Do we know about it? Do we even want to know about it? Don’t laugh, because I think the two questions are difficult. I think I have to admit that for many years, I suspected the iniquity you will find carefully documented here. But I liked my life, liked feeling nice and warm, not too warm; liked knowing that a decent meal awaited me at the end of my working day and that I would start my next working day with two pieces of delicious buttered bread and cheese. I liked imagining that I was not exploiting badly paid workers in Bangladesh or anywhere else. I was going about my business, earning my monthly wages doing what I had been taught to do.
And of course I was not actively exploiting anybody. But for the clothes I wore, the coffee and tea I drank, the chocolate and even most of the fruit I ate, the workers that produced those goods were earning next to nothing and living as slaves. I still drink coffee and tea, still eat chocolate and exotic fruit, by the way. The workers’ plight would not improve if I did not. Only system changes will improve their lives.
Now it has become clear to me that my children and grandchildren will probably not be assured the easy life I have enjoyed. I don’t like that at all! More and more of those of us who live in the so-called West will, with increasing frequency, feel cold and wet and hungry (or very much too hot), and more and more of us are even now dying during dramatic climate events. Moreover, there will be worse to come due to future financial events that will dwarf even the one in 2008.
I know a bit more now than I used to, about the economic trends that have been prevalent over the past decades. I know, in short, that we’ve been had. Yes, even we who live in the West are discovering, country by country, that we’ve been had. The spirits of Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman and the Mont Pelerin Society are still with us. The results of the power they wielded are all too evident. Everywhere.
For details, cf. Chapter 2 in The Revolt of the Rich – How the Politics of the 1970s Widened America’s Class Divide, by David Biggs (2024). I have highlighted this book, because it really is – the whole book – a pretty shocking eye-opener and extremely well sourced.
The prevalent economic order is not slowing down the accelerated ecological breakdown and GLOBAL INEQUALITY. On the contrary.
I admit that the information on the linked site is academic stuff, but it is carefully explained, though not exactly in the form of bedtime stories. I, too, tend to want simple messages, the kind so generously offered by demagogues of all political colours. Sometimes, however, we just have to take the time to sit down and really concentrate. To understand the lessons offered on the said website, you do not need an academic background, but you will need to exercise your brain to understand a message which runs so totally contrary to what has been inculcated in us by Milton Friedman and his ilk. Learning that something is the opposite of what we thought it was tends to require mental muscle.
Few if any Norwegian economists will admit, now, to adhering to Milton Friedman’s tenets. Nevertheless, “Neoliberalism” is the system we all are governed by. It is unsustainable in every sense of the word, and most of us suspect that now. That is the good news. (Goodness knows there is plenty of bad news.) The problem is, few of us have any idea of what alternatives are, or might be, sustainable.
I therefore also recommend Jason Hickel’s substack, a far more amenable read, and a very interesting one, indeed. In 2017, Jason Hickel authored the book The Divide – a Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions (2017). He believes – and many with him – that sustainability is possible; not only possible, but also rewarding!
Plenty of economists agree with him, too, would you believe it? However, as Philip Mirowsky explained in his book Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (2013), any economist who wants a job must forget all about that sort of thing. Mirowsky also taught me the word “discombobulate”.
We have been discombobulated into believing that there is “no alternative” to the system – call it capitalism, if you will – to which we are shackled. “No alternative” my foot! Take a look at the links I have listed above and, if possible, also the two books, The Revolt of the Rich and The Divide. You will see that a better world is indeed possible.