Andrew Diamond

One assumption underlying this book is that every morning all 200 million of us get out of bed and put a lot of energy into creating and re-creating the social calamities that oppress, infuriate and exhaust us.

Much of the unpleasantness, abrasiveness, and costliness of American life comes from the fact that we’re always dealing with strangers. This is what bureaucracy is: a mechanism for carrying on transactions between strangers. Who would need all those offices, all that paperwork, all those lawyers, contracts, rules and regulations if all economic transactions took place between lifelong neighbors? A huge and tedious machinery has evolved to cope with the fact that we prefer to carry on our activities among strangers. The preference is justified, as are most of the sicknesses in American society, by the alleged economic benefits of bigness, but like many economic arguments, it’s a con.

Instead of starting with people and working from what people want, economists like to start with tasks: improving the condition of the corporations, or the market, or the interest rate, or the GNP [Gross National Product]. They talk of creating jobs, markets, demand. Economists assume that jobs must be created even for things that don’t need to be done so people can have money to spend on things they don’t need. And to get people to buy things they don’t need, we create a huge industry [advertising] to get them to want them. Meanwhile, the things people really need–food, shelter, safety, health, a pleasant environment–they can’t afford.

Money is supposed to be a tool–a means to some other end. But economists say things like, “What will be the effect of such-and-such a change on the Gross National Product, on employment, on the interest rate, on the stock market, on inventories, on new plant investment,” and so on. These are only measurements of means–what is the goal? What do we want to do with our work and our resources? Just make jobs? Just make money? A job does something. Money buys something. We keep forgetting what it is we want–what kind of environment, what kind of life. Do we work only to make more work, and get money only to accumulate more money?

The last thing we ever think about economically is what we need or want… In the long run no sound economy can be based on useless or destructive labor. The troubles we’re experiencing didn’t arise because someone made the wrong economic prediction, or used the wrong economic indicator or the wrong theory of corporate investment. They arose because we’ve been using our energies mindlessly for decades; we’ve put our labor and resources into activities that have brought us nothing back.