After World War II and Patton's 11th Armored Division, Lessinger enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. While pursuing his Ph.D. he began to develop the alternative to mainstream economics he now calls Transformation Economics. In 1964 he joined the faculty at the University of Washington. In 1986, Random House published the first statement of his theory. With his wife of over 60 years, Lessinger lives in the northwest corner of Washington, part of the Responsible Capitalist's region of opportunity he calls Penturbia. A lifelong violinist, at 86, playing chamber music is still his major delight.
"From the start, I resisted the central assumption of classical economic theory: unrelenting competition among rational individuals. It seemed to me that in every era, human connections - not always rational - trumped competition and dominated economic action.
Nor did I judge technological innovation as the primary instrument of social and economic progress. In our long evolution, we traded spears for plows, plows for tractors and tractors for automobiles. A critical condition however always precipitated the next step - dire necessity due to excessive exploitation of the prevailing mode of organization. Millennia of good hunting enlarged population shrank the food supply and created pain and suffering.
Weathered by time and capsized by a torrent of calamities, it was pain and suffering that launched every transformation. Each time, prosperity returned with the explosion of new demands. Markets opened, inventors wakened to the opportunity and whole new industries were born.
We are not passive. As rational creatures we read, write, argue, compete and cooperate. Via millions of creative exchanges we redraw the common map of our minds. Over many decades our efforts coalesce in a single direction, conspicuous, rational and even predictable.
Death of the Consumer Economy and Rise of the Green Revolution does not extrapolate. It studies when, how and why an aging socioeconomy becomes obsolete, and it identifies the rise of its successor.
A great divide separates 2008 from only four years earlier. In 2004, a Gallup Poll editor reported that the public is "practically dozing" on global warming.
By 2007, new polls showed that 88 percent of Americans believed that global warming threatened future generations and 70 percent recommended "taking immediate action to help the environment."
A full century of emphasis on consumer self-interest is drawing to a close. We're getting a crush on love, on caring for the less fortunate, on sharing responsibility for our community, our world, our planet. Something important is happening. In a scant four years the facts of global warming have scarcely changed. Changing is we the people. A new world view is transforming our society, our economy."
—Jack Lessinger