Mixed Media

BY JASON ASHLOCK

BY PHIL GRAMM, JOHN EARLY, AND ROBERT EKELUND

BY TIM JACKSON

A curious new tradition has emerged among chief executives. As a calendar year draws to a close, CEOs across industries seem to find it important to tell us what they’ve read. Their gift to us is, apparently, a kind of literary performance. Such seasonal bookishness can be playful or pedantic, vapid or visceral. It depends. But because they have soared on fiscal wings above the madding crowd, our late capitalist philosophy suggests they must surely hold superior intellect as well. Thus, attention must be paid.

This brings us to a stack of books on Doug McMilllon’s desk.

The CEO of Wal-Mart is an anomaly. A product of rural America who levitated above his farmland origins to his current perch above the world’s largest employer, it’s hard not to see Mr. McMillon as a particularly American image of possibility. Every morning, more than two million humans wake up and go to work for the organization he leads. So, it is notable when, along with predictable book recommendations about the metaverse and generic self-improvement, one spots a work of peculiarly insidious denialist propaganda, The Myth of American Inequality.

The title of former Senator Phil Gramm’s recent work, a specious and ideological rereading of decades of economic data, leaves little to interpret. In the fantasy world of Gramm, all that you think you know about the wealth gap is wrong. It is, in fact, a sad story spun by leftist academics based on flawed data models that have then been perpetuated by the government and allowed to dominate the debate for decades. Until, our noble Senator arrives to set the thinking of Thomas Pinketty, Janet Yellen, Marianne Bertrand, Lawrence Summers, and the vast majority of economists in the world straight. Like the climate change denialists with whom Gramm keeps close company, his genre is science fiction without the science.

One might expect such an apologia from a retired politician who played a significant role in the monetary policies that created an extraordinary divergence in prosperity and potential. The chief executive of Wal-Mart, of course, has a front-row seat—as both employer and retailer—to the challenges facing families and communities living in the world Gramm’s policies helped create, while simultaneously overseeing a company that benefitted tremendously from the same. So perhaps fidelity should not be surprising. But might one be forgiven for thinking it’s a little on the nose?

In his brutally clear-eyed assessment of the current state of capitalism, Post Growth, Tim Jackson would place a Gramm-McMillon alliance in the category of a declining system’s desperate attempts to defend itself against eventual demise. Where Gramm takes comfort in his tiny house of ideological defensiveness, Jackson takes to the hills, wandering a vast and diverse landscape of economists, politicians, poets, and practitioners to interrogate what he deems the “foundational myth of capitalism

In truth what Jackson describes is not one myth but many, what Arlie Hochschild names the “deep story,” a richly imbricated collection of narratives that comprise what we understand as Capitalism This particular story has held powerful sway over the imaginations and behaviors of our societies, with the assumption of perpetual growth, the refusal of human limitations, and even the denial of death dominating our decisionmaking context and legitimizing a succession of policies that have proven disastrous for the planet and its human population

Like all stories, however, this one must come to an end From Jackson’s panoramic seat, the foundational myth of capitalism has been crumbling for decades Hastening its demise are long-term trends decreasing labor productivity, subsequent collisions between wage-earners and profit-owners, the surpassing of planetary boundaries that sustain current practices of production and distribution—dysfunctional patterns which have been increasingly obvious but easily avoided, hidden by the curtain of prosperity and the fables of leaders like Gramm.

Jackson’s view is not only backwardfacing, while his criticism of capitalism’s fallacies and foibles is needle-sharp, he is also well-practiced at the reasonable delivery of heterodox ideas. Since the publication of his seminal work Prosperity Without Growth in 2009, he has been a leading voice among the movement that ranges from the pragmatists Green New Dealers to the radical DeGrowthers, which vary in their tactics but are joined by their daring to imagine beyond the waning days of capitalism to what’s next. Such a post-growth narrative is rich with possibility, and Jackson delights in exploring the new mythic terrain. Placing in conversation thinkers as varied as Rosa Luxembourg, Pierre Thielhard de Chardin, Emily Dickinson, Thich Nhat Hanh, Martin Heideggar, Jeremy Bentham, and dozens more, Jackson makes a case for a nonincremental shift to a new social contract, one he sees made evident in the public sector response to the COVID-19 pandemic The swift and historic action taken by governments and society provides a model for bold action that can usher in a promising new era of human flourishing