Consider what typically constitutes “good” business news: the stock market is booming. corporate profits increase. business growth. In general, any factor that contributes to an environment in which companies can grow larger, hire more employees, generate more profits, and enrich investors to a greater extent. This vision of the legitimate purpose of business is so ingrained in America’s cultural fabric that a business journalist or analyst who would not accept it would never be hired. Still, it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what the economy really is.
The task of the economy is to work for the people. It is not people’s job to sacrifice themselves on the altar of the economy. The unconscious feeling drilled into all of us that we should feel some sense of collective pride at having been ground to dust in the service of economic growth is a sick indoctrination that is hard to stubbornly resist. The simple step of asking what the economy does for us—rather than what our lives contribute to the economy—can go a long way in redefining the way we think about it.
They say behind every fortune there is a crime; Likewise, behind every mainstream economic analysis lies a set of toxic assumptions designed to reassure us. Consider the problem of inflation. It’s rising worldwide. The growing consensus in the financial community is that the era of low inflation is finally over because the era of globalization that made it possible is coming to an end. In other words, it is becoming increasingly difficult for global corporations to hop around the globe in search of impoverished people to exploit for cheap labor. The generations of workers in China and Mexico and Bangladesh and elsewhere who served as the human fuel for low labor costs and cheap consumer goods in abundance now wish to imagine that one day they might lead a decent life. These workers have the odd notion that a lifetime of hard work should result in a higher standard of living for the next generation. This really throws a wrench into the capitalist formula of incessant back and forth to poorer and poorer nations to maintain desperately low wages. Like predatory Magellans, these companies are finding that you can only outsource jobs on planet Earth so many times before you end up back where you started.
If, like us, you focus your economy on making corporate profits, sustained increases in inflation are bad. But if you take it as a sign that finding millions of desperate people willing to work for pennies an hour isn’t quite as easy these days, it seems historic cause for celebration. If human thriving is our primary goal, the most obvious response to inflation is to make sure people have enough money to deal with rising prices — to make sure real wages go up for low-income workers, housing, health care and higher education is becoming more accessible and affordable. In other words, the human-centric response to inflation is public investment in public goods, a broad push to provide everyone with their basic needs. After all, there’s no better way to fight high prices than to make things for free.
However, if you view the economy as a machine to push up stock prices, your natural response to inflation is the opposite: austerity. Forcing a recession, creating higher unemployment and brutalizing workers into becoming desperate enough again to accept lower wages is also an effective way to combat high prices — and one that requires far less labor than, say, building a free public health care system. As long as you personally have enough money to protect yourself from the consequences of doing this, it can be quite appealing. It is no coincidence that this is the consensus decision of the global economic establishment, a group of people who can afford the luxury of not having to look at the issue from the perspective of a single mother clinging to a meager job in a Nuevo Laredo factory . So, for example, when you see prominent Democratic economists arguing against student debt relief, wonder if they might think differently if they were poor enough to be touched by the icy hand of ruinous debt themselves.
The idea that the very function of our economy is to enable people to lead a decent life brings with it an understanding that the distribution of material resources is of paramount importance. saying “The United States is the richest nation in the history of the world” means nothing to a person who has no assets and sleeps in their car. The serious distributional problem we have in our society, with a few billionaires and many more poor people, is treated as a secondary concern by traditional economic analysis. The simple intellectual act of accepting that the well-being of humanity is the very function of the economy is enough to prove, with little room for argument, that high inequality means your economy is collapsing. Politicians prefer the public to see economics as a mysterious area that ordinary people cannot understand. But everyone can understand that human rights are more important than money. All politics ultimately flow from these priorities.
The subject was formerly called Economics “political economy.” This was a more honest formulation—it reflected the fundamental truth that economics is inseparable from politics, and therefore also from morality. The impoverishment of working people is good news for America’s worst employers, who employ this human This is an economic fact, not a natural state of the world, it is instead a collective decision we have made to structure our system in a way that can be incentivized to do so . This system does not exist in nature; we built it. We can change it. Money is an imaginative invention, a useful creation, a method of facilitating exchange and making life easier. It is a tool that helps us It is by no means a master to be served.
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