Unjust Deserts

timBooks and Reviews

Unjust Deserts

by Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly, The New Press, 2008

Reviewed by Hazel Henderson

This meticulously researched, fascinating book revisits an eternal question for all human societies, the relative roles and rights of individuals vis-à-vis society.  This long-standing tension has evolved as human organizations grew in scale along with our technological virtuosity.  In agrarian times, it was clearer how individual human labor produced food and fiber from the earth.  Today almost all production is organizationally produced and depends on the legacy of generations of effort, invention and scientific achievements of our forbearers.  This changes old formulas about earned and unearned income, wealth and inheritance.  The conventional view of the lone, rugged individual, entrepreneur or inventor obscured the role of society and the role of cumulative knowledge and social organization that underpinned each individuals’ effort.  With many vivid examples throughout our history, the authors illustrate the growing wave of inherited knowledge on which each individual entrepreneur business and scientific achiever is surfing.  This 3,000 year story of human achievement is carefully documented from the earliest times to the Warren Buffets and Bill Gate’s of today.

Much as Malcolm Gladwell also traces in his Outlier (2008), Alperovitz and Daly reach a similar conclusion: individual success is only explainable as part of society’s gift and the hard-won legacy of prior generations.  However, Alperovitz and Daly dig deeper by showing that conventional economics must now change to keep pace with the new realities of the knowledge society.  The implications for the public debate over budget priorities are clear: investments in human capital, education, health, scientific research and a new 21st century infrastructure are paramount.  As a former advisor to the US Office of Technology Assessment, the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Engineering, I can only say  “Amen,” and add my own proposal over many years: correct the classification of education from an “expenditure” to the “investment” column in GDP national accounts since investing in education is always our most important asset: the next generation.