As we were walking to Usdan over the weekend, we noticed an interesting piece of chalking that said:
“SHARE! It’s better than capitalism!”
We are both seniors, we both love Wesleyan, and we both know that we go to school with some of the most brilliant and innovative minds in the country. In addition, we’ve both studied economics, or at least enough to know a thing or two about various economic systems. So imagine our surprise when we found out that a fellow Wesleyan student had discovered a new system for the allocation of resources and the organization of the means of production! First feudalism, mercantilism, socialism, capitalism, and now SHARE! Needless to say, we we’re pretty excited.
We were curious to hear about SHARE!, so we turned to Google. Google found us something on pregnancy support, a food-buying club in Wisconsin, and the Server Hosted African Rhythm Exchange (S.H.A.R.E.), but nothing on a new economic system. To be fair, we didn’t go through all 1,130,000,000 results for SHARE!, so we thought we’d keep looking. Trying to look in a more scholarly direction, we consulted JSTOR, our favorite online journal database. But JSTOR left us unfulfilled. Instead of getting to the bottom of SHARE!, JSTOR “could not complete [our] search because there was an error in the query’s format.” JSTOR asked us to “please refer to [JSTOR’s] search help for correct formats and try again.”
Disillusioned by the Internet, we decided to consult our professors about SHARE! We asked Peter Rutland, the Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor in Global Issues and Democratic Thought, what he thought about SHARE! as a potential economic system to replace capitalism. At first, Rutland thought the chalking might actually be a reference to shares (as in, of a corporation), which would suggest that a reconciliation between capitalism and SHARE(s)! might be possible. But this seems improbable given the sentence construction, which suggests that SHARE! is, in fact, an alternative to capitalism.
When we later told Rutland (who is from Britain!) that we read about SHARE! on the sidewalk outside Usdan, he offered a different explanation. “Well,” Rutland said (in a British accent!), “it doesn’t sound like something out of Marx so much as something out of kindergarten.” Rutland also admitted that he had long been bemused by the obsession in American primary schools with the concept of sharing. In Britain, Rutland claims, this concept does not exist and kids are taught to keep what they have. “I’m glad someone is finally looking into this,” he said (Britishly!).
We must regretfully conclude that we do not have enough information to assess SHARE!’s validity as a rival economic system. Much like Marx’s 1867 treatise on political economy “Das Kapital” (roughly translated as “The Capital”), the 2008 treatise on political economy “SHARE!” excited us with its potential but left little explanation for its future implementation. We return dejectedly to capitalism, which we praise for its ability to respond efficiently to consumer preferences but blame for its inability to provide us with health insurance after we graduate.
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