Positive Sum

CHAPTER EIGHTPOSITIVE‐SUM HEROES: LEARNING HOW TO MOVE FORWARD

Human beings can be disastrous and cruel. But you know what? We can also be miracles. And, my God, do we need miracles today.

—Eddie Glaude, Jr.¹

I discovered the work of Louis O. Kelso in the mid‐1980s, when I was a college student at Princeton. By then this maverick political economist, corporate and financial lawyer, author, lecturer, and merchant banker was already in his early 70s, while I was still a pre‐med student. At the urging of my academic advisor, I was considering a major in the humanities and had found myself drawn to political economy, in particular. I was fascinated by Kelso's take on the struggle to navigate the labor‐management tensions I'd witnessed as a kid.

A political centrist, Kelso saw the same fundamental flaw that others had seen before him, starting with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Industrial progress was concentrating wealth in ever fewer hands, while the workers responsible for producing all that money were increasingly disconnected from the prosperity it created. The bread lines and shuttered factories of the Great Depression had highlighted the catastrophic failures of this system. Even as technology had shifted wealth creation from human labor to machines and capital, the riches flowed only into the hands of those who were already powerful. So workers traded time for wages, while someone else collected the profits.

A World War II veteran who had studied the economics of post–World ...