Democracy and Economics

It's so far been an outstanding reading year for me.  Aside from books already mentioned in previous posts I've been pleasantly surprised by some I took a gamble on-- among them, The Veiled Prophet, David Thomas O'Shea's epic Palo Alto like account of St Louis's secret society of affluence and influence; Sarah Wynn-Williams' Careless People, a memoir and whistle-blowing expose of her former employer, Facebook (and do not for a minute entertain Facebook's quite predictable Scientology-like slander against her in their feeble defense); Trevor Jackson's unorthodox history of Capitalism, The Insatiable Machine; and Adam Johnson's scathingly dead-eyed media critique How to Sell a Genocide: The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza. To these I also add Lisa Herzog's The Democratic Marketplace (2025), a concise, succinct urgently argued  prescription for undoing the harms of the dying neoliberal order which threatens to be supplanted by something even worse for regular people if we do not act now to interdict it.  An economic philosopher, Herzog's book was written with a general audience in mind, and serves as a beautiful survey of the issues and threats at hand-- coming particularly out of the United States, Great Britain and lingering elements of the European establishment--  and the prospects for facing them.

In her introduction, Herzog describes the economics she discovered as a student as "a field in which abstract models reigned supreme and little attention was paid to actual economic life."  

The problem is that, especially as used in undergraduate teaching and public discourse, they convey simplistic pictures that come with implicit value judgments, or with assumptions about what is feasible institutional design, without laying these assumptions open to discussion. Economic models thereby distort and limit the imagination of how economic life could be organized, and how it could be brought in line with democratic values  The history of Western economic thought, which would help contextualize these models, is rarely taught; they are often presented as if they were universal truths. This is a kind of intellectual parochialism that can pose as universalism only because colonial and neocolonial power relations have spread this way of thinking all over the globe.

Herzog's book is a corrective.  A chapter by chapter scan through the table of contents is a good means of diving into the themes and focuses.

The first chapter, Markets, Corporations and Their Alliance Against Democracy, paints the picture of a rarefied elite, with the help of servicers in highest echelons of power, the mainstream media and the academies of the west, actively stifling the engagement of those who do not sit on boards, own corporations or tend to their growing fortunes through the auspices of rent.  This in a nutshell is roughly where the problem starts and resides. 

Chapter 2, Workers: Underlings or Citizens is the summation of the how the majority of the population has come to be missing from decisions that impact the entire planet; why this is a problem; and what can be done about it.  High on the list is the notion of the democratic workspace achievable either through inclusion, voluntary or mandatory of workers on the boards of companies, made easier through ownership  of the workplace in whole or in part by the public if not by the workers themselves.

The third chapter, Inequality: Why Democracies Need Less of it, is a thorough discussion of how inequality arises, how it functions to promote the interests of the excessively wealthy at the expense of everyone else, and the measures that can be taken to address the problem.  Herzog references the work of Ingrid Robeyns, whose 2024 book Limitarianism has already been discussed and endorsed by this blog. 

Among the topics of Chapter 4 - From Growth to Functions - is the heated debated between proponents of the Green New Deal or "Green Growth" as Herzog calls it, and those of "Post-Growth", another debate we have dealt with before.  On the one side, we have what Herzog critiques as a "utopian" project of retooling society for a labor-centered reorientation of the economy to a focus on production of instruments to mitigate the effects of growth for growth's sake on the planet.  On the other are those who would limit, if not outright ban, even comforts that take too much out of the environment.  Herzog's take is a refreshing one: she sees the conflict as one of small differences and urges that proponents of each camp find common ground and work  together to militate against our addiction to consumption and toward replacing the drive to accumulate endlessly with the development of a more healthy and in-tune relationship with nature.

Chapter 5, Time for Democracy, advocates shorter workweeks as a means of improving worker's lives, ideally with an eye to increasing participation in democracy even to the point of creating material incentives for it. Herzog considers "lottocracy", but ultimately rejects it as a utopian idea that does not have a lot of success to show for itself.  She points to the failure of Iceland's citizen council to promote adoption of a citizen re-written constitution in 2013 and a similar failure in France to use a council selected by sortition to effect change in the government's environmental policies.  This a valid criticism that those in the movement would do well to address.  In the meantime, Herzog advocates concrete incremental steps of reform to level differences in wealth and power across society and to increase participation and deliberative democracy on the part of all. 

In the final chapter, Repairing Democracy on the Open Sea, Herzog advocates dismantling 3 myths of economics that are in the way of a healthy democracy of full citizen participation.   The first is the myth that the pursuit of efficiency justifies austerity on the part of workers and expanding riches at the top, let alone any imposition of economic policy. Second, we need to destroy the taboo of questioning the supremacy of private property.  There are good reasons to believe that the accumulation of private property for wealth (as opposed to personal property for everyday needs and uses) is, aside from a merely  arbitrarily determined "value" of society that it is incorrect to assert is a natural right, an inevitable obstacle to the goal of a good life for everyone.   Finally, the presumption that economics is necessarily a system of winners and losers that it behooves individuals to game to their advantage is a harmful untruth, a choice that society and individuals would do well to unmake.   Instead of mindless competition that is ultimately a losing proposition for all Herzog urges cooperation to build a more full and fulfilling life for all.