The Economist’s visceral reaction is to scoff whenever a non-economist says something about the economy. I’ve seen the attitude time and again that, privileged to economic knowledge, Economists have no economics to learn from the rest of society. Yet I’ve witnessed that much of what economists have to say about the economy is useless at best, and incredibly destructive at worst (such as all the advice about financial deregulation since the 1990s). And at the same time, I’ve been left with no doubt that journalists, social scientists, moral philosophers, bloggers, business people, and even everyday workers can have a great deal of economic insight.
This time, a gem of economic insight from Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times. What Kristof realizes, and many economists apparently do not, is that any plan for economic recovery and prosperity necessarily needs to look seriously at the organization of firms in the United States. Publicly-traded corporations are not the only option; in fact, they seem to be one of the worst. There are various models of different organizational, decision-making, and ownership structures that lead to different economic outcomes. Kristof argues that if we want a model that encourages human development, affords universal access to healthcare, and curbs income inequality, we have a lot to learn from the organization of the US military:
You see, when our armed forces are not firing missiles, they live by an astonishingly liberal ethos — and it works. The military helped lead the way in racial desegregation, and even today it does more to provide equal opportunity to working-class families — especially to blacks — than just about any social program. It has been an escalator of social mobility in American society because it invests in soldiers and gives them skills and opportunities.
The United States armed forces knit together whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics from diverse backgrounds, invests in their education and training, provides them with excellent health care and child care. And it does all this with minimal income gaps: A senior general earns about 10 times what a private makes, while, by my calculation, C.E.O.’s at major companies earn about 300 times as much as those cleaning their offices. That’s right: the military ethos can sound pretty lefty.
Now this is a model of the economy that I think deserves a Nobel Prize.
Open Economics 