What Is Wrong with the West’s Economies?

Mark Thoma is skeptical that … the answer to our inequality/job satisfaction problems lies in the prescription given in What Is Wrong with the West’s Economies?.

Of the concrete steps that would help to widen flourishing, a reform of education stands out. The problem here is not a perceived mismatch between skills taught and skills in demand. … The problem is that young people are not taught to see the economy as a place where participants may imagine new things, where entrepreneurs may want to build them and investors may venture to back some of them. It is essential to educate young people to this image of the economy.

It will also be essential that high schools and colleges expose students to the human values expressed in the masterpieces of Western literature, so that young people will want to seek economies offering imaginative and creative careers. Education systems must put students in touch with the humanities in order to fuel the human desire to conceive the new and perchance to achieve innovations. This reorientation of general education will have to be supported by a similar reorientation of economic education.

We will all have to turn from the classical fixation on wealth accumulation and efficiency to a modern economics that places imagination and creativity at the center of economic life.

Emphasis Mine

What heresy from a Capitalist economist! Wealth accumulation is not the point of Capitalism!

I suppose this is a tacit admission that Capitalism is not living up to its ideal as a panacea for all social ills. The system is not delivering benefits to the poor because people are using it the wrong way!

This is the major blind-spot of all Capitalist economists—this is how Capitalism works. It is all about wealth accumulation. Wealth accumulates to the most efficient, the most ruthless, the most politically connected.

Wealth means accumulation of even more wealth. The less efficient, the less ruthless, the less politically connected are impoverished in the process and eventually discarded from the system altogether.

Changing how people see the world means changing the social, economic, and political systems that form those views. You cannot change one without changing the others.