Economic reconstruction is a process for creating a proactive vision of economic change. The most basic idea is that problems in the economy, such as deindustrialization, environmental decay, outsourcing, industrial incompetence, poverty and addiction to a permanent war economy are based on the design and organization of economic institutions. [1] Economic reconstruction builds on the ideas of various institutional economists and thinkers whose work both critiques existing economic institutions and suggests modes of organizing society differently (cf. Veblen, 1998). Economic reconstruction, however, places much more emphasis on the idea of alternative plans and alternative organization. [2]
The need for reconstruction occurs as fundamental problems plague the contemporary organization of the economic, political, and even "oppositional" spheres, such as the contemporary organization of social movements. These spheres each tend to support short-term solutions that do not leave in their wake the organization of resources and power in a way that is responsive to citizen needs. Power, democracy and critical alternatives are not linked. In contrast to this state of affairs, economic reconstruction supports the creation of new institutions and the redesign of old ones. The basic idea is to create a new way to organize the economy and society so that institutions work for, rather than against, peoples' interests and needs. [3]
The first generation of economic reconstructionists included Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey. [lower-alpha 1] The second generation included Lewis Mumford. [4] The third generation included Seymour Melman, Percival Goodman and Paul Goodman. [5] Key reconstructionists today include Barry Commoner, Gar Alperovitz and Marcus Raskin. [6] Key figures whose work informs the critique of contemporary society found in the work of economic reconstructionists include Stanley Aronowitz (in his writings about social movements, the state, universities and culture), Noam Chomsky in his writings about anarchist cooperatives and democracy, and John Kenneth Galbraith (in his writings about the economy and economists). Another important figure is Simone Weil whose writings about problems or limits attached to militarism, social science atomization, Marxism, the economy and political parties all resonate with an economic reconstruction agenda.
Advocates of economic reconstruction advocate fundamental change related to key social problems related to environmental decay, [7] militarism, [8] parasitic globalization, [9] unemployment and depressed living standards based on the social organization of work. [10] In the environment, a key challenge is redesigning "the technosphere" or the ways in which the means of production, transportation and distribution are designed on a relatively unsustainable basis. [11] When it comes to militarism, the key challenge is to support a demilitarized society through economic conversion, disarmament, alternative security, military budget reductions and related social innovations. When it comes to unemployment and depressed living standards, a key challenge is to promote economic democracy, through concrete institutions and actions such as cooperatives, worker participation and control, employee ownership plans, socially responsible firms, community procurement, and various initiatives to organize the economy on a decentralized basis. [12] In many cases, federations among local cooperatives or networks of such firms may prove essential to move beyond the problem of "economic democracy in one firm." [13]
Economic reconstruction also extends to the ways in which housing or communities and media are organized. By reducing dependency on the automobile, by linking work and residence, we can limit the problems creating by congestion, pollution and commuting (particularly those problems based on petroleum based automobile transportation. [14]
Some may argue that economic reconstruction can be reduced to socialism or economic democracy itself or perhaps principles found in various anarchist or radical writings. The problem, however, is that many of these plans lack operational details related to how alternative institutions would actually be designed. These details are essential for creating operational plans and actions. In addition, economic reconstruction is not limited to a specific challenge such as capitalism, but must also address other challenges, i.e. militarism, environmental decay, the sexual and ethnic division of labor, etc. A goal of economic reconstruction is to show the need for multiple, yet integrated solutions to societal breakdown. [15]
Thorstein Bunde Veblen was a Norwegian-American economist and sociologist who, during his lifetime, emerged as a well-known critic of capitalism.
Seymour Melman was an American professor emeritus of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.
A Veblen good is a type of luxury good for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own.
Institutional economics focuses on understanding the role of the evolutionary process and the role of institutions in shaping economic behavior. Its original focus lay in Thorstein Veblen's instinct-oriented dichotomy between technology on the one side and the "ceremonial" sphere of society on the other. Its name and core elements trace back to a 1919 American Economic Review article by Walton H. Hamilton. Institutional economics emphasizes a broader study of institutions and views markets as a result of the complex interaction of these various institutions. The earlier tradition continues today as a leading heterodox approach to economics.
The technocracy movement was a social movement active in the United States and Canada in the 1930s which favored technocracy as a system of government over representative democracy and concomitant partisan politics. Historians associate the movement with engineer Howard Scott's Technical Alliance and Technocracy Incorporated, prior to the internal factionalism that dissolved the latter organization during the Second World War. Technocracy was ultimately overshadowed by other proposals for dealing with the crisis of the Great Depression. The technocracy movement proposed replacing partisan politicians and business people with scientists and engineers who had the technical expertise to manage the economy. But the movement did not fully aspire to scientocracy.
Ted Howard is a social entrepreneur and author. He is the founder and Executive Director of The Democracy Collaborative and served as the Minter Senior Fellow for Social Justice with the Cleveland Foundation from 2010-2014. For more than 30 years, Howard has worked for non-profit organizations including UN agencies and The Hunger Project.
Wesley Clair Mitchell was an American economist known for his empirical work on business cycles and for guiding the National Bureau of Economic Research in its first decades.
Gar Alperovitz is an American historian and political economist. Alperovitz served as a fellow of King's College, Cambridge; a founding fellow of the Harvard Institute of Politics; a founding Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies; a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution; and the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland Department of Government and Politics from 1999 to 2015. He also served as a legislative director in the US House of Representatives and the US Senate and as a special assistant in the US Department of State. Alperovitz is a distinguished lecturer with the American Historical Society, co-founded the Democracy Collaborative and co-chairs its Next System Project with James Gustav Speth.
The National Commission for Economic Conversion and Disarmament was founded in 1988, with preliminary work starting as early as November 1987. The key principals behind the commission were Seymour Melman together with Jonathan Feldman and Robert Krinsky. The three, conceived of the commission as the extension of conversion activities, initiated at Columbia University linked to the Corliss Lamont Fellowship program in Economic Conversion and Disarmament.
Economic conversion, defence conversion, or arms conversion, is a technical, economic and political process for moving from military to civilian markets. Economic conversion takes place on several levels and can be applied to different organizations. In terms of levels, conversion can take place at the level of new innovation projects, divisions within multi-divisional firms, companies, and national economies. In terms of objects, conversion can govern workers, firms and land. Some of these scales obviously overlap. Organizations that can be converted include defense firms, military bases, and defense laboratories.
Douglas Fitzgerald Dowd was an American political economist, economic historian and political activist.
Cooperative economics is a field of economics that incorporates cooperative studies and political economy toward the study and management of cooperatives.
Institutionalist political economy, also known as institutional political economy or IPE, refers to a body of political economy, thought to stem from the works of institutionalists such as Thorstein Veblen, John Commons, Wesley Mitchell and John Dewey. It emphasizes the impact of historical and socio-political factors on the evolution of economic practices, often opposing more rational approaches. In the political sense, this implies the influences actors like the state have on socio-economic practices and the shaping of institutions via political decision-making.
Marcus Goodman Raskin was an American progressive social critic, political activist, author, and philosopher. He was the co-founder, with Richard Barnet, of the progressive think tank the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. He was also a professor of public policy at George Washington University’s School of Public Policy and Public Administration.
Simon Nelson Patten was an economist and the chair of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Patten was one of the first economists to posit a shift from an 'economics of scarcity' to an 'economics of abundance'; that is, he believed that soon there would be enough wealth to satisfy people's basic needs and that the economy would shift from an emphasis on production to consumption.
The New Economy Coalition (NEC) is an American nonprofit organization based in Boston, Massachusetts, formerly known as the New Economics Institute. It is a network of over 200 organizations based in the US and Canada working for "a future where people, communities, and ecosystems thrive...where capital is a tool of the people, not the other way around." as part of what it describes as the New Economy movement.
Economic democracy is a socioeconomic philosophy that proposes to shift decision-making power from corporate managers and corporate shareholders to a larger group of public stakeholders that includes workers, customers, suppliers, neighbours and the broader public. No single definition or approach encompasses economic democracy, but most proponents claim that modern property relations externalize costs, subordinate the general well-being to private profit and deny the polity a democratic voice in economic policy decisions. In addition to these moral concerns, economic democracy makes practical claims, such as that it can compensate for capitalism's inherent effective demand gap.
The term pluralist commonwealth refers to a systemic model of wealth democratization supported and facilitated by a variety of different institutional forms. Political economist and historian Gar Alperovitz is generally credited for the development of this model as a way to resolve socio-economic problems associated with corporate capitalism and traditional state socialism. Expanding upon proposals that focus more narrowly on state- versus worker-ownership or state- versus self-managed enterprises, this "pluralist" approach involves large-scale public ownership of corporate equity, worker-owned and community-benefitting enterprises, Community Development Corporations, nonprofit corporations and enterprising state and local public agencies. According to Waheed Hussain: "A pluralist commonwealth is a free-market society in which the economic returns on productive assets improve the lives of large communities of individuals, rather than a narrow elite."
The Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) is an international organization of economists working in the institutionalist and evolutionary traditions of Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons and Wesley Mitchell. It is part of the Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA), a group of approximately 55 organizations including the American Economics Association (AEA), that holds a three-day meeting each January.
The New Economy Movement in the United States is a group of organizations that are attempting to restructure the current economic system. The movement prioritizes human well-being over economic growth. Its primary goal is to localize the economy in an attempt to spread wealth and promote sustainable business practices. The New Economy movement challenges both neoclassical and Keynesian economics to include theories of ecological economics, solidarity economy, commons, degrowth, systems thinking and Buddhist economics. The movement promotes more public ownership of the economy through organizational structures such as cooperatives, and state-owned banks. The goal of these changes is to remove or alleviate harmful environmental and social impacts of capitalism through alternative economic as well as political practices. A principal leader of the movement is the political economist and activist Gar Alperowitz, who, with others, promote the democratizing ownership of businesses and the economy as a means to achieve a sustainable, fair, and equal society.
