Lehman Brothers

Britain’s railways are broken. They no longer serve the needs of passengers or the general public. Train services are unreliable, too often delayed, too expensive and complex to use, and marred by strikes. This book takes the reader on a journey to discover how years of under-funding and privatisation have deprived the public of a usable rail system. It is only through understanding how Britain’s rail system has been broken that we can know how to fix it. As it shows, fixing the railways means going beyond simple demands such as ‘renationalise the railways’ and asking instead ‘what do we want the railways to be for’? It is only by attempting to answer this question that we can rebuild the rail system into something that genuinely meets people’s needs. The answer is far from straightforward, but this book argues that, if they are to be useful, the railways must be part of the solution to the twin crises of the climate emergency and social inequality. This means significant increases in government investment, but the current state of the railways stems largely from successive governments’ unwillingness to properly fund them, mostly to protect the wealthy from tax increases. Given the uneven distribution of political power in Britain and the rigidity of public policy, those who want to see the railways fixed have no choice but to fight to take rail policy out of the hands of the political and financial elite who have led us into this mess.

For a number of decades our economy has failed to work for ordinary citizens. Stagnant wages have been combined with underemployment and rising costs of basic goods like healthcare, education and housing. At the same time, a small minority of the population make obscene profits, while in the background we continue to hurtle headlong into an environmental emergency. However, despite there being no shortage of anger and anti-elite sentiment expressed in what is often referred to as the ‘culture wars’, no significant challenge to the dominant economic model has broken into the mainstream. The pound and the fury argues that behind this failure of imagination are a set of taken-for-granted myths about how the economy works – myths that stifle debate and block change. The book analyses these myths, explores their origin, how they circulate and how they might be dispelled at a time when, away from the public gaze, economic theory is opening up new possibilities of economic action. Possibilities that, as we emerge from the chaos of Covid-19, could lead to the radical structural changes we desperately need.

Today, in many countries what is viewed as ‘credible’ economic knowledge stems from academic economics. The discipline of academic economics is based in universities across the world that employ economists who produce research that is published in academic journals and educate students who then go into government, businesses, and think tanks. Through the book’s authors’ and contributors’ experiences of economics education, and as part of the international student movement Rethinking Economics, it argues that academic economics in its current state does not provide people with the knowledge that we need to build thriving economies that allows everyone to flourish wherever they are from in the world, and whatever their racialised identity, gender or socioeconomic background. The consequences of this inadequate education links to modern economies being a root cause of systemic racism and sexism, socioeconomic inequality, and the ecological crisis. When economies are rooted in a set of principles that values whiteness, maleness and wealth, we should not be surprised by the inequalities that show up. Structural inequalities need systemic change, change that infiltrates through every level of the system, otherwise we risk reproducing and deepening them. This book makes the case that in order to reclaim economics it is necessary to diversify, decolonise and democratise how economics is taught and practised, and by whom. It calls on everyone to do what we can to reclaim economics for racial justice, gender equality and future generations.