Commercial Society: A Primer on Ethics and Economics

by Cathleen Johnson, Robert Lusch Professor of Marketing University of Arizona Business School, David Schmidtz

One of the greatest and most joyful challenges of adult life is to develop skills that make the people around us better off with us than without us. Integrity is a key part of that challenge. We are social animals, aiming not simply to trade but to make a place for ourselves in a community. You don’t want to have to pretend that you feel proud of fooling your customers into believing you could be trusted. The ethical question how do people have to live in order to make the world a better place with them than without them? The economic question what kind of society makes people willing and able to use their talents in a way that is good for them and for the people around them? The entrepreneurial question what does it take to show up in the marketplace with something that can take your community to a different level? In this book, the authors discuss the connections between the ethical, economic, and entrepreneurial dimensions of a life well-lived.

354 pages, Paperback

Published October 4, 2019

Reviews

[Francisco Galán · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love that this book discusses fundamental concepts about contemporary, commercial society. It helped me to make sense of the world we live in and my place in it, in a way that no other book or resource that I know of does.

But while some chapters are eye-opening, others seem taken from an economics textbook, a philosophy book, or a personal finance blog. It's confusing. I had a difficult time finding a common purpose or narrative throughout them. Most of them were about simple concepts I already knew about and, thus, were trivial or unhelpful.