Steve Weiner, computer specialist and Aesthetic Realism associate, writes:
This new issue is about a most necessary and hopeful question to ask: how central a role is ethics playing in what is happening in America right now? Further: does ethics have to do with every economic decision (right or wrong) that is made, how much an item will cost, how much a worker will get paid? And how are these economic matters related to the way ethics works in each one of us? You will find logical, satisfying, surprising answers to these questions—and more—in “Always–Ethics & Aesthetics,” the mighty and moving new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known!
The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:
Dear Unknown Friends:
It’s an honor—and also thrilling—to continue serializing Economics Is Diverse, by Eli Siegel. There’s an urgency about doing so too, because this talk of November 1970 is part of Mr. Siegel’s landmark Goodbye Profit System lecture sequence—in which he explained so much that humanity needs right now to understand.
He showed in those talks that history had reached the point at which an economy based on contempt could no longer work well. And the once celebrated “profit motive” is, indeed, contempt for one’s fellow humans. It’s the seeing of other people in terms of money for Me. How much profit can I as employer squeeze from this worker’s labor by paying him or her as little as possible? How much profit can I as seller extract from buyers because of their needs—often their desperate needs?
In 2024, what Mr. Siegel described is still true, and even more obviously so. Profit economics staggers along, but it is inefficient. No matter how many statistics people are presented with, they don’t believe the economy is “working” for them, and they increasingly resent taking part in it.
The NY Historical Society, 1814, Had This
In the section of Economics Is Diverse presented here, Mr. Siegel uses a document of 1814: a catalogue of holdings by the New York Historical Society. And he has us feel more widely and closely what economics includes, through people of then….Read more