Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism [9781554683741]

Overview

The national bestseller by the co-author off the international bestseller The Rebel Sell in the vein of Freakonomics

Filthy Lucre aims to level the playing the field in economicsand, in this time of enormous market volatility and unprecedented instability, raise our level of economic literacy. Drawing on everyday examples to skewer the six favourite economic fallacies of the right and then the left, we learn why the right wing so wrongly believes that capitalism is the natural order of things, that any tax cut is a good tax cut, and that personal responsibility can solve any problem. And, contrary to how the left feels, why we must resist the urge to fiddle with prices, why the pursuit of profit is not such a bad thing, and why, despite efforts to improve or even fix wages, some jobs will always suck. In a time when populism rules and politicians' basic understanding of economics challenges the world order (and would have John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith rolling in their graves), this book defies and definies the elemental tenets of monetary policy and economics.