An Economy of Want. Economics Reworked. By Donald Power. ISBN 978-1399985888. Also available free from Amazon as an e-book.
This self-published book starts off well enough. That, like all other animals, humans survive by applying their natural energy to obtain from the rest of nature what they need. Thanks to humans’ particular anatomy, their needs — or ‘wants’ as Power calls them — have become immensely greater than those of any other animal, as have the ways of obtaining from nature the means of satisfying them. How they obtain them has been the basis of the economic system of every human society.
Present-day society, he points out, is one where a minority owns most natural resources and instruments of production, fashioned and refashioned from materials that originally came from nature, while the rest have nothing but their natural ability to work. The latter have to work for the former and provide them with the means to satisfy their wants. This means, Power claims, that the economy is driven by what the owners ‘want’ in order to satisfy their needs. They pay workers to produce these and so provide workers with the money to satisfy some of their own ‘wants’ even if not much more than enough to maintain their particular ability to work.
That is alright as far as it goes, but the assumption is that what drives the economy today is the consumption wants of the owners. Power explicitly states this and it is the basis of his argument against the dominant school of economics that teaches that the free market system tends to lead to full employment and also of his explanation of booms and slumps. According to him, the level of employment depends on what the owners want (desire) to consume, so it is entirely possible that they might not want enough to bring about the full employment of the whole workforce. Booms are explained by the owners coming to want more and slumps by their coming to want less after the bubble bursts. He would seem to be saying that the economy is driven by the arbitrary desires of business owners.
He is, however, on the right track in that how today’s economy moves does depend on what the owners do with the surplus that the workers provide them with. But it is not what they want to consume that drives the economy but what they re-invest — or don’t. Power is well aware that they seek profits but gives the impression that this is something they decide to do when they desire to consume more. In reality, it is something that is forced upon them by the workings of the competitive struggle for profits, which is part of what capitalism is; they have to give priority to re-investment in more modern machinery and methods just to survive as a business concern. The capitalist economy is not driven by consumption, not even the consumption of the capitalists. It is driven by business owners’ market-imposed quest for profits, not their own consumption. What we have today is not so much an Economy of Want as an Economy of Profit.
Power’s main concern is to save the planet. Because he thinks that the economy is driven by wants rather than profits, he thinks that it can be reformed — ‘redesigned’ is a word he uses — to work differently by measures to change what people want to buy or use. He proposes to limit the consumption of the owners and, through taxes and subsidies, to re-direct the population towards wanting goods and services whose production and use don’t harm the rest of nature. This is a desirable goal but is incompatible with the present economic system which is driven by profits not wants and so requires its abolition.
Having said this, the book is written in simple, easy-to-read English. It is also refreshing to read a book from a critic of the way capitalism works who doesn’t repeat nonsense about banks having the power to create money from thin air. He accepts that work is the basis of wealth-production. In fact, he uses a labour theory of value, even though he doesn’t realise that Marx was as aware as he is that this doesn’t explain the price of land, paintings or the high income of talented footballers and other artists (demand in relation to unique supply does; the labour theory only applies to what can be reproduced).
Adam Buick
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