We need to rethink our economic assumptions
The author advocates that we move past neoliberalism- the dominate economic paradogm.
Read the rest at the link. The author gets it wrong at the end of the article about taxes and government revenue,To defeat Trump in the upcoming election, Democrats are advancing a set of proposals engineered to excite their base: a single payer health system, college for all, a guaranteed jobs program. All are worthy of debate but perhaps the problems go deeper. Perhaps they go to the core of our beliefs about how the world works, what makes the economy tick, and how this relates to human welfare.
The dominant paradigm right now is what is sometimes called Neoliberalism which I define as a belief in the efficiency of markets. Those on the left believe that a market economy needs more than a little help from government. There are social costs and benefits that markets ignore; economic downturns are not self-correcting; and a lack of competition or transparency can harm consumers. By addressing these and other shortcomings, government can free the market to do what it does best. Still, the central belief is that markets are the most efficient way to organize a society and by extension optimize individual freedom.
Critics of this paradigm note that it is fundamentally flawed. Human beings are not just consumers, they don’t always behave rationally, and they don’t always maximize their own well-being. They need a sense of community, they care about the welfare of others, and their sense of what matters goes well beyond a larger GDP. They respond not just to economic incentives but to the desire for respect from their peers, to social norms, and to moral or religious principles. There is an efficient allocation of resources to go with every possible allocation of dollar votes and the distribution of dollar votes should be a communal decision arrived at by democratic means.