Ill Fares the Land

Our current economic narrative only serves to exacerbate inequality. It’s time to write a new one.

Words: George Monbiot
Illustration: Aleksandar Savic

Do you feel trapped in a broken economic model? A model that’s trashing the living world and threatens the lives of our descendants? A model that excludes billions of people while making a handful unimaginably rich? That sorts us into winners and losers, and then blames the losers for their misfortune? Welcome to neoliberalism, the zombie doctrine that never seems to die, however comprehensively it is discredited.

You might have imagined that the financial crisis of 2008 would have led to the collapse of neoliberalism. After all, it exposed its central features, which were deregulating business and finance, tearing down public protections, throwing us into extreme competition with each other, as being deeply flawed. Intellectually, it did collapse, but still it dominates our lives. I believe that this is because we have not yet produced a new story with which to replace it.

Stories are the means by which we navigate the world. They allow us to interpret its complex and contradictory signals. When we want to make sense of something, the sense we seek is not scientific sense but narrative fidelity…