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| Monday 15 February 2010 |
Not robbing the rich or helping the poor
If a ‘Robin Hood’ tax on financial speculation is so radical, why are world leaders paying lip service to it?
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| Friday 29 January 2010 |
In defence of abundance
Today’s critics of prosperity are guarded about expressing their views directly, instead hiding behind climate change, ideas about ‘moral limits’, and the elevation of happiness over GDP. This makes it even more important to oppose them.
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| Friday 4 September 2009 |
Anti-consumerist tracts: so many to choose from!
A new book embodies the intellectual flimsiness and elitist disdain for the masses that courses through the veins of today’s anti-shopping lobby.
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| Friday 31 July 2009 |
Anti-consumerist tracts: so many to choose from!
Neal Lawson’s All Consuming – yet another book that bashes the consumerist society – sums up the flimsy intellectualism and elitist disdain for the masses that courses through the veins of today’s anti-shopping lobby.
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| Thursday 7 May 2009 |
Getting to the root of the economic crisis
Blaming bankers glosses over long-term economic decline, says a speaker at the upcoming Battle for the Economy.
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| Friday 27 March 2009 |
Distorting the spirit of equality
The Spirit Level, a new book on why equal societies are better than unequal ones, fancies itself in the tradition of the French Revolution. In truth, it turns equality from a political goal into a therapeutic imperative.
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| Friday 30 January 2009 |
The culture war behind the ‘credit crunch’
There seems to be a diametric divide between economic theories of under-consumption and over-consumption. In fact, both camps – with their focus on consumer habits rather than productive forces – share a common currency.
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| Monday 13 October 2008 |
Why the bear markets are talking bull
Hysterical coverage of falling share prices rests on the fallacy that they are a good indicator of economic health.
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| Friday 10 October 2008 |
From ‘Supercapitalism’ to the bailout debacle
Robert Reich’s book on big business and democracy shows that the top-down desire to lower living standards predated the credit crunch.
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| Wednesday 17 September 2008 |
Five myths about the Wall Street crisis
Beneath the startling headlines, many of the explanations for the troubles at Lehman Brothers and AIG are sub-prime.
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| Thursday 4 September 2008 |
Alistair Darling’s split personality
Comparing the credit crunch to postwar Britain reveals little about today’s economy, but a lot about our leaders.
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| Friday 29 August 2008 |
Sacrifice disguised
as democracy
Robert Reich has written a fairly sophisticated critique of contemporary capitalism. Yet he manages to twist his assault on big business into a demand that the masses should accept a cut in their living standards.
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| Monday 11 August 2008 |
Even capitalism’s fan club is losing faith
Why have free marketeers joined greens and ‘anti-capitalists’ in arguing that economic growth is a bad thing?
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| Monday 21 July 2008 |
Wall-E: what a waste of space
Pixar’s latest box-office smash, a cute cartoon that depicts humans as greedy fatsos, robotically recycles the anti-consumerist message.
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| Tuesday 24 June 2008 |
This year’s must-have fashion: pity for Indians
Recent TV documentaries exposing that Primark’s clothes are made by Indian child labourers have been nauseatingly elitist.
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| Monday 10 March 2008 |
The Chinese: from Yellow Peril to Green Peril?
The slandering of China as a sooty, smoggy ‘destroyer of the planet’ overlooks the sweeping historic benefits of Chinese growth.
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| Friday 29 February 2008 |
Down with ‘enoughism’
Two new books claim that our blinged-up, fast-car consumer society is laying people low with compulsive acquisition disorder, harried women syndrome and various other sicknesses of the mind. Don’t buy it.
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| Friday 8 February 2008 |
Midwife of miserabilism
How John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society - which celebrates its fiftieth birthday this year - anticipated today’s grinchy green politics.
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| Friday 25 January 2008 |
The midwife of miserabilism
With its attacks on advertising, opulence and environmental filth, John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, published 50 years ago, anticipated today’s small-minded growth scepticism.
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| Monday 7 January 2008 |
There's more to economics than shopping
Commentators obsessed with whether Brits are buying too much or too little ignore major shifts in the world economy – and world politics.
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