Archive for June 5th, 2008

Getting a Grip on “Supercapitalism.” Part five.

admin June 5th, 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 fifth installment of their correspondence. Keep checking back for future installments and please: share your thoughts by leaving a comment!

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5. FML: Throughout your book, you repeat that as consumers we now have more choice. Actually, we have less choice in many ways. In food, roughly ten corporations bring us about half the 30,000 items in a typical supermarket. Yet the choice relatively few consumers now have is healthy food, produced fairly, at affordable prices. Tens of millions of Americans live in poor neighborhoods where virtually no fresh food is to be found. Certainly choice means capacity to choose safety: Yet with untested chemicals used in most of our processed food and cosmetics and household cleaning agents etc., we do not have that choice. Last week The New York Times reported that 80 percent of ingredients in our pharmaceuticals are imported, with virtually no safety testing. Choice means little without information on which to base our selections. Yet, while 40 or more countries require labeling of food containing genetically modified organisms, such labeling has been blocked by industry here.

Certainly in all our other many roles, Americans feel choices shrinking: farmers lose the choice of staying in business. Young people lose the choice of going to college without being burdened in debt for decades. Almost 50 million feel they have no choice of affordable health insurance. And more.

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RR: I don’t claim (heavens!) that the choices we make are well-informed as to safety, health, or social consequences. Quite the contrary. In chapter three, for example, I show how our choices in food may satisfy us superficially but have terrible consequences for our health. Informed choice depends on adequate labeling, safety inspections, health care, and many other “social” choices we’re unable to make because our private consumer choices trump those important social decisions.

As to the choice of a farmer staying in business or a young person attending college without debt or someone getting affordable health insurance — the question has to be “relative to what?” In the earlier period, a much smaller percentage of our population attended college than now; fewer had any choice of health coverage (and the insurance they did have offered less in terms of drugs and tests, for good or ill); and, given the changing structure of the economy, certain occupations inevitably will become obsolete or so productive that relatively few people are needed in them (the advent of electric lights reduced the choices of candle makers staying in business). None of this is to suggest that American society is now fair or just. I only mean to suggest that, economically speaking — from the standpoint of consumers — we have more choices today.