David F. Ruccio — Inequality and immiseration

"Immiseration" has a nice quality to it and is less emotionally loaded than "exploitation," which is now associated with "Marxism" in the pejorative sense in capitalist countries like the US.

It’s clear that, for decades now, American workers have been falling further and further behind. And there’s simply no justification for this sorry state of affairs—nothing that can rationalize or excuse the growing gap between the majority of people who work for a living and the tiny group at the top.

But that doesn’t stop mainstream economists from trying...

Are mainstream economists capitalist shills or are they just clueless about reality? Or maybe both.

American workers are getting relatively less of what they produce, which means more is available to distribute to those at the top of the distribution of income.

That’s what mainstream economists can’t or won’t understand: that workers may be worse off even as their wages and incomes rise. That problem flies in the face of every attempt to celebrate the existing order by claiming “just deserts.”

There’s nothing just about the relative immiseration and growing inequality faced by American workers. And nothing that can’t be changed by imagining and creating a radically different set of economic institutions.

Economists operate in terms of the institutional status quo and those stepping out of line are marginalized a "heterodox," or "Marxist." The economics department at Notre Dame, where David Ruccio taught for many years, was recently reorganized to diminish if not entirely excluded heterodox teaching. This is also an institutional problem and it is closely connected with the larger institutional issues in which contemporary capitalism is embedded and imposed on workers (labor) and the environment (land).

The economics profession needs to be address these issues to remain credible.

 

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Inequality and immiseration
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame