Tag: Gaza (Page 1 of 2)

By “wealth” I am referring not only to that of each country, but to what has been and still is being misappropriated by the “West” from the Global South.

It’s been several years since I subscribed to the last Norwegian newspaper that sported a so-called anti-imperialist profile. Now there are none, alas. Back then, though, the paper published every week one long article written by an economist. Various economists, in fact, would take turns providing the weekly article. They appeared to suggest (very cautiously) that we are not obliged to choose between voracious capitalism or Stalinism. There are, in fact, alternatives.

For me that single weekly article was extremely important as I was, at the time, engaged in daily arguments with a colleague – a very highly qualified economist (and dear friend). Having read my Piketty, I maintained that capitalism was destroying us all. He maintained I was ignorant (which I was). I retorted that he was reactionary, which he still is.

So the book Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (2013) was an eye-opener for me. Its author, Philip Mirowsky, explained that you just couldn’t get a job as an economist at US universities (which tend to rely on donor funding) or in any self-respecting company, unless you had embraced the religion of market fundamentalism. (That explained the cautiousness of the young economists writing the weekly article in my paper.) To quote Wikipedia:

“[In the book], Mirowski concludes that neoliberal thought has become so pervasive that any countervailing evidence serves only to further convince disciples of its ultimate truth. Once neoliberalism became a Theory of Everything, providing a revolutionary account of self, knowledge, information, markets, and government, it could no longer be falsified by anything as trifling as data from the “real” economy.”

Mirowski’s book also included diatribes about a “Mont Pelerin Society”. I asked myself: “is the man delusional?”

Since then, I noticed that many progressive economists preferred to refer to their field as the “history” (“philosophy” or “anthropology”) of economics, rather than just plain economics, cf. David Graeber (anthropologist), author of the classic “Debt” (as well as of “Bullshit Jobs”) which has left an indelible imprint on his readers. You might , by the way, enjoy a look at the first dozen or so paragraphs of his essay about power ignorance and stupidity.

Is a brighter future possible? A more equitable one?
For the moment, things look pretty bleak, at least in the EU and UK, which appear to have embarked on the suicidal course of militarism. However, in the UK, a new political party has been created “to take on the rich and powerful and to campaign for the redistribution of wealth,” as the BBC unenthusiastically reported.

During our arguments many years ago, my former colleague, the highly qualified economist, compared economics to a force of nature that can tear down your house or, if correctly managed, transform cataracts into electric energy. Now I can dismiss his analogy, with confidence. Because since then, I have learnt a little about economics, not the economics he had been taught, but the kind that the cautious young economists were suggesting back then. There are more of them now, and some of them even hold positions in universities.

I should add: I have met many people who “absolutely loathe economists”, and with good reason. The economists they loathe have been the servants of the 1–10 per cent. The economists I speak of serve the rest of us.

The important point to realise is that economics are man-made. We make the rules. The decisive question, though, is: Who are the “we“?

What follows is a list of those who have taught me what I now know.

• I wish to introduce the list by mentioning my very brave and mild-mannered compatriot  Glenn Diesen. Every day he interviews globally recognised specialists on his substack account. Some of his interviewees are political scientists and known geopolitical or military analysts. Others, however, are economists, hedge-fund managers or geopolitical economists. In his own country, Norway, Glenn Diesen is smeared and harassed in every single mainstream outlet. The very virulence of the attacks against him suggests that those who wish to defend US global hegemony find him dangerous.
  
  
• I suspect that Jeremy Corbyn and his new party will have collaborated closely with New Economics Foundation, and that they will have done so for quite some time. There is nothing adventurous about NEF people. They are down-to-earth economists wearing ties and polished shoes, but their economics are of a different kind than what we have been exposed to over the past decades. They also have a web page called “Change the rules“.
  
  A similar organisation exists in the USA. (For all I know, there may be more) Institute of New Economic Thinking.
  
  
• Radhika Desai presents herself as a marxist economist. I would like to recommend her conversation with Glenn Diesen during which she defines “neoliberalism”. I think we need to understand what the term actually means. Those who are unfamiliar with her exposition of “rentier capitalism” (and Marxist jargon in general) may find her intimidating. But rentier capitalism is none the less a fact.
  
  
• Jason Hickel has devoted much of (maybe even most of ) his professional life, so far, to exposing the West’s exploitation of the so-called 3. world. Yet he is probably better known for his book Less is More, which has been embraced by environmentalists. The two issues are, of course, interrelated. I warmly recommend his book The Divide – Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Market (1923). He writes eloquently and is able to provide data, not least thanks to his university position, that is not otherwise easily accessible. He also has a substack account.
  
  
• Michael Hudson is an outlier in several ways. He is nowhere near “young”, and he refers with respect to the classical school of economics (e.g. Adam Smith whom he maintains neoliberals would have called a Marxist had they actually read his book.) Hudson was an honest to goodness Wall Street economist, although Wall Street called him Doctor Doom. For a long time now he has contributed with Radhika Desai to the excellent website Geopolitical Economy. He has also writen more books than i can list, but I warmly recommend Killing the Host – How financial parasites and debt bondage destroy the global economy.
  
  
• Geopolitical Economy is run by Ben Norton, an exceptionally well-spoken man who elucidates economic issues that seem arcane to most of us, Indeed, there is no doubt that the jargon employed by economists discourages us from trying to understand what the financial set is up to. For example , in the episode  How corporate landlords are taking over society,  he asks Michale Hudson to explain how the financialisation of economics has been nursing a set of parasites that are making life difficult for the rest of us.
  
  
• David Gibbs  is not an economist. He is a professor of history at Arizona University. His latest book The Revolt of the Rich – How the Politics of the 1970s Widened America’s Class Divide (2024) is intriguing (why on earth should the rich “revolt”, and against whom? ) and illuminating. Here again I learn about the Mont Pelerin Society, how they bided their time, and how they struck when the time was right. This book tells us a great deal about why the economy and the standard of living has been going from bad to worse since the 1970s , in the US and the UK.
  
  
• Rutger Bregman is also a historian. According to Wikipedia (as at 17 Aug. 2025), “he has been described by The Guardian as the “Dutch wunderkind of new ideas” and by TED Talks as “one of Europe’s most prominent young thinkers”. His book Utopia for Realists “promotes a more productive and equitable life based on three core ideas which include a universal and unconditional basic income paid to everybody, a short workweek of fifteen hours, and open borders worldwide with the free exchange of citizens between all nations.” (ibid). See his TED talk “Poverty isn’t a lack of character; it’s a lack of cash.
  
  
• Kate Rawroth, however, is a full-fledged economist. Her book  Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (2017) has become a classic for those who wish to know how economics can serve ordinary people to the south and the north of the equator.
  
  
• Ha-Joon Chang, an economist from South Korea, is on good terms with everyone, even with Friedrich von Hayek (the father of neoliberalism). What I find endearing about him, though, is that he appears to sincerely believe that we should all try to understand a bit about economics so that we can take part in decision making, in accordance with our Democratic rights (to the extent we actually enjoy Democratic rights). To that effect, he has written a brief introduction to economics for people like you and me: Economics: The User’s Guide (2014).
  
  Mild and smiling as he seems, he has a hard punch. In Kicking Away the Ladder (2003) , (which I have not read), he dared take on the really big and bad guys, cf. the Wikipedia article about him. At that time, his book was a very brave one, I suspect.
  
  Above all, though, I recommend Edible Economics – A hungry economist explains the world. For anybody interested in international cuisine, and even for those who are not, this is quite simply an entertaining read. His tremendous erudition and the deadly punches he delivers in his mild-mannered way seem unobtrusive enough, but the man is, I repeat, brave.
  
  Those who eagerly follow Trump’s battle with the BRICs might find it worth their while to follow the youtube channel of Sean Foo, a very young, but smart self-declared geopolitical economic analyst.
  
  
• To conclude this list, I add the obvious: Thomas Piketty. As I see it, his two monumental books about Capital (2013 and 2019) introduced a paradigm shift. Not only did they question the validity of the neoliberal order, they appeared to prove that “growth” as traditionally defined was completely unsustainable.
  
  The books were so monumental that they delivered the academic “coup de grace” to neoliberalism . (Alas, though, neoliberalism refuses to die quietly. Like the dragons of folklore, it lies wounded and compromised, but continues to spew poisonous gasses from its nostrils.)
  
  I recommend Piketty’s blog in Le Monde. He writes there from time to time, in French and in English.
  
  
• Finally, a reminder of what Western neoliberalism amounts to, when all is said and done: