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The US New Left spawned a generation of progressive economists who sought to challenge economic orthodoxy. For the “popular economics” movement, that has meant taking on pro-capitalist economics in academia as well as the public sphere.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, in the context of increasing outrage over the war in Vietnam and social movement ferment, the New Left in the United States splintered in a variety of directions. Some young leftists made the “turn to industry,” getting jobs in manufacturing, logistics, and other industries with the hope of organizing the working class; others joined Third Wordist–inspired guerrilla groups like the Weather Underground. Still others, of course, went into the academy, and some sought to bring their politics with them.

The latter included young economists and sociologists who were interested in challenging pro-capitalist economic orthodoxy in the profession and the broader culture. In 1968, many of these academics formed the Union of Radical Political Economics to promote this work; in 1974, some of them founded Dollars & Sense (D&S), a magazine intended to promote a left-wing analysis of economic issues to the broader public, especially activists in labor unions and other social movements.

On the occasion of Dollars & Sense’s fiftieth anniversary, we spoke with founding editor Arthur MacEwan, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and longtime editor Zoe Sherman, associate professor of economics at Merrimack College, about the history of this “popular economics” project and pressing economic questions confronting the Left today.

Andrej Markovčič

What was going on in 1974, socially and politically, that made it feel like a new magazine was needed? What was the environment that led to the creation of Dollars & Sense?

Arthur MacEwan

Those of us who started the magazine were a combination of graduate students, young faculty members at various universities in the Boston area, and other people who were in some way connected to that. Some were economists, but others were sociologists who were concerned with economic issues.

The main thing was that we, like a lot of other people, were affected by the various social movements of the 1960s and early ’70s: the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and developments in the labor movement. But the economics curriculum that we had gone through, and that those of us who were faculty members had to slide into teaching, didn’t deal with the things that were the primary concerns that led many of us to study economics. We had this idea that economics was important in relation to these issues, but you wouldn’t have figured it out from the curriculum that we were presented.

This led to us and people in other parts of the country creating the Union for Radical Political Economics, or URPE, in 1968. There was a lot of concern in that organization about how we could use what we had learned. Those of us here in the Boston and Cambridge area had this idea to produce a magazine that would be directed toward a popular audience who wanted to learn about these things — who wanted to understand the arguments and the economic issues that were connected to the things that concerned them.

For example, people in the movements wanted to know: How did the movements of the overall economy, issues of inflation and unemployment, arise? And how did the government’s actions to deal with inflation and unemployment affect them?

Then there was racism: How did racism relate to the interests of employers? And what role had racism played for white workers? Similarly, what role did male chauvinism play in the economy? Who gained from gender discrimination and how did this discrimination work? Although the war in Vietnam seemed to be winding down, there were still questions. For instance, what were the economic interests that generated the war?

My own research at that time focused on economic development and imperialism. I had written about the war, arguing that the motivating factor was not so much direct economic interests (e.g., the value of Vietnamese resources or the Vietnamese market to US firms) but the broad interest that US firms have in keeping the world economy open to their operations. Also, I was getting involved in the macroeconomics of the US economy, trying to develop an understanding of how inflation was brought about by capital-labor conflict.

Andrej Markovčič

What did you all see as D&S’s distinctive contribution? What made it different from other left-wing or progressive publications out there at the time?

Arthur MacEwan

The primary thing we were after was to get beyond muckraking. If you’re going to write about the economy, there’s a lot of muck. A lot of articles back then and a lot of articles today are, quite reasonably, talking about a situation and how bad it is. But we’ve viewed our role as trying to provide more explanation of how that developed.

Particularly with regard to the overall instability in the aggregate economy — in the macro economy, as it’s called — I was reminded recently that in the first issue of the magazine we had an article titled, I believe, “What Good Is a Recession?” It was a catchy title, because recessions are supposed to be bad. The point was to explain a recession from the point of view of the stability of those on top, business, and so on. Even if it has some costs to them, it reestablishes their power because it weakens the labor movement, puts people out of work, makes them desperate to take whatever they can get.

I recall a quote we used — I can’t remember exactly who said it — somebody in a US presidential administration in the 1970s said, on the success of that period, “We zapped labor.” Interestingly, a year and a half ago, when the Federal Reserve was tightening interest rates to get rid of inflation, it essentially expressed the same idea. Our goal was to explain that connection to people in terms of how it worked, beyond simply saying these people are just trying to hurt labor.

I think our writing on the instability of the overall economy was particularly important. It tied a lot of things together at that time. For example, it gave you a framework for talking about race issues; because if labor is getting zapped, it was African Americans who got zapped the most. You could talk about imperialism, what we now talk about in terms of “globalization.”

Zoe Sherman

We recently had an editorial retreat, and Chris Sturr, our current coeditor, brought these boxes of old issues. One of the things it was helpful to be reminded about is that the information environment was very different. Now if you want to know the unemployment rate, anybody can go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. But that wasn’t the case in 1974; there was no Bureau of Labor Statistics website. So there were sometimes just pages of government data. The context of the magazine gave some guidance about how to interpret it, but just reporting some of that information was a useful function of the magazine then.

Arthur MacEwan

In that early period, we started a column called “The Economy in Numbers.” We would take some particular number that we had to dig for; it wasn’t there on the web for you. We would explain it and give some sense of its importance. That was a useful thing that the magazine did that didn’t involve grand analysis.

Andrej Markovčič

Today you can easily get those numbers, but there’s still the challenge of interpretation. It’s very hard for even relatively well-informed people to have a cohesive sense of economic reality. These numbers are all around us, but they float by without any context.

Arthur MacEwan

“The Economy in Numbers” still exists, not in every issue necessarily, but for exactly the purpose you’re talking about. And it’s not just a number — we usually present a trend of a particular number as important.

Andrej Markovčič

Another aspect that seems difficult is communicating the stakes of a position — explaining why it matters, for instance, if a person has one understanding of the causes of inflation as opposed to a different one. How did you handle that?

Arthur MacEwan

One thing I’d say is that we’ve viewed ourselves as a very broad tent rather than speaking for a particular part of the Left. We tried to avoid sectarian lines on issues.

One of the things we started doing is having debates in the magazine, representing two sides of an issue. [Economist and longtime D&S editor] John Miller and I wrote an article for the current issue where we list some of these debates. These included, for instance, discussions about how to understand and respond to the international debt crisis of the 1980s; whether the US left should prioritize democratization of the Federal Reserve; and the impact of military spending on the economy. I thought those were quite productive for demonstrating that there were legitimate disagreements within the Left.

Zoe Sherman

That spirit is still very much the guiding spirit of the magazine; there’s not one line that every article has to follow. We can publish articles that disagree with each other.

Arthur MacEwan

For example, an issue that still arises today on the Left is, how do you handle protectionism? What is the left position on tariffs, or on industrial policy more broadly? How do we respond to the nationalism that is involved? Those are things we had a debate on back in the 1980s. But we could have that debate again today.

Andrej Markovčič

When did D&S start putting out readers for college courses?

Part of our audience was students taking economics courses in universities around the country. Even though there were very few places where you could go as a graduate student to get a progressive education, to use a vague, general term, there were a lot of individual faculty members around the country who wanted to expose their students to these ideas, and they would use the magazine. They cut excerpts from it to present to their students.

Then we realized — not only was this a potential audience but it was also a moneymaker. We now publish several readers: Real World Microeconomics, Real World Macroeconomics, Real World Globalization, one on the environment that has had several editions. We have been publishing those for at least thirty years.

Zoe Sherman

Real World Macro, as a companion text for macroeconomics courses, was the first, and that one’s currently in its forty-first edition. The microeconomics one is in its thirty-first edition.

Andrej Markovčič

What has D&S and the popular economics movement been up to this last decade or so? Do you have a sense that your audience has changed, or is it the same, or a younger version of the same people?

Zoe Sherman

At our scale and style of operation, we don’t always know who our magazine audience is. We know which professors are adopting the books, and that is some of the same people and younger versions of the same people: academics who want to be able to teach left economics perspectives in their classes.

It’s harder to find a print magazine subscription base. We know there are fewer people receiving the print magazine. But I’m sometimes surprised when I talk to people. I was talking to a colleague of mine at Merrimack College who’s a feminist business historian, and before she became an academic she was doing business journalism. I mentioned something about my involvement with D&S, and she said, “Oh, I used Dollars & Sense so much as a business journalist to learn the economic context for the things that I was writing about.” I had no idea she would have even encountered it.

Arthur MacEwan

Over the past fifty years, an awful lot of people have gone through the collective [of D&S] editors. We haven’t kept good track of all these people, but we know a lot of cases where people have gone on to work in other progressive organizations. I know that one of our editors went to work at Food First, a food and development policy think tank, which is a West Coast–based organization. If you read her work, it’s related to a lot of stuff she developed at D&S. And, of course, on the other hand, there’s the contemporary D&S collective member who became a BusinessWeek reporter.

Not everybody went in the same direction, but a lot of people had the D&S collective as a learning experience and went on to other things in the larger progressive movement in a very useful way. In the current issue of the magazine marking the fiftieth anniversary, there’s a picture of a group of us that was taken in 1987. One person in that picture now does all sorts of work on international agrarian conflicts about the Green Revolution; they have been very involved in the conflict between the United States and Mexico over the importing of GMO corn. Another one has become a professor of women’s studies, and so on.

Zoe Sherman

Something that we started a couple years before the pandemic is writing workshops for people who were graduate students or young faculty who had really exciting research agendas but had maybe never been trained in writing that was not difficult to read. Academic writing is not going to be super readable for lots of other people. It’s not even all that readable for other academics, to be perfectly honest.

This was an online, everywhere-and-nowhere kind of thing from the start. We got a bunch of people involved, and it’s cycled as people have graduated and moved through careers; we recruit new grad students each year. So we’ve been able to bring the exciting new research that they’re doing to the magazine through that mechanism.

It’s like how the D&S collective has functioned as a public service training ground, as Arthur was saying. But the writing workshops have also functioned that way too. It gives people a tool set that gives us great content, but they can also bring those popular writing skills to other venues where they want to communicate what they’re learning in their research.

Andrej Markovčič

What is your general sense of the role of economists in popular writing and the state of popular economic writing more generally today?

Zoe Sherman

Until this year, I was in classrooms. I recently left the classroom, but that gave me some instant feedback about how a particular set of readers — my students — were engaging with the material. And it’s challenging. The kinds of attention fragmentation that we’ve experienced since the commodification of attention went into overdrive with the internet and smartphones and social media make it harder, because even when economic concepts are presented in the most accessible, simplified way, there are still steps of an argument to think through.

I recently saw someone make a distinction between simplifying and dumbing down. We definitely do not want to dumb down. We want to make pieces that are short enough and simple enough to give people an entry into the topic, but we don’t want to dumb things down. So that definitely poses difficulties for us, as public educators. And in classrooms we can actually test whether people learn what we want them to learn in our public education. Our read of what’s within the realm of our readership’s common sense constantly shifts.

The mood of the country shifts too — we’ve also had that fragmentation. What seems like common sense to one group seems like heresy to another. But we’re trying to build a set of tools that allows for a commonsense understanding that this isn’t the best of all possible worlds. The fact that it’s bad doesn’t mean that we can’t do better.

That’s what we’re still trying to do. If we understand why we’re getting the outcomes that are causing harm, maybe we could do something differently. Maybe that will help us choose the right next move — or a right next move, there’s probably not just one uniquely best choice — but a helpful next move, for how we might be able to do things better. An economy is a mechanism for a community of people to take care of each other’s needs. That’s not how it functions right now, but that’s what it should be. We have needs that we must collectively care for.

As things currently stand, we are not doing very well in the United States at meeting even foundational needs to keep people alive and healthy: housing, food, medical care. And those things that we have in reasonable abundance, like clothing, are often produced in ways that involve unacceptable environmental costs and terrible labor conditions. (Things are, of course, better in some other parts of the world and much worse in many others.) And the extremes of income inequality we have reached distort every aspect of economic and political life. But there are plenty of good ideas about how to expand access to people’s basic needs, such as rent stabilization and public housing policies, and a public option or a straight-up single-payer system for medical insurance.

There are known ways to rein in inequality. For about one year at the beginning of this decade, we did! As things reopened after the strictest phase of pandemic lockdowns, a combination of factors improved labor’s bargaining power and wages at the bottom grew faster than average incomes overall; a more generous child tax credit and other supports for households with children cut the child poverty rate in half. Then we let ourselves revert to the fifty-year trend line of spectacularly increasing incomes at the top while leaving most of the population behind.

I don’t want to claim that policy design and implementation are easy; there are many fiddly but important details to work out. But at the same time, there are things we know how to do at the level of the mechanics of policy — within a single business, at the municipal or state level, at the national level — but that we still struggle to accomplish politically. Along with the critiques of what is, I hope that D&S can give our readers a sense of possibility and ways that they can talk about those possibilities that will spread the idea that we can take care of one another.

Arthur MacEwan

One of the differences today from when we started the magazine is that there are a number of organizations doing progressive economics work, and we’re part of a larger community of such organizations. There are organizations that are doing the research: the Economic Policy Institute, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

They give us a lot of stuff we can draw on. That makes our job a lot easier. And now there are not only schools where there are groups of progressive economists, like University of Massachusetts Amherst and a few other places, but there are a lot of individuals doing research that we can use. No, left-wing economists haven’t become a dominant force in the profession, but we’re there, and this gives us a lot more to draw on than we had earlier.