Referring to the modern economic goal of maximizing consumption, Dr. Goodwin raised the equity issue, observing that purchasing behavior depends not only on what people want, but also on what they can pay for. "I don't know of any apologist for economics," she acknowledged, "who will state that the goal of the field is to maximize the consumption of the rich while ignoring those without purchasing power but that is the effect of a system of goals which, in abjuring overt values, seeks scientific neutrality by hitching its wagon to the star of consumer behavior."

In addressing the question of Where do we go from here? Dr. Goodwin named three ways in which our conception of economics needs to change if it is to align its internal goals with acceptable final goals. First, economics must take seriously the fact that goals and values do get embedded in all social sciences. Presently, economics is a somewhat dangerous discipline because it purports to be value-neutral while it is, in fact, being developed as a tool to maximize output and the consumption of wealthy consumers. The claim of value-neutrality must be abandoned.

Second, we need to alter the tradition of conceptualizing all individuals as divided into two economic roles: the worker and the consumer. Producer and consumer are neither a complete set of an individual's roles nor do most of us manage to be only one of these at a time. Economics should be rethought in terms of what's good for the whole person.

Third, economics should be asking the following questions: Should human beings be viewed simply as necessary parts of a growing economy? Or, instead, should economic activity serve human well-being? Economic theory as it is now taught and practiced is much more growth-centered than human-centered.

Neva Goodwin and Richard Parker lead a lively
discussion on human-centered economics

Richard Parker, Lecturer and Senior Fellow at the Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics, and Public Policy, provided a far-ranging response to Dr. Goodwin's remarks. He went a step further than Neva Goodwin when he agreed that economists need to recognize growth as instrumental and not as a human goal but that, for the most part, economists seem to concur that "it's really up to someone else to figure out what final human goals are. [Economists are] just here to provide economic growth as a means toward achieving whatever it is that final human goals are."

Dr. Parker went on to emphasize that the profession of economics has become over-mathematicized and too unrelated to the real world. "In the course of discussion tonight," he suggested, "we might ask how we proceed to form precisely the economics that serves human needs and not the rather more limited needs of mathematically-inclined economists."

Gail Leftwich, Director of the Cambridge Forum, posed the question, "Is it the individual about whom we should be concerned or is it the individual-functioning-in-a-community?"

Gail's question is one, Neva Goodwin replied, with which a movement among economists known as Communitarians is concerning itself. For too long economists have seemed to address economics as if only individuals were involved.

Picking up on the notion of changing perspectives, Dr. Parker observed that "200 years ago, 90 percent of US citizens were self-employed whereas today only 10 percent of Americans are self-employed. We are," he continued, "employees of others and to a degree grant thereby a certain piece of our own individual freedom to our employer in a way that strikes deeply at mythic notions of an ongoing individualism, at least within the economic arena."

"Thirty to forty years ago," a member of the audience offered, "the belief was that if the pie were bigger, everybody would share it. Recent data indicate that maybe the top two quintiles are participating and the bottom two are going in a retrograde direction, the bottom one at a particularly rapid rate. This whole concept of redistribution can be considered an addition to the concept of growth."

Dr. Goodwin offered an illustration to broaden the discussion of an equitable economy. A marvelous idea grew up in communities of elderly, she explained, whereby everybody's hour of labor was defined as worth one time dollar . Seniors had wanted to make useful contributions but had not wanted to volunteer. They felt that if they offered their time for nothing, their time would be valued at zero. Through a computerized system, the work activities of seniors earned time dollar bank credits which could be cashed in when needed. This is a fascinating alternative that one should take into account in discussing a mixed economy, the lecturer suggested.

"How," a member of the audience asked, "will some of these issues we are discussing ultimately find their way into policies, accounting rules, etc.?"

"What you're teaching to students today is what is going to shape the culture of tomorrow," Dr. Goodwin replied. "There are many entry points at which one can try to change economics and the impact of economics, but I think the one that's most powerful is what gets taught. That's why I care about text books and curricula and the material that's available for teaching students."

As the dialogue continued, a participant wondered aloud, "What can we do about the control of the media and the power of the whole advertising industry?" Neva Goodwin concurred that the issue is a huge and terribly important one and that "to say that people should be able to say anything they like with very few restrictions...and then to apply that standard to commercial speech...has made it almost impossible to regulate the cultural impact of advertising and marketing. I think that we've got to take that one head-on as a basic legal issue that needs to be argued throughout society until it gets to the Supreme Court and gets taken on again."

To answer the question of why it is that Americans seem to have led the trend toward narrowing the discipline of economics, Dr. Goodwin provided a quick historical review. "After the Depression, there was a great deal of criticism of the way corporations had been organized and the way that stockholders got so badly burned, as well as criticism of banks. And the institutional solutions to these two issues unfortunately went in the direction of making the stockholder the sole individual whose interest was to be considered in the way a corporation is run. Then it happened that American corporations became the most powerful in the world. The result is that we have a culture where corporations are enormously powerful and the only group to whom they are supposed to be responsible is the stockholders."

Dr. Parker injected the reminder that "It's really quite important to remember that the institutions that make up the modern capitalist economy are profoundly institutions of state and government. The corporation is a legal fiction. We talk falsely when we talk about the modern American economy simply being a market economy."

"The largest part of the American economy is now dominated by the information side of the equation," a questioner began. "How does the information economy help or hurt?"

"That's not a small question," Neva Goodwin responded. "One piece of it has to do with the enormous power of corporations, who are among the largest players in the world today. If you list the 100 largest GNP's, 52 of those are now corporations and only 48 are nations. The nations themselves are being challenged by these other entities. Nations are at least geographically based. Corporations are not geographically based and information technology allows all of us, if we wish, to interact with communities that are not geographically based. This creates another player. We have nations and we have corporations; it's possible that the third player is the ability of individuals to form communities of a different type that's neither corporation nor nation and that can give some countervailing power.

"That's the optimistic side of it. The other side of it, of course, is the ability of corporations to make use of information technology to foist upon the world ever more of the consumer culture which turns people into machines for purchasing and consuming so as to keep the economy growing. I see this constant race where the corporations try to grab this new beast and harness it to their use, and individuals and other types of communities are grabbing it and harnessing it to their use. I don't know how it's going to come out."

(l-r) New Cambridge Forum Director Pat Suhrcke,
Gail Leftwich, Donald McInnes, chairman of the
board of Cambridge Forum, and Virginia Straus.
Best wishes to Gail as she leaves Cambridge Forum.

As the program moved toward its conclusion, BRC Executive Director Virginia Straus invited the audience to join her in offering a farewell salute to Gail Leftwich, Cambridge Forum Director and the evening's moderator, who is leaving Cambridge for a position in Washington, DC. A floral bouquet was given to Ms. Leftwich in acknowledgment of her efforts to "bring people together to talk again" and also in acknowledgment of all of the "seeds for beloved community that you have planted in Cambridge."

-- Helen Marie Casey