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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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| Thursday 15 November 2007 |
Workers of the world, disunited?
Globalisation has not set Asian workers inexorably against Western workers. In fact, we have a truly global working class for the first time ever.
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| Friday 26 October 2007 |
Escaping the ‘Malthusian trap’
In linking population growth in Africa with declining living standards, economist Gregory Clark presents poverty as a natural given rather than a product of manmade underdevelopment.
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