Why We’re Getting Poorer: A Realist’s Guide to the Economy and How We Can Fix It by Cahal Moran, 2025
Why We're Getting Poorer delves into the key topics in economics – money, globalisation, inequality, climate change and growth – showing that what we think we know about these things is wrong, and teaching us what we really need to know.
Deciphering the jargon and complexity of economic thinking, with examples ranging from the Simpsons to the German football league to The Inbetweeners, Cahal Moran shows us why our economy set us up to fail, and offers suggestions for how we can make positive changes.
Written by an award-winning economist and the YouTuber responsible for ‘Unlearning Economics’, Why We're Getting Poorer is a thrilling, iconoclastic guide to how the world really works.
An insider's guide to our broken economy and how it fails to serve us.
‘A fascinating examination of the failures of modern economics, and how these failures are harming us all' Grace Blakeley, author of Vulture Capitalism
"The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men:
City officials are proposing stricter enforcement, higher fines and new #technology in part to prevent rent-controlled apartments from being listed on #Airbnb and other booking sites, the subject of a Capital & Main and ProPublica investigation.
#Landlords Evicted #Maui Residents and Housed Wildfire Survivors for More Money. FEMA Didn’t Take Basic Steps to Stop It.
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#FEMA officials said they didn’t want their housing program for survivors of Maui’s 2023 wildfires to displace any residents. But they didn’t bar the agency’s contractors from leasing properties previously occupied by long-term tenants.
Cities Say They Store Property Taken From #Homeless Encampments. People Rarely Get Their Things Back.
Storage programs are meant to protect people’s property rights and allow them to reclaim their possessions. But they rarely accomplish either objective, according to a ProPublica investigation of cities with the largest homeless populations.
"The inflation rate signals instability in the social order. That instability, it seems, translates into capitalists’ fears about the future. When the price system is more unstable, capitalists discount present income more steeply."
“...Slavery finds its origins in war. But everywhere we encounter it slavery is also, at first, a domestic institution. Hierarch and property my derive from notion of the sacred, but the most brutal forms of exploitation have their origins in the intimate of social relations: as perversions of nurture, love and caring. Certainly, those origins are not to be found in government...”
― David #Graeber and David #Wengrow, in "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" #slavery#family
“What makes the Roman Law conception of property - the basis of almost all legal systems today - unique is that the responsibility to care and share is reduced to a minimum, or even eliminated entirely. In Roman Law there are three basic rights related to possession: usus (the right to use), fructus (the right to enjoy the products of a property, for instance the fruit of a tree), and abusus (the right to damage or destroy). If one has only the first two rights, this is referred to as usufruct, and is not considered true possession under the law. The defining feature of true legal #property then, is that one has the option not taking care of it, or even destroying it at will.”
― David #Graeber and David #Wengrow, in "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" #slavery#family#familia#sociology#anthropology#law#patriarchy#bioPower#reputation#honor
“Public torture, in seventeenth-century Europe, created searing, unforgettable spectacles of pain and suffering in order to convey the message that a system in which husbands could brutalize wives, and parents beat children, was ultimately a form of love… It seems to us that this connection – or better perhaps confusion – between #care and #domination is utterly critical to the larger questions of how we lost the ability freely to recreate ourselves by recreating our relationships with one another. It is critical, that is, to understanding how we got stuck, and why these days we can hardly envisage our own past or future as anything other than a transition from smaller to larger cages.”
― David #Graeber and David #Wengrow, in "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" #history#learning#learn#property#family#sociology#anthropology#law#patriarchy#bioPower#reputation#honour
"The #law is the most powerful engine through which ideologies can become self-replicating engines. John Locke’s theory of property as the endowed right of white men to use and to produce worked like witchcraft—the natural world, which had sustained societies for thousands of years, could suddenly be taken by force, enclosed, and tilled for the sole profit of one man, with trespassers punished. The conversion of land into one person’s permanent property was not permissible under the indigenous populations who had long occupied it, nor was such a thing permissible anywhere in the world except Europe—and even there, only after the enclosure movements of the 1600s."
Mehrsa #Baradaran in her book: "The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America"
"Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century
[…]
• Data on real wages suggests that, historically, extreme poverty was uncommon and arose primarily during periods of severe social and economic dislocation, particularly under colonialism.
• The rise of capitalism from the long 16th century onward is associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality.
• In parts of South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, wages and/or height have still not recovered."