Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy,
by Gar Alperovitz, published by Wiley & Co.
There are voices speaking the words the world needs to hear. One belongs to political scientist Gar Alpervoitz. Alpervoitz has not hesitated to face up to the challenges before us. From the redistribution of wealth and rules governing property ownership to moving the boundaries between capitalist and socialist economics and creating a just and sustainable economy, he effortlessly outlines a bold and practical vision and places it in a powerful historical context.
In the introduction to America Beyond Capitalism Alpervoitz writes:
HOW DO WE DETECT when a society is in trouble–real trouble? What canary in the coal mine signals danger? The real signs of major trouble are to be found not only in huge deficits, unemployment, even terrorism. The time to pay close attention is when people begin to lose belief in things which once mattered profoundly––like the most important values which have given meaning to American history from the time of the Declaration of Independence: equality, liberty and democracy.
Beyond this, if equality, liberty, and meaningful democracy can truly no longer be sustained by the political and economic arrangements of the current system, this defines the beginning phases of what can only be called a systemic crisis––an era of history in which the political-economic system must slowly lose legitimacy because the realities it produces contradict the values it proclaims.
To grant the simple possibility that the present system, like others in history, might one day be transformed opens a certain perspective on possibilities both for the coming century and for its opening decades. The tendency of those who think about “systemic change” is commonly towards abstraction. Words like “revolution” appear often in traditional writing. It is striking that––again, just below the surface of most media concern–there has also been an extraordinary explosion of practical real world economic and political experimentation in the United States which ties in with (and points in the direction of) some of the main features of the new system-oriented ideas.
Systemic change, above all, involves questions of how property is owned and controlled–i.e., the locus of real power in most systems.
These are fairly “radical” ideas, and you’d never suspect them from someone with his resume. Alpervoitz is a Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland; a former Fellow at Kings College, Cambridge; a founding Fellow of the Institute of Politics at Harvard; a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies; and a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution. Unlike many academics, he comes from a political background and was a Legislative Director in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and a Special Assistant concerned with United Nations issues in the Department of State.
Those are impressive credentials and they serve to make his ideas even more so. In a world of incremental thinking, Alpervoitz is all about systemic change. He’s also willing to risk the kind of name-calling that scares the hell out of his progressive brethren. Anyone who writes books and talks openly not only about income inequity but about income redistribution, is putting a bull’s-eye on his back. And Alpervoitz is fearless.
In his most recent book, Unjust Deserts, written with Lew Daly, he challenges the very notion of who should rightfully own the wealth that an increasingly small group of individuals claim as their own.
Alpervoitz finds that humanity’s “stock of knowledge” now plays a central role in economic growth and is largely responsible for the real income gains that separated the twentieth century from all that came before it. He declares this “stock of knowledge” a social inheritance that should not be the exclusive province of a select group of individuals. Created by many generations of people, and nurtured by governments, institutions, and cultures, it was not produced nor should it belong to a tiny group of uber-capitalists who have leveraged it into fantastic amounts of money.
Yet even as our economic growth has become highly socialized by the impacts of expanding knowledge, the fruits of that knowledge—the well-being generated by knowledge-based growth—flows increasingly to the top. A new aristocracy is reaping huge unearned gains from our collective intellectual wealth. Unjust Deserts, says Barbara Ehrenreich, “reveals the untold story of wealth creation in our time,” and, as Bill Moyers writes, “opens an extraordinary new vista on the moral bankruptcy of our second Gilded Age.”
Unjust Deserts also challenges the notion that real estate and natural resources should exclusively benefit the individuals who were lucky enough or smart enough to write a check to purchase those assets.