Gar Alperovitz

Bio

"Gar Alperovitz grew up in America’s heartland in Racine, Wisconsin, in the 1940s, at a time when the city was one of the country’s most vibrant industrial hubs. His father owned a small specialty manufacturing company employing about 30 people. “I knew what the inside of a factory looked like,” he recalls. “It was not an abstraction for me as it must be now for most young people growing up in America.” He counts among his early and most profound influences the revisionist historian and communitarian socialist William Appleman Williams with whom he studied as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin. It was there that he first began to explore (and later to doubt) that there was a way to realize the values embodied in traditional liberalism within the existing economic paradigms--in his view, neither socialism nor corporate capitalism held the answers.

Gar went on to do graduate work in political economy at the University of Cambridge where he became keenly interested in the broad societal implications of globalization. His PhD thesis, focusing on the relationship between World War II planning and US domination of global financial and trade policy, was published by Simon & Schuster and became the book that opened the debate on America’s use of the atomic bomb as a policy tool: Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power.

Gar counts a visit to an Israeli kibbutz in the mid 1950s as another seminal influence. That initial visit led, 25 years later, to deeper research into the kibbutz structure and into how community ownership and the infusion of social values into a business operation can yield positive impacts on efficiency and productivity.

After graduate school Gar became legislative director for Senator Gaylord Nelson, an early conservationist and the founder of Earth Day. As a pre-baby boomer armed with a PhD from Cambridge, the opportunities in academia were wide open to him, but instead he chose a more expansive path—participating in, starting up, and running a series of think tanks: as a founding fellow of Harvard’s Institute of Politics in 1966, cofounding with Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks the Cambridge Institute in 1968; serving as President of the Center for Community Economic Development, and, with Jeff Faux, founding in 1977 The National Center for Economic Alternatives, where a framework for the role that worker-owned cooperatives could play in economic and societal transformation was developed.

In 2000 Gar and sociologist Ted Howard co-founded the Democracy Collaborative, the thought incubator for Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperatives." (http://www.capitalinstitute.org/conversation/braintrust/gar-alperovitz)