Oren Cass on Productive Pluralism vs Consumerism
* Book: Oren Cass. The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. Encounter Books,
URL = https://www.encounterbooks.com/books/the-once-and-future-worker/
Definition of Productive Pluralism=
Oren Cass:
"Productive pluralism is not satisfied with an efficient labor-market outcome per se. It requires a particular outcome: the provision of sufficient meaningful work to sustain families and communities. If the labor market settles on an efficient outcome in which large segments of the population lack meaningful work, our response can’t be to say “thanks, understood” and then to wait for those displaced people suddenly to transform themselves into something else, or simply to give them government aid. Our response must be “that needs to change.”
(https://lawliberty.org/oren-casss-productive-pluralism/)
Contextual Quote
"This is a book that demands to be read not just for its economics but for its politics. Cass’s definition of prosperity in terms of meaningful production rather than mere consumption directs the reader toward the purpose of politics, which is to be concerned with the human things and not just the economic ones."
- Greg Weiner [1]
Discussion
Greg Weiner:
"Cass's "Productive Pluralism"
Oren Cass’s The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America is nothing if not bold. He is only 17 pages in when he takes on Adam Smith, whose dictum that economic activity is about consumption rather than production was sanctified by Keynes and made the cornerstone of 20th century macroeconomic policy. The result, Cass argues, is that we define prosperity in terms of the overall size of the economic pie—“economic piety,” in his formulation—rather than according to the dignity of work.
Cass’s powerful analysis is a call to place the human need to produce at the center of policymakers’ attention. The goal, he writes, should be “rising productivity for all workers” rather than an agenda “that aims to maximize what each household can consume.” The notion that prosperity is definable in terms of overall GDP conceals the real pressures it places on production.
It is possible, Cass suggests, to have a growing economic pie—even one broadly shared—while large swaths of the population are excluded from the vital and meaningful activity of production. The postwar emphasis on the size of the pie rather than personal production holds that even those who lose out on production can, by means of redistributionist welfare policies, be robust consumers. What Cass recognizes—and what Smith was not wholly inured to either—is the vapidity of a life of consumption without production.
This is a book that demands attention from every critic of President Trump, but especially from those who persist in bewilderment at his ascent. Many conservatives will bristle at the whiff of economic engineering it sometimes emits, but there is less of that then first meets the eye. Cass’s emphasis is more on leveling the playing field for production and removing distortions that favor consumption at work’s expense."