The last 40 years have seen a remarkable – and prolonged – global experiment in inequality. While the post-war years of social reform led a new drive towards greater equality, that trend was then set in reverse. Today most rich nations are significantly more unequal than in the 1980s. This reversal has been driven in […]
Capitalism
If progressive European political parties are to achieve both relevance and electoral success, a paradigm shift is required: away from Social Democracy’s attachment to financialised globalisation. If they aim to defeat nationalism, and to end the cycle of debt inflations and deflations on one side and trade wars on the other, it is not only […]
We stand at a pivotal point in history – one that contains the opportunity to replace the equality-in-prosperity formula of progressive politics with a new one: solidarity-in-wellbeing. For the past 100 years, the critique of capitalism has centred on unfair distributive outcomes (economic inequality), as well as the damage that consumerism and the commitment to […]
We live in an advanced form of what the US economist Hyman Minsky had termed ‘money manager capitalism’ 25 years ago. Today, the dominant role played by the captains of industry in the area of industrial capitalism falls to the money managers in charge of hedge funds and pension funds. By identifying this new incarnation […]
The beginning of the year 2021 feels like a crossroads. We have now been through three major crises in the last 20 years, each worse than the last: the dotcom bubble of 2000, the Great Recession of 2008, and the global recession triggered by the Covid pandemic, bringing what might be the biggest economic downturn […]
We need to move away urgently from the dead-end of ‘progressive deglobalisation’ and its fatal embrace of nationalism.