by Louis O. Kelso and Patricia Hetter
(click on title above to view full paper | 85kb
PDF file - requires Adobe
Acrobat Reader to view and print.)
Great crises come when great new forces are at work changing fundamental
conditions, while powerful institutions and traditions still hold
old systems intact.
Willliam
Graham Sumner, 1904
Everywhere the realization is growing that something is wrong—fundamentally
and dangerously wrong—with the world’s economic structure. People
who want to work are finding it increasingly difficult to earn a good
living. Leaders in the Western industrial democracies are tacitly
abandoning their formal economic goal of full employment, finding that
the costs of creating it are unacceptable.
Yet the historical tendency of the rich to grow richer and of the
poor to sink into dependency accelerates, while the middle class loses
ground or struggles to retain its tenuous foothold. Despite awesome
technological progress, the wondrous accomplishments of science, engineering,
agriculture, and public health, we seem as stymied as ever by the wealth-poverty
dichotomy that is turning neighborhoods, cities, nations, and the world
itself into a battleground of haves versus have-nots. Hopeless
poverty, social alienation, and economic breakdown in a world that
has all the physical, technical, managerial, and engineering prerequisites
for improving the lives of millions attest to a crippling organizational
malfunction that prevents us from making full use of the powers we
have developed. Many other apparently insoluable problems also
point to a structural defect: increasing economic dependence on arms
production and sales, rising public and private debt, unmarketable
production surpluses in agriculture and manufacturing, the loss of
domestic and international markets to foreign competitors, and the
lack of an alternative to full-employment. The inability of our
leaders to solve these problems, or even contain them, is undermining
confidence in democracy.
This book is concerned with root causes—the root cause of poverty
and, more important, of affluence in the modern industrial world. It
is concerned not only with economic helplessness and dependency, but
also with economic power and independence. It investigates the
source of personal and individual economic power, not to eliminate
it, as the socialists have vowed to do, but to extend it beyond the
rich to the traditional disenfranchised poor and middle classes.
Read More - Download the
full paper (85k PDF)
-- Originally published in Democracy and Economic
Power: Extending the ESOP Revolution through Binary Economics (Maryland:
University Press of America, 1991), pp. 3-9.
