real utopias

According to economist Lance Taylor and his colleagues, we're not yet talking about the kinds of major changes needed to keep us from becoming a Downton Abbey society....

Not since the Great Depression of the 1930s has it been so apparent that the core capitalist economies are experiencing secular stagnation, characterized by slow growth, rising unemployment and underemployment, and idle productive capacity. Consequently, mainstream economics is finally beginning to recognize the economic stagnation tendency that has long been a focus in these pages, although it has yet to develop a coherent analysis of the phenomenon.1Accompanying the long-term decline in the growth trend has been an extraordinary increase in economic inequality, which one of us labeled “The Great Inequality,” and which has recently been dramatized by the publication of French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.2 Taken together, these two realities of deepening stagnation and growing inequality have created a severe crisis for orthodox (or neoclassical) economics.

Recently I was encouraged to take a look at an important book that has some answers for the future of our society and democracy. The book is Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, a political economist. It seemed to shock the pundits of the talk shows, but to me it explained the obvious, backed up with three centuries of data from 20 countries.

The latest bestseller in economics has done a great deal of service to progressives in highlighting the imperative of shared wealth. But given the social and ecological limits to economic growth, this emerging conversation on global sharing has to get a lot more radical.