In modern Australia, productivity is all that matters, our leaders tell us. Economic growth above all else. But is this really what we, the people, want? Does it make our lives and our communities better? If the high priests of economics wish to take credit for the growth in Australia’s economy over the last three decades, they must also wear the blame for the social destruction that has accompanied it – the devastation of once prosperous industrial centres and the suburbs they sustained, as factories closed and workers were forced to abandon their trades. The social costs of this ‘economic modernisation’ have been immense, but today are virtually ignored. The fracturing of communities continues apace. An Economy Is Not a Society is a passionate and personal J’accuse against the people whose abandonment of moral policy-making has ripped the guts out of Australia’s old industrial communities, robbed the country of productive capacity, reversed our national ethos of egalitarianism and broken the sense of common purpose that once existed between rulers and ruled. Dennis Glover argues that those in power – on both the Right and the Left – must abandon the idea that a better society is purely about offering individuals more dollars in their pockets. What we desperately need is a conversation about the lives, jobs and communities we want for ourselves and our families. Only in this way can our broken political system begin to be repaired.