Culture

Author: Jim Stanford
Publisher: Pluto Press
4/5


Let’s be honest: reading about economics is not really my idea of a leisurely Sunday afternoon activity. However, in an attempt to expand my horizons, I picked up Economics for Everyone: a Short Guide to the Economics of Capitalism. Written by Jim Stanford, an economist for the Canadian Auto Workers union and columnist for the Globe and Mail newspaper in Canada, Economics for Everyone covers the fundamentals of capitalism in a relatively succinct but thorough way. In under 400 pages, Stanford manages to explain the basic concepts of capitalism, and describe its inception, how it currently works, and the complexity of its global effects. 
As a naive reader, I stood to learn a lot, and Stanford didn’t fail to deliver. I learnt, for example, that the ‘economy’ is simply all the work that human beings perform in order to produce the things we need and use in our lives. The economy is very social, in the sense that we rely on and interact with each other in order to reach our goals in the course of working. I also learnt that ‘capitalism’ is not synonymous to ‘economy’. Capitalism is just one of the ways to organise the economy. In a capitalist economy, the production of goods and services is usually done by private companies who want lots of profit, and most of the work done is by people hired to do it, not the owners themselves. Not all economies are like this. One more tidbit: About 85 percent of the population depend on wage labour they supply to employers for their income, while well over half of all wealth is owned by the richest 5-10 percent of society! The world’s richest 225 people have a combined annual income of $US50 billion, which is more than the combined annual incomes of the people in the world’s twelve poorest countries (around 385 million people). Incredible.
For someone like me, who has negligible technical economic knowledge (although Stanford says that everyone has experience in the economy as we participate in it), I found it easy to understand the concepts being explained. As well as the in-text definitions, there is a companion online glossary on the book’s website. Tables and boxes highlighting important concepts, as well as cartoons and diagrams, all help Stanford’s explanations of the intricacies of capitalism. Economics for Everyone is an informative read to find out just why capitalism is such a dirty word, and that we could all get so much more if we pushed for action collectively instead of just accepting that the economy is “how it is.”