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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.
environmental crisis requires an interventionist Keynesian response. There have been influential calls for a Green New Deal or simply green Keynesianism. There is a constituency for change in economic interests and a powerful social movement, but there are also dangers in a lowest-common-denominator approach which ‘greenwashes’ insufficiently radical reform, which can be undone by the dynamics of capitalist and inter-state rivalry. The final section argues that reining in capital in more consistently Keynesian ways would require a leap of political faith which probably goes
confirm the ability of states to intervene effectively, even if this involved the rescue of the rentier class rather than Keynes’s preferred euthanasia. More radical Keynesians insisted the responses were insufficiently Keynesian and denounced the rapidity of their abandonment for austerity as ‘madness’. The continuation of liberal policies, however, found powerful backers and a powerful rationale in class and international competition. Similarly, the environmental crisis saw powerful demands for ‘green Keynesianism’ or a ‘Green New Deal’, but these faced substantial
instance, on both sides of the Atlantic, Green New Deal proposals continue to meet with ridicule and obstinate resistance couched in the terms of their expansionary fiscal proposals – in other words, commitment to a massive mobilisation of public investment, ownership and capacity. Coupled with proposals such as a return of industries like transport and energy to public control, wealth taxation, or a jobs guarantee, certain more ambitious or justice-oriented Green New Deal programmes also take direct aim at private assets and the
possibility – or, more appropriately in some cases, the inevitability – of green growth. Confronted with the threat of firm material limits to expansion, concentrated wealth and accumulation, the concept of green growth has become a necessary tool in the policy effort to minimise disruption to our existing economic model in the face of accelerating climate and ecological damage. Even progressive proposals such as the Green New Deal resolution endorsed by US Representative Ocasio-Cortez are not immune to these risks of injustice
‘green growth’, to the constant justification in economic terms of climate and environmental action within international institutions such as UN climate negotiations or the World Bank. Even in ostensibly radical proposals such as the Green New Deal resolution advanced by Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey, various progressive policies are interspersed with the language of markets and profit, from providing ‘adequate capital’ to private businesses, to prioritising sufficient ‘returns on investment’ to