Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

This new issue of TRO, with its surprising title, is deep, thrilling, and ever so encouraging!  You’re going to have a great good time—and new perception—as you read “Economics—It Wants to Be Ethical.” In previous issues serializing Eli Siegel’s lecture Economics Is Diverse, we’ve seen how people in history wanted there to be fairness in the exchange of goods; we’ve learned about the importance of unions’ demands for justice to labor, and much more. And this issue is about right now: are people in 2024 showing they object to an economy that is unjust to them? Yes! Then, as you read you’ll see that there’s much humor in this TRO too—including some laugh-out-loud humor. You’ll love “Economics—It Wants to Be Ethical,” the latest number of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

 Dear Unknown Friends:

In this issue of TRO we publish the final section of Economics Is Diverse, by Eli Siegel. The talk is one in his great Goodbye Profit System series of lectures, begun in 1970. Economics Is Diverse was given in November of that year; and as we’ve been publishing it, I’ve been commenting on what Mr. Siegel was showing in the Goodbye Profit System series—because what he explained then is knowledge we need now.

In this final section of Economics Is Diverse, he uses a humorous work—very different from the sources he had quoted from earlier. Yet it too is a means of understanding economic history.

Here’s What Has Happened

As I have described: Mr. Siegel explained in the 1970s that history had reached the point at which economics based on contempt—on seeing people and events and the world’s possibilities in terms of how much money one could make from them—had fundamentally failed. To have the profit motive as the basis of an economy—to have as one’s impetus How much money can I make from you and him and her and that?—is something humanity more and more has seen as insulting and ugly. Men and women have felt, with anger, that this profit-driven economy has made their lives increasingly difficult rather than increasingly at ease; has added to their ill-nature rather than to their kindness and true self-expression.

The humorous book Mr. Siegel discusses in this section deals with graft in a large American city—with people’s not letting a little thing like the law get in their profitable way. The book’s humor is authentic. And there has been other—and greater—humor about the profit drive. This is so even as that profit drive has made for some of the largest, cruelest, yet everyday brutality in the world—including the brutality of child labor, sweatshops, poverty, lives made to waste away through long hours of ill-paid labor.

As an Introduction

As an introduction to this final section of his lecture, I am going to quote four maxims from Eli Siegel’s Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims. And I’ll comment on them, a little, in relation to economics….Read more