We live in an age of extreme inequality, in which the remedies we think we understand seem to have no effect while the rich go on getting richer. We are repeatedly told that work is the best route out of poverty, yet in 2014 more of the income-poor in the UK were in jobs rather than out of them.
Guy Standing, best-selling author of The Precariat, reveals the devastating effects of the construction of a global market economy. At the heart of the problem is the construction by successive governments, working in the interests of elites, of the most unfree market system ever created. This is a system in which property - financial, physical and intellectual - is controlled by a tiny but enormously powerful rentier class, at the expense of all the rest of us.
The rental income obtained from assets and from the exploitation of scarce resources from oil to pharmaceutical licences has rapidly become the dominant force in the global economy, aided by government subsidies, tax breaks and systemically corrupt deals.
