What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth - Softcover

Berry, Wendell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1582436061 ISBN 13: 9781582436067

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2010

Synopsis

"The reasoned and insistent exhortations of a man with a cause who, rather than mellowing with age and wisdom, continues to grow in forcefulness and vision." —Booklist



Over the years, Wendell Berry has sought to understand and confront the financial structure of modern society and the impact of developing late capitalism on American culture. There is perhaps no more demanding or important critique available to contemporary citizens than Berry's writings — just as there is no vocabulary more given to obfuscation than that of economics as practiced by professionals and academics. Berry has called upon us to return to the basics. He has traced how the clarity of our economic approach has eroded over time, as the financial asylum was overtaken by the inmates, and citizens were turned from consumers — entertained and distracted — to victims, threatened by a future of despair and disillusion.

For this collection, Berry offers essays from the last twenty–five years, alongside new essays about the recent economic collapse, including “Money Versus Goods” and “Faustian Economics,” treatises of great alarm and courage. He offers advice and perspective as our society attempts to steer from its present chaos and recession to a future of hope and opportunity. With urgency and clarity, Berry asks us to look toward a true sustainable commonwealth, grounded in realistic Jeffersonian principles applied to our present day.

About this title

About the Author

Wendell Berry is the author of fifty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. He was recently awarded the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Louis Bromfield Society Award. For over forty years he has lived and farmed with his wife, Tanya, in Kentucky.

Reviews

The bulk of Berry’s new essay collection consists of older pieces, mostly from two out-of-print books, which complement the five new pieces in tone and substance. They are, altogether, the reasoned and insistent exhortations of a man with a cause who, rather than mellowing with age and wisdom, continues to grow in forcefulness and vision. The main thrust of the book is the proper ordering of economics, so that it addresses common human realities instead of the demands of financial systems. To support stable communities, from the household to the nation, economics should put nature foremost (“Virtually nobody,” Berry complains, “regards nature as an economic resource”), succeeded by land use, manufacturing, and consumption, in a four-part structure of valuation. Unsurprisingly to those who have followed Berry’s half-century of writing, reverence and stewardship are key qualities of spirit for such an economy. Moreover, like the great mid-twentieth-century cultural critic Paul Goodman, whom Berry acknowledges here, Berry proposes an agenda of concrete changes in agricultural policy to enable the reordered economy he so cogently describes. Invaluable counsel. --Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1582436061
• ISBN 13: 9781582436067
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256