Back in 2019, the Business Roundtable did something that sounded shockingly meaningful. After insisting for decades that the only purpose of the corporation is to make as much money as possible, they changed their mind, officially taking the position that, in fact, corporations do have some social and moral obligations, and that “an economy that serves all Americans” required balancing the interests of “customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders.” 

Words do matter, and sometimes new words point to new actions… but other times new words are just a deceptive way to cover up the same old actions. And the case of the elite CEOs who constitute the Business Roundtable is squarely in the second group. As The American Prospect details, nothing of consequence changed as the result of this new statement of purpose. In fact, the Prospect found it's even worse than that. The companies run by the CEOs who signed on to the new statement have actually performed worse on social responsibility: their companies laid off more people during the pandemic, contributed less to COVID relief, had higher rates of environmental and labor standards violations, produced more carbon, and even put more money into dividends and stock buybacks. In other words: the inverse of what they claimed was the entire point. 

Make it make sense.

It has long been an article of faith for mainstream economists that unemployment has to rise substantially in order to get inflation under control. Regardless of the reason why prices rose over the past few years, raising unemployment was the only way most economists could figure it was possible to get prices to level out. Most notoriously, Larry Summers predicted 10 million people would have to lose their jobs in order to reduce inflation — his job, of course, not being one of them. 

It’s obvious now that this orthodox consensus turned out to be dead wrong — unemployment has remained quite low, and inflation has moderated now that supply chain snarls have been ironed out and CEOs are feeling pressure to rein in their price gouging. But it’s extraordinary to look at this chart showing estimated versus actual increases to unemployment, and digest just how wrong the consensus was. It’s yet another piece of evidence on the pile suggesting that perhaps trickle-down neoliberalism does not in fact describe how the economy actually works.  

The excessive cost of housing continues to disrupt the economic well-being of renters, prospective homebuyers, and just about everyone else. And while politicians are increasingly speaking directly to the issue, there still haven’t been a lot of big-picture solutions on offer whose potential impact matches the scale of the problem.

And that’s why the recent op-ed from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Tina Smith was so welcome: a clear, compelling, big idea on how to move from the idea of housing as an investment that makes a few people rich, to housing as a basic necessity that everyone can access securely. By creating a new federal development authority to build millions of new homes, Ocasio-Cortez and Smith argue that we can and focus on affordable rents rather than profits and finally begin to create the affordable housing we need, at the scale we need it. Otherwise, we’re all just left hoping the private market will solve the housing crisis on its own. 

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