Review of The Democratic Marketplace: How a More Equal Economy Can Save Our Political Ideals by Lisa Herzog (Harvard University Press, 2025)
Despite American workers putting in long hours and being one of the only countries without mandated vacations, the cost of living in the United States continues to increase by leaps and bounds over what people take home. They’re not being helped by the Trump administration, which has worked to castrate the National Labor Relations Board while redistributing billions upward to billionaires via generous tax cuts. It’s no wonder that “oligarchy” is a word on everyone’s lips.
In such a squeeze, however, people may become more open to discussing the comprehensive changes needed to build an economy that works for ordinary people; Zohran Mamdani’s successful underdog campaign for an affordable New York City is a case in point. With her new book, The Democratic Marketplace: How a More Equal Economy Can Save Our Political Ideals, Lisa Herzog, a professor of political philosophy at the University of Groningen, has recently made an accessible and lucid theoretical contribution to the discussion of what a more just economy might look like. Her concise, evidence-based arguments about the shortcomings of our economic system and potential ameliorative reforms will be welcome to progressives and socialists alike, even if they suffer for lack of engagement with more radical theoretical traditions.
Herzog begins by cataloging the deep problems with the US economy today. For many years, it was thought that the dreamy union of capitalist markets and democracy was the “formula for the success of the West.” But since then, this marriage has looked increasingly toxic.
Inequality has skyrocketed since the 1970s, such that the “ratio of CEO pay to average pay in big US companies is now almost 300:1,” Herzog notes. “The gaps that are opening up between different tiers of the economic spectrum are even wider for wealth than for…
Auteur: Matt McManus
