I grew up under Reagan/Thatcher and believed in a left-right trade-off between social justice and economic efficiency. At the end of university, where I had dropped Economics for a Politics degree I found it so uninspiring, I went on holiday and read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
The Joads were lured to California by a bogus promise of well-paid work, as tractors transformed the rural economy and the bank foreclosed on their farm. This made me realise that markets are not neutral or fair but can be weaponised. The Joads and countless others were used as commodities, their misery exploited to create a glut of workers and drive down wages.
I learned my way through various jobs, working economics out from first principles. Like many converts, I wanted to share the joy more widely and set about writing Creative Destruction. I became an economist at a big bank years before I got an economics degree and I believe this gives me an unusual perspective.
You can judge that over coming weeks as I explore how supply and demand really work and why poor people lose out or, next week, why our whole future could depend on the difference between free trade and free markets.
There will also be one on transforming public policy that would have saved the UK hundreds of billions of pounds in recent years, and a few trillion dollars in the US.
We must build a fairer, freer, greener world, and an economy in which people matter, unlike the Joads in Steinbeck’s novel. Creative Destruction explores how. Spread the word: We Can Cure Capitalism.
To begin with, I wanted to locate economics within the wider social context. This is what I eventually came up with, showing the fundamental building blocks of society and those with agency to change it (here, boxed in)
Buy Creative Destruction here.
Spread the word: We Can Cure Capitalism.