November 15, 2007 | Read Time: 1 minute
NEW BOOKS
Are the Rich Necessary?: Great Economic Arguments and How They Reflect Our Personal Values
by Hunter Lewis
This book presents several short economic debates about wealth, poverty, inequality, philanthropy, capitalism, redistribution, the role of government, and related issues.
Hunter Lewis, who founded Cambridge Associates, an investment firm, argues both sides of such questions as “Are there alternatives to the profit system?” and “Can government protect us from the excesses of the profit system?”
He describes four “economic value systems”: equalitarianism (or egalitarianism), fraternalism, reciprocalism, and philanthropism. He describes the principles and assumptions on which they are based, and what proponents and critics say of each.
In the final chapters, Mr. Lewis sets forth his own argument on the best way to ease poverty and create economic cooperation, which he says is key to building lasting societal wealth. He embraces philanthropism, which focuses on “charity, altruism, and service” and, he argues, “embodies an alternative vision, as well as an economic and social system, one that could play an even more meaningful role than it does.”
“An expansion of philanthropic values (along with an expansion of the nonprofit sector of the economy through tax credits) could offer a way forward out of the old, bitter, and often sterile economic quarrels of the past,” he concludes.
Publisher: Axios Press, P.O. Box 118, Mount Jackson, Va. 22842; (540) 984-3829; fax (540) 984-3843; info@axiospress.com; http://www.axiospress.com; 277 pages; $20; ISBN 978-0-9753662-0-2.
