Recapitalizing America

First published in 1983, Recapitalizing America (now with a new preface by Donald Tomaskovic-Devey) identifies, criticizes, and offers alternatives to the accepted wisdoms of recapitalization, whose variants include not only Reaganomics and Thatcherism but also the less rigid neo-liberal and even liberal policy proposals likely to supplant them. The authors do not want simply to restore the Keynesian welfare state liberalism of the past, but to change and build beyond it.

If the economic ideology of pro-business recapitalization is productivity, the social ideology is the deliberate widening of inequalities and the legitimation of the inegalitarian trends. In opposition to this erosion of support for greater equality, Miller and Tomaskovic-Devey first expose the faulty economic analysis of recapitalization and then propose an alternative economics and politics which are grounded in a commitment to social justice. More specifically, they argue that high-technology jobs cannot solve the problem of unemployment, that the U.S. does not suffer from low investment but from the inappropriate use of capital funds, and that higher productivity is no panacea for the complex problems of the American economy. Their prescriptions include a more effective allocation of capital coupled with a realistic assessment of the difficulties faced by democratic planning, advocacy of employment as the social policy, and the recognition that a more caring society depends not only on legislation and administration but more fundamentally on the concern of one citizen for another.