Book review: The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy

In my opinion, one of the major plagues on America today is capitalism run amok, or as I call it, BKC (brass knuckles capitalism). Corporations in America are far too powerful and getting stronger all the time. They have seriously corrupted both state and federal governments and both major political parties. Corporate rot is everywhere in government, commerce and society. The defining hallmark of BKC running free, wild and butt naked is its complete lack of social conscience. 

The only moral value of high priority concern is profit. Harm to consumers, destruction of the environment, limiting civil liberties, and even attacking democracy itself, are matters that BKC elites blithely turn over to the public relations department for dealing with. The PR people are experts at lying, slandering, deflecting, deceiving, subverting inconvenient facts and truths, hiding corporate sleaze in opacity and all other kinds of disgusting, immoral dark free speech. 

The WaPo published a review of the book The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy by Nick Romeo, a writer for the New Yorker and a professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. This is worth a read because it argues for injecting some morality and social conscience into economics. The WaPo writes (the review is here, not behind a paywall):

‘The Alternative’ is just the book economists should read — and won’t

Journalist Nick Romeo lays out eight examples of what we gain when we think about morality alongside money

In Romeo’s diligently researched and admirably principled new book, “The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy,” he argues that the world wrought by neoclassical economics is “perfectly logical” — but horrifically inhumane.

Fortunately, it is not the only option. The eight case studies in “The Alternative” present diverse solutions to the problems of paltry wages, rampant unemployment, unstable housing and exploitative labor practices. At a time when global and national politics often overshadow local victories, it is heartening to hear of a successful workers’ cooperative in Spain, or of the small city in Portugal that empowers its residents to determine how to allocate its budget, or of the handful of American cities where there are plans to establish “a public-sector platform to create more humane and efficient labor markets” — in effect, to reconceptualize gig work as a public utility so as to protect workers while allowing them to enjoy flexible schedules.

Though the tactics he chronicles differ dramatically, they are all designed to reimagine “the economy as a place of moral action and accountability,” and they are all examples of the sort of compassionate creativity that Summers and his ilk should, but probably won’t, dare to muster.

“The insight that economics is in essence a subfield of philosophy was once widespread,” Romeo writes wistfully. In an earlier era, many of the subject’s leading lights were commendably humanistic: Adam Smith is renowned as both a moral philosopher and the founder of the dismal science.

But in the intervening centuries, mainstream academics have adopted what Romeo describes as “a technocratic, quasi-scientific vocabulary,” an arcane lexicon that “obscures the ethical and political questions that lie at the heart of the discipline.” Although “the major topics of economics are inescapably moral and political,” many of today’s thinkers refuse to countenance value judgments, much less acknowledge that their supposedly neutral methods are rife with questionable assumptions.  

One pathbreaker who features prominently in “The Alternative” is Aaron Seyedian, founder of Well-Paid Maids, a cleaning service in Washington that pays workers $22 an hour before tips and provides them with “an expansive benefits package with twenty-four days of paid time off annually, predictable schedules, employer-paid commuting costs, and excellent health, dental, and vision benefits.” In depressing contrast, “the median hourly wage for cleaners in Washington, D.C., is $15.44 an hour, and many lack sick leave, vacation, or unemployment insurance.”

Now that is a book that all economists should be forced to read and then re-read. As Romeo argues, economics is both moral and political and that is how it started out. 

How did we go from an admirable mindset of moral economics to utterly immoral BKC? As far as I can tell, it is mostly (~95% ?) a matter of those with wealth and power wanting more wealth and power. Morals get in the way of profit. If morals go away, profits and power increase. I firmly believe that describes the morally rotted economic situation America is mired in. 

OK, class dismissed. milo!! Stop poking Ronson with that stick . . . . . you are such a hairpin, young man! Go sit in the corner for 10 minutes and think about how you would like it if Ronson poked you with that stick! 

By Germaine: Seeker of morality in politics, commerce, society, government, and religion (yes, religion too)