While there had been much radical thought before John Stuart Mill, Joseph Persky argues it was Mill, as he moved to the left, who provided the radical wing of liberalism with its first serious analytical foundation, a political economy of progress that still echoes today. A rereading of Mill's mature work suggests his theoretical understanding of accumulation led him to see laissez-faire capitalism as a transitional system. Deeply committed to the egalitarian precepts of the Enlightenment, Mill advocated gradualism and rejected revolutionary expropriation on utilitarian grounds: gradualism, not expropriation, promised meaningful long-term gains for the working classes. He endorsed laissez-faire capitalism because his theory of accumulation saw that system approaching a stationary state characterized by a great reduction in inequality and an expansion of cooperative production. These tendencies, in combination with an aggressive reform agenda made possible by the extension of the franchise, promised to provide a material base for social progress and individual development. The Political Economy of Progress goes on to claim that Mill's radical political economy anticipated more than a little of Marx's analysis of capitalism and laid a foundation for the work of Fabians and other gradualist radicals in the 20th century. More recently, modern philosophic radicals, such as Rawls, have deep links to this Millean political economy. These links are still worthy of development. In particular, a politically meaningful acceptance of Rawls's radical liberalism waits on a movement capable of re-engineering the workplace in a manner consistent with Mill's endorsement of worker management.

The Political Economy of Progress: John Stuart Mill and Modern Radicalism (Oxford Studies in History of Economics)

Business & Money

Persky, Joseph

Economics

Oxford University Press

Building a Social Science: 19th Century British Cooperative Thought (Oxford Studies in the History of Economics)

Madden, Kirsten

When Corporations Leave Town: The Costs and Benefits of Metropolitan Job Sprawl

New suburban communities have sprung up all over America, while industrial plants and other commercial districts in the inner city have been left to decay. Nowhere is this more evident that the midwestern United States, where newly formed communities have funneled jobs and income from the inner city. Generally known as sprawl, the problem is particularly acute in those metropolitan areas where deconcentration is taking place-decline in the central city coupled with suburban growth. This process creates benefits in the sububrs, but also increasingly poses costs in the form of congestion and increased infrastructure costs. When Corporations Leave Town analyzes and develops a consistent and comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of employment deconcentration, focussing on central cities and their suburbs. 
Sprawl and deconcentration have become big issues in Vice President Albert Gore's presidential campaign, and are the subject of a growing number of policy initiatives, conferences, and research efforts by organizing such as the Urban Land Institute, the National Homebuilders Association, and the Brookings Institute. Joseph Persky and Wim Wiewel compare the costs and benefits of a firm's locating in the central city with locating in the suburbs. They use a hypothetical model of a large manufacturing plant and a business services office in the Chicago metropolitan area to calculate tangible and intangible costs such as population and traffic congestion, air pollution, housing abandonment, loss of farmland, tax liabilities, and the strain put on suburban public resources. Persky and Wiewel then explore a broad range of public policies advocated for reversing or mitigating metropolitan deconcentration.

Wiewel, Wim

Wayne State University Press

The authors explore a new framework for evaluating economic development projects. This framework is based on a job-chain approach. Each new job created by an economic development incentive is filled by an employee who leaves behind another job. In turn, that job may be filled by someone who leaves behind their old job, etc. Such job chains end when an unemployed worker, someone not previously in the labor force, or an in-migrant to the labor market takes a vacancy. Job chains are the mechanism for observing and measuring "trickle down". The job trains model developed in this book presents new insights into local economic development evaluation and strategy.

Does "Trickle Down" Work?: Economic Development Strategies and Job Chains in Local Labor Markets

Felsenstein, Daniel

Carlson, Virginia

Job Hunting & Careers

W E Upjohn Inst for

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