Nick Romeo
Nick Romeo is a journalist and author. His recent book, The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy uses extensive original reporting to provide a road map for a sustainable and fair twenty-first-century economy. The Guardian praised the book as “an enlightening, inspiring read,” and the Washington Post called it “a brisk and sensible book that details bold and ingenious proposals in measured tones.”
Nick has spent years covering policy and ideas for The New Yorker magazine, where he has explored the neuropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey’s novel theory of consciousness, reported on the world’s largest worker-owned cooperative in Mondragon, Spain, and examined a job guarantee experiment outside of Vienna, Austria. Nick has also contributed front page breaking news stories, profiles, and essays to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Scientific American, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, and many other venues. He teaches in the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley.
798: Nick Romeo: The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy
Regular listeners and readers of my podcast and blog know I grew up with parents who helped form a grocery buying group which folded into a food co-op. Different co-ops work differently, but the general idea is that shoppers co-own the business. There’s less motivation to stock doof and more to source local, fresh produce and keep money in the community. While we still shopped at supermarkets, we favored the co-op for having greater selection of produce that was fresher and tasted better. It was such a part of my childhood that I make sure to belong to a co-op today.
Many people today see co-ops as luxuries or privileged, which seems bizarre to me since they did it because they didn’t have much time or money and had three children to feed. I also see them as not capitalist, communist, or representing any particular political or economic system. They’re just people shopping together.
Nick Romeo’s book title refers to Margaret Thatcher saying there was no alternative. Quoting Wikipedia:
“There is no alternative” is a political slogan originally arguing that liberal capitalism is the only viable system. At the turn of the 21st century the TINA rhetoric became closely tied to neoliberalism, and its traits of liberalization and marketization. Politicians used it to justify policies of fiscal conservatism and austerity.
In a speech to the Conservative Women’s Conference on 21 May 1980, Thatcher appealed to the notion saying, “We have to get our production and our earnings into balance. There’s no easy popularity in what we are proposing but it is fundamentally sound. Yet I believe people accept there’s no real alternative.” Later in the speech, she returned to the theme: “What’s the alternative? To go on as we were before? All that leads to is higher spending. And that means more taxes, more borrowing, higher interest rates more inflation, more unemployment.”
I grew up knowing plenty of alternatives to what other people couldn’t imagine alternatives to. Nick’s book treats plenty of alternative systems that work. I found the book while researching Mondragon by way of his New Yorker article How Mondragon Became the World’s Largest Co-Op: In Spain, an industrial-sized conglomerate owned by its workers suggests an alternative future for capitalism.
Beyond the details of particular alternatives like co-ops, purpose trusts, letting citizens make crucial budget decisions, job guarantee programs, and so on, his book undermines the belief that no alternatives exist. Unquestioned beliefs are a big part of culture. Sustainability is full of them. They show a failure of imagination and promote it too.
Nick’s book reverses that course.