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“A Journey of Discovery (detail),” Scrappy Annie

Editor’s Note, March 2021: To mark the first edition of NPQ’s Economic Democracy Weekly, I thought it would be appropriate to revise and abridge an early article from July 6, 2018, when NPQ’s economic justice initiative had just formally begun. A lot has changed since then, and yet the issues that motivate NPQ’s economic justice program have only worsened—especially growing income and wealth inequality. At the same time, democratic alternatives have grown in strength.

Through it all, we have tracked these developments—and with the new newsletter, we look forward to continuing our work in these areas in even greater breadth and depth.—SD

“We are suffering not from the rheumatics of old age, but…from the painfulness of readjustment between one economic period and another.”

—John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, 1930

As the quote above from John Maynard Keynes reminds us, this is not the first time the economy has faced upheaval. Keynes wrote at the beginning of the Great Depression, following the rise of record-setting economic inequality—records that in the US would hold for more than 80 years, until our time...