Marjorie Kelly on employee ownership and capital bias. Brilliant stuff here.

Adam Simpson: Right. Well, this brings us, I think, quite naturally to worker ownership, which is something you documented in a lot of your work, it’s something that I think you still work on the majority of your time, today. What is unique about the paradigm of worker ownership as opposed to, because I think a lot of people would have kind of as a premise that it’s part of the kind of maybe the Orwellian sense of our economy, we call it a free market. But, we have a sense that we are free enough in this economy, and the sense that ownership should be distributed, and democratized in that sense, that wouldn’t occur to a lot of people. I’m wondering how you would kind of describe worker ownership as this critical paradigm, that you’ve come to believe in.

Marjorie Kelly: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Back in 1776 in the US we began a process of democratizing politics. We have never democratized economics. It used to be that the whole world was knit together. In the monarchy they had all the social power, they had all the economic power, they had all the political power. Those have become separate spheres. We’ve never democratized economics, and we don’t think about democracy of having any business being in the economy, we think, no, democracy is over here, that’s more government, and the economy is just what it is, what it is, and the wealthy people own everything, and we just think that’s normal. Why does worker ownership matter? Let’s start from the point of view of families. One of the things that John Barros said to us, and he’s the head of economic development in Boston, he said, “It takes a job to get out of poverty. It takes assets to stay out of poverty.” Something like 47% of Americans, today, cannot put together $400 in an emergency. Now, think about that, you break your ankle, your tire goes flat, your kid needs a school band uniform, I mean, whatever, you can think of a million reasons that you might and need $400, and to think that many Americans cannot put together $400, I mean, that’s scary. You would live in a state of kind of, I think, economic anxiety, pretty much, all the time. Is that a good life? Is that the life of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness? It’s not. That’s a terrible quality of life. Most of us don’t think about assets. Most of us don’t understand the difference between income and assets. An asset is something that has enduring value, and it can actually generate wealth over time. It’s different than just hit of income, which can start or stop. If workers own an enterprise, they’re much less likely to lay themselves off. They’re much less likely to outsource their jobs to China.