[...] 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.

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 reassurance that what they are doing is for the best, and don't wish to hear otherwise. Mainstream economics, he writes, 'has been shaped by an agenda focused on showing that markets are good for people rather than on discovering how markets actually work.' So economists still maintain that money (as defined by the banking and finance community) is the best measure of the human value of economic activities--even though we see more and more examples every day of environments and lives ruined by the pursuit of monetary profit.

Centrally planned economies now dominate the world economy, but instead of having 'Socialist Republic' after their names, they have 'Inc' and 'plc': they are massively centralized, commercial hierarchies, and this has happened without much discussion of their feasibility or otherwise.

Under 'business as usual', however, managements are less concerned with discharging an organization's avowed purpose (providing nutritious food, easy transport between A and B, warmth, comfort, and so on) than with discharging their responsibilities to shareholders (to provide healthy dividends and an ever-rising share price) or to themselves (to maintain their careers on a constantly rising trajectory and their children at private schools). Such organizations are simply not equipped to tackle their alleged aims, but Ashby's law decrees that the discrepancy between claim and reality must be made up somehow. [...]

The attempt to shut down the economy in October 1972 not only failed; it also shone a floodlight on the sheer scale of the redundancy (in terms of unnecessary equipment and so on) a supposedly 'efficient', competition-based economy needs, just to that its players can compete with each other.

In 2013, the New Yorker's George Packer found that companies like Google and Facebook are full of people who fervently believe they are changing the world more effectively than any government can, and that it is entirely appropriate to become extremely rich by doing so. Packer found the phrase 'change the world' used constantly in these companies and among their backers, yet they were surrounded by (and oblivious to) levels of homelessness and poverty that had been unknown in San Francisco a couple of decades earlier.

Given the extreme discomfort and danger of coalmining work, it can seem extraordinary that people would fight so hard and suffer so much to preserve it--but perhaps it is no more extraordinary than the lengths dancers, musicians, writers and climbers will go to, to do what they have set their hearts on doing. It may seem odd to speak of coalminers in the same breath as ballet dancers and composers, but that may reflect more on the inequality of a society in which these different communities have so little mutual contact, than it does on the nature of their per se.

Instead of confronting the problem of excess wealth, liberal-minded political groups usually focus on relieving poverty, perhaps by enforcing and raising minimum wages. But raised minimum wages are easily negated when earnings and wealth at the top explode, driving up the price of housing and further augmenting the power of interests that are inimical to things that support general welfare, such as public transport, schooling and healthcare. As wealth gaps widen, the poor rely more on credit, which further enriches the already wealth. Investment becomes increasingly focused on financial opportunities. The principle of inequality, unchallenged, becomes further entrenched.

The epidemiological evidence suggests that inequality is a bit like asbestos: it has no known 'safe level'. Why not ban it? Or why not at least discuss banning it, to draw out all the arguments pro and con? [...]

Elitism's defenders have often argued that inequality is needed to spur innovation. The evidence gathered by this book contradicts that. The story of computers and high technology, in particular, tells us that tolerating inequality becomes downright dangerous as technology gets more powerful. The idea that big rewards (or even any material reward at all) are helpful in any productive sense, has no support [...]

There is an objection which points out that absolute equality is not achievable. That has never stopped societies outlawing other intractable injustices such as rape, murder, apartheid or even slavery. All the great battles against injustice, in which modern societies take such pride, were considered unwinnable until, suddenly, they were won. And some of society's most mundane underpinnings depend on equally 'unachieveable' goals. Perfect verticality is a completely unachievable abstraction but it does not stop bricklayers continually checking that walls and lintels are as vertical and level as they can possibly be; we would never trust a bricklayer who did anything else [...]