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Conventional economics doesn't capture all of the economy's costs and, according to its critics, it isn't meant to. The Harvard economist Steven Marglin argued in his 2008 book The Dismal Science that mainstream economics has always been the servant of powerful interests, which naturally want rea…

[...] The subtext is: there is no need to wonder about the future because brilliant minds are working on it, and it will be nice. Everything you could wish for is being taken care of.

The power-shift towards finance became self-reinforcing. Financial institutions deployed their increased lobbying power successfully against the legal barriers between speculative and retail banking [...] This drew creative effort and investment into the monetary system itself, and away from the pr…

[...] the publication in 1973 of Fischer Black and Myron Scholes's algorithm for the pricing of options.

Before Black and Scholes's work, derivatives had been a small fraction of all investments, essentially the contracts known as 'futures,' [...] Black and Scholes's algorithm allowed almost eve…

Positionality is a valuable concept for anyone who is interested in making society more fair, because it highlights the fact that the system is not composed entirely of people who believe in it and want it, but perhaps very largely of people who have been dragooned into it and would love to be free…