Editorial – How to clear a room

Editorial – Hans Lovejoy

Want to clear a room? Say ‘economics!’.

Except – there is an extraordinary modern economist named Mark Blyth.

With a charming Scottish lilt, he simplifies complex global concepts and proposes ways societies can prosper, unencumbered by the crushing debt handed down by global banking elites.

His online economic lectures are unlike most, in that they are personable, engaging, and easy to understand.

For example, Blyth eloquently explains the concept of how most governments – with the exception of the likes of Norway and Iceland – use their policy levers to provide socialism for the rich and inflict capitalism on the poor.

Angrynomics is his new book, and is co-authored with Eric Longeran. According to Columbia University Press, ‘It explores the rising tide of anger, sometimes righteous and useful, sometimes destructive and ill-targeted, and proposes radical new solutions for an increasingly polarised and confusing world’.

On 19 June, Blyth told Edward Steinfeld, director of the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, that when economies stop, (or are perceived as having stopped) serving the interests of the majority of citizens, anger arises. 

‘That seems to be the feeling that has swept right across the [wealthy] OECD countries and others. 

‘Essentially, it’s perceived as a rigged game. There’s a bunch of insiders variously called the elites, or cosmopolitans, who have made off with all the cash. And everyone else is working harder and harder for less and less’.

He says, ‘The word “citizen” has been emptied of all value. ‘Essentially you are a consumer. To re-enrich that, you need to give people a stake in their society – which is something else that has been eviscerated’.

Blyth’s policy proposals in Angrynomics include national wealth funds, dual interest rates and direct government transfers to household incomes.

So his solutions are not based on raising taxes, and instead can ‘make serious dents in inequality’.

Even before COVID-19 (BC), wealthy economies such as Australia were slowing down, and wealth distribution, along with upward mobility and opportunity, was evaporating.

In BC times, there were not enough jobs to match unemployment in Australia, and wages had stagnated. Meanwhile, the governing class were, and still are, doing exceptionally well. Every week there are new examples of them gaining confidence in all the wrong places. Instead of protecting and advancing human rights, civil liberties are being targeted and diminished. Open corruption in the ranks of the elite has been normalised in full view of the general public.

While anger rises within the unwashed masses, Blyth offers tangible and much needed constructive solutions.