About The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy

Confronted by the terrifying trends of the early twenty-first century – widening inequality, environmental destruction, and the immiseration of millions of workers around the world – many economists and business leaders still preach dogmas that lack evidence and create political catastrophe: Private markets are always more efficient than public ones; investment capital flows efficiently to necessary projects; massive inequality is the unavoidable side effect of economic growth; people are selfish and will only behave well with the right incentives.

But a growing number of people – academic economists, business owners, policy entrepreneurs, and ordinary people – are rejecting these myths and reshaping economies around the world to reflect ethical and social values. Though they differ in approach, all share a vision of the economy as a place of moral action and accountability. Journalist Nick Romeo has spent years covering the world’s most innovative economic and policy ideas for The New Yorker. Romeo takes us on an extraordinary journey through the unforgettable stories and successes of people working to build economies that are more equal, just, and livable.

Many books have exposed what’s not working in our current system. Romeo reveals something even more essential: the structure of a system that could actually work for everyone.

About Nick Romeo

Nick Romeo

Nick Romeo is a journalist, critic, and essayist. He has spent years covering policy and ideas for The New Yorker magazine, where he has explored the neuropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey’s novel theory of consciousness, reported on the world’s largest worker-owned cooperative in Mondragon, Spain, and examined a job guarantee experiment outside of Vienna, Austria.

Nick has contributed front page breaking news stories, profiles, and essays to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Scientific American, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, and many other venues. His work ranges from reports on the refugee crisis in Greece to the privatization of archaeological resources in the American southwest to a profile of the Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. He has reviewed dozens of books and has published on the history of the novel, Plato and behavioral economics, and the purpose of education. Nick holds a BA from Northwestern University, as well as an MFA in fiction and an MA in ancient Greek philosophy from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

About Bernice Yeung

Bernice Yeung

Bernice Yeung is the managing editor of Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program.

Previously, she was a reporter for ProPublica, where she was a member of reporting teams that uncovered flaws in the U.S. food safety system, examined the impact of COVID-19 on meatpacking workers, and chronicled the failures of the criminal justice system in handling sexual assault cases.

As a reporter with Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, she collaborated with the IRP on two multi-platform projects, “Rape in the Fields” and “Rape on the Night Shift,” which exposed the extent of on-the-job sexual violence against immigrant farmworkers and night-shift janitors.

Those projects led to her first book, In a Day’s Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers (The New Press, 2018), which was honored with the PEN America/John Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize.

Her work has appeared in media outlets ranging from The New York Times to NPR to PBS Frontline. The collaborative reporting she has done as part of various investigative teams has been a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, and has received honors such as a National Press Club Award, a George Polk Award, a Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. In 2015-2016, she was a Knight-Wallace Fellow who studied how social science survey methods could be applied to journalism.