What happens when you immerse a brilliant mind into the combined disciplines of history and economics, then let him practice his craft, hone it for 55 years, and let him ruminate on the biggest dilemma of modern times for 30 or 40 of those years? Answer: He comes up with a set of original, brilliant ideas. And perhaps just in time.
Gar Alperovitz has been flying under the radar for the past 77 years. But no more. His latest book with the above title is the stuff for the Nobel Prize committee to read and take to heart. It is that profound. But it’s even more important to you and to me. Here is why:
The wealthiest Americans are sitting on $60 trillion of wealth, 7 times as much as all the rest of us combined. In addition, they and others have stashed perhaps another $32 trillion in offshore tax havens. That is hoarded wealth, nonproductive wealth, enough to solve all the world’s economic problems. And it all stems from one simple human shortcoming—greed.
Many of us have ranted about this enormous problem for years believing that awareness would stimulate action. Historians know better. Gar Alperovitz knows better. He has shown us a solution. It is so important I would rename his book “Civilization: Too Big to Fail.”
Here is a sample of what you will find in his book:
Democratizing wealth and building a community-sustaining economy from the ground up
Never before have so many Americans been more frustrated with our economic system, more fearful that it is failing, or more open to fresh ideas about a new one. The seeds of a new economy—and, if we act upon it, a new system—are forming.
What is that next system? It’s not corporate capitalism, not state socialism, but something else—something entirely American.
In What Then Must We Do?, Gar Alperovitz speaks directly to the reader about why the time is right for a revolutionary new economy movement, what it means to democratize the ownership of wealth, what it will take to build a new system to replace the decaying one—and how to strengthen our communities through cooperatives, worker-owned companies, neighborhood corporations, small and medium-size independent businesses, and publicly owned enterprises.
For the growing group of Americans pacing at the edge of confidence in the old system, or already among its detractors, What Then Must We Do? offers an evolutionary, common-sense solution for moving from despair and anger to strategy and action.
About the Author: Gar Alperovitz, Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, is cofounder of The Democracy Collaborative. He is a former fellow of the Institute of Politics at Harvard and of King's College at Cambridge University, where he received his PhD in political economy. He has served as a legislative director in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and as a special assistant in the Department of State. Earlier he was president of the Center for Community Economic Development, Codirector of The Cambridge Institute, and president of the Center for the Study of Public Policy.
Perhaps once in a lifetime, if you’re lucky, you will meet up with a white-haired older man who can speak without notes for a very long time. He doesn’t stammer, or use clichés, or fall back on somebody else’s stale old rhetoric. He mesmerizes you with his knowledge of facts and insights. And just when you think he has strayed too far into the past, and too far afield, with too many thoughts, he starts down a different path. He begins to link his thoughts into a fabric that illuminates, and draws you in even more. In the end he sums them up in the most convincing way. And considering his subject all along has been economics (the dismal science!), then he has worked a miracle.
Share
Save
Follow Me