12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
an excellent look into our economy, October 25, 2000
"In a moral economy, with today's technology," Powelson begins his book, "no one should be poor." Because Powelson wanted to know why most of the world's people were nonetheless poor, he began about a quarter century ago "to read voraciously in histories all over the world" (p. ix). In 1994 the culmination of his reading, reflection, and analysis was published as Centuries of Economic Endeavor: Parallel Paths in Japan and Europe and Their Contrast with the Third World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). In The Moral Economy, he now attempts to describe the world of the future on the assumption that the most enduring trends observed in the past will continue. It is an optimistic book, because the trends he perceives can lead eventually to a world in which moral behavior will become routine in the sphere of economic activity, as people find it in their own interest to behave morally. Economic and political power will be diffused so that no person or group, including the government, is able to dominate others. Those who wish to contravene the rules will be disciplined by the market. "The moral economy," Powelson writes, "captures the benefits of technological invention through classic liberalism while using sidewise checks and balances to prevent environmental damage, ethnic and gender bias, and distorted distributions of wealth. . . . In the moral economy, governments facilitate but rarely mandate" (p. 19)...
Balance of power is the key to the moral economy, and the book abounds with suggestions about how the power of some to dominate others can be constrained. Powelson rejects libertarianism, because it has no role whatsoever for government, in favor of classic liberalism. This orientation manifests itself throughout the book in his concern for the freedom of individuals to make their own choices, under the constraint of rules in whose making they have participated, and in his high regard for the capacity of markets to constrain power while coordinating diverse projects. These elements are strikingly absent from the analyses and prescriptions of the foes of globalization...
The substantive part of the book begins with an instructive chapter on "Power and the Market," in which Powelson introduces the useful notion of "vicarious power." This is the power citizens want to exercise through government over the decisions of other citizens simply because they believe there is one right way, their way, to deal with such matters as education, health care, or making provisions for retirement. Next come chapters that examine the sources and potential remedies for poverty, environmental degradation, excessive population growth, and gender and ethnic bias, along with proposals for improved provision of welfare, retirement income, and health care. Subsequent chapters pertain to how we establish accountability, the role of trust in economic systems, management practices under different sets of incentives, the nature and importance of property rights, the operation and control of monetary systems, the proper roles of law and regulation, the causes and cures of corruption, appropriate principles of taxation, the large topics of education and religion, and the evolution of a shared sense of morality that would be an essential underpinning for a globalized moral economy...
The Moral Economy exemplifies a rare thing: a book by an author deeply concerned about establishing a moral economy who tries to look at the evidence and to pay attention to all viewpoints. It deserves a much wider readership than it is likely to receive. I wish it could find at least an equal place with When Corporations Rule the World on the reading list of the religious leaders who decided to join the Seattle demonstrations on behalf of God.
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