MyAV范

This essay聽was first published in Ordinary Hope: A Mission to Rebuild.

As the general election campaign of 2024 reached its high-point, a small group of international economists and policymakers gathered together at the MyAV范 Policy Lab to reflect on the possibility that the election of a new government would mark a turning point in the history of the British economy.

The immediate reason for the gathering was a visit to the UK from the celebrated American author, Nick Romeo. Romeo鈥檚 book The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy had recently been published to much acclaim. It sets out the possibilities of significant economic change.

In Romeo鈥檚 own words, The Alternative is a book that aspires to do much. It searches for 鈥減lausible solutions to wealth inequality, environmental collapse, the evaporation of good middle-class jobs, the casualization of a growing number of workers, the outsized influence of investment capital, the erosion of democratic governance in private and public sectors, and more鈥�.

More than that, Romeo suggests that the answers to these challenges are already present amongst us, just waiting to be found. The 鈥渟trongest evidence that alternative arrangements are viable is to show that they already exist鈥�, Romeo argues, before going on to outline a host of the most compelling new ways of conducting our economic lives together which he has detected in advanced economies across the world.

In conversation, Romeo is even more blunt. 鈥淭here can be a sense that our big economic institutions have tended to treat economics as a kind of natural phenomenon,鈥� he said to us. 鈥滻t is just something that happens. It鈥檚 out there in the world. One can study it and observe it.鈥� And yet, Romeo insists, that is not the case. Economists, investors, business owners, entrepreneurs and economic policy-makers all have choices to make. And, what is more, Romeo believes they are increasingly making different ones than they have before.

鈥淚 think it is about shifting away from a naturalised view of issues 鈥� such as inequality - to a view that says we don鈥檛 have to accept things as they are because they have always been. When, in fact, we have made choices to build the economy in which we live.鈥�

Romeo鈥檚 book is littered with examples of those creating new tools and systems for growing a healthy economy and building a strong social settlement. And where lives are shaped by individuals and institutions choosing to question 鈥榳hy does it have to be this way?鈥�. Yet viewing Romeo鈥檚 work as romantic or radical is a misunderstanding of his core argument. Fundamentally, he is suggesting that we, as citizens and politicians, have choices - that there are options. Romeo believes we have a growing sense of frustration amongst the electorate because we have failed to question and explore alternatives.

It is in these alternatives that Romeo finds his Ordinary Hope.

鈥淎 big aim of my writing is to broaden our sense of what鈥檚 possible."

One practical area that Romeo outlined in his discussions at MyAV范, and covers in depth in the pages of The Alternative, is the treatment of gig workers and their dependence on single large players in the technology-driven service sector. Romeo is not the first to point out that gig workers, and many small businesses for that matter, are forced to use new digital platforms that are taking a bigger and bigger share of the income being earned. Like others, he points out this is a significant market failure shaped by monopoly power. What is more, however, Romeo thinks he has seen an alternative emerge.

鈥淲hat if you had a more horizontal market in which all the demand for labour was on a public platform that was not trying to profit maximise. So rather than taking 30 or 50% per transaction, per ride or delivery, what if you took 3 to 5% because it was a digital infrastructure dedicated to facilitating economic activity.鈥� Romeo introduces us to the people who are leading just such an initiative.

And it is not just the gig economy. Throughout the discussion, Romeo combines the big and the small, often returning to the examples of state, regional, and city leaders who have led the way in helping major economic re-imaginings take hold.

鈥淚f you work at a smaller, more local level, it鈥檚 often quite plausible to find a lot of common ground with people,鈥� he explains.

The Alternative dives into detail in several key areas. These include different models of ownership and corporate governance that have challenged conventional stakeholder capitalism in California to enable social enterprises to protect their core purposes. It also encompasses civic job guarantee programmes, which see local government bring local employers, training agencies and trade unions together to cut social security bills.

They also extend to participatory budget programmes, where democratic mechanisms enable citizens to participate in economic decision-making. 鈥淭here is a city in Portugal, just outside Lisbon, called Cascais,鈥� Romeo explains. 鈥淎 sizeable chunk of the municipal budget is allocated through a kind of direct democracy mechanism, where people can propose projects. They have to persuade other people that their ideas are worth funding. So, there鈥檚 a kind of campaigning and voting thing. This is very much at a grassroots civic level, think middle schoolers or high schoolers, as well as old people. Everyone鈥檚 eligible. So they go around and they try to persuade people at coffee shops, restaurants, parks, and they鈥檙e real projects that they can fund. They actually break ground on major infrastructure investments.鈥�

For Romeo, believing in the possibility that comes from embracing local and human-level examples of change is crucial to delivering more systematic transformation for the long term. In the small, the big ideas can grow 鈥� from saplings comes a forest.

And it might just be that this new forest is taking shape. At the same discussion, the MyAV范 academic Wendy Carlin, reminds the gathered groupings that a whole new paradigm of economic thinking might just be emerging in front of us. Such a paradigm is characterised by new ways of thinking about the ethical foundations of our economy, our explanatory model of the economy itself, the key policy choices in front of us and the ways in which we talk about the economy in our everyday conversation.

When we have thought about those categories over the past 40 or 50 years, we have tended to see the economy in terms of negative freedoms and keeping the state out of our business. We have understood human beings as narrowly self-interested and rational. Our policymakers have called for the reduction of state expenditure and for the deployment of market mechanisms wherever possible. And we have talked about the economy, as Romeo says, as a kind of natural phenomenon, where human beings do well when they leave it alone, and where there is 鈥渘o such thing as society鈥�.

Now, though, Carlin suggests alternatives are coming into view.

We increasingly recognise that we should be pursuing a more just future, where we enjoy undominated social relations of equal dignity; where we protect the future of the planet and insist on an accountability of private and state power. At the same time, we recognise that rational individuals are not the only actors in an economy. Groups matter too, and power and influence is wielded in many subtle ways not just through market exchange. When those understandings shift, Carlin also outlines, then we become open to the kinds of policies that Romeo is outlining 鈥� job guarantees, new models of ownership and control, participatory budgeting. And we start to speak about the economy differently too, as dependent on a series of collective choices that must reflect what we care about in our ordinary lives.

As the participants at the MyAV范 event listened to the exchange between Romeo and Carlin, and mapped it onto their own experiences, thoughts naturally returned to the agenda of the general election campaign and of the new government that was to follow.

Few of these ideas had explicitly appeared during that campaign itself. The debate had followed a fairly predictable pattern 鈥� with arguments about the parties promises (or absences of promises) on growth and spending, debt and taxes. But that is certainly not to say that the ideas were not percolating through nonetheless. Some parties, after all, were promising not just growth, but growth in every part of the country; they were arguing for prosperity that was not just compatible with a green revolution but dependent on it; and Labour, for one, were contending that strengthening the rights of working people in collective bargaining was not bad for productivity but likely to improve it.

Hidden in all of these claims might just be the beginning of what Romeo calls 鈥渢he alternative鈥�. It is the job of all of us who care about economic justice, he insists, to help the rest of the country to see it.