Turgotonomics

Attacked and ridiculed, the leak of 243 pages of TTIP negotiations concerning climate, environment and public health prove that civil society organisations were right all along.

Those who care to see know the real damage that austerity has had on people’s lives. From those needing care who now get so little, to those waiting longer for hospital treatment, and those whose homes might not have been flooded without the cuts from 2011.

Economists struggling to make sense of economic polarization are, increasingly, talking not about technology but about power.

When it comes to fiscal policy the politics of the right at the moment could be reasonably described as deficit fetishism. The policy of the centre left in Europe could also with some justification be described as growing appeasement towards deficit fetishism.

The imposition of German demands on Greece, without consideration for its democracy, sovereignty or interests, is one of those moments that changes everything.

At first sight the negotiations between Greece and the Troika seem to be simply a battle about resources: how much of the pie that is Greek national income their creditors should receive.

A few weeks ago I was having dinner with David Cameron. Well, almost - we were at the same restaurant but on tables at the opposite sides of the room.

In the next two decades, 47 per cent of employment is ‘in the high-risk category’, meaning it is ‘potentially automatable’.

In one week I had seen plenty of misery in Greece’s train of misfortune. Apart from protest slogans covering public and private walls, the homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks, and the soup kitchens, it is the generalized distress that has struck me.

When the fossil-fuel divestment movement first stirred on college campuses three years ago, you could almost hear Big Oil and Wall Street laughing.

The rich get rich through wealth extraction, not wealth creation. It’s time that was put to an end.

The dissent of students to the dominance of neoclassical economics in the curriculum is not new. As early as 2000, a group of French students organized under the name ‘Post-Autistic Economics’.