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Central banks control the interest rate through the decisions of their various monetary committees. Almost all of them are set to raise rates multiple times this year. But what do they basis this decision on? These days it is related to the rate of inflation, but to what extent is that driven by the amount of money in circulation. Can the central bank control both? And what about the velocity of money? All questions Phil Dobbie puts to Steve Keen in this week's Debunking Economics podcast, along with the question, what if we didn't change interest rates at all?

Subscribe to hear this podcast - and all the others - in full.

One of the surprises as we emerge from the worst of COVIS (hopefully) is wjaty's being called the Great Resignation. Even though employment levels in most countries remain below pre-pandemic levels, that's not stopping those who hung onto their jobs through the crisis from leaving in their droves. So, what's driving this trend. Prof Steve Keen suggests it's a "kick in the balls to the gig economy". But what happens next? Already central banks are lifting interest rates, fearful of rising wages pushing inflation higher. How is that going to work out. Tune in to this free half-hour podcast as Phil Dobbie talks to Steve about what's driving this dramatic shift in the labour market.

Subscribe to hear all of the podcasts in full.

Even the most ardent supporters of small government will agree there are times when governments need to offer subsidies to companies and industries. Paying for the furloughing of workers during the pandemic was one unavoidable example. But are their times when subsidies can distort the economy in unforeseen ways. The support for the food industry that promotes livestock over plant-based diets is a prime example. This week Phil Dobbie asks Prof Steve Keen whether there a better way of supporting industries without complex subsidies?

Around the world we have seen the size of the money supply increasing considerably over recent decades, but none more so than the last couple of years, as governments spend like crazy to support people during lockdowns and illness. In the UK the amount of money in circulation has increased by almost £200 billion. Phil Dobbie asks Steve Keen if there are consequences of growing the monetary base so quickly, and what's the role of the central banks in controlling this supply?

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There are a lot of people questioning the direction of conventional economics, yet, even after the biggest spending splurges ever made by governments outside wartime, there is still a lot of talk about fiscal conservatism, paying back the debt and balancing the budget. But contrarian voices question whether that is the best way forward, whilst others are seeing an end to fiat money and are buying into alternatives, like Bitcoin. In this free half hour podcast Phil Dobbie and Steve Keen look at those questioning the way our economies run and the contrarians who believe there's a better way; contrarians who don't agree with each other.

This episode is free. Become a subscriber to hear them all in full.

Is a negative trade balance such a bad thing? Some countries with a bit deficit seem to be doing okay, like American, even the UK to an extent, whereas others, like Japan have a trade surplus and a economy on the road to nowhere. This week Phil Dobbie and Steve Keen discuss how important is a trade balance for the overall good of an economy. And what about jobs? Donald Trump was concerned his trade deficit was giving away jobs to China. Was he right about that? And what about the strange suggestion from Modern Monetary Theorists that exports are bad, imports are good for an economy?

To hear the full version subscribe by picking a plan in the right column of the Debunking Economics website (not the mobile app). Or become a supporter at https://www.patreon.com/ProfSteveKeen

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Central banks control the interest rate through the decisions of their various monetary committees. Almost all of them are set to raise rates multiple times this year. But what do they basis this decision on? These days it is related to the rate of inflation, but to what extent is that driven by the amount of money in circulation.

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Very excellent overview of some of the key issues with our economy in general!

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Very excellent overview of some of the key issues with our economy in general!

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To start this new year, we're introducing our vision for an economy transformed.

We need an altogether new kind of economy, and we've developed 7 transformational ideas for Europe to bring about a life-sustaining economy within Earth's limits.

The economy is designed, and we can redesign it!

We want to inspire action to wholly transform the current dominant growth-based, capitalist, neoliberal economy, which is at the root of the destruction of our shared planet and of people. And to dismantle the power structures maintaining and driving it.

We want to galvanise collective action from governments and people to redesign an economy that serves the wellbeing of all and our shared planet.

Over the past year and more, with our European network in 32 countries, we have developed these ideas from the bottom up, through interactive webinars and workshops with people all over Europe.

It is not a utopian 'blueprint' or manual for how we can achieve these ideas - rather a broad and inspiring vision. Our vision is of a new economy for the European level, and is written from a European perspective. Whilst many of the ideas can be applied globally, we seek to learn from allies in the Global South in order to integrate a genuine Global South equity perspective in future.

What's the problem with the current economic system?

The economy in practice, politics and culture today is seen and acted on as a distinct sphere, separate from society and nature. This thinking neglects the fact that the economy both relies on and serves or impacts all people. It does not consider that the economy is embedded in nature, and thus dependent upon our shared planet for providing resources and absorbing pollutants.

European economies were built in great part through the colonisation of the Global South, extracting and depleting resources and appropriating human bodies and labour. This exploitative and unjust situation still exists today through neocolonialism.

This economy is failing. The system as we know it - and those with power who continue to push it - has driven multiple crises: ecological, democratic, financial, psycho-social.

What is the purpose of the economy we want?

We must act collectively to redesign an economy serving all people and our shared planet. One whose purpose is to satisfy the basic needs - physical and non-physical - of all people, and to ensure a decent and dignified life for all; We need to design an economy within ecological limitations, to ensure far greater global equity in the use of natural resources.

We need to ideologically divest from the idea that bigger and faster is always better, that 'growth is progress'. European economies must degrow overall: the total volume and pace of the European economy must get smaller and slower. Degrowth means shrinking sectors of economic activity that are ecologically destructive and offer little or any social benefit, whilst maintaining or growing sectors that satisfy the basic needs and wellbeing of all.

What are our 7 transformational ideas for European governments?:

We have broken-down our vision of a new economy into 7 parts - 7 interdependent areas which together can transform our economy to sustain life within Earth's limits.

1. An economy within Earth's limits: we need a life-sustaining economy, ending Europe's over-exploitation of resources beyond the Earth's capacity to regenerate. An altogether different way of producing and consuming.

2. A truly democratic and participative economy: a new economy is a broader and more ambitious project of handing power back to citizens and re-placing the economic sphere under public scrutiny.

3. A public future: our vision is of an economy that meets the basic needs of everyone, through publically- and common-owned and managed services and infrastructure, and without growth and profit motives.

4. Rethinking work: its centrality in society, the definitions, scope, and value of different types of work - gives the potential to imagine a society liberated from, and emancipated in, wage work.

5. The role of businesses: we need fundamentally different businesses and companies, both in terms of purpose and organisation - businesses that are smaller in size and power, that are collectively managed, that are for purpose not profit.

6. Trade, solidarity and international relations: Europe needs to become a truly fair global economic player. To stop its unfair trade relations and move towards less and more localised trade, and to end financial debt towards Global South countries.

7. Values we want in a new economy and society: a new economymust embody and enact the core values of sufficiency, care and empathy, equality and inclusiveness, and autonomy.

We hope these ideas inspire you that with imagination and collective action, a new economy is possible.

Happy new year and happy new economy!

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To start this new year, we're introducing our vision for an economy transformed - 7 transformational ideas for Europe to bring about a life-sustaining economy within Earth's limits.

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To start this new year, we're introducing our vision for an economy transformed. We need an altogether new kind of economy, and we've developed 7 transformational ideas for Europe to bring about a life-sustaining economy within Earth's limits.

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Task: Choose the one resource that is most relevant to you and to have a look through it. Please choose one to two activities from it that you might like to incorporate into your classroom. 

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Task: Choose the one resource that is most relevant to you and to have a look through it. Please choose one to two activities from it that you might like to incorporate into your classroom. 

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TY / Cross-curricular How the World Works 3

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TY / Cross-curricular How the World Works 3

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25 June 2020

PDF 11.03mb | Download Now

Not Business as Usual is designed to support Junior Cycle Business Studies teachers in exploring global justice topics using active learning methodologies. It provides clear guidance on how to incorporate financial justice themes into all three strands of the curriculum - Personal Finance, Enterprise and Our Economy.

The resource aims to:

Explore responsible and ethical consumer behaviour

Learn and engage with and from sustainable business ideas

Examine tax and debt as global justice issues

Explore the linkages between economic systems, the environment and equality.

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Not Business As Usual | Financial Justice Ireland

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Exploring Global Justice in the Business Studies Curriculum Not Business as Usual is designed to support Junior Cycle Business Studies teachers in exploring global justice topics using active ...

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'New Perspectives' - LCA Social Education Student Workbook

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'New Perspectives' - LCA Social Education Student Workbook

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Tweet to SBP article about tax and fairness 

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Tweet to SBP article about tax and fairness 

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Nice to able to speak about fairness and equity in context of #OECD  tax deal in @businessposthq today. Kudos to @peterodwyer1 one of the few who finds space for alternative perspectives

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Nice to able to speak about fairness and equity in context of #OECD  tax deal in @businessposthq today. Kudos to @peterodwyer1 one of the few who finds space for alternative perspectives https://t.co/jBEGP1Xu4S

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Nice to able to speak about fairness and equity in context of #OECD tax deal in @businessposthq today. Kudos to @peterodwyer1 one of the few who finds space for alternative perspectives pic.twitter.com/jBEGP1Xu4S
— sorley mccaughey (@sorleymccaughey) September 26, 2021

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Nice to able to speak about fairness and equity in context of #OECD  tax deal in @businessposthq today. Kudos to @peterodwyer1 one of the few who finds space for alternative perspectives https://t.co/jBEGP1Xu4S

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Nice to able to speak about fairness and equity in context of #OECD  tax deal in @businessposthq today. Kudos to @peterodwyer1 one of the few who finds space for alternative perspectives https://t.co/jBEGP1Xu4S

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Nice to able to speak about fairness and equity in context of #OECD  tax deal in @businessposthq today. Kudos to @peterodwyer1 one of the few who finds space for alternative perspectives

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Recent News articles about Tax and Ireland 

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Recent News articles about Tax and Ireland 

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The Irish arm of a major US pharmaceutical firm is using a supposedly defunct legal loophole to avoid paying taxes on some of its profits, a charity group has alleged.

hristian Aid Ireland said Abbott Laboratories - which employs over 4,500 people at nine sites across the island of Ireland - is using the so-called 'Single Malt' structure to legally avoid paying corporate tax on up to €477m worth of profits, by funnelling intellectual property (IP) assets from Ireland to Malta to avail of tax breaks there.

Abbott said it is "paying all of its taxes owed in every country in which it operates around the world" and has "never used the Single Malt structure".

But according to US tax filings and publicly available financial statements analysed by Christian Aid Ireland, Abbott has been shifting IP assets to Malta since 2019, despite Ireland signing a 2018 agreement with the Maltese authorities to shut down the practice.

"There are elements of both Irish and Maltese tax law that allow for this to happen - and indeed US law," said Sorley McCaughey, Christian Aid's head of policy and advocacy.

"The problem lies, at least partly, within Ireland's jurisdiction, and the Irish Government can't just wash its hands of the problem."

The company's latest available accounts, seen by Christian Aid, show Abbott funnelled €31m in profits on €65m of income in 2019 through a 'Single Malt' structure.

"That is an extremely modest estimate," Mr McCaughey said. "Since that has happened they have moved a number of their patents and trademarks."

A spokesperson for the Department of Finance said it would not be "appropriate" to comment on the tax affairs of individual businesses, but said the 2018 deal with Malta "addresses issues where there is a mismatch of residence and domicile provisions which could otherwise result in double non-taxation".

Mr McCaughey said Abbott - a recipient of IDA grants - has seen sales of its rapid antigen tests soar during the Covid-19 crisis, reaching almost $4bn in 2020, including sales to low-and middle-income countries that were purchase-guaranteed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and part-funded by the World Health Organisation.

"We reject any implication that we're not paying taxes in developing countries," Abbott said in an emailed statement, adding that it "makes a significant positive impact in advancing the health and economies of developing countries".

The revelation comes as Ireland continues to oppose a minimum effective corporate tax rate of 15pc that has the backing of 134 other countries in talks led by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

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Pharma giant Abbott using tax loophole, alleges Christian Aid

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The Irish arm of a major US pharmaceutical firm is using a supposedly defunct legal loophole to avoid paying taxes on some of its profits, a charity group has alleged.

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Podcast/lecture: 'Funk money' - Decolonisation and the rise of tax havens

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Podcast/lecture: 'Funk money' - Decolonisation and the rise of tax havens

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Podcast lecture: 'Funk Money': Decolonisation and the Expansion of Tax Havens, 1950s-1960s

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Article: Inequality is the great concern of our age. So why do we tolerate rapacious, unjust tax havens?

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Article: Inequality is the great concern of our age. So why do we tolerate rapacious, unjust tax havens?

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Gabriel Zucman | Associate professor of economics, UC Berkeley

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Examine democratic and budgetary crises across the world and youll find a running theme tax havens. Lets take a look: in the last three years alone, in France the budget minister has had to resign because he had cheated on his taxes for 20 years through unreported offshore accounts. In Spain, the former treasurer of the party in power has gone to jail after having revealed a hidden system of financing through Swiss banks. In the United States, Congress has revealed that Apple avoided tens of billions in taxes by manipulating the location of its profits, at a time when US infrastructure is crumbling.

Accepting the status quo seems irresponsible.

Transfer prices are the prices at which multinational firms exchange goods and services internally. In principle, according to the League of Nations rules, intra-group transactions should be conducted at the market price of the good or service traded, as if the subsidiaries were unrelated. In practice, transfer prices are routinely manipulated by armies of accountants. There are billions of intra-group transactions every year and tax authorities cannot possibly monitor all of them.

In addition, in many cases, there is no relevant market price, giving firms full latitude to choose the price that will minimise their tax bill. What was the market price of Googles technologies when it transferred them to its Bermuda subsidiary in 2003, before it was even being listed as a public company?

Until recently, we did not have a clear view of the extent of corporate tax dodging. With few exceptions, economists have not been particularly interested in the role that tax havens play in the global economy.

There have been numerous journalistic investigations, which have pushed forward our understanding of the tricks used by multinational firms, but from careful case studies it is hard to infer the overall cost to government coffers.

In my new book, The Hidden Wealth of Nations, I try to fill this gap. I gathered the available data sources on the international investments of countries, the balances of payments, the on- and off-balance sheet positions of banks, the wealth and income of nations, the accounts of multinational companies and more.

Some of these statistics have never been used before and this is the first time that all this information has been collected, confronted and analysed with a single objective: to expose the true activities of tax havens and their costs to foreign nations.

The results are striking. The artificial shifting of profits to offshore tax havens has reached extreme levels over the last years, with 55% of the foreign profits of US firms now made in a handful of almost zero-tax countries . Thats 20% of all US corporate profits, both domestic and foreign, a tenfold increase since the 1980s. Silicon Valley giants have been particularly innovative when it comes to dodging taxes.

While the US federal government hasnt changed its nominal tax rate on corporations since the late 1980s it has remained at 35% the rate that US firms actually pay has declined to 20%. The available evidence suggests that the trends are similar in other countries: everywhere, firms have the same incentives to shift as much profits as they can to offshore havens.

Because no one openly condones illegal tax evasion, the proponents of profit shifting argue that its all legal. Yet the European Commission has opened an investigation on the tax deals offered by Ireland and Luxembourg to companies such as Apple, Amazon, Starbucks and Fiat. What was said to be legal might turn out to not quite be so. The proponents of tax dodging also say that less tax on businesses means more investment and more jobs. This misses three things.

First, the taxes avoided by big companies have to be compensated for by higher taxes for the rest of us higher income taxes on the middle classes and higher sales or property taxes for everyone, unless we cut spending on education, health and infrastructure.

Second, tax avoidance distorts competition; big firms get away with low tax rates because they can operate all over the world and can afford the pricey services of the big accounting firms, while nascent businesses have to face the statutory rates. This unfairness rigs the functioning of markets.

Yet the fundamental problem is that corporate tax avoidance increases inequality. Corporate taxes are one of the main way to tax capital. In Europe and the United States, about one-third of all capital tax revenue comes from corporate income tax, the rest comes from property taxes and individual taxes on dividends, interest, capital gains, estates and inheritances. When corporations skirt the tax system, they reduce the effective taxation of capital. Because capital is very unequally distributed, this reduction benefits only the wealthiest among us.

Corporate tax dodging is then tantamount to upward redistribution. A reduction in capital taxation also means higher rates of return for capital owners. History teaches us that higher rates of return tend to be associated with more wealth inequality down the road.

What can be done?

The OECD plan that was agreed upon last week is useful because it may make it harder for firms to shift profits to tax havens. However, it falls short in two key areas. It fails when it comes to transparency. Although it calls for multinational companies to compile country-by-country accounts of their profits, sales, and employees, these accounts will not be publicly disclosed. Citizens, consumers, journalists and researchers will have no way of knowing which firms shift their profits offshore. More fundamentally, the OECD retains the flawed framework of transfer pricing, which makes it too easy for corporations to escape taxation.

The good news is that corporate tax avoidance has a solution that is technically simple, proved to be effective and requires little international cooperation. Instead of taxing the subsidiaries of multinational groups as if they were separate entities, corporations should be taxed on their consolidated global profits.

Apple made $50bn in profits globally last year: this figure is known and hard to manipulate; it is the right starting point. We then need to find a way to allocate profits to each country. One easy way is to allocate profits proportionally to where sales are made. Lets imagine that Apple made 10% of its sales in the United Kingdom. Therefore, 10% of its global profits, or $5bn, would be taxable in the UK.

Corporations can move their profits all over the world, but they cant move their customers: they are in the US, the UK or Germany, not in Bermuda. Thats the beauty of the reformed corporate tax system, known as formula apportionment, that Im supporting.

Is this idle fantasy? Not at all: this is exactly how US states tax US companies with activities across the country.

Profits within the United States are apportioned to California or New Jersey based on the share of US sales made in these states. In this way, a corporation cant claim that its profits were all made in tiny Delaware (population 935,000), where the corporate tax rate is 0%.

No tax system is perfect and Americas is no exception. However, it has been in place for decades, has a reasonably good track record and no one would everimagine abandoning it in favour of the international transfer pricing model supported by theOECD.

Extending the US system to the international stage would make it impossible for Bermuda or Luxembourg to steal the tax bases of countries where economic activity actually takes place.

How do we get there? The UK could tomorrow unilaterally decide to tax multinational firms using an apportionment formula, without asking permission from anyone. The relevant information already exists: we know the global profits and sales of firms and it is easy to track the location of their sales. In that sense, corporate tax reform does not require a great deal of international co-operation.

More co-operation, however, is always better and it turns out we have a unique opportunity to reach an international deal.

The US and Europe are currently engaged in discussions to establish a transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP) and the US has similar talks with Asian economies. These free-trade talks are the right platform to reform corporate tax.

It makes no sense to talk free trade in 2015 while totally disregarding tax issues. Further trade liberalisation should be conditional upon reaching an international agreement on how to tax the Amazons, Apples and Googles of the world. Concretely, as part of TTIP negotiations, the EU and the US should agree on two simple things: a common definition of corporate profits and a fair rule for apportioning the profits of firms across the Atlantic, for instance, based on the location of sales.

Tax havens such as Luxembourg and Ireland have an incentive to maintain the flawed status quo. For years, they have been blocking attempts to move to an apportionment system within the European Union. The benefits of stealing other countries revenues can be quite large indeed. Doing so helps attract a little bit of real activity, such as accounting firms, lawyers and financiers.

More importantly, it boosts the importance of offshore centres on the international stage. Luxembourg is a case in point: the Grand Duchy has one thousandth of the EUs population, yet this is where two of the last five presidents of the European Commission come from.

There is a growing demand for transparency and reform among EU citizens. The United States already uses formula apportionment internally; it sees the virtue of this system. It is the responsibility of EU countries to forge an agreement. It took decades for the European Union to convince Luxembourg to partially abandon banking secrecy. Do we have to wait decades for corporate tax reform to occur?

An alternative approach involves threatening with economic sanctions the countries that want to facilitate tax avoidance and evasion. One type of threat would be trade tariffs, proportional to the costs that unco-operative tax havens impose on the governments of foreign countries.

Like most economists, I favour free trade: Ibelieve it spurs growth and innovation. But if free trade means widespread tax dodging, rising inequality and tax unfairness, it has no future. The good news is that globalisation and tax justice are not incompatible. If we put taxes back at the centre of TTIP and other free-trade talks, we can quickly and thoroughly reform corporate tax and make widespread tax dodging a thing of the past.

Gabriel Zucman is assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens

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Inequality is the great concern of our age. So why do we tolerate rapacious, unjust tax havens? | Gabriel Zucman

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Examine democratic and budgetary crises across the world and youll find a running theme tax havens. Lets take a look: in the last three years alone, in France the budget minister has had to resign because he had cheated on his taxes for 20 years through unreported offshore accounts.

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Where has all the money gone? STOP tax dodging (Ireland)

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A brief account of economic history since WWI

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A brief account of economic history since WWI

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This is a short slide deck outlining how we got to some of the places we are at today in the economy. Make sure to read the presenter notes!

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Jason Hickel tackles GDP - Wellbeing Economy Alliance

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Jason Hickel tackles GDP - Wellbeing Economy Alliance

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By: Isabel Nuesse

One of the most significant measurements in our economy is Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP is a measurement of the total value of goods and services produced in a country. It measures the size of a nation's economy but doesn't reflect a nation's wellbeing. While inherently flawed, GDP continues to dominate the space as the measurement to compare countries against one another, and more importantly influence global policymaking.

In a Wellbeing Economy, we argue that it is time that we move beyond GDP and find a more holistic measurement that encapsulates both human and ecological wellbeing.

In the podcast Citations Needed, Economic Anthropologist and WEAll Ambassador Jason Hickel breaks down the history of GDP, how it drives both the climate crisis and inequality, and what practical steps we can take to ensure thriving livelihoods for all.
What's the history?
GDP was initially developed as a war-time measure. Simon Kuznets, the economist that created the national income accounts which inspired the current GDP measurement, warned the US congress about using this as the measurement.

"The [people's] welfare can therefore scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above."

Meaning, there is no determination of social progress or human welfare that can be derived from this metric. So why do we continue to use it?

Using GDP as the main measurement of economic success was solidified after WWII hit. Countries focused on the measure of economic production, as wartime was a race to military domination. Growth ruled supreme. Who could produce the most output, the fastest, and where did the highest capacity lie?

It was further solidified after the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 which had over 700 delegates from 44 nations and created big institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF). GDP then continued to dominate during the 1980s, when these institutions created structural adjustment programs (SAPs) - primary for countries in the global south- which move countries away from national development models and push for global development models that essentially only pursue economic growth.

Luckily, these criticisms of GDP as the sole metric for economic success are coming to the forefront. It's hard to ignore when the richest 1% of the human population pockets 22% or a quarter of total GDP

As Jason says, "We're plundering the earth to pay tribute to the global elite."

To further demonstrate this, Hickel says that if we took ⅓ of the income of the richest 1%, it would be enough to raise everyone in the world above a high poverty line of $7.40/day - eradicating poverty forever. If we took another fraction of that, we could provide high-quality universal public healthcare for the world. And, it would still leave the richest 1% with over $130,000/year per person forever.

These numbers are striking.

Where do we go from here?
Jason points out that once we admit that we don't need more growth - we can focus on building an economy that can deliver high quality of life for all, and meet the ecological needs of the planet.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) model that outlines how to keep global warming to under 1.5 degrees celsius from pre-industrial levels, requires a reduction in material use and energy use in the global economy. Meaning, we must scale down - or reduce growth.

If both material and energy use is reduced, GDP will likely crash, causing our economy to collapse as our entire system is underpinned by its health. In order to prevent that crash, we need to organise our economy in a way that will not deliver such a catastrophe.

How can we develop policies that allow human flourishing, despite declining industrial activity?

What's needed is a fair distribution of existing income and a redistribution of productivity gains to more people. Jason suggests that one practical way of doing this is shortening the average working week to four days, increasing wages so they are living wages for workers despite fewer hours, and redistributing necessary labour amongst more people.

He raises an interesting point about how self-defeating we will be if we continue to pursue GDP growth. Yes, the world is switching to renewables at a rapid pace, which will reduce the carbon footprint of our globe. However, renewable development still requires extraction of raw materials. And, if we're continuing to grow the economy, we need to transition the whole economy to renewable energy and do it three times over to maintain our current pace of growth.

In order to give technology a chance to be effective in delivering goals of human and planetary flourishing, we need to remove the growth priority so that innovations that address some of the glaring problems of the world are elevated, not stunted, because of low growth trajectories. The more you require companies to ramp up supply to meet demand, the more pressure on those capacities and the less of a solution they become.
How does equity play a role?
Equity and justice have to be at the core of this transition to a 'post-growth' economy. The vast majority of the causes of the ecological crisis come from excess consumption from high-income nations. If everyone in the world consumed at the level of the average person in the Global South, we would have no ecological crisis. If they consumed at the level of the high-income nations, we would be operating at over 4x capacity of the Earth.

There needs to be a balance between necessary growth for lower-income nations and degrowth for higher-income nations.

The other key point is that this transition must be de-colonial at its core. No longer can the Global North rely on the extraction from the Global South. Imagine the possibility of an economy that doesn't rely on that kind of extractivism!

Institutions such as the IMF can no longer link voting power to GDP metrics. This is actively exclusionary and continues to set the wealthiest nations up for success. As Jason notes, "it's crazy to have a plutocracy ¹ at the heart of global economic governance."
Plutocracy: a society that is ruled or controlled by people of great wealth or income
Jason presents another glaring statistic: "The poorest 60% of humanity only receive 5% of the income from global GDP growth"- proving that the theory that wealth at the top will "trickle down" to all levels of society does not hold true in the real world.

Meaning, this idea that global aggregate economic growth is necessary in order to reduce poverty is untrue. The global south contributes the vast majority of both labour and resources and yet don't reap the benefit of their output.

We need a fair economy that allows the global south to claim their fair share of yields they produce. This will in turn eradicate much of the poverty in the world simply by distributing income more fairly.

Jason concludes that once we build a more fair economic structure and shift to a post-growth economy we can more easily fight the climate crisis and tackle global poverty.

The last point that Jason makes on the podcast is around the phrasing that, "humans are the virus" that is damaging the earth. He wants to completely shift that thinking. Humans are not the virus, capital is the virus.

Capital is programmed to replicate itself - everything it touches turns into more capital. Exactly like a virus that colonises the host to produce more of itself.

The problem is that expansionary economic systems are organised around appropriation, plunder, and extrication.

It's time we changed the economic system, don't you agree?

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Jason Hickel tackles GDP - Wellbeing Economy Alliance

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By: Isabel Nuesse One of the most significant measurements in our economy is Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP is a measurement of the total value of goods and services produced in a country. It measures the size of a nation's economy but doesn't reflect a nation's wellbeing.

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Article: The Growth Delusion by David Pilling — why GDP is misleading​ ​

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Article: The Growth Delusion by David Pilling — why GDP is misleading​ ​

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In the good old days before Brexit and the global financial crisis, politics was all so simple. The western liberal democracies had reached the "End of History". So far as old conundrums such as ideology and identity were concerned, nobody really cared much any more. All that mattered now was to ramp up material prosperity. "It's the economy, stupid", as Bill Clinton apocryphally said.

It all sounds rather naive now, of course. Two and a half decades on from President Clinton's bons mots, the world's developed economies are wealthier than ever - indeed, more than 70 per cent larger in real terms than they were in 1992. Yet far from having achieved a nirvana of political stability, they are racked by a social strife and ideological conflict unseen in many decades.

Where did Clinton's confident verdict go wrong? It is the Ur-question of our era, and the political convulsions of the past decade have ushered in a golden age of popular social and economic analysis intended to explain why an expanding economy is not by itself enough.

The Growth Delusion, a new book by the FT's Africa editor David Pilling, goes straight to the heart of the matter. For Pilling's subject is not growth, but gross domestic product itself: the fundamental macroeconomic concept that he correctly identifies as dominating most modern discussion of national economic well-being.

That special status is, as he explains, unmerited. Like the proverbial sausage, most people's enthusiasm for GDP as a summary measure of a nation's prosperity quickly evaporates once they see what it is actually made of. With the eye of a seasoned journalist, Pilling colourfully captures why it is that GDP is such a quirky - some might say downright misleading - statistic.

The official protocols define the scope of GDP as measuring all monetised activity between willing parties in a given period. It is a pragmatic definition, but leads to some counterintuitive results. The sale of stolen goods for cash contributes positively to GDP, for example - so theft is good for growth. A parent's housework and childcare, however, being unpaid, are excluded - resulting, by one recent evaluation, in a $3.8 trillion underestimate of the size of the US economy.

Then there are the thorny questions of how to measure the value added of finance and the public sector. The only - unsatisfactory - solution yet found is to reverse-engineer the answer from costs. Throw in the vagaries of price index construction, quality adjustments and purchasing power parity, and the net result of such conceptual shortcomings is that within an alarmingly wide margin of error, GDP is simply not a very good indication of how well-off a country is.

Much of this will probably be familiar territory to many FT readers - and were The Growth Delusion nothing more than a stylish tour of the inadequacies of GDP, it would be a lesser book. At its core, however, is a much more interesting insight - one that raises it above the usual tirades against lies, damned lies, and statistics.

While the sale of stolen goods contributes to GDP, housework and childcare - being unpaid - are excluded

This is that all concepts used in economic measurement are creatures of particular policy objectives, devised with specific uses in mind. As The Growth Delusion explains, GDP is the locus classicus of this principle. The concept was developed by the Russian-American economist Simon Kuznets in order to justify the unprecedented fiscal activism of the US's New Deal in the 1930s. It was refined and developed by two British scholars, Richard Stone and James Meade, in order to optimise the wartime exploitation of resources in the UK. GDP was tailored to facilitate fiscal policy, in other words - not to summarise national well-being or to benchmark industrial sophistication.

This realisation that GDP is properly adapted to a rather limited range of purposes should, however, come as a liberation, not a disappointment. In the final section of The Growth Delusion, Pilling gives a flavour of modern attempts to formulate public policy goals beyond the growth of GDP and construct the new statistics needed to motivate and monitor their implementation.

Some of these are by now tried and tested - for example, the Human Development Index (HDI) devised by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq in 1990, and widely used in international development since then. Others, such as the measures of happiness promoted by Richard Layard of the London School of Economics, have yet to break into the mainstream - though the case for them to do so is strong.

The HDI and happiness indices do at least aim to measure the well-being of the population. GDP, by contrast, is an intrinsically unreliable guide. My favourite piece of evidence is supplied by Pilling not in this book, but in his previous one, Bending Adversity (2014). Accompanying a visiting western leader on a tour of Tokyo deep into its two lost decades of growth, the two men find themselves boggling at the city's gleaming, futuristic skyline late one night. "If this is a recession," the politician groans, "I want one."

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty and the Well-Being of Nations, by David Pilling, Bloomsbury RRP£20/Tim Duggan Books RRP$26, 352 pages
Felix Martin is author of 'Money: The Unauthorised Biography' (Bodley Head) Join our online book group on Facebook at FTBooksCafe. Subscribe to FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos Follow @FTLifeArts on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Subscribe to FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos
Letter in response to this review:
The view that GDP has to rise forever is misleading / From Madhav Acharya, Vienna, VA, US

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The Growth Delusion by David Pilling - why GDP is misleading

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Sign up to myFT Daily Digest to be the first to know about Books news. In the good old days before Brexit and the global financial crisis, politics was all so simple. The western liberal democracies had reached the "End of History".

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Podcast: 22. SJI Interviews Ep10: COVID-19 in the Global South, with Maeve Bateman, Financial Justice Ireland (30 mins)

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Podcast: 22. SJI Interviews Ep10: COVID-19 in the Global South, with Maeve Bateman, Financial Justice Ireland (30 mins)

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22. SJI Interviews Ep10: COVID-19 in the Global South, with Maeve Bateman, Financial Justice Ireland

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Listen to this episode from Social Justice Matters on Spotify. In Episode 10 of our Interview series, Eamon Murphy sits down with Maeve Bateman, Director of Financial Justice Ireland (formerly DDCI) to discuss some of the problems facing the developing world as a result of COVID-19.

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Article: Former Maldives President Calls for Debt Restructuring to Fight Against Climate Change

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Article: Former Maldives President Calls for Debt Restructuring to Fight Against Climate Change

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Without debt restructuring, the Maldives will struggle to fund much needed climate change adaptation measures - even as the island nation faces the existential threat of rising sea levels - according to the country's former president.

Mohamed Nasheed, who led the Maldives from 2008 until 2012 and pushed for greater attention to the effects of climate change on the country, says that vulnerable countries will struggle to pay down debt while mitigating the effects of a warming planet.

"The planet has already heated enough, going out of its usual course, and therefore we are going to face challenges with extreme weather coming upon us," Nasheed told Day 6 guest host Faith Fundal.

Among the world's lowest-lying nations, 80 per cent of the islands of the Maldives are only one metre above sea level. That makes the archipelago's approximately 1,200 islands extremely vulnerable to storm surges and severe weather events.

The inhabited islands, about 200, are home to a population of about 530,000 people, which means solutions are needed urgently.

In order to protect the islands, Nasheed says the country must invest in mitigation projects like water breakers to help slow coastal erosion.

But he says with the country spending approximately 30 to 40 per cent of its budget on debt repayment, and another 25 per cent on adaptation measures, the Maldives are facing a financial crunch.

The Maldives spends around $10 million annually for coastal protection initiatives, but will need up to $8.8 billion to protect all of its inhabited islands, according to a 2016 estimate by its environment ministry reported by Reuters.

"For us to be able to have a decent living, we must be able to suspend our debt repayment and spend on adaptation measures as well," said Nasheed, who is now an ambassador for the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a group of countries disproportionately affected by climate change.

'Most vulnerable country in the world,' says minister

Speaking on CNBC in May, the Maldives' environment minister Aminath Shauna warned the country could disappear by the end of the century if environmental damage continues at its current pace.

"Climate change is real and we are the most vulnerable country in the world," she said.

As the sea level rises, ocean water is encroaching on land, which is already being consumed by increasingly powerful waves that are eroding coasts. Warmer oceans, too, have resulted in coral bleaching and the loss of biodiversity, impacting the region's fishing industry.

Fresh water supplies have also been contaminated by sea water, requiring costly desalination, Nasheed says.

It's no surprise that the country, best-known for its luxury resorts, is already preparing for a warmer future.

The government has built sea walls and is also implementing natural solutions like planting coral reefs to help reduce coastal erosion.

A human-made island, built with sand pumped from the seabed, will be home to the City of Hope - a new settlement that rests two metres above sea level - in the coming years.

But efforts to mitigate climate change require funding - and Nasheed maintains that will be impossible without debt restructuring for vulnerable countries like his.

"It is through [restructuring] that we would be able to find some space in our budgets to build the water breakers, to build the embankments, to raise our land, to build flood defence systems, to have better irrigation for us to survive," he said.

Tipping point

A report released earlier this month by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that in several scenarios, Earth will surpass 2 C of warming above pre-industrial times within this century unless significant reductions in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming decades.

On the heels of the report, Nasheed warns the Earth is at a tipping point.

"Everything is going out of control. We are losing the equilibrium of the planet," he said, echoing calls for measures that would limit warming to just 1.5 C and reduce carbon in the atmosphere.
WATCH: IPCC says the world is dangerously close to runaway warming

Even still, Nasheed says he's positive about the possibilities that technology holds in the effort to slow global warming.

"I'm very optimistic, mostly because renewable energy now is financially viable, economically feasible," he said. "Even if people try to sell fossil fuel, soon it [will] go out of the market."

"The world will be challenged. There's no doubt about that.... But the question is, how far can we adapt ourselves to survive the extreme weather that will be upon us?"

Written by Jason Vermes with files from Reuters. Produced by Sameer Chhabra.
Hear full episodes of Day 6 on CBC Listen, our free audio streaming service.

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Desperate to fund fight against climate change, former Maldives president calls for debt restructuring | CBC Radio

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Without debt restructuring, the Maldives will struggle to fund much needed climate change adaptation measures - even as the island nation faces the existential threat of rising sea levels - according to the country's former president.

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Article: Why it is time to change the way we measure the wealth of nations

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Article: Why it is time to change the way we measure the wealth of nations

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Imagine two people. Let's call them Bill and Ben. Bill is a mid-ranking investment banker who clears £500,000 a year after tax. Ben is a gardener who takes home £25,000. Who is better off?

If we judge them by their income, then Bill is clearly richer; 20 times richer, to be precise. But who is wealthier? For that, you're going to have to know more about their stock of assets and broader circumstances.

In national accounting terms, Bill's £500,000 salary is the equivalent of gross domestic product. It is the "flow" of income earned in a year. But, as any mortgage lender knows, that doesn't tell you anything about his wealth or his salary next year or the year after that.

Did I mention that Bill is up to his neck in debt after a crippling divorce, or that he has an expensive cocaine habit? He's sold off most of his assets, including his vintage Harley-Davidsons. All he is left with is a costly mortgage and several payments on his (scratched-up) Porsche. At 59, he's also washed up at work. In fact, he is about to be fired when the bank shifts its derivatives trading team from London to Frankfurt.

Ben, meanwhile, lives in the £100m country estate he inherited from his great aunt. On the weekends, he potters about for fun in his own Versailles-inspired garden, paying himself a nominal salary.

This year, before he turns 21, he plans to sell the estate and move into a modest flat in Knightsbridge. He'll invest the £95m he has left over and live off the interest while he completes his studies as a patent lawyer, a profession that should earn him a bit of pocket money in the years ahead.

Now who looks richer? Bill the banker or Ben the gardener?

Michal Kalecki, the Polish economist, is said to have described economics as "the science of confusing stocks with flows". Investors scrutinise a company's balance sheet as well as its profits and losses. Yet, when it comes to sizing up a nation, we are mostly stuck with GDP, which counts the value of goods and services produced in a given period.

GDP numbers can be misleading. That applies especially to resource-rich countries. Saudi Arabia 's income per capita of around $20,000 a year depends on the price and production volume of oil, which will one day run out. At that point, unless the Saudis figure out a way of replacing lost income - through developing high-tech industries staffed by educated people - it will become the Bill the banker of nations.

As Paul Collier, professor of economics and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, says, it is a lesson hard to glean from national income statistics. You need regular updates of a country's balance sheet to "blow the whistle" on unsustainable policies.

Yet it is not something lost on astute leaders. Much of the urgency behind the reform efforts of Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi's 32-year-old crown prince, stems from an apparent determination to diversify the economy before it is too late.

"Policies that create wealth go beyond increasing output," say Kirk Hamilton and Cameron Hepburn, in their recent book National Wealth: What is Missing, Why it Matters. "They involve investments today for returns in the future."

I have long had vague misgivings about GDP as an accurate barometer of living standards and the sustainability of wealth. As a young reporter for the FT in Latin America in the 1990s, I quickly learnt to report minutely on the quarterly gyrations of GDP and to lend my articles a touch of gravitas by deploying GDP as a denominator. Tax revenue or debt levels or education expenditure were best expressed as a percentage of GDP to facilitate cross-country comparisons. Yet beyond knowing that GDP was a measure of economic output, I never stopped to think exactly how it was calculated or precisely what it meant.

Later, as a correspondent in Japan, I wondered why people seemed so well off when nominal GDP had not budged for 20 years. Deflation and low population growth were part of the answer. That meant real per capita income was higher than the nominal number suggested. But the quality of services and technology also made a difference to living standards. To GDP, an elegant Mitsukoshi department store was the same as a Walmart, and a clapped-out British commuter train did just as well as a Japanese Shinkansen travelling at 200mph and arriving with a punctuality measured in fractions of a second.

Later still, in China, I marvelled at year after year of double-digit growth, but worried that no one was taking any statistical reckoning of the not-so-hidden costs of growth in poisoned air and depleted soil. It seemed perverse that, if China spent money cleaning up its mess, that too would count as growth, much as GDP counts money spent to repair the damage after natural disasters, terrorist attacks or war. Any activity, it seemed - digging a hole and filling it up again - would do.

In my most recent job, as Africa editor, I discovered that GDP data - often treated as sacrosanct and used, for example, to determine appropriate levels of borrowing - were virtually meaningless. Normal methods of compiling GDP, which rely on costly surveys of businesses and households, were often too expensive for cash-strapped governments to undertake. Besides, they failed to account properly for activity in the massive informal and subsistence sectors. Terry Ryan, chairman of Kenya's National Bureau of Statistics, told me that if - as the official data suggested - some 72 per cent of Kenyans lived on a dollar or two a day, then "72 per cent of my people are dead".

In Nigeria, minor changes to methodology implemented in 2014 revealed that the economy was 89 per cent bigger than assumed, making a mockery of previous estimates. Again in Kenya, one group of economists said they could monitor the economy more accurately than GDP from outer space. Satellite imagery of night-lights showed that national income statistics were missing swathes of activity outside Nairobi, the capital.

As I began to read more in the course of researching a book, The Growth Delusion, I found that I was far from alone in my scepticism. There was a whole academic literature, a mini-industry becoming more respectable by the day, questioning the ability of GDP to reflect our lives.

Invented in the 1930s by Simon Kuznets, initially as a way of calculating the damage wrought by the Great Depression, GDP is a child of the manufacturing age. Good at keeping track of "things you can drop on your foot", it struggles to make sense of the services - from life insurance and landscape gardening to stand-up comedy - that comprise some 80 per cent of modern economies. The internet is more perplexing still. In GDP terms, Wikipedia, which puts the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips, is worth precisely nothing.

Nor does GDP have much useful to say about income distribution, one of the themes of our age. Kuznets warned urgently that his measure should never be confused with wellbeing. Yet in treating GDP as the nonpareil of numbers, it is a warning we have ignored.

In GDP terms, Wikipedia, which puts the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips, is worth nothing

Among GDP's shortcomings, the distinction between flow of income and stock of wealth, highlighted by the story of Bill and Ben, is one of the most serious.

Partha Dasgupta, emeritus professor of economics at Cambridge University, has been trying to invent ways of measuring wealth for decades. The "rogue word" in gross domestic product, he says, is "gross". "If a wetland is drained to make way for a shopping mall, the construction of the latter contributes to GDP, but the destruction of the former goes unrecorded."

When I went to see Dasgupta, now in his mid-seventies, at his rooms at St John's College, he began with the intricate interplay between wealth and income. One could think of it in terms of life planning, he said. A family might use income to purchase an asset, say a house, or it might trade in an asset to pay for an education, which, in turn, could later be converted into higher income. With any entity - a family, a company or a nation - wealth is "what enables you to plan", he said, by "converting one form of capital into another".

With nations, some forms of capital are easier to count than others. So-called manufactured capital comprises investments in roads, ports and cities. It is relatively easy to value and many countries keep inventories of capital stock. Human capital is the size and skill of a workforce. Natural capital includes non-renewables, such as oil and coal, and renewables, ranging from farmland to complex ecosystems that provide water, oxygen and nutrients.

Attempts to value some of these assets can appear absurd. In 1997, the environmental economist Robert Costanza caused uproar with his estimate that the planet's natural capital - "nature" to you and me - was worth $33tn. His sums, published in the scientific journal Nature, were pilloried by both conventional economists, who thought the exercise unscientific, and by environmentalists, who objected to the very idea of hanging a dollar tag on an ocean or a rainforest. Costanza found, for example, that lakes and rivers were "worth" $1.7tn, while nutrient cycling, an "ecosystem service", provided $4.9tn of benefit to mankind.

To call his calculations back-of-the-envelope would be to malign envelopes. Yet when challenged on his methodology, he responded, "We do not believe there is any one right way to value ecosystem services. But there is a wrong way, and that is not to do it at all."

Some economists view any attempt to account for natural depletion with suspicion. When I asked Lawrence Summers about it, he decried what he saw as a bogus attempt by environmentalists to limit growth. His main complaint was that wealth accountants were quick to shout when resources had been depleted, but slow to acknowledge when they had been augmented.

New technology, such as fracking and deep-sea drilling, Summers said, had increased exploitable oil and gas reserves. Video conferencing was a breakthrough that meant people could hold more international meetings while reducing travel-related emissions.

But wealth accountants, he said, were never honest enough to concede how innovation could add to wealth as well as subtract. "It's all a doom and gloom operation," he practically growled down the phone. "In favour of everybody staying at home. Everybody staying home and knitting."

Summers is right that it is difficult to know how much current capital stock is worth, since its value can change depending on technological or political developments. Cobalt was once a mildly interesting byproduct of copper; now it's a must-have component of electric car batteries. Oil has been liquid gold and may yet be again. But stricter environmental regulations could one day render it a stranded asset worth nothing.

More philosophically, it is hard to put a price on the future. One of the supposed virtues of wealth accounting is that it is forward-looking. It analyses today's stock of capital that will produce tomorrow's income stream. GDP, on the other hand, is backward-looking. It merely tots up total production over a specific period in the past. So, in theory, wealth accounting should help one generation think about the next.

Yet in practice, as my colleague Martin Wolf told me, there are limits. We may love our children and their children and even their unborn children. But what about the children after them and those after them? "The question of sustainability is partly: who cares about the future?" he said. In the long run, "we will all be zero-energy soup".

Such practical and philosophical considerations aside, there is now real momentum behind wealth accounting, even among the most orthodox of institutions. This month, the World Bank will release the most comprehensive attempt yet to crack the problem.

The Changing Wealth of Nations 2018 is the fruit of years of work by a dedicated team. It builds on research published in 2006 and 2011. In its latest iteration, the bank produces comprehensive wealth accounts for 141 countries between 1995 and 2014. For each country, there are estimates for "produced" capital, including urban land, machinery and infrastructure. Natural capital includes market values for subsoil assets, such as oil and copper, arable land, forests and conservative estimates for protected areas, which are priced as if they were farmland.

To GDP, a clapped-out British train did just as well as a Japanese Shinkansen travelling at 200mph

For the first time, the bank makes an explicit attempt to measure human capital. Using a database of 1,500 household surveys, it estimates the present value of the projected lifetime earnings of nearly everyone on the planet.

"We're looking at GDP as a return on wealth," says Glenn-Marie Lange, co-editor of the report and leader of the bank's wealth accounting team. "Policymakers need this information to design strategies to ensure that their GDP growth is sustained in the long run.''

Among the report's findings, the full details of which are embargoed, is a huge shift of wealth over 20 years to middle-income countries, largely driven by the rise of China and other Asian countries. A third of low-income countries, however, especially in Africa, have suffered an outright fall in per capita wealth over that period, in what could be a dangerous omen about their capacity for future growth. In the world as a whole, the report finds, human capital represents a whopping 65 per cent of total wealth. In 2014, this was $1,143tn, or about 15 times that year's GDP.

The report is particularly illuminating in tracing the path to development as countries, in the manner described by Dasgupta, trade in one form of capital for another. Crudely put, they use income derived from natural resources to build up other forms of capital, principally in infrastructure, technology, health and education. So, while natural capital accounts for 47 per cent of the wealth of low-income countries, it represents only 3 per cent of the wealth of the most advanced.

The lesson, says Collier of the Blavatnik school and author of The Bottom Billion, a book about failing economies, is that spurts of GDP don't tell you anything if you don't know about underlying wealth. In Africa, countries such as Nigeria have converted resources into consumption booms, but have largely failed to build the infrastructure or invest in the healthy, educated population that will sustain future growth.

Much of Africa, says Collier, has "dug itself up and chopped itself down, but didn't build enough in its place. It's not sustainable growth. It's a fiction of the flow data." It is a lesson that Bill, the indebted banker with limited future earning prospects, would have done well to take to heart.
The writer is the FT's Africa editor. His new book 'The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty and the Well-Being of Nations' is published by Bloomsbury in the UK on January 25 and in the US by Tim Duggan Books on January 30 Follow @FTLifeArts on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Subscribe to FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos
Due to a misunderstanding, comments by Lawrence Summers intended as off-the-record were published in this article on January 5, 2018. Prof Summers intended the comments to be treated as 'off the record' and that nothing be used without his approval to assure his views were fairly represented. The writer has apologised to Prof Summers for any unwitting breach of such a request.

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Why it is time to change the way we measure the wealth of nations

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Imagine two people. Let's call them Bill and Ben. Bill is a mid-ranking investment banker who clears £500,000 a year after tax. Ben is a gardener who takes home £25,000. Who is better off? If we judge them by their income, then Bill is clearly richer; 20 times richer, to be precise.

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Crashed_ How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World ( PDFDrive )

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Thomas Sankara - An Upright Man

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War by Other Means (free on John Pilger's website)

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Capital in the 21st century (if you watch one, let it be this! On Amazon Prime)

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Push

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A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

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The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

The Divide by Jason Hickel

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Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution

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How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

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The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy

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The Growth Delusion by David Pilling

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

The Hegemony of Growth: The OECD and the Making of the Economic Growth Paradigm

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Upstream

The Dig (quite US focussed)

EU Watchdog Radio

A World to Win with Grace Blakely

Weekly Economics Podcast (with New Economics Foundation)

New Economics Foundation

This is Capitalism (BBC Radio 4, short, 10 episodes)

The David McWilliams Podcast

Social Justice Ireland

Planet Money

More or Less: Behind the Stats (BBC)

The Taxcast (from the Tax Justice Network

David Harvey's Anti-capitalist Chronicles

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Grace Blakely, 'Stolen'

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Yanis Varoufakis, ‘Talking to my daughter about capitalism'

Ha Joon Chang, ‘Economics: A User’s Guide’

Ha Joon Chang, ‘23 things they don’t tell you about capitalism’

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Jason Hickel, ‘Less is More’

Kate Raworth, ‘Doughnut Economics’

Ann Pettifor, ‘The case for the Green New Deal’