Future Markets ConsultationInteresting posts and articles from around the web, collected in one place.
Plus original content from our researchers and other contributors.
How We Can Protect Our Farmers and Promote Free Trade
“there is a solution here where the UK can both protect farmers and execute a trade policy which allows them to be competitive on global markets. To do so means asking what it is we should be protecting them from, and we should, in answering that question, come up with a set of holistic solutions. The Department for International Trade’s newly formed Trade and Agriculture Commission, on which I sit, is an excellent opportunity for constructive engagement to solve these issues and find common ground among stakeholders.”
Dismantle Racial Capitalism
“The COVID crisis has cast into stark relief what has always been true: the wealth and prosperity of the U.S. economy rests on the labor, and the lives, of black and brown people. Systemic racial disparities of wealth and health are woven deeply into the fabric of American capitalism.”
The Relational Economy
“Even before the coronavirus, the boundaries between work and home had thinned, and our vocabularies for both were blending. ‘Emotional capitalism’—a term Perel borrows from sociologist Eva Illouz—leads to first dates that feel like job interviews, as we apply market logic to our love lives. Meanwhile our bosses expect us to bring all the passion we have to our jobs, and in return we expect work to provide ‘authenticity and vulnerability and trust and transparency and belonging,’ according to Perel.”
Toward a New Fiscal Constitution
“With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing governments to spend on an unprecedented scale to sustain businesses and households, there has never been a better time to restore the state to its proper role as a rudder for the broader economy. The market alone is simply no match for the challenges of the twenty-first century”, so Mariana Mazzucato and Robert Skidelsky argue.
Money Buys Even More Happiness than It Used to
“While the old adage says that money can’t buy happiness, several studies have determined that the more your income increases, the happier you are, up until US$75,000 a year. […] But in a new analysis of more than 40,000 U.S. adults aged 30 and over, my colleague and I found an even deeper relationship between money and happiness. […] Today, money and happiness are more strongly related than they were in the past. It seems money buys more happiness than it used to. How did this happen?”
Corporate Activism Is More than a Marketing Gimmick
“While some see companies’ support for Black Lives Matter as a calculated marketing ploy, I argue that companies’ support for Black Lives Matter is an example of corporate activism – in other words, a sincere engagement with the policymaking process. Setting aside the question of whether corporate activism is good or bad for democracy, and whether it is sometimes clumsy or even offensive, it is a genuine attempt to influence policy outcomes.”
Coronavirus Recovery – The New Economic Thinking We Need
“based on the experience of the past decade, it’s hard to say that economic crises are truly abnormal. Heterodox economics, an approach to economics that I belong to, says economic crises are an inherent feature of capitalism. […] More government spending on public investment projects and public services, as well as greater oversight of how market activity influences society, must be the focus going forward.”
Big Pharma Wants to Pocket the Profits From a COVID Treatment You Already Paid For
“Our data suggests that Gilead’s considerable accomplishment in securing authorization for use of remdesivir in treating COVID-19 represents only the culminating step in a cumulative process of innovation that involved the collective action of public, as well as private, enterprise. While Gilead will likely invest several billion dollars in bringing remdesivir to market, our data suggests that the public sector, in aggregate, has already invested much more. Patent law and the USPTO recognize the role played by Gilead in the discovery and development of remdesivir. There is, however, no mechanism for similarly recognizing the decades of foundational, basic research that made this discovery possible.”
The United States: An Exceptional Case?
“Many see the US as a land where free markets and antitrust enforcement have historically kept monopolies under control. But is that really the case? Watch a conversation between Stanford University professor Stephen Haber, Columbia University professor Richard R. John, and Luigi Zingales.”
The Fundamental Error of the ‘New Economics’ Brigade
“The basic point being missed by all these calls for this new economics is that the old has examined, debated even, all of the questions and problems currently in the air. There are libraries full of commentaries, tens of thousands of very bright people have worked for a couple of centuries to get to this current state of knowledge. Most of what is in the current political air has already been considered – and found wanting”, so claims Tim Worstall, who works for the Adam Smith Institute, in response to a recent op-ed by Jonathan Aldred in The Guardian.
This Pandemic Has Exposed the Uselessness of Orthodox Economics
“Economic orthodoxy supports the narrative that this pandemic is a unique disaster no one could have prepared for, and with no wider lessons for economics and politics. […] There is an alternative: the pandemic provides further evidence that to tackle the climate emergency, inequality and any emerging crises, we must re-think our economics from the bottom up”, says Cambridge economist Jonathan Aldred, author of License to Be Bad; How Economics Corrupted Us (2019).
The Market Is Not Our Master — Only State-Led Business Cooperation Will Drive Real Economic Recovery
“Market-shaping still preserves the beauty of markets as mechanisms that enable the generation of wealth like no other, and which reward entrepreneurship and innovation. And as long as they are shaped to deliver positive outcomes, markets can avoid the blunt instrument of over-regulation. By extension, market-shaping is best achieved by multiple actors coming together and collaborating to achieve a shared goal. Much as multi-lateral international cooperation will defeat COVID-19 more effectively than countries going it alone, economic recovery will happen faster with collective action.”
After Growth; Is There Any Alternative to Planet-Destroying Growth?
“In the 1960s, President Julius Nyerere had a difficult message for citizens of the newly independent nation of Tanzania: accept less. […] Nyerere’s challenge—how to make a compelling argument for less—resonates anew in the context of global climate change. It is also one of the central challenges posed by Julie Livingston in her book Self-Devouring Growth. In giving this name to our collective planetary predicament, she is not invoking a metaphor, but describing an observable physical process.”
The Dignity of Labor
“Despite the outpouring of praise for essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, their own interests continue to come second to the broader public’s need for cheap and reliable labor.”
Conspicuous Consumption Is Over. It’s All about Intangibles Now
” In Veblen’s now famous treatise The Theory of the Leisure Class, he coined the phrase ‘conspicuous consumption’ to denote the way that material objects were paraded as indicators of social position and status. More than 100 years later, conspicuous consumption is still part of the contemporary capitalist landscape, and yet today, luxury goods are significantly more accessible than in Veblen’s time. […] However, the democratisation of consumer goods has made them far less useful as a means of displaying status.”
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