Posted by:
Steve Dubb
Unjust Deserts highlights social nature of wealth
We call this website Community-Wealth.org, but we rarely discuss the nature of wealth on this site itself. An interesting paradox, however, of our age is revealed in a debate stirred by a recent book, featured on this website but until now not commented on by this blog, called Unjust Deserts. Co-authored by Lew Daly of Demos and Community-Wealth.org’s own Gar Alperovitz, the book is receiving increasing attention. Ezra Klein in American Prospect notes that typically the debate over the $1.57 trillion owned by the world’s 400 wealthiest individuals (as estimated by the 2008 Forbes 400 list) comes down to a single question: Is the wealth “earned” by these individuals a matter of “skill” or just “dumb luck”?
The argument of Daly and Alperovitz is different. As Klein notes in his review of the book, the argument goes beyond the question of “skill or luck” to look more fundamentally at how wealth is generated.
As Daly and Alperovitz highlight in their book, for decades leading economists have realized that most wealth is in fact socially generated. For example, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow calculated that 88 percent of output growth between 1909 and 1947 could not be explained by changes in land, capital, or labor. Rather, Solow found that it was technical change—which is to say, advances in knowledge and technique and capability—that powered growth. In other words, it is society — from the literal contribution to knowledge of those who came before we were born — that is responsible for most of our wealth. This finding makes current trends of growing inequality—the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently reported that 2006 was marked by “greater income concentration at the top [in the United States] than at any time since 1929"—very hard to justify.
Articles discussing Unjust Deserts can be founded at either of two websites. This site, maintained by Gar Alperovitz, was recently updated and contains links to a number of interviews and reviews, including an interview with Laura Flanders and a review by Hazel Henderson. Demos has its own book website, which includes links to a number of radio broadcasts.
Recently, the Library Journal included Just Deserts in its “Business Books: Best of 2008” listing. An interview, appearing last fall in Dissent Magazine also provides an interesting forum where Daly and Alperovitz discuss their work in more detail. In that interview, conducted by James Lardner shortly after the November 2008 election, Alperovitz highlighted the irony that a central argument advanced in the waning days of the campaign concerned whether the government could legitimately “spread the wealth around.” Noted Alperovitz, “the problem with Joe the Plumber’s critique of ‘spreading the wealth around’ is that it doesn’t take into account the fact that wealth is already highly socialized before we even start talking about taxation. It has already been ‘spread around’ by many kinds of social contributions that add far more value to our labor and investments than what anyone pays in taxes.