Frank this resonates deeply - you've articulated exactly why our current economic framework feels so fundamentally broken. The dignity economy you're describing isn't just a nice ideal, it's actually achievable with the policy tools we already have available.
Your diagnosis points to the prescription: we've been trapped by economic mythology that treats scarcity as natural law when it's really just policy choices serving corporate interests. Since 1971, money has functioned as a coordination tool we create, not a scarce resource limiting what's possible. The "tough choices" politicians talk about are artificial constraints designed to maintain existing power structures while trillions flow to corporate subsidies and bailouts.
The dignity you're describing becomes practical through systematic changes: federal job guarantees creating meaningful work in infrastructure and community development, giving working families the same wealth-building advantages businesses already get through depreciation rules, and community-controlled economic development powered by federal resources. When we guarantee economic security - healthcare, education, housing stability - we don't suppress innovation, we enable it. People can take real entrepreneurial risks when failure doesn't mean catastrophe.
What excites me most is how this transcends traditional political divisions. A Republican small business owner struggling against monopolies, a Democratic parent losing wealth to planned obsolescence, an independent rural family worried about security - they all benefit from the same systematic changes that create genuine dignity and opportunity. The current system extracts wealth from anyone who works for a living while concentrating it among those who already have political connections.
We don't need to wait for capitalism to collapse or retreat to purely local solutions while authoritarians capture national policy. We can build a broad coalition around making capitalism actually work for dignity and opportunity creation rather than wealth extraction. I've been working on a framework that shows exactly how to implement what you're describing - the specific policies and coalition-building approach that can make the dignity economy real:
Gain valuable economic skills in a profession that can ultimately meet your lifestyle needs, go to market, spend less than you make. 10 years later, or about 25% through a normal working career, you'll be fine. That's all I would require for a society. In the meantime just manage. Amazing how many people can't follow that plan, or follow the law, or wait until they're married and emotionally and financially stable enough to have children so they can raise kids to do the same.
I think the problem is that this plan is now out of date. That's how it used to work, an that's the assumptions baked into our system of how it's supposed to work. But that is falling apart and basically already gone. The problem is that the people who played by the plan and are still churning away inside the system naturally still think this plan works when the reality is they're just the lucky ones who got in on the old rules and the new rules haven't yet chosen to spit them out.
If things still worked that way, we'd be fine. My point is we need to create a pipeline like that built for the way things work now so folks can once again work hard and play by the rules and be okay.
The reason is that we do not live in Lake Woebegone where all the children are above average. Not all have the intellectual or grit facilities to "follow that plan, or follow the law, or wait until they're married and emotionally and financially stable enough to have children so they can raise kids to do the same" and they never did.
Under the SC culture we had in the postwar era, we had strong growth and strong demand for labor. Firms needed to hire unskilled labor and develop them into high value assets. At my employer Upjohn, back in the day, we would hire janitors as regular company employees. After a year they would be able to bid for other nonprofessional jobs inside the company (all such jobs were first posed internally before going outside the company). If you were a good worker, never later, didn't miss work, you could get hired by production and start as a chemical operator trainee (grade 107). You would spend 3 years as a trainee, where you were shown the ropes by senior operator (grade 109) and everything you did was signed off by a 108 or higher. After you finished your training you would be promoted to 108. And if you were good you could advance to 109, become a lead (110) or a supervisor (professional grade 4).
Today, under the SP culture, janitorial services are provided by an outside company. There is no way they can advance. New operators come in as contractors. So you pay more for them that they get paid. Workers who want to get one of these good jobs today must have the agency to obtain training/certification. In the old days companies or unions took in "raw, undeveloped" labor and developed them into productive workers and bore the cost of doing this. Today employers expect workers to come to them already developed. Only bright, agentic people can do this on their own.
One of the reasons fewer men are going to college nowadays is because there is a lot of opportunity in the trades, for guy who like to work with their hands and don't mind the weather. I'm not one of these guys, but I know lots of professional guys who are totally into home improvement projects. I suspect younger versions of guys like this are eschewing college to do projects for a living. There will learn the trade and then start their won businesses and do very well for themselves.
But not everyone is high-IQ self starter. Lots of guys need guidance. Under SC capitalism they got it, under SP they don't. Hence my solution is to go back to the SC model.
No one needs to be gifted or even above average to succeed. The average American man can't do 20 push ups, but although being very attainable with basic work effort and diligence over a few months of training, doing 20 push up by no means makes someone fit, or strong, or "gifted". It's just a reflection of how many people are horrifically out of shape and have stopped caring. Outside of the elderly and severely disabled, very few have an excuse for this.
I have countless friends without college degrees that are now 40 years old with families, homes, and are slowly building wealth. They started out working scaffolding, sheet metal work, private security and now earn six figures. There is no need for intellect or intelligence outside of their professional domain in which they are now masters.
There is no success without ambition, integrity, work ethic, a desire to better oneself, consistency, and overall patience that it won't come within one or maybe even ten years. The economy is fine. The people aren't working.
You write than you have countless friends without college degrees that are now 40 years old with families, homes, and are slowly building wealth. Who started out working scaffolding, sheet metal work, private security and now earn six figures. Among whom, you assert, there is “no need for intellect or intelligence outside of their professional domain”.
I will bet those friends of yours who are building wealth in the trades are not dummies.
The people who do the best in the trades tend* to be those who do not remain as employees. Starting a business requires smarts, grit, and agency. People who can do this are not people with no need for intelligence (or grit or agency) outside of their professional domain. If you have these things within your domain, then you have them. Just because they may not have exercised these attributes in some other domains doesn’t mean a lack of ability, but a lack of interest.
*Tradesmen in union shops like my wife’s nephew (a welder at the Norfolk shipyard) also do well. And the chemical operators/tradesmen at my company in the pre-Pfizer holocaust days did well too. These guys were all smart, some as capable of booksmarts as I, as shown by their kids going to get PhDs in STEM fields. They simply had not opted for that path for one reason or other (sometimes getting their girlfriends pregnant and so having to get married).
But as former foster parents who remaining in touch with their lives and their childrens lives afterward I have also seen how those in the lower tiers of the working class have fared. Some have done very well, all of them are smart (90+ percentiles in school). Those who were borderline special ed, have not done well at all. And those in between various outcomes.
They actually were dummies by any standard. One of them took the SATs four times in high school with the help of tutors and failed to score above 1000. His brothers were good students. One of them was in special ed classes through elementary and high school and never took the SATs--he barely graduated. They all had severe diagnosed learning disabilities.
I think the difference is that they came from two parent homes and were expected to work. While their siblings went off to college, or in some cases died of drug overdoses, they found a profession that required that didn't require any sort of math or reading level above junior high.
In all cases they were held accountable by their parents (who weren't rich or even financially comfortable by any stretch) and were able to show up on time ready to work, and got along well with their bosses and co-workers. These aren't business owners. They are still either hourly wage earners or after twenty years earn a salary in a middle management position. One of them got into trade sales for the company and makes nearly $300k. He can't type without looking at the keyboard.
I also have a cousin that was arrested for selling ecstasy in high school on school grounds. He joined the Air Force a few years later and after 20 years is retired on full pension and works in a machine shop on top of that.
I've also seen this path fail, but not for "lack of opportunity". It's because the individual failed in their duty as employee in some way that cost them their job. DUI, skipping work, etc.
The macro narrative that "the economy is broken" is bull shit. There are too many people that are broken through no fault of "society".
I don't think it works as well anymore because society and the economy has changed. Costs for the basics have risen and wages are not keeping pace. Jobs are not as secure as they once were and it can be hard to find another job. Employers used to have a sense of obligation to employees that no longer exists.
Dennis, you're absolutely right that the fundamentals have shifted - rising costs, stagnant wages, job insecurity, and the breakdown of employer-employee loyalty have made the traditional path much harder. What the data shows is that these aren't just random economic trends, but the result of specific policy choices that redirected economic gains upward. CEO-to-worker pay ratios went from 20-to-1 in 1965 to 344-to-1 today, representing a systematic capture of value that used to flow to working people. The employer obligation you mention disappeared when financialization shifted corporate focus from long-term investment in workers and communities to short-term shareholder returns. But here's the key insight: since these changes were driven by policy choices, we can make different policy choices to restore systems where basic effort and good character automatically translate to security and upward mobility, rather than requiring people to be strategic exceptions just to achieve what was once ordinary.
First of all, I'm going to preface this with telling anyone who reads this comment to buy and read Frank's book the realignment. It is a stellar account of American political history and is worth keeping on your nightstand to go back and refer to down the road.
I'm dictating this, so please forgive me for any typos or lack of capitalization. My hands are just too big to handle the keyboard on my phone.
Okay, now to commenting on this post...
Frank, your post could have been written by JD Vance.
Or come for that matter, AOC.
I don't think that any of the up-and-coming leadership of the political parties in this country would dispute any of the things you called for in this piece.
But the devil is in the details.
I suspect that every single working person in our current economy, whether they're a janitor all the way up to Elon Musk, would nay say the goals, the shape of the economy you would like to see. In other words, everybody wants what you just described.
But as I said, The Devil is in the details. How do we establish an economy in which infrastructure is not only built, but also been maintained.? How do we pay for that?
I personally believe that Donald Trump will be looked at by history as a revolutionary figure as impactful on the history of the United States as Franklin Roosevelt.
The reason I think that is because he is looking at the current situation, and is seeing that the current efforts to improve the situation do not work.
Do. Not. Work. Period.
As you explained to me in your book the realignment, you pointed out clearly that the vast majority of the policies and programs that Roosevelt brought in as an attempt to fix the depression..
Most of his stuff did not work. In fact, the one can say the majority of his stuff had no effect.
Seriously, outside of the Tennessee Valley authority, social security... And to be honest sitting here right now that's all I can think of. World war II cemented Roosevelt in the pantheon of American presidents. Had Germany not declared war in the United State,. I don't know where we would be right now.
And I think Trump is trying to outdo Roosevelt at the current moment. In short, most of his ideas, programs, and plans will not work.
But I do believe that some of his ideas, programs, and plans will work. And will have as lasting in effect on American society as Roosevelts from 90 years ago. I don't know if your readers realize that Roosevelt actually got elected for the first time in 1932 I believe. Maybe 1936
The biggest problem I have with this piece is the same problem I had when I looked at Ezra Klein's latest book about abundance.
You talk about the dignity economy, but your definition is, to be honest, kind of airy fairy. What I mean is that there are no specifics on how the dignity that American workers want would actually come to fruition in a real world in a real world basis.
For example, I would not be surprised if individual States, if not, the federal government itself have laws or regulations that require a workplace to be a place of dignity.
And sadly to say, I'm also willing to bet that if those requirements do exist, their definition of dignity is just as nebulous as what you put here.
And it would be in definitions, management metrics, is where JD Vance and AOC would start to part ways.
Right now I can't help but think of Paul Krugman formerly of New York Times.
That clown spent all summer and into the fall of last year in his columns telling us that there was no inflation. And not only does that asshole have a PhD in economics, teaches at Ivy League universities, that asshole also has a Nobel prize in economics.
I point that out simply to illustrate that even the most illustrious studiers of economics don't get it right. And I'm talking not getting it right by a million miles.
If you want to respond to this, I would really appreciate you to develop the concept of dignity. What is it? What is its nature? Is it a self-generated state of mind or is dignity something that someone else gives in a similar fashion that respect is given.
And once we understand dignity as an idea, how then does this idea translate into the workplace.
Furthermore, a working definition for the scope of this thread would be really appreciated for the term economy.
That's all I got buddy. Thanks for the post. As always, a gourmet serving of food For thought
Great note, as always Jim! I realized when I wrote this that the definition of the specifics a Dignity Economy would include were undefined. Some of that was space limitations. Some because I just wanted to focus on the concept without getting the article bogged down in details. Some however because I think it's a hard question that's going to take a lot of experimentation to figure out and get right. However, I'm working on it! I'm thinking a lot about this because I think it's the key--both political and to get America back on track.
Jim, you're absolutely right that the devil is in the details, and Frank's concept of dignity deserves concrete specifics rather than abstract ideals. Let me offer a working definition and practical framework.
Dignity in economic terms means having genuine choice and agency over your economic life rather than being forced into extractive arrangements. It's not a feeling someone gives you—it's structural. When a 1960 refrigerator lasted 30 years, that was economic dignity: one purchase decision that built wealth over time. Today's 8-year replacement cycle by design is the opposite—forced wealth extraction disguised as consumer choice. This isn't natural market evolution—it's deliberate policy design.
Since 1971, we've operated under economic mythology that treats money as scarce when it's actually a tool we create to coordinate activity. The federal government creates money for military spending and corporate bailouts without constraint, then claims "we can't afford" community development. This artificial scarcity maintains power structures while real constraints—workers, materials, organizational capacity—sit unused. Understanding this changes everything about what's possible.
The practical translation is systematic wealth-building support that mirrors business advantages. When businesses lose equipment value, they get tax deductions worth thousands annually. When families face planned obsolescence, they get nothing while shareholders profit from replacement cycles. We can provide working families depreciation credits, community-controlled banking serving local prosperity, federal job guarantees creating meaningful infrastructure work, and universal basic assets ensuring everyone starts with productive tools.
Management metrics? Here's one: an economy has dignity when basic competence and good character automatically translate to security and upward mobility, rather than requiring strategic exceptions to achieve what was once ordinary. Current CEO-to-worker ratios of 344-to-1 (versus 20-to-1 in 1965) show how gains got systematically redirected away from frontline workers toward executive layers.
I've developed the complete framework with specific policies and implementation details:
Not sure I agree with the premise. Sounds vaguely Marxist to say that the purpose of the economy is to provide everyone with a good life. I would prefer the statement that the economy exists to provide individuals with the opportunity to pursue a life of their own choosing. The pursuit of happiness, where that happiness and the form that the pursuit takes is determined by each individual. You want wealth? Fine, pursue that. Education? Pursue it. You want to be off the grid? Do it. Homelessness? Make that choice and it’s yours. To me, Marxism requires that we (as workers) unite as one and do the work assigned to us by the state. In that case, the economy does have a purpose defined by the government. No pursuit, no individual choices. Just a cog on a gear in a machine. And in theory, if everyone obeys, the economy fulfills its purpose of a “good life” for all. 😟
I don't intend for this to be Marxist, and in fact try to distinguish in the piece from what I'm saying from that sort of Marxist thought. And I actually agree with your formulation, which is how I aways phrase the idea of the American Dream--a chance to compete on a level field to become whatever it is you want to be.
My point is simply that the economy isn't an abstract machine that generates "value" on a chart. It's supposed to be a machine that makes things to give people good lives. This is always why I say for "everyone who wants to contribute"--it's not handing out candy but ensure there is an opportunity to flourish if you're willing to step up. It's so no one who wants to help gets left behind like a poor kid who never gets picked for the team.
The only place we might disagree here is I think something like the "cog" choice should probably be available. I wouldn't choose it, but this is what a lot of people want. They want to simply plug themselves into the system and get out the basics to live their real life doing what they want. I think it's important that option exists because not everyone wants to start a business or beat the world and that's okay. If you don't give people that option, the people who want and need it will fall down the ladder and get lost and then get angry and tear it down. It's in everyone's interest to give them the option to flourish to in the way they want and need.
Ok. I did miss your specification that the decent life should be attainable by those willing to work. I kept thinking that at some point you were going to drop the “willing to work “ criterion and just say everyone should have a decent life paid for by others who have jobs. So while I will agree on your goal, I do have to say the devil is in the details as usual with economics. There are an awful lot of moving parts in the economy, and with most every person motivated primarily by their own self-interest, it’s practically impossible to achieve the goal you’ve proposed. Although, having said that, I think most Americans look at countries like Sweden and wonder why we can’t do that here.
I don't disagree that it's not easy to achieve. My complaint is that nobody is trying to achieve it. When people talk about the economy, they treat it like some ancient machine they don't understand spitting out numbers instead of a system with a purpose. Remembering the purpose of why we're all doing this is important to making sure the system we are running actually spits out the results we want.
Titanic Survivor, you've identified the crucial challenge—how do you design systems that work with self-interest rather than against it to achieve Frank's goals? The good news is we actually have successful models, including some of the "moving parts" you mentioned already working in America.
Your Sweden reference is interesting because they didn't eliminate self-interest—they channeled it productively. But we don't need to copy their model. We can look at what already works here: the military's systematic pathway from service to middle-class security, community development block grants that have quietly built America for decades, and even the tax code that gives businesses depreciation deductions for equipment losses. These systems work precisely because they align individual self-interest with broader prosperity.
The key insight is that people are already motivated by self-interest—we just need policies that make individual wealth-building align with community prosperity instead of extracting from it. When businesses get tax advantages for equipment depreciation while families get nothing for planned obsolescence, that's a system designed to channel self-interest upward. But we could just as easily give working families depreciation credits, create community-controlled banking that serves local wealth building, or expand federal job guarantees that let people earn security through meaningful work.
The "devil in the details" becomes much simpler when you realize we're not fighting human nature—we're designing better channels for it. People want security, opportunity, and the chance to build something for their families. The question isn't whether to reward that motivation, but whether to concentrate those rewards among existing wealth holders or distribute them broadly to anyone willing to contribute.
I've been working on a framework that shows exactly how these moving parts could work together to achieve what you and Frank both want:
The big caveat is that the economy's purpose is to provide everyone with a good life of dignity, not exclusively those "willing to work hard and contribute." Currently, sustaining a system capable of offering dignity to all requires a huge proportion of the population to be incentivized to "be productive." But with enough automation of essential activities, that would no longer be required, and it would become perverse to demand it.
In other words, basing an economy around a requirement to work hard is itself a means to an end. By folding it into the end you're making a similar mistake to the one you critique here; you would be unprepared to drop the criteria for hard work when it ceases to be necessary.
I'm completely worried about what is going to happen when AI wipes out every entry level job. What I'm trying to take into account is that human nature rebels against the idea of working to support someone who isn't contributing themselves. It drives into our primal defenses against cheating. Just like chimps, people would rather destroy everything so no one gets anything than see someone take advantage of them. It's just how we're wired.
The key then is to make sure everyone who wants to contribute can, and in a way that doesn't turn them into a serf.
I have that same fear. Old school automation eliminating a lot of the factory jobs in 1980's. Then the PC revolution eliminated a lot of the clerical jobs in the 1990's and 2000's. We saw a rise in the number of "computer jockey" jobs when people work on computers all day doing various sorts of information processing/coding jobs. These will be eliminated by AI.
I think there's an underlying assumption here that many people don't want to work and need to be incentivized into productivity. I don't see evidence for that view. Most people actually want meaningful engagement—not because we need to legislate work requirements, but because humans are naturally creative and social. The current system that requires a "huge proportion of the population to be incentivized to be productive" reflects artificial scarcity, not human nature. We already have massive surplus labor capacity with a vast reserve army of unemployed, underemployed, and misemployed people while essential infrastructure crumbles and community needs go unmet.
The beauty of what I call an opportunity economy is that it works with diverse human motivations. Some people want basic security and time for family or creative pursuits—universal basic assets can provide that foundation. Others are driven by ambition, prestige, wealth accumulation, or the desire for power and control—the system should enable those paths too through genuine market competition and entrepreneurship support. We don't need to wait for automation to unleash this potential.
We could deploy federal job guarantees tomorrow for infrastructure repair, environmental restoration, community development, and care work—not as forced labor, but as meaningful opportunities for those who want them. The constraint isn't money—since 1971, the federal government creates money for spending and uses taxes to manage inflation, not to "fund" programs. We create money for military budgets and corporate bailouts without question, then claim "we can't afford" to mobilize our abundant human capacity for community benefit.
You're spot-on that automation changes this equation over time. As technology handles more routine production, "contribution" expands beyond traditional wage labor to include care work, artistic creation, community organizing, or simply living with dignity. Understanding our actual monetary capacity means we can provide everyone with productive tools, community-controlled resources, and economic security regardless of their relationship to traditional employment. As automation advances, we can focus human energy on creativity, care, and community building rather than forcing people into make-work to justify their existence.
We have both the financial resources and the human capacity for abundance right now—the constraints are entirely political:
I'm all for it, but do not understand the author's sense that dignity is at odds with, fast growth, business profits, etc.
Also, it's a bit disconcerting that the author does not see the obstacles that have been put in the way of the kind of economy he desires: NIMBY politics around land use, building codes, road and street pricing; high deficits; trade restrictions; restriction on high skilled and educated immigrants; regulations that do not weigh the costs and benefit of the regulation; weak public education; inadequate deterrence and punishment of crime.
Thomas, you're identifying real policy challenges, but I think the tension you're missing is that many of these "obstacles" are actually based on economic mythology that serves existing power structures rather than natural economic laws. Take "high deficits"—since 1971, the federal government creates money for spending and uses taxes to manage inflation and resource allocation, not to "fund" programs. We never ask how to "pay for" military budgets or corporate bailouts because we understand the government creates that money, yet we treat community development as constrained by imaginary budget limits. Similarly, many of the regulations, trade restrictions, and zoning laws you mention aren't just inefficient policies—they're often deliberate mechanisms that concentrate wealth upward while appearing to serve legitimate purposes.
The dignity economy isn't at odds with growth or business profits; it's at odds with extraction disguised as productive activity, like planned obsolescence that forces replacement cycles or financial engineering that prioritizes shareholder payouts over investment in productive capacity. When CEO-to-worker ratios went from 20-to-1 to 344-to-1, that wasn't natural market evolution—it was policy design that redirected gains away from frontline workers. Understanding how our economic system actually works versus the mythology we're told reveals which obstacles are genuine constraints versus artificial barriers designed to maintain existing hierarchies.
I write more about the mythology and the faux-science of mainstream economics on my substack:
What the author does by summarily dismissing as "outdated 1960s welfare statism" was the period between 1940 and 1973 when the actual economy came closer to the dignity economy he asks for than anything we had before or since.
I would submit we are a lot farther from what he wants today than we were when I was kid.
I think there's a logical problem in your chain of thought. The reason the 1950s and 1960s were good for working people mostly had to do with the post-WWII boom, which was the result of America being the only productive industrial economy left standing after a global war. It took about 2-3 decades before Europe and Japan fully got back on line, while the Soviets were cut off from global commerce, and the remainder was under dysfunctional post-colonial policies. For a moment, America was making everything valuable for the world and there was a lot of wealth to share. The policies of that era didn't cause the wealth. Those policies moreover were industrial era policies designed to administer an industrial economy of factories within that specific Cold War era world. They weren't designed for America today.
Saying going back to 1960s welfare state ideas would restore 1960s America is like saying restoring the policies of feudal England would bring back the circumstances of feudal England. It's a different nation, with a different economy, with different technology, with different beliefs and ideas, with a different population, in a different world. The policies successful in one circumstance don't produce the same results under another. Ask Blockbuster Video.
I don’t think that story is true. If it were, then I would expect the US to have imported much less after the war than it had before the war. But it was about the same. So that foreign competition argument does not wash.
Michael, you're absolutely right that Frank's explanation doesn't hold up to the data, and your trade analysis is spot-on. The real difference between 1940-1973 and today wasn't global competition—it was deliberate policy choices about how economic gains get distributed. During that era, we had systematic mechanisms that ensured broad prosperity: CEO-to-worker ratios stayed around 20-to-1, strong collective bargaining, high marginal tax rates on top earners, and financial regulations that prevented extractive speculation.
Starting in the 1970s, we systematically dismantled those policies through financial deregulation, union-busting, tax cuts for the wealthy, and shifting corporate governance from stakeholder capitalism to shareholder primacy. The result was predictable: CEO ratios exploded to 344-to-1 while worker wages stagnated despite continued productivity growth. This wasn't natural economic evolution—it was financialization redirecting surplus value that used to flow to working people toward executive compensation and shareholder returns. Frank's absolutely right that we need new solutions for today's economy, but I think we can modernize the policy mechanisms that actually worked rather than treating them as obsolete. We can design updated versions of those broad-based prosperity policies that work with current technology and global conditions rather than accepting artificial constraints as natural.
The challenge is that treating effective historical frameworks as museum pieces rather than adaptable models is part of a broader retreat from national policy engagement that inadvertently helps authoritarians capture the institutions that actually control resource allocation:
The author writes "“The objective of the economy is to give everyone willing to work hard and contribute a good life with dignity.”
That is consistent with the objective of a capitalist economy operating under SC business culture. We had that in the decades after WW II, which if you are old enough you might recall.
But today as a result of economic policy implemented since 1980 we now live in a capitalist economy operating under SP business culture. Under SP the objective of capitalism is to maximize shareholder value, that is stock market capitalization, which has produced what I call a ziggurat of finance, the excess market capitalization over the peak levels seen under SC culture.
Something like $50 trillion of excess valuation is stored up in various ziggurats which represents value extraction from the real economy over decades which has impeded the ability of the economy to do what you have called it to do.
I am reading your book. You have grasped the concept of successive "political rebellions" (critical elections) leading to dispensations. Curiously, you missed the one in 1980. I lived through that one, and it was palpable. They even called it a revolution.
I write about my take on 1980 there a bit. There is a lot of debate about this but I don't consider it a realignment. Many do, although the majority position in the scholarship still is it isn't. My take is that the political focus changed, but the party ideologies didn't and it's the ideologies that matter for a realignment. Both parties kept their old ideas and applied their existing ideologies to new problems, from mainly economic to social ones.
However, society definitely changed. There was a major event. I just think it was the next great awakening event.
So I think there are two independent cycles of political realignments and awakenings. Realignments are about changes in political ideologies. Awakenings are about mass moral revivals. And there is interplay between them. So in my view 1980 isn't a realignment, but it was the start of an awakening. (Well actually the awakening started in the middle 1960s but it was the election in 1980 that enough of the new generation had come of age into middle adulthood that it went from just the focus of the youth of the New Left into mass politics.)
I agree with the two cycles. The Awakening is a Creedal Passion Period (CPP), and was largely over by 1980. My application of Turchin’s social contagion model gives dates if 1963-1978 for that one, and 2013-2027 for the present one.
My thesis is the economic policy changes brought in by the Reagan administration change the business culture from SC to SP just as the economic policy changes brought in by the FDR administration changed business culture from SP to SC. This economic cultural shift has produced sa lot of the economic problems you talk about. I would call that a major development.
As for ideology. My understanding is the "Reagan Revolution” was an expression of “movement conservatism” begun by Buckley and others in the 1950’s. It is very different than the “cloth coat” Republicanism espoused by Nixon in his Checkers speech and exhibited by Eisenhower and pre-1932 Republicans. These Republicans were fiscal conservatives willing to raise taxes (in 1932) and keep them high (Eisenhower) to maintain fiscal balance.
Nixon strayed from this path, calling himself a “Keynesian” to justify running deficits, but by copping to this label that he was acknowledging he was no longer a fiscal conservative.
The Reagan administration used a made-up thing called “supply side economics” and asserted it would balance the budget. That is, he chose to run a policy that would increase deficits and call it fiscally conservative (that is, lie). Republicans have not run a balanced budget since 1957, and yet even today polls show that voters think they are fiscal conservatives. The use of overt lying on Republican politics is a new thing introduced in 1980. I would say that is a ideological change.
Can Americans agree on a vision of “good”? I’m not sure, and I think this may be at the core of many of our problems. You’re right to look around and ask “what’s all this for? What is its purpose or function?”, but I’m not sure there is enough cultural cohesion to arrive at an answer.
I like the idealism. Parts of it may even work. But at the end of the day, anyone's role is dependent on the marginal utility they bring to it, and if there is an alternative that uses fewer resources in exchange, then that will be chosen instead of them. Be flexible in your utility and you should be fine.
The thing is that our competition games take place within a system of rules. So the marginal utility of actions are restrained by the rules of the market system we're operating in. For example, it might be efficient to beat workers to make them work harder, or to use toxic chemicals and then dump them into the water supply, but we don't do these things because the game says they're not allowed. So we compete for efficiency in the ways that the game allows. We just saw a similar huge change in the last few years with me too, with businesses making very different judgments about the most efficient way to manage their businesses when not even the law changed but merely social rules.
So it's entirely doable, just by tweaking the social and legal expectations of what managers are supposed to be achieving. This is how you unlock the power of markets without allowing people's shortsighted or selfish tendency to break the nation they're supposed to be supporting or their society.
Patrick, you're right that markets operate within rules, and Frank's point about those rules being changeable is crucial. But here's what the current rules have produced: CEO-to-worker ratios went from 20-to-1 in 1965 to 344-to-1 today. That's not reflecting marginal utility differences - it's reflecting policy choices about who gets to capture economic gains.
The "revolution when exchange is too unequal" you mention is already happening - it's just taking the form of political upheaval rather than street protests. People are rejecting institutions that no longer serve them because the current rules systematically extract value from working people while concentrating it among executives and shareholders.
Your flexibility advice works for individuals, but systemically we need rules that reward genuine productivity and value creation rather than financial engineering. When businesses get tax deductions for equipment depreciation while families get nothing for planned obsolescence, when corporations extract over 100% of profits for shareholders instead of investing in productive capacity - these aren't natural market outcomes, they're policy designs that create artificial scarcity.
The question isn't whether markets should determine value, but whether our market rules should enable broad-based wealth creation or concentrate gains among those who already have political connections.
Here's a link to an article on one specific rule change that shows exactly how 'the rules have changed away from opportunity for all':
Frank this resonates deeply - you've articulated exactly why our current economic framework feels so fundamentally broken. The dignity economy you're describing isn't just a nice ideal, it's actually achievable with the policy tools we already have available.
Your diagnosis points to the prescription: we've been trapped by economic mythology that treats scarcity as natural law when it's really just policy choices serving corporate interests. Since 1971, money has functioned as a coordination tool we create, not a scarce resource limiting what's possible. The "tough choices" politicians talk about are artificial constraints designed to maintain existing power structures while trillions flow to corporate subsidies and bailouts.
The dignity you're describing becomes practical through systematic changes: federal job guarantees creating meaningful work in infrastructure and community development, giving working families the same wealth-building advantages businesses already get through depreciation rules, and community-controlled economic development powered by federal resources. When we guarantee economic security - healthcare, education, housing stability - we don't suppress innovation, we enable it. People can take real entrepreneurial risks when failure doesn't mean catastrophe.
What excites me most is how this transcends traditional political divisions. A Republican small business owner struggling against monopolies, a Democratic parent losing wealth to planned obsolescence, an independent rural family worried about security - they all benefit from the same systematic changes that create genuine dignity and opportunity. The current system extracts wealth from anyone who works for a living while concentrating it among those who already have political connections.
We don't need to wait for capitalism to collapse or retreat to purely local solutions while authoritarians capture national policy. We can build a broad coalition around making capitalism actually work for dignity and opportunity creation rather than wealth extraction. I've been working on a framework that shows exactly how to implement what you're describing - the specific policies and coalition-building approach that can make the dignity economy real:
https://open.substack.com/pub/chevan/p/introducing-opportunity-economics?r=8ae8z&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Thanks!
Gain valuable economic skills in a profession that can ultimately meet your lifestyle needs, go to market, spend less than you make. 10 years later, or about 25% through a normal working career, you'll be fine. That's all I would require for a society. In the meantime just manage. Amazing how many people can't follow that plan, or follow the law, or wait until they're married and emotionally and financially stable enough to have children so they can raise kids to do the same.
I think the problem is that this plan is now out of date. That's how it used to work, an that's the assumptions baked into our system of how it's supposed to work. But that is falling apart and basically already gone. The problem is that the people who played by the plan and are still churning away inside the system naturally still think this plan works when the reality is they're just the lucky ones who got in on the old rules and the new rules haven't yet chosen to spit them out.
If things still worked that way, we'd be fine. My point is we need to create a pipeline like that built for the way things work now so folks can once again work hard and play by the rules and be okay.
Why doesn’t it work anymore?
The reason is that we do not live in Lake Woebegone where all the children are above average. Not all have the intellectual or grit facilities to "follow that plan, or follow the law, or wait until they're married and emotionally and financially stable enough to have children so they can raise kids to do the same" and they never did.
Under the SC culture we had in the postwar era, we had strong growth and strong demand for labor. Firms needed to hire unskilled labor and develop them into high value assets. At my employer Upjohn, back in the day, we would hire janitors as regular company employees. After a year they would be able to bid for other nonprofessional jobs inside the company (all such jobs were first posed internally before going outside the company). If you were a good worker, never later, didn't miss work, you could get hired by production and start as a chemical operator trainee (grade 107). You would spend 3 years as a trainee, where you were shown the ropes by senior operator (grade 109) and everything you did was signed off by a 108 or higher. After you finished your training you would be promoted to 108. And if you were good you could advance to 109, become a lead (110) or a supervisor (professional grade 4).
Today, under the SP culture, janitorial services are provided by an outside company. There is no way they can advance. New operators come in as contractors. So you pay more for them that they get paid. Workers who want to get one of these good jobs today must have the agency to obtain training/certification. In the old days companies or unions took in "raw, undeveloped" labor and developed them into productive workers and bore the cost of doing this. Today employers expect workers to come to them already developed. Only bright, agentic people can do this on their own.
One of the reasons fewer men are going to college nowadays is because there is a lot of opportunity in the trades, for guy who like to work with their hands and don't mind the weather. I'm not one of these guys, but I know lots of professional guys who are totally into home improvement projects. I suspect younger versions of guys like this are eschewing college to do projects for a living. There will learn the trade and then start their won businesses and do very well for themselves.
But not everyone is high-IQ self starter. Lots of guys need guidance. Under SC capitalism they got it, under SP they don't. Hence my solution is to go back to the SC model.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-economic-culture-evolves
and not the neoliberalism (that breeds SP culture) that we have now
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/what-is-neoliberalism-an-empirical
No one needs to be gifted or even above average to succeed. The average American man can't do 20 push ups, but although being very attainable with basic work effort and diligence over a few months of training, doing 20 push up by no means makes someone fit, or strong, or "gifted". It's just a reflection of how many people are horrifically out of shape and have stopped caring. Outside of the elderly and severely disabled, very few have an excuse for this.
I have countless friends without college degrees that are now 40 years old with families, homes, and are slowly building wealth. They started out working scaffolding, sheet metal work, private security and now earn six figures. There is no need for intellect or intelligence outside of their professional domain in which they are now masters.
There is no success without ambition, integrity, work ethic, a desire to better oneself, consistency, and overall patience that it won't come within one or maybe even ten years. The economy is fine. The people aren't working.
You write than you have countless friends without college degrees that are now 40 years old with families, homes, and are slowly building wealth. Who started out working scaffolding, sheet metal work, private security and now earn six figures. Among whom, you assert, there is “no need for intellect or intelligence outside of their professional domain”.
I will bet those friends of yours who are building wealth in the trades are not dummies.
The people who do the best in the trades tend* to be those who do not remain as employees. Starting a business requires smarts, grit, and agency. People who can do this are not people with no need for intelligence (or grit or agency) outside of their professional domain. If you have these things within your domain, then you have them. Just because they may not have exercised these attributes in some other domains doesn’t mean a lack of ability, but a lack of interest.
*Tradesmen in union shops like my wife’s nephew (a welder at the Norfolk shipyard) also do well. And the chemical operators/tradesmen at my company in the pre-Pfizer holocaust days did well too. These guys were all smart, some as capable of booksmarts as I, as shown by their kids going to get PhDs in STEM fields. They simply had not opted for that path for one reason or other (sometimes getting their girlfriends pregnant and so having to get married).
But as former foster parents who remaining in touch with their lives and their childrens lives afterward I have also seen how those in the lower tiers of the working class have fared. Some have done very well, all of them are smart (90+ percentiles in school). Those who were borderline special ed, have not done well at all. And those in between various outcomes.
They actually were dummies by any standard. One of them took the SATs four times in high school with the help of tutors and failed to score above 1000. His brothers were good students. One of them was in special ed classes through elementary and high school and never took the SATs--he barely graduated. They all had severe diagnosed learning disabilities.
I think the difference is that they came from two parent homes and were expected to work. While their siblings went off to college, or in some cases died of drug overdoses, they found a profession that required that didn't require any sort of math or reading level above junior high.
In all cases they were held accountable by their parents (who weren't rich or even financially comfortable by any stretch) and were able to show up on time ready to work, and got along well with their bosses and co-workers. These aren't business owners. They are still either hourly wage earners or after twenty years earn a salary in a middle management position. One of them got into trade sales for the company and makes nearly $300k. He can't type without looking at the keyboard.
I also have a cousin that was arrested for selling ecstasy in high school on school grounds. He joined the Air Force a few years later and after 20 years is retired on full pension and works in a machine shop on top of that.
I've also seen this path fail, but not for "lack of opportunity". It's because the individual failed in their duty as employee in some way that cost them their job. DUI, skipping work, etc.
The macro narrative that "the economy is broken" is bull shit. There are too many people that are broken through no fault of "society".
I don't think it works as well anymore because society and the economy has changed. Costs for the basics have risen and wages are not keeping pace. Jobs are not as secure as they once were and it can be hard to find another job. Employers used to have a sense of obligation to employees that no longer exists.
Dennis, you're absolutely right that the fundamentals have shifted - rising costs, stagnant wages, job insecurity, and the breakdown of employer-employee loyalty have made the traditional path much harder. What the data shows is that these aren't just random economic trends, but the result of specific policy choices that redirected economic gains upward. CEO-to-worker pay ratios went from 20-to-1 in 1965 to 344-to-1 today, representing a systematic capture of value that used to flow to working people. The employer obligation you mention disappeared when financialization shifted corporate focus from long-term investment in workers and communities to short-term shareholder returns. But here's the key insight: since these changes were driven by policy choices, we can make different policy choices to restore systems where basic effort and good character automatically translate to security and upward mobility, rather than requiring people to be strategic exceptions just to achieve what was once ordinary.
https://open.substack.com/pub/chevan/p/introducing-opportunity-economics?r=8ae8z&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
First of all, I'm going to preface this with telling anyone who reads this comment to buy and read Frank's book the realignment. It is a stellar account of American political history and is worth keeping on your nightstand to go back and refer to down the road.
I'm dictating this, so please forgive me for any typos or lack of capitalization. My hands are just too big to handle the keyboard on my phone.
Okay, now to commenting on this post...
Frank, your post could have been written by JD Vance.
Or come for that matter, AOC.
I don't think that any of the up-and-coming leadership of the political parties in this country would dispute any of the things you called for in this piece.
But the devil is in the details.
I suspect that every single working person in our current economy, whether they're a janitor all the way up to Elon Musk, would nay say the goals, the shape of the economy you would like to see. In other words, everybody wants what you just described.
But as I said, The Devil is in the details. How do we establish an economy in which infrastructure is not only built, but also been maintained.? How do we pay for that?
I personally believe that Donald Trump will be looked at by history as a revolutionary figure as impactful on the history of the United States as Franklin Roosevelt.
The reason I think that is because he is looking at the current situation, and is seeing that the current efforts to improve the situation do not work.
Do. Not. Work. Period.
As you explained to me in your book the realignment, you pointed out clearly that the vast majority of the policies and programs that Roosevelt brought in as an attempt to fix the depression..
Most of his stuff did not work. In fact, the one can say the majority of his stuff had no effect.
Seriously, outside of the Tennessee Valley authority, social security... And to be honest sitting here right now that's all I can think of. World war II cemented Roosevelt in the pantheon of American presidents. Had Germany not declared war in the United State,. I don't know where we would be right now.
And I think Trump is trying to outdo Roosevelt at the current moment. In short, most of his ideas, programs, and plans will not work.
But I do believe that some of his ideas, programs, and plans will work. And will have as lasting in effect on American society as Roosevelts from 90 years ago. I don't know if your readers realize that Roosevelt actually got elected for the first time in 1932 I believe. Maybe 1936
The biggest problem I have with this piece is the same problem I had when I looked at Ezra Klein's latest book about abundance.
You talk about the dignity economy, but your definition is, to be honest, kind of airy fairy. What I mean is that there are no specifics on how the dignity that American workers want would actually come to fruition in a real world in a real world basis.
For example, I would not be surprised if individual States, if not, the federal government itself have laws or regulations that require a workplace to be a place of dignity.
And sadly to say, I'm also willing to bet that if those requirements do exist, their definition of dignity is just as nebulous as what you put here.
And it would be in definitions, management metrics, is where JD Vance and AOC would start to part ways.
Right now I can't help but think of Paul Krugman formerly of New York Times.
That clown spent all summer and into the fall of last year in his columns telling us that there was no inflation. And not only does that asshole have a PhD in economics, teaches at Ivy League universities, that asshole also has a Nobel prize in economics.
I point that out simply to illustrate that even the most illustrious studiers of economics don't get it right. And I'm talking not getting it right by a million miles.
If you want to respond to this, I would really appreciate you to develop the concept of dignity. What is it? What is its nature? Is it a self-generated state of mind or is dignity something that someone else gives in a similar fashion that respect is given.
And once we understand dignity as an idea, how then does this idea translate into the workplace.
Furthermore, a working definition for the scope of this thread would be really appreciated for the term economy.
That's all I got buddy. Thanks for the post. As always, a gourmet serving of food For thought
Great note, as always Jim! I realized when I wrote this that the definition of the specifics a Dignity Economy would include were undefined. Some of that was space limitations. Some because I just wanted to focus on the concept without getting the article bogged down in details. Some however because I think it's a hard question that's going to take a lot of experimentation to figure out and get right. However, I'm working on it! I'm thinking a lot about this because I think it's the key--both political and to get America back on track.
Jim, you're absolutely right that the devil is in the details, and Frank's concept of dignity deserves concrete specifics rather than abstract ideals. Let me offer a working definition and practical framework.
Dignity in economic terms means having genuine choice and agency over your economic life rather than being forced into extractive arrangements. It's not a feeling someone gives you—it's structural. When a 1960 refrigerator lasted 30 years, that was economic dignity: one purchase decision that built wealth over time. Today's 8-year replacement cycle by design is the opposite—forced wealth extraction disguised as consumer choice. This isn't natural market evolution—it's deliberate policy design.
Since 1971, we've operated under economic mythology that treats money as scarce when it's actually a tool we create to coordinate activity. The federal government creates money for military spending and corporate bailouts without constraint, then claims "we can't afford" community development. This artificial scarcity maintains power structures while real constraints—workers, materials, organizational capacity—sit unused. Understanding this changes everything about what's possible.
The practical translation is systematic wealth-building support that mirrors business advantages. When businesses lose equipment value, they get tax deductions worth thousands annually. When families face planned obsolescence, they get nothing while shareholders profit from replacement cycles. We can provide working families depreciation credits, community-controlled banking serving local prosperity, federal job guarantees creating meaningful infrastructure work, and universal basic assets ensuring everyone starts with productive tools.
Management metrics? Here's one: an economy has dignity when basic competence and good character automatically translate to security and upward mobility, rather than requiring strategic exceptions to achieve what was once ordinary. Current CEO-to-worker ratios of 344-to-1 (versus 20-to-1 in 1965) show how gains got systematically redirected away from frontline workers toward executive layers.
I've developed the complete framework with specific policies and implementation details:
https://open.substack.com/pub/chevan/p/introducing-opportunity-economics?r=8ae8z&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Not sure I agree with the premise. Sounds vaguely Marxist to say that the purpose of the economy is to provide everyone with a good life. I would prefer the statement that the economy exists to provide individuals with the opportunity to pursue a life of their own choosing. The pursuit of happiness, where that happiness and the form that the pursuit takes is determined by each individual. You want wealth? Fine, pursue that. Education? Pursue it. You want to be off the grid? Do it. Homelessness? Make that choice and it’s yours. To me, Marxism requires that we (as workers) unite as one and do the work assigned to us by the state. In that case, the economy does have a purpose defined by the government. No pursuit, no individual choices. Just a cog on a gear in a machine. And in theory, if everyone obeys, the economy fulfills its purpose of a “good life” for all. 😟
I don't intend for this to be Marxist, and in fact try to distinguish in the piece from what I'm saying from that sort of Marxist thought. And I actually agree with your formulation, which is how I aways phrase the idea of the American Dream--a chance to compete on a level field to become whatever it is you want to be.
My point is simply that the economy isn't an abstract machine that generates "value" on a chart. It's supposed to be a machine that makes things to give people good lives. This is always why I say for "everyone who wants to contribute"--it's not handing out candy but ensure there is an opportunity to flourish if you're willing to step up. It's so no one who wants to help gets left behind like a poor kid who never gets picked for the team.
The only place we might disagree here is I think something like the "cog" choice should probably be available. I wouldn't choose it, but this is what a lot of people want. They want to simply plug themselves into the system and get out the basics to live their real life doing what they want. I think it's important that option exists because not everyone wants to start a business or beat the world and that's okay. If you don't give people that option, the people who want and need it will fall down the ladder and get lost and then get angry and tear it down. It's in everyone's interest to give them the option to flourish to in the way they want and need.
Ok. I did miss your specification that the decent life should be attainable by those willing to work. I kept thinking that at some point you were going to drop the “willing to work “ criterion and just say everyone should have a decent life paid for by others who have jobs. So while I will agree on your goal, I do have to say the devil is in the details as usual with economics. There are an awful lot of moving parts in the economy, and with most every person motivated primarily by their own self-interest, it’s practically impossible to achieve the goal you’ve proposed. Although, having said that, I think most Americans look at countries like Sweden and wonder why we can’t do that here.
I don't disagree that it's not easy to achieve. My complaint is that nobody is trying to achieve it. When people talk about the economy, they treat it like some ancient machine they don't understand spitting out numbers instead of a system with a purpose. Remembering the purpose of why we're all doing this is important to making sure the system we are running actually spits out the results we want.
Titanic Survivor, you've identified the crucial challenge—how do you design systems that work with self-interest rather than against it to achieve Frank's goals? The good news is we actually have successful models, including some of the "moving parts" you mentioned already working in America.
Your Sweden reference is interesting because they didn't eliminate self-interest—they channeled it productively. But we don't need to copy their model. We can look at what already works here: the military's systematic pathway from service to middle-class security, community development block grants that have quietly built America for decades, and even the tax code that gives businesses depreciation deductions for equipment losses. These systems work precisely because they align individual self-interest with broader prosperity.
The key insight is that people are already motivated by self-interest—we just need policies that make individual wealth-building align with community prosperity instead of extracting from it. When businesses get tax advantages for equipment depreciation while families get nothing for planned obsolescence, that's a system designed to channel self-interest upward. But we could just as easily give working families depreciation credits, create community-controlled banking that serves local wealth building, or expand federal job guarantees that let people earn security through meaningful work.
The "devil in the details" becomes much simpler when you realize we're not fighting human nature—we're designing better channels for it. People want security, opportunity, and the chance to build something for their families. The question isn't whether to reward that motivation, but whether to concentrate those rewards among existing wealth holders or distribute them broadly to anyone willing to contribute.
I've been working on a framework that shows exactly how these moving parts could work together to achieve what you and Frank both want:
https://open.substack.com/pub/chevan/p/introducing-opportunity-economics?r=8ae8z&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
What concrete policies would fulfill such promises?
Would this approach be interesting or appealing to you?
https://open.substack.com/pub/chevan/p/introducing-opportunity-economics?r=8ae8z&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
No. Insufficiently concrete, and I'm unconvinced of the premises.
Love this!
The big caveat is that the economy's purpose is to provide everyone with a good life of dignity, not exclusively those "willing to work hard and contribute." Currently, sustaining a system capable of offering dignity to all requires a huge proportion of the population to be incentivized to "be productive." But with enough automation of essential activities, that would no longer be required, and it would become perverse to demand it.
In other words, basing an economy around a requirement to work hard is itself a means to an end. By folding it into the end you're making a similar mistake to the one you critique here; you would be unprepared to drop the criteria for hard work when it ceases to be necessary.
I'm completely worried about what is going to happen when AI wipes out every entry level job. What I'm trying to take into account is that human nature rebels against the idea of working to support someone who isn't contributing themselves. It drives into our primal defenses against cheating. Just like chimps, people would rather destroy everything so no one gets anything than see someone take advantage of them. It's just how we're wired.
The key then is to make sure everyone who wants to contribute can, and in a way that doesn't turn them into a serf.
I have that same fear. Old school automation eliminating a lot of the factory jobs in 1980's. Then the PC revolution eliminated a lot of the clerical jobs in the 1990's and 2000's. We saw a rise in the number of "computer jockey" jobs when people work on computers all day doing various sorts of information processing/coding jobs. These will be eliminated by AI.
I think there's an underlying assumption here that many people don't want to work and need to be incentivized into productivity. I don't see evidence for that view. Most people actually want meaningful engagement—not because we need to legislate work requirements, but because humans are naturally creative and social. The current system that requires a "huge proportion of the population to be incentivized to be productive" reflects artificial scarcity, not human nature. We already have massive surplus labor capacity with a vast reserve army of unemployed, underemployed, and misemployed people while essential infrastructure crumbles and community needs go unmet.
The beauty of what I call an opportunity economy is that it works with diverse human motivations. Some people want basic security and time for family or creative pursuits—universal basic assets can provide that foundation. Others are driven by ambition, prestige, wealth accumulation, or the desire for power and control—the system should enable those paths too through genuine market competition and entrepreneurship support. We don't need to wait for automation to unleash this potential.
We could deploy federal job guarantees tomorrow for infrastructure repair, environmental restoration, community development, and care work—not as forced labor, but as meaningful opportunities for those who want them. The constraint isn't money—since 1971, the federal government creates money for spending and uses taxes to manage inflation, not to "fund" programs. We create money for military budgets and corporate bailouts without question, then claim "we can't afford" to mobilize our abundant human capacity for community benefit.
You're spot-on that automation changes this equation over time. As technology handles more routine production, "contribution" expands beyond traditional wage labor to include care work, artistic creation, community organizing, or simply living with dignity. Understanding our actual monetary capacity means we can provide everyone with productive tools, community-controlled resources, and economic security regardless of their relationship to traditional employment. As automation advances, we can focus human energy on creativity, care, and community building rather than forcing people into make-work to justify their existence.
We have both the financial resources and the human capacity for abundance right now—the constraints are entirely political:
https://open.substack.com/pub/chevan/p/the-us-national-debt-is-caused-by?r=8ae8z&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
This is a good thought, but could be half as long.
I'm all for it, but do not understand the author's sense that dignity is at odds with, fast growth, business profits, etc.
Also, it's a bit disconcerting that the author does not see the obstacles that have been put in the way of the kind of economy he desires: NIMBY politics around land use, building codes, road and street pricing; high deficits; trade restrictions; restriction on high skilled and educated immigrants; regulations that do not weigh the costs and benefit of the regulation; weak public education; inadequate deterrence and punishment of crime.
Thomas, you're identifying real policy challenges, but I think the tension you're missing is that many of these "obstacles" are actually based on economic mythology that serves existing power structures rather than natural economic laws. Take "high deficits"—since 1971, the federal government creates money for spending and uses taxes to manage inflation and resource allocation, not to "fund" programs. We never ask how to "pay for" military budgets or corporate bailouts because we understand the government creates that money, yet we treat community development as constrained by imaginary budget limits. Similarly, many of the regulations, trade restrictions, and zoning laws you mention aren't just inefficient policies—they're often deliberate mechanisms that concentrate wealth upward while appearing to serve legitimate purposes.
The dignity economy isn't at odds with growth or business profits; it's at odds with extraction disguised as productive activity, like planned obsolescence that forces replacement cycles or financial engineering that prioritizes shareholder payouts over investment in productive capacity. When CEO-to-worker ratios went from 20-to-1 to 344-to-1, that wasn't natural market evolution—it was policy design that redirected gains away from frontline workers. Understanding how our economic system actually works versus the mythology we're told reveals which obstacles are genuine constraints versus artificial barriers designed to maintain existing hierarchies.
I write more about the mythology and the faux-science of mainstream economics on my substack:
https://chevan.substack.com/p/your-mainstream-economics-decoder?r=8ae8z
Hay de todo en la viña del Senor!
How do you translate your style of analysis to policy actions?
Take a look at this and let me know if that is going in the direction you expect or would like:
https://open.substack.com/pub/chevan/p/introducing-opportunity-economics?r=8ae8z&utm_medium=ios
What the author does by summarily dismissing as "outdated 1960s welfare statism" was the period between 1940 and 1973 when the actual economy came closer to the dignity economy he asks for than anything we had before or since.
I would submit we are a lot farther from what he wants today than we were when I was kid.
I think there's a logical problem in your chain of thought. The reason the 1950s and 1960s were good for working people mostly had to do with the post-WWII boom, which was the result of America being the only productive industrial economy left standing after a global war. It took about 2-3 decades before Europe and Japan fully got back on line, while the Soviets were cut off from global commerce, and the remainder was under dysfunctional post-colonial policies. For a moment, America was making everything valuable for the world and there was a lot of wealth to share. The policies of that era didn't cause the wealth. Those policies moreover were industrial era policies designed to administer an industrial economy of factories within that specific Cold War era world. They weren't designed for America today.
Saying going back to 1960s welfare state ideas would restore 1960s America is like saying restoring the policies of feudal England would bring back the circumstances of feudal England. It's a different nation, with a different economy, with different technology, with different beliefs and ideas, with a different population, in a different world. The policies successful in one circumstance don't produce the same results under another. Ask Blockbuster Video.
I don’t think that story is true. If it were, then I would expect the US to have imported much less after the war than it had before the war. But it was about the same. So that foreign competition argument does not wash.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/why-the-postwar-prosperity-was-not
Michael, you're absolutely right that Frank's explanation doesn't hold up to the data, and your trade analysis is spot-on. The real difference between 1940-1973 and today wasn't global competition—it was deliberate policy choices about how economic gains get distributed. During that era, we had systematic mechanisms that ensured broad prosperity: CEO-to-worker ratios stayed around 20-to-1, strong collective bargaining, high marginal tax rates on top earners, and financial regulations that prevented extractive speculation.
Starting in the 1970s, we systematically dismantled those policies through financial deregulation, union-busting, tax cuts for the wealthy, and shifting corporate governance from stakeholder capitalism to shareholder primacy. The result was predictable: CEO ratios exploded to 344-to-1 while worker wages stagnated despite continued productivity growth. This wasn't natural economic evolution—it was financialization redirecting surplus value that used to flow to working people toward executive compensation and shareholder returns. Frank's absolutely right that we need new solutions for today's economy, but I think we can modernize the policy mechanisms that actually worked rather than treating them as obsolete. We can design updated versions of those broad-based prosperity policies that work with current technology and global conditions rather than accepting artificial constraints as natural.
The challenge is that treating effective historical frameworks as museum pieces rather than adaptable models is part of a broader retreat from national policy engagement that inadvertently helps authoritarians capture the institutions that actually control resource allocation:
https://open.substack.com/pub/chevan/p/why-progressives-are-accidentally?r=8ae8z&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
The author writes "“The objective of the economy is to give everyone willing to work hard and contribute a good life with dignity.”
That is consistent with the objective of a capitalist economy operating under SC business culture. We had that in the decades after WW II, which if you are old enough you might recall.
But today as a result of economic policy implemented since 1980 we now live in a capitalist economy operating under SP business culture. Under SP the objective of capitalism is to maximize shareholder value, that is stock market capitalization, which has produced what I call a ziggurat of finance, the excess market capitalization over the peak levels seen under SC culture.
Something like $50 trillion of excess valuation is stored up in various ziggurats which represents value extraction from the real economy over decades which has impeded the ability of the economy to do what you have called it to do.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/ziggurats-of-finance
It is not that there are people behaving badly, but rather the wrong incentive structure and belief system.
I agree with this. (I was sort of hoping you would comment on this one Michael because I knew you'd have a take).
I am reading your book. You have grasped the concept of successive "political rebellions" (critical elections) leading to dispensations. Curiously, you missed the one in 1980. I lived through that one, and it was palpable. They even called it a revolution.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-importance-of-a-political-dispensation
I write about my take on 1980 there a bit. There is a lot of debate about this but I don't consider it a realignment. Many do, although the majority position in the scholarship still is it isn't. My take is that the political focus changed, but the party ideologies didn't and it's the ideologies that matter for a realignment. Both parties kept their old ideas and applied their existing ideologies to new problems, from mainly economic to social ones.
However, society definitely changed. There was a major event. I just think it was the next great awakening event.
So I think there are two independent cycles of political realignments and awakenings. Realignments are about changes in political ideologies. Awakenings are about mass moral revivals. And there is interplay between them. So in my view 1980 isn't a realignment, but it was the start of an awakening. (Well actually the awakening started in the middle 1960s but it was the election in 1980 that enough of the new generation had come of age into middle adulthood that it went from just the focus of the youth of the New Left into mass politics.)
I agree with the two cycles. The Awakening is a Creedal Passion Period (CPP), and was largely over by 1980. My application of Turchin’s social contagion model gives dates if 1963-1978 for that one, and 2013-2027 for the present one.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/cycles-of-radicalization
As for the 1980 critical election, the Reagan administration brought in radically different policy that anything Nixon had done.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/what-is-neoliberalism-an-empirical
My thesis is the economic policy changes brought in by the Reagan administration change the business culture from SC to SP just as the economic policy changes brought in by the FDR administration changed business culture from SP to SC. This economic cultural shift has produced sa lot of the economic problems you talk about. I would call that a major development.
As for ideology. My understanding is the "Reagan Revolution” was an expression of “movement conservatism” begun by Buckley and others in the 1950’s. It is very different than the “cloth coat” Republicanism espoused by Nixon in his Checkers speech and exhibited by Eisenhower and pre-1932 Republicans. These Republicans were fiscal conservatives willing to raise taxes (in 1932) and keep them high (Eisenhower) to maintain fiscal balance.
Nixon strayed from this path, calling himself a “Keynesian” to justify running deficits, but by copping to this label that he was acknowledging he was no longer a fiscal conservative.
The Reagan administration used a made-up thing called “supply side economics” and asserted it would balance the budget. That is, he chose to run a policy that would increase deficits and call it fiscally conservative (that is, lie). Republicans have not run a balanced budget since 1957, and yet even today polls show that voters think they are fiscal conservatives. The use of overt lying on Republican politics is a new thing introduced in 1980. I would say that is a ideological change.
This discussion would be perfect for town halls. You have already provided the context for a fruitful outcome. I know, I'm dreamimg.
I intend to keep coming back to it and refining what a Dignity Economy would look like.
Can Americans agree on a vision of “good”? I’m not sure, and I think this may be at the core of many of our problems. You’re right to look around and ask “what’s all this for? What is its purpose or function?”, but I’m not sure there is enough cultural cohesion to arrive at an answer.
I like the idealism. Parts of it may even work. But at the end of the day, anyone's role is dependent on the marginal utility they bring to it, and if there is an alternative that uses fewer resources in exchange, then that will be chosen instead of them. Be flexible in your utility and you should be fine.
The thing is that our competition games take place within a system of rules. So the marginal utility of actions are restrained by the rules of the market system we're operating in. For example, it might be efficient to beat workers to make them work harder, or to use toxic chemicals and then dump them into the water supply, but we don't do these things because the game says they're not allowed. So we compete for efficiency in the ways that the game allows. We just saw a similar huge change in the last few years with me too, with businesses making very different judgments about the most efficient way to manage their businesses when not even the law changed but merely social rules.
So it's entirely doable, just by tweaking the social and legal expectations of what managers are supposed to be achieving. This is how you unlock the power of markets without allowing people's shortsighted or selfish tendency to break the nation they're supposed to be supporting or their society.
Agreed, to a point. Feelings only go so far. When the exchange is too unequal, there will be a revolution.
Patrick, you're right that markets operate within rules, and Frank's point about those rules being changeable is crucial. But here's what the current rules have produced: CEO-to-worker ratios went from 20-to-1 in 1965 to 344-to-1 today. That's not reflecting marginal utility differences - it's reflecting policy choices about who gets to capture economic gains.
The "revolution when exchange is too unequal" you mention is already happening - it's just taking the form of political upheaval rather than street protests. People are rejecting institutions that no longer serve them because the current rules systematically extract value from working people while concentrating it among executives and shareholders.
Your flexibility advice works for individuals, but systemically we need rules that reward genuine productivity and value creation rather than financial engineering. When businesses get tax deductions for equipment depreciation while families get nothing for planned obsolescence, when corporations extract over 100% of profits for shareholders instead of investing in productive capacity - these aren't natural market outcomes, they're policy designs that create artificial scarcity.
The question isn't whether markets should determine value, but whether our market rules should enable broad-based wealth creation or concentrate gains among those who already have political connections.
Here's a link to an article on one specific rule change that shows exactly how 'the rules have changed away from opportunity for all':
https://open.substack.com/pub/chevan/p/how-corporate-friendly-accounting?r=8ae8z&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
This is a lot of words to try to rationalize Trump voters and Bernie Sanders voters, and dismiss the views of everyone else.
How so? I don't think that's what I was intending to do at all. I'm curious how you read it.