I’ve recently read – and utterly recommend – The Price of Inequality, by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. This is a brilliant book, great reading for anyone no matter what their political colour. It’s a tremendously thorough discourse on the reasons behind economic failures post-1970, the wage stagnation of poor and middle class earners, the utter corruptions of markets, and with a strong emphasis on rent-seeking (wealth captured from others and not genuinely created wealth for the economy – and that the people who ‘earn’ more might not have actually contributed anything to the economy), which has contaminated a lot of economic growth over the past thirty years.
Though very much a US-centric book, it’s written in a very clear language. A lot of it reminds me of old A-Level Economics text books, in fact, in their accessibility. It’s basically the sort of discussion that you wish politicians on all sides of the divide were actually having with each other in an effort to properly fix things, as well as something that chimes with the radical centre, where I feel the future of economics and politics will be. (At least in the Anglo-American sense – perhaps a movement towards Germany’s Social Market Economy of the past several decades? Who knows.) Even the IMF acknowledge the links between inequality and instability.
Anyway, if you don’t read the book, at least watch the video, since it contains some juicy stuff.
