Recasting Egalitarianism: New Rules for Communities, States and Markets

by Samuel Bowles, Harry Brighouse, Herbert Gintis

In Recasting Egalitarianism , part of Verso’s Real Utopias series, economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis diagnose the current malaise of the Left as a result of the obsolescence of its traditional economic models. They propose to rejuvenate the egalitarian project through a strategy of asset-based redistribution, drawing in novel ways on markets, competition, state regulation and community governance. In this major work on economic and social policy, the authors address the twin challenges posed by a globally integrated economy and the key economic roles now played by information, motivation, and other intangibles. They propose an egalitarian redistribution of assets—land, capital, and housing—and argue for the beneficial disciplining effects of competition both in markets and among publicly-funded service providers, pointing out that the injustices commonly associated with markets can be avoided if assets are more equally distributed. The lead essay in the book lays out the underlying logic of this proposal in some detail. This is followed by responses by critics and supporters.

Genres: Economics

412 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.

Samuel Bowles is Research Professor and Director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute and Professor of Economics at the University of Siena. He is coauthor of Notes and Problems in Microeconomic Theory (North Holland Texts in Mathematical Economics) and Schooling in Capitalist America (Basic Books), and has published articles, most recently, in the American Economic Review, Nature, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Economic Journal, and the Journal of Theoretical Biology.

Reviews

[g.lkoa]

This collection owes much of its arrangement to the themes adressed in Democracy & Capitalism, of which it can be counted as the EtR, sort of Verso-approved alternative revised&corrected for the aficionados of the Real Utopias series. As such, it comes off as just anatomically designed to lose most of the nuances as well as the most demanding, yet fascinating, subtextual "technicalities" of the ’86 work... not to say its distictly sensible flavor. The most part of these contributions manage pretty well to deliver a bunch of good sightings, also offering a more gentle synopsis of some discrepancies, parapraxes (if not detachment from the *real* and its incremental complexity) of the lefty/rad intelligentsia, probably intelligentsia tout court. But some of the essays were redundant. It’s worth noticing that in the meanwhile elapsing the aforementioned book and this one, the last strand of the Langeesque, Noveesque, then Roemeresque worker-control firm's thread (rampantly held by B&G until mid-’80s) eventually started to consummate.