Our Vision
The coronavirus crisis has thrown societies and economies around the world into a state of unplanned and unexpected transition. No society entered into the crisis with an eye to establishing a just economy; nevertheless, an economic transition of some sort has already begun.
In the US, the failure of society to protect all portions of the population consistently and equally cast into painful relief the fundamentally broken nature of the existing social order and has already yielded new efforts to define the content of a social compact that would deliver the foundations of health and economic security for all.The contributors to this volume come from diverse backgrounds and disciplines, and we did not seek to converge, nor do we think it possible to converge, on a single, ideal end state before taking action. Yet we all shared a core set of commitments: avoiding domination, ensuring broad-based economic security and social and ecological sustainability, and preserving dynamism in the face of uncertainty and continuous change. Because of our shared commitment to recognizing uncertainty and fallibility of institutions as a basic condition, our method has been fundamentally pragmatist in its orientation, translated into the shared assumption that a transition toward a more just economy involves a dynamic process that is guided by principles and that expects and requires iterations. The transition would begin without preconceptions about the details of the solutions, but with a belief that solutions are embedded in knowledge that emerges from learning in society, and is best discoverable through a process of iteration—learning, doing, adapting, and learning once more. Taking as given the conditions of extreme uncertainty in which we live, it would be dangerous, contentious, and counterproductive to try and identify an end state. What we need to begin transitioning to a just economy is a commitment to collaborative investigation, subject to a set of guiding principles.
What guiding principles might put us on our way toward a more just economy? Consistent with a pluralist and pragmatist commitment, we do not propose a comprehensive list or single overarching principle. One that we are confident should not be left off the list is non-domination, where domination is defined as having arbitrary reserve control over others.1 A just economy is one that is not constructed on foundations of, nor permits, domination. Promoting non-domination will involve developing social relations of production that are attentive to power in markets and redress power by providing the resources for building counterpower for those presently operating under domination. It will involve developing economic models that, if adopted at a sufficient scale, offer distinctive opportunities to satisfy basic needs and desires and engage in the economy, without being subject to systematically imbalanced economic power, and that support sources of political power necessary for more egalitarian politics.
What should we seek? Economic policy, and often social policy associated with it, has in the past been focused on maximizing economic performance, usually measured as gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, on the assumption that once “the pie” is as large as it can be, social policy can be pursued around distribution. Our shared understanding that political economy involves values and conflicts in production, not only in distribution, and that a stark distinction between the political and economic cannot be sustained, requires a different set of goals and a different set of measurements. If we seek an economy and society committed to non-domination, broad-based economic security, and social and economic sustainability while preserving and encouraging social, cultural, and economic dynamism, we cannot continue to rely on economic growth as a single aggregate goal or metric. In part, the goal is to move past poorly calibrated, aggregate measures and proxies for well-being like GDP. Instead, we would like to push toward metrics that will both help people steer toward the goal of a just economy and help others to gauge whether they are steering effectively.
But the primary goal is to explore institutions and processes that would lead to a political economy that avoids domination, ensures broad-based economic security and sustainability, and preserves dynamism. Such a goal cannot be pursued through a predetermined path, say, a proper “mix” of the economy in terms of public and private ownership. Instead, we imagine this to be a dynamic process that expects and requires iterations. Our shared view is that advanced economies are in pressing need of institutional experimentation to include exploring new forms of corporate governance, public-private partnerships, and redesigned structures and goals for the admi