real utopias

Periodically, the New York Times publishes sobering long-form articles depicting the economy in dark tones that clash with their more upbeat business page reportage. For example, the NYT recently noted a pollindicating the decline of belief in The American Dream – Many Feel that The American Dream is Out of Reach, Poll Shows (December 10, 2014). While the poll showed a trend towards disbelief in attaining the American Dream, I was depressed to learn that 64 percent still believe “… it is possible to start out poor in this country, work hard and become rich.” This means that more Americans believe in the Dream than believe in the Devil.

There is now a widespread consensus that mainstream/neoclassical economists failed miserably to either predict the coming of the 2008 financial implosion, or provide a reasonable explanation when it actually arrived. Not surprisingly, many critics have argued that neoclassical economics has created more confusion than clarification, more obfuscation than elucidation. Economic “science” has, indeed, become “an ideological construct which serves to camouflage and justify the New World Order” [1].

There is now a widespread consensus that mainstream/neoclassical economists failed miserably to either predict the coming of the 2008 financial implosion, or provide a reasonable explanation when it actually arrived. Not surprisingly, many critics have argued that neoclassical economics has created more confusion than clarification, more obfuscation than elucidation. Economic “science” has, indeed, become “an ideological construct which serves to camouflage and justify the New World Order” [1].

Economist Juliet Schor is known worldwide for her research on the interrelated issues of work, leisure, and consumption. Her books on these themes include The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting, and the New Consumer, and Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth (retitled True Wealth for its paperback edition). She is also a professor of sociology at Boston College. —Eds.

This panel explored causes of the Great Recession and the continuing economic sluggishness since the recession’s ended, as well as how the left can respond to this situation. In keeping with the conference theme, panelists addressed what different analyses and theories imply about the kind of socioeconomic change that is called for.

Inequality and its corrosion of the body and the soul of capitalist societies has been the hottest topic among respectable liberal economists and political analysts in the United States since the crisis of September 2008. To be sure, Left economists have been tracing the twin scourges of flatlined real wages and widening inequality since the mid-1970s. But it took a major economic shock to move the most prominent and acute liberal pundits finally to bring the issue to the front of the line. Widely read liberal economists have over the last four years written books on the evils of inequality: Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality, James Galbraith’s Inequality and Instability, Robert Reich’s Aftershock, and its theatrically released dicumentary replica, Inequality For All, and Paul Krugman’s End This Depression Now! are only the most conspicuous of the outpourings of lamentation over what is now perfectly evident as inequality on the move – the gap between the very wealthy and the rest is entrenched and continuously widening. The embedded and worsening nature of capitalist inequality, and the kind of society it is creating, is one of the major foci of Thomas Piketty’s much-heralded book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.