing wages), then teaching entrepreneurship — or ‘lemonade-making 101’ — is the next logical step.
Perhaps the pushing of an entrepreneurial agenda shows that governments can no longer provide what they used to. It’s for entrepreneurs to provide their own jobs, their own training, maybe even their own healthcare and pensions. Yet there’s a flaw. A society of entrepreneurs competing in the market means that some will fail, because that’s the nature of markets — in theory, they sort winners from losers. Yet if we’re telling children, even by implication, that Davy, Pam and Sue will be binned in the market’s sorting office, then what message are we communicating? We’re telling the next generation of citizens that selling is better than caring, that some people create jobs, while others drain resources. An elbow society is a divided society fuelled by inequality; and it’s not a society many of us enjoy living in now, let alone recommend as a blueprint for the future.
But maybe we should let child entrepreneurs rip. After all, lemonade is the perfect product, containing all the contradictions of capitalism: rising and popping bubbles, sweet and sour flavors, a buzzy aftertaste. Yet between making and selling lemonade there’s a gap. Production requires investment, with much economic investment flowing from the state. Getting lemonade to the customer requires transport infrastructure, again built largely by the state. To sell lemonade you need customers, and customers with money, so it’s in everyone’s interest for people to have money they can exchange for goods to keep the economy moving. A truly entrepreneurial society is therefore one built on cooperation instead of greed.
So perhaps rather than telling children to bow before the market and set up shop, we should teach them to provide the impossible.
Free lemonade for all! (Even for capitalists.)
