Everything for sale

Robert Kuttner's quarrel, in this provocative and illuminating book, is not with capitalism per se or with a broad role for market forces: "Consumption is doubtless pleasurable," he writes, "and no one minds a high material standard of living." His dispute is rather with the current libertarian or laissez-faire direction of both economic practice and economic theory that has been gradually gaining in prominence since the mid-1970s.

Champions of this approach extol the unfettered marketplace and trust in its ability to increase wealth, promote innovation, and "optimize outcomes"  - and to regulate itself flawlessly all the while.

In politics, this trend was fortified by Ronald Reagan's 1980 victory and by the clarion call, undimin-ished to this day, for less government "interference" in people's lives. Dissenting voices have been drowned out by a stream of circular arguments and complex mathematical models that ignore real-world conditions and disregard values and pursuits that can't easily be turned into commodities. These values and pursuits happen to be ones that most Americans still consider integral to the nation's identity: justice, freedom, worship, leisure, family, charity, love. Human motivation, Kuttner main-tains, cannot always be reduced to a grid of prices. The fact that we persist in behaving "irrationally and igno-rantly" according to the market model far from invalidates the model for its partisans; somehow it rallies them all the more fiercely to the cause.

In Everything for Sale, Kuttner makes a powerful case for the mixed economy, in which government steps in to override markets for a variety of reasons: to stabilize monetary forces, to promote growth, to temper inequalities, to cultivate civic virtues. This is the system that produced a quarter-century of unprecedented expansion and prosperity in the wake of depression and war. (The Great Depression was itself, of course, an example of a market run amok. It is a system that admits regulation not as a necessary evil but as an expression of society's will and as the frequent mother of invention, when industry is forced to discard out-moded, dangerous, and often inefficient technologies and practices. It is the system that, Kuttner contends, holds the greatest hope for a flourishing twenty-first century. His concrete observations and clear analyses, purged of jargon, address themselves to every layperson, businessperson, policy-maker, and open-minded economist in America.