Review Essay on Economics for the Common Good
Every economist and economics graduate student, including the theorists, should read this fine book. It develops the basic themes of social economics: the goal should be an economics of human well-being, based on objective social values and individual self-development. A normative approach to human well-being needs to replace the conventional emphasis on economic rationality and economic efficiency. This review examines the argument chapter by chapter, with comments and criticisms, and closes with an overall evaluation. The first five chapters explore the meaning of social economic thought and the common good. The social economy is seen as an organic community that features a harmonious relationship of its various parts, with a general agreement on personal and social values, in which individual desires are modified by the need to meet the needs of others. The goal of the social economy is to provide for the basic needs of all?food, clothing and shelter?and to provide opportunity for each to achieve self-fulfillment and self-satisfaction. The economy as social relationships within the larger community, motivated by common recognition of social values, is contrasted with the view of the economy as competing individuals, motivated by materialist acquisitiveness, whose conflicts are converted to harmony by market forces. These themes are reinforced in the second chapter, which discusses the social economics of J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, who began his career as a follower of Adam Smith, but who became an advocate of a positive role for government in "the management of the national fortune for the happiness of all" including protection of the poor. The usual interpretation of Sismondi in the history of economic thought is simply as a contributor to the corpus of classical economics,