Getting a Grip

admin May 29th, 2008

When Frances Moore Lappé has a question about something she does her research, reaches out, and asks away.

Recently she did just that, writing directly to Robert B. Reich, in response to her read of his 2007 book, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life. Reich wrote back at length, clearly glad to engage in the back-and-forth. Below is the third installment of their correspondence. Keep checking back for future installments and please: share your thoughts by leaving a comment!

3. FML: You suggest that “we” have made a Faustian bargain to have cheap consumer products while foregoing our capacities to earn a living wage and have social protections. A “bargain” is a conscious choice. “We” were not given a choice. I feel strongly that if the citizenry had been allowed to choose between good incomes with some job security plus affordable housing and health care and education versus cheap goods at big box stores we would have chosen the former. If we citizens had been engaged in coming to public judgment, we would likely, I feel, have realized that with better incomes we would not have felt compelled to betray our own preferences for healthy communities with independent, hometown stores and decently paid labor. In other words, I feel certain that virtually all of us, if given the choice, would have opted for continuing the pattern of the first period in which all income groups did well and the poorest did the best—and even the richest quintile did better than in the second period!

More generally, I find your use of the royal “we” troubling. You imply that we’ve all gained in the second period because all of us are consumers and most of us investors. I understand that less that 7% of the bottom half of Americans by income own shares. And the concentration of gain from investment income is so skewed that the use of the term “we” is misleading.

RR: I don’t mean to suggest that we made the bargain willingly or knowingly. In fact, the gist of my argument is that our democracy has become so overwhelmed by corporate money that we lost our capacity address the tradeoffs between the consumer-investors in us and the citizens in us, and therefore allowed consumer-investor values to trump all others.

(You’re right that most saving is concentrated in a relatively small number of households, but unlike the first period, a majority of households now hold some shares of stock and therefore “shop” for good investment deals; more importantly, all households engage in consumption, and now shop quite vigorously for good deals. Widening inequality is of course a huge and growing social problem; under any Rawlsian notion of fairness, though, we wouldn’t willingly vote for it. The problem, again, is in the incapacity of citizens to express themselves in a democratic process that is responsive to them.)

• Frances , Guest writer , Robert Reich