Talking to My Daughter About the Economy

the story of Faustus and Mephistopheles is no fairy tale; it marks a painful moment in human history, the moment when debt and profit partnered up.

Oscar Wilde wrote that a cynical person is someone who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. Our societies tend to make us all cynics. And no one is more cynical than the economist who sees exchange value as the only value, trivializing experiential value as unnecessary in a society where everything is judged according to the criteria of the market.

is no coincidence that societies not in need of developing agricultural cultivation – in places where wild game, nuts and berries were never in short supply, as was the case for Aboriginal Australian societies and indigenous communities in South America – kept to music and painting and never invented writing.

So, let me begin with a common error that many make: they think that markets and the economy are one and the same thing. They are not

As long as highly skilled human labour remains necessary to design the machines that build other machines, full automation of the production process will not happen. In this scenario the effect of distributing profits as I have described would be to ensure that prices remain more or less stable while incomes rise, with the result that products become increasingly more affordable.

And if it ever happens that the production process does become fully robotized, with humans no longer needing to work on the design or the manufacture of the robots that make other robots, then all prices and all incomes will gradually recede until every product is like the air we breathe: so plentiful that no one needs to pay for it, however precious it may be.

a goal can only be achieved collectively, success depends not just on each individual pulling together but primarily on each individual believing that every other individual will do so.

ikonomia, which comprises two words: oikos (‘household’) and nomoi (‘laws, rules, constraints’).

However, it is this same point that underlies the conviction of certain people that there is no such thing as unemployment, only workers who refuse to sell their work at a low enough price.

Whether you adapt your behaviour to suit market society’s needs, or become obstinate enough to want to adapt society to your own ideas about what society should be like instead, performing the Archimedean leap – a periodic mental withdrawal from our society’s norms and certainties – is vital.

All systems of domination work by enveloping us in their narrative and superstitions in such a way that we cannot see beyond them.