The conversation that led to these essays started, as my better conversations often do, with an attempt at a grand formulation that I wasn’t entirely sure I meant.

I found myself describing what I do in terms that sounded almost theological. I took a trinitarian theme. There is, I said, “the world” as it is. And then there is “us” as conscious beings within it. And finally, there is the tension, contradiction, brokenness, or “viciousness” that appears to separate us from it. What the relationship between those three creates is the question of whether any reconciliation between them is possible.

My wife, who has a reliable instinct for when I am disappearing into my own abstraction, let me finish and then offered a rather more direct account of the same thing. “What you do”, she said, “is point at what is wrong, and you then help people realise they are not helpless. You seek to establish their agency in the presence of adversity”. That, I think, is true. But I want to sit with the more complicated version for a moment, because I think it captures something important.

The world I spend most of my time writing about is genuinely broken. This is the first element, and it is not broken in a rhetorical sense, nor as a polemical device. It is broken in the precise sense that the systems meant to serve the common good have been reorganised, over several decades and through considerable deliberate effort, to serve the interests of those who already have most in our society and those of a similar sort around the world.

Tax systems exist that allow the wealthy to route income through structures unavailable to anyone else.

Financial markets extract from the productive economy rather than fund it.

Political institutions are captured by the interests they were designed to regulate.

These are not temporary glitches. They are the shape of the thing. And we are inside it. That is the second element. We are not neutral observers of this broken world. We live in it, work in it, and feel its effects in concrete ways, in what we can afford, in what services exist when we need them, in the pervasive background anxiety of economic life that most people carry, to name but a few of the real world’s consequences for us. The relationship between the broken structure of the world and the lived experience of it is real and tight, even when it is not visible.

The third element, the tension, contradiction, brokenness, or “viciousness” as I think it might be called, is the gap between those two things. The brokenness of the structure and the rawness of the experience are connected, but the connection is usually hidden.

That is not accidental. One of the chief functions of mainstream economics, as I have spent a good deal of my working life arguing, is to make that gap appear natural. The aim is to present the outcomes of very specific, historically contingent, politically chosen arrangements as if they were the necessary results of how markets must work and how human nature compels us to behave. If you believe that framing, then the viciousness we observe is just the way things are meant to be; the weather we always take with us, as Crowded House once sang. There is nothing to reconcile in that case. Only endurance is required.

The creator’s job, as I understand it in this situation, is to make the connection visible and to show that the gap between what the world is and what people experience is not just weather, but deliberate policy. It is not a chance of nature, but the result of deliberate choice. The significance is clear. It is that choices, unlike the weather, can not only be different, but can be changed.

This, then, is about seeking a kind of reconciliation. It is not about creating acceptance or making peace with things as they are. It is about the restoration of a relationship between cause and effect that has been deliberately obscured. When that relationship becomes visible, something changes. The world is still broken. But its brokenness now has an address.

What I have been thinking about is what that phrase actually means for someone who makes content for a living, as I now do. And I think it might be the most honest description of what I am trying to do that I have yet come across.

I am not explaining when I create content.

I am not seeking to persuade.

I am trying to make people wonder.

The distinction matters.

Explaining implies the audience arrives ignorant and leaves informed.

Persuading implies they arrive wrong and leave converted.

Both are rather condescending models, if you think about them, and neither captures what actually happens when a piece of content works.

What does happen in that case, and what I notice when something I have written or said seems to have landed, is that someone’s certainty has shifted. Their opinion might not have done, but their certainty has. The thing they had taken as given, or even certain, is suddenly, and however briefly, available for inspection. The door they didn’t know was there has opened a crack.

That is what I mean by wonder. And it is harder to produce than either information or argument.

The questions that seem to do this most reliably are not the ones with the most dramatic answers. They are the ones that make an assumption visible.

What if government debt is actually national savings?

What if taxation doesn’t fund spending but instead manages the consequences of spending?

What if scarcity is not the neutral backdrop to economic life but is, in many cases, deliberately constructed?

None of those questions requires a particularly dramatic answer to be worth asking. The asking itself is the point. Because once the question has been genuinely entertained, the old certainty doesn’t come back quite as solid as it was.

There is a philosophical tradition that treats wonder as the beginning of all serious inquiry. I will not go into all the classical references. The point is simply that wonder is active in a way that information is not.

You can receive information passively.

You cannot wonder passively.

Wonder requires you to hold two things at once. They are what you thought you knew, and the possibility that it might be otherwise. That tension is uncomfortable in precisely the way that productive thinking is always uncomfortable.

This is why I think the standard tests for whether a piece of content has succeeded are too narrow.

Did people agree with it? Did it go viral? Did it generate traffic? All of those can happen with content that produces no wonder whatsoever.

The better question is, did people leave it thinking differently about something they had previously stopped thinking about?

Did someone, somewhere, put their phone down and look at the ceiling for a moment or reflection?

That is the moment I am aiming at when creating content. It doesn’t always come, of course. I am quite realistic enough to know that. There wasn’t a Stairway to Heaven, after all, as far as we know. And that last point is key. Considering possibility is what the work of content creation is for. It is about creating the moment when we wonder.

Parts 2 and 3 of this series will follow soon.

Politicians, economists, media commentators and others are all offering us various forms of distraction whilst failing to acknowledge the enormous potential long-term economic impacts of the war between the USA, Israel and Iran.

The International Monetary Fund has said at its Spring Meeting that this war might leave an economic scar for a decade or so, but, doing so, they appear to think it is already over. It is a long way from being that, and the consequences are, if anything, growing.

Firstly, global tensions resulting from this war are rising, threatening the foundations of the world economy. The risk of disruption to oil flows through key routes such as the Strait of Hormuz is not theoretical. Flows through the Red Sea are also potentially at risk. Those risks are immediate. Many of the world’s largest economies depend on those flows. If they continue to be interrupted, the consequences will not be localised. They will be systemic.

Secondly, global supply chains are becoming increasingly fragile. The UK economy, like many others, is dependent on components and goods produced elsewhere, particularly in China. These supplies are not optional extras to our economic well-being. They are essential inputs. Interrupt their flow and production, and many retail activities might come to a halt. It really is that simple. This might be happening in the UK very soon.

Thirdly, food systems are heavily exposed to risk at present. Fertiliser supply, shipping capacity, and timing all matter for food supply. Disrupt them, and yields will inevitably fall, and when yields fall, shortages follow. That is a physical fact that cannot be ignored, and when shortages happen, it is always the poorest who suffer first and most. Hundreds of millions, and maybe billions, of people might be at risk of food shortages later this year. They are already beginning in Southeast Asia.

What is most striking is not just the scale of this issue in terms of food supply and other economic risks, but also the absence of any meaningful political response to them. In place of that response, we are being offered marginal policy adjustments and debates that fail to engage with the possibility of systemic breakdown. Rachael Reeves is, for example, at the IMF in the next few days, and is apparently planning to tell those there that they should copy the UK’s response to this crisis, which is, so far, minimal, confused, meaningless for most people, and designed with the sole objective of ensuring that whatever happens she can continue to meet her own fiscal rules.

The truth is that markets will not stand apart from these realities. Very soon, they will appreciate and reflect them, even though they have not as yet. At that point, those governments that have chosen not to act will be revealed for the failure that they will have permitted. Those failures will not be neutral. They will reflect choices, including the decision to rely on market outcomes when markets have never been able to solve crises of this sort, and those decisions will have serious consequences.

We have been here before. History shows that supply crises do not automatically become survival crises, but they can when political will fails. Right now, politics, economics, and our media (which is firmly keeping its head down) are all collectively failing us. We are facing a crisis, and they are choosing not to notice.

Action in the form of price controls, tax changes, rationing and the adoption of economic management approaches based upon those required by a wartime economy are all necessary at this moment, and none of them is happening. The price for inaction at this moment might be very high indeed.

Tired of war.

Tired of anger.

Tired of death.

Tired of lives lost.

Tired of hope destroyed.

Tired of unnecessary grief.

Tired of the destruction of well-being.

Tired of forced migration.

Tired of tears.

Tired of children living in tents, denied the childhood they deserve.

I am tired of the political excuses offered for war

I am tired of racial hatred.

I am tired of human lust for power wrapped up in theocracy.

I am tired of talk of defence that excuses aggression.

I am tired of biased reporting

I am tired of being told that people who have died on one side of a dispute are lives lost and that on the other, they are just killed.

I am tired of a failure to recognise that any life lost unnecessarily is just that: it is a life lost unnecessarily.

I am tired of the belief that war will ever solve anything.

I am tired of the assumption that after war everything will go back to normal.

I am tired of the cost of conflict always being borne by anyone but those who started it.

I am tired of those who think we don’t have a duty of care to everyone, whoever they are, wherever they come from, whatever they believe, whatever their skin colour, whatever their gender, whatever their age.

I am tired of those who think that others don’t matter.

Most of all, I am tired of those who destroy hope,

I live in hope.

Hope of a better day.

Hope of a better life for everyone.

Hope that I might live to see that.

Hope that everyone might then share hope.

Is that too much to hope for?

We are familiar with those false economic claims. There “is no money” for social security. Government must “live within its means.” Public services “must be cut” because there is no alternative. These ideas are presented as facts. They are narratives and are repeated so often that they pass without question.

The difficulty is that questioning them requires effort. And effort is precisely what thinking demands, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, thinking is hard work. It requires us to set aside the easy analogy and engage with the world as it is. The household budget comparison is a case in point. It is attractive because it is simple. But it is also wrong. A government that issues its own currency does not operate like a household, and the failure to recognise that has had profound consequences. It has provided the intellectual cover for austerity and the weakening of the public realm.

To think properly is to hold competing ideas in mind, to test them, and to accept that certainty is rarely available. That is demanding. So, understandably, many prefer what feels familiar instead.

Secondly, thinking is unsettling. It may lead us to conclude that those we trust, such as our politicians, commentators, even the institutions we rely upon, have been mistaken or misleading. It may also reveal that our own assumptions are flawed, or that our interests are not as aligned with fairness as we might like to believe.

That is not a comfortable place to be. The natural response is to defend what we already think, rather than revise it. That helps explain why weak economic ideas persist, and why more convenient explanations, such as blaming migrants, or assuming inefficiency in public services, are so readily embraced.

Thirdly, thinking challenges power. Much of our public discourse is not designed to encourage enquiry. Media rewards immediacy and simplicity. Politics rewards certainty. Economic orthodoxy has often prospered not because it explains reality, but because it offers reassurance to those who benefit from it.

Slogans are central to this. “There is no money left.” “We must live within our means.” “Growth will solve everything.” These are not arguments. They are mechanisms to end discussion. They remove doubt, and with it, the possibility of understanding. And when understanding is removed, so too is accountability.

The consequence is predictable. We stop asking the questions that matter, such as:

· Who benefits from the way our economy is structured?

· Who bears the cost?

· And what, ultimately, is the economy for?

Without those questions, we drift into acceptance. Public services decline. Inequality widens. Stagnation is treated as inevitable. But none of these outcomes are inevitable.

So what follows?

If thinking is difficult, then it becomes a responsibility to make it possible. That means improving our collective understanding of how the economy works. It means challenging the myths that dominate discussion, particularly around government spending and taxation. It also means being honest about purpose.

An economy is not an abstract system. It is a means of organising resources to sustain life. That includes maintaining the human, social, environmental, and physical capital on which we all depend. Social security, in that context, is not a cost to be minimised, but a guarantee of dignity.

Recognising that requires moral courage. It asks us to consider not just efficiency, but fairness. Not just growth, but distribution. Not just outcomes, but responsibilities.

Thinking in these cases might be slow. It requires time, reflection, and revision, all of which are in short supply in a culture that rewards immediacy. But the alternative is not neutrality. It is the acceptance of narratives that serve some at the expense of others.

We can see the consequences of that in the current political climate. Anger fills the space where understanding should be. Blame replaces analysis. Division replaces care.

So, the choice is clear.

We can continue to accept what we are told, however inadequate it may be. Or we can do the more demanding, but ultimately more constructive, thing: we can think. Thinking is not an academic exercise. It is a moral act because only when we understand how our economy works can we begin to change it. And only when we are willing to ask who it serves can we decide what it ought to become.

Firstly, this tells us something about the anger that exists in Britain. People are angry because their lives are insecure. Public services have been cut. Housing is unaffordable. Wages have stagnated. Social security has been stigmatised and weakened. When these realities are ignored, anger searches for an explanation. It is easier to blame migrants than admit that policy choices have failed. It is easier still to blame academics who point out those failures.

Secondly, attacking intellectuals is about removing accountability. Democracies rely on people who gather evidence, analyse it and explain it. Economists, lawyers, historians, sociologists, philosophers, ethicists, teachers and journalists all play this role. When they are labelled enemies, the aim is to free policy from scrutiny. Unrealistic ideas such as mass deportations can then be presented as simple solutions. The costs, legal barriers and human consequences are hidden. The politics of resentment replaces the politics of evidence.

Thirdly, this strategy is historically familiar. Authoritarian movements often begin by undermining those who question them. They attack universities, independent media and civil society. The goal is not truth but obedience. When truth becomes optional, power becomes arbitrary. That is why language about intellectuals, and the need to “root them out” matters so much. It signals an intention to rule without challenge.

Why does this matter for political economy? Because the anger being exploited is real. Britain has experienced years of policy that prioritised financial markets over people. Investment has been weak. Regional inequality has grown. Public infrastructure has been neglected. When people feel abandoned, they search for explanations. If honest explanations are not offered, dishonest ones fill the gap.

A politics of care would take a different route.

It would begin by recognising that insecurity is the real problem. People need reliable healthcare, education, housing and transport. They need stable incomes and dignified work. They need social security that protects them when life goes wrong. These are not luxuries; they are the foundations of social stability.

It would then restore honesty to economic debate. Governments with their own currencies have the capacity to mobilise resources for public purposes. The constraint is not a mythical shortage of money but the availability of people, skills and materials, and the need to manage inflation and distribution. When we understand this, we can focus on what really matters: how to use our collective resources to improve well-being.

Finally, a politics of care would rebuild trust. That means valuing expertise, not mocking or, worse still, suppressing it. It means encouraging debate, not silencing it. It means recognising that migrants, academics and workers all contribute to society. Division weakens us; cooperation strengthens us.

The proposals now circulating from Rupert Lowe are not serious solutions to Britain’s problems. They are distractions from them. They take justified anger and turn it towards the vulnerable and the critical rather than towards failed policy. That path leads away from democracy and towards something darker.

We need another path. We need a politics that addresses the causes of anger instead of exploiting them. We need investment in public services, fair taxation, and a commitment to truth. Above all, we need to remember that care is not weakness. It is the basis of a society that works.

Dario Amodei, CEO of tech company Anthropic, has described this moment in AI’s development as “the adolescence of technology”. His point is that AI’s power is arriving before judgment. Capability is growing faster than the institutions, norms and rules needed to manage it. His framing is, I think, helpful, because adolescence is not just about growth; it is also about risk. Three issues stand out.

Firstly, capability is accelerating. Amodei believes general-purpose AI may arrive within a few years. Whether that timetable proves right or not, the direction of change is clear. AI systems are now being used to improve other AI systems. Feedback loops are forming. But democratic politics does not move at that pace, and neither does regulation. Public understanding certainly does not adapt that quickly. We have already seen what happens when financial markets and technological change outrun democratic oversight. The result is instability, inequality and loss of trust. There is no reason to think AI will be different.

Secondly, the risks are not marginal. They are systemic. They include concentration of corporate power, use by authoritarian states, major disruption to employment, loss of meaningful work, erosion of democratic capacity, and systems behaving in ways no one fully understands. All these risks share a common feature: asymmetry. Some actors gain leverage. Most people lose agency. In political economy, that pattern is familiar. It is what financialisaton did to the economy. It is what global supply chains have done to employment security. AI does not correct those tendencies. It amplifies them.

Thirdly, governance is lagging far behind capability. Amodei recognises this, and he is right to do so. Voluntary safeguards are not enough. Market incentives will not produce restraint. If AI is becoming part of society's operating system, it must be governed as infrastructure, not as a consumer product.

But even that is not the full story. There is a moral dimension that tends to disappear in technical discussions. AI does not care. It cannot understand social context, human vulnerability or ethical responsibility. It can optimise towards targets, but it cannot judge whether those targets are socially just or morally defensible.

That matters, because much of what states and public institutions do is rooted in care: healthcare, education, welfare, social protection and justice. If decision-making in those areas becomes driven by optimisation metrics rather than human judgement, we will not get neutral efficiency. We will get systemic exclusion, delivered faster and at larger scale. AI could become the perfect tool for neoliberalism: automating decision-making while stripping out responsibility.

So, what follows from this?

Firstly, AI governance cannot be left to markets. Markets reward speed, scale and monopoly. They do not reward resilience, equity or long-term social stability. If AI is left primarily in private hands, it will deepen inequality and weaken democratic control, regardless of the intentions of its designers.

Secondly, the state must reclaim a developmental role. That means public investment in computing capacity, data stewardship and research directed at social objectives. It also means ensuring that productivity gains are translated into income security, public services and social infrastructure, not simply higher profits.

Thirdly, we must be honest about what we mean by progress. Productivity alone is not a measure of social success. If AI increases output while undermining employment, security and democratic participation, then society will be worse off, not better.

AI is not destiny. It is a set of choices, embedded in institutions and economic structures. In the context of Amodei’s argument, adolescence can lead to maturity, but only if guidance and boundaries are put in place. Without them, power does what it always does: it concentrates, it extracts, and it escapes control.

The danger with AI is not that it will think like humans. It is that we will reorganise society around systems that do not care about humans at all. That would not be a technological failure. It would be a political one.

My argument is that nationalism can unite a people or destroy them. The difference lies in whether it builds belonging through care or fear through exclusion.

It is vital to recall that nationalism has always had a constructive side. The founding of the NHS, free public education and the social security safety net were all created as a consequence of collective self-definition: we, as citizens of the UK, took responsibility for each other. This was nationalism as solidarity: a moral economy that treated the nation as a shared home, grounded in what I call a politics of care.

However, nationalism can - and does - turn toxic when it defines itself by what it hates rather than what it values. Economic fear, inequality and political neglect by those in power create fertile ground for that shift. When people feel abandoned, they reach for identity. When identity is all that remains, others become the enemy.

In that case, the test of any nationalism is moral. Does it recognise every member of the community as worthy of care? Or does it divide citizens into deserving and undeserving, insiders and outsiders? Economics and politics are never neutral here: policies that promote insecurity and inequality also promote the anger that makes destructive nationalism thrive.

A politics of care can reclaim the language of belonging. There is nothing wrong with loving the place you live, the people you share it with, or the culture that shaped you. But love of home should never require hatred of others. The purpose of economic policy should be to make everyone secure enough that fear no longer drives identity.

Nationalism, then, is not inherently good or bad. It is a vessel that can be filled with care or with cruelty. The challenge for any democratic society is to fill it with inclusion, dignity and shared responsibility and not with grievance and division.

And why does this matter? In all four countries of the so-called United Kingdom, nationalism is increasingly significant in politics at present. In three of those countries, the nationalism on display is very largely, if not entirely, inclusive, which is the basis of its appeal to many. In England, it is the opposite: it is exclusive and toxic, and it is inducing fear. The two types of nationalism are not to be confused. Understanding that most definitely matters.

This piece is based on a post from Funding the Future https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/10/26/nationalism-good-or-bad/

When I use that term, I mean something very simple. Firstly, every economic question takes place within a framework of power. There is no such thing as a free market operating in isolation from government, law, or politics. Governments make the laws that define property and contracts. They regulate what can and cannot be traded. They decide what is taxed, what is subsidised, and what is ignored. They also issue the money that markets depend upon. Without that act of creation, there would be no economy at all.

Secondly, this means that the state is not a spectator. It is the central player in the economy. A currency-issuing government spends first and taxes later. It is spending that puts money into the system. Taxation then follows to control inflation, to reclaim excess purchasing power, and to give value to the currency. Pretending otherwise – that government must somehow “find the money” before it spends – turns political choices into false technical problems.

Thirdly, recognising this forces us to face questions that mainstream economics works hard to hide. Who owns the means of production? Who benefits from public policy? Who bears the burden of taxation? These are questions about justice and distribution, not equations. Political economy does not ignore them, because it knows they shape everything.

And finally, political economy matters because it restores honesty to public debate. It acknowledges that economics is about values. When politicians claim they have “no choice” because “the markets demand” or “the budget must be balanced,” they are trying to conceal the moral dimension of their decisions. There are always choices. What matters is whose interests those choices serve.

In that sense, political economy is the study of power – economic, fiscal, and social – and how it is used. It is about understanding that money is a social construct, that governments create it when they spend, and that they should use that power for the public good rather than private gain.

We need more political economy, not less. Without it, we end up pretending that decisions about people’s lives are simply technical matters best left to “experts.” But they are not. They are moral questions. And that is why the language of political economy must return to the heart of our public life.

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This piece is based on a post from Funding the Future https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/10/20/what-i-mean-by-political-economy/

As should be obvious, this is the first post that I have made here. In other words, Substack has been promoting content when there has been none of it to read. That has felt a little surreal.

I do, of course, have content elsewhere. I’ve been writing a near-daily blog for 19 years now. At present, there are around five posts a day on average on that blog. I am not usually short of things to say. There are, on average, more than 25,000 reads on that channel a day at present. The number is increasing steadily.

In addition, for the last year, I have been posting YouTube videos on a daily basis. Right now, there are more than 200,000 subscribers to my channel, and over the last six months there have been more than 18 million views of videos that I have produced, which is a number that is very hard to comprehend when all I do is sit down and talk into a camera for ten minutes or so each day. Something, however, must have struck a chord with quite a lot of people.

That, however, then leaves me with a dilemma. Given that I am reluctant to repost material here that has already directly appeared in the same form elsewhere, and given that I do not want to let down my readers and viewers on my other outlets, what might I do on Substack that is, somehow, different, original, and a contribution to knowledge, whilst being a benefit to someone who wants to subscribe here?

Asking that, I must also consider the fact that I am, inevitably, finite. At 67, I am fortunate to be in very good health. I also no longer have commitments to any employment, which does help with time availability. However, there are still only 24 hours in a day, and I am not keen to spend every single one of those at a keyboard, even if I probably have sufficient ideas to let me do so.

The solution that I have come up with is something that I have been pondering doing for a while. Whilst I might have posted 23,000 times on my blog, it is not the case that every single one of these entries is entirely different from all others that have gone before, or after. Over the years, some themes have inevitably recurred.

That is firstly because I think them to be important.

Secondly, as someone who has been involved in education for a long time, I think that reiteration does not harm.

Thirdly, I have never been above revisiting a subject when I believe that I have new things to say on it, or have reconsidered it from a new angle, or want to look at it in greater depth.

I am aware that it has been suggested that there are only about four plots for novels, and every prospective author just needs to work out which of them they wish to rework. I am sure it is a little more complicated than that, but that (under my own name) is a genre that I have never tackled.

What I can say, with confidence, is that there are more subjects in political economy than there would appear to be plots available to the novelist, but that they still repeat is unsurprising. As a result, what I’m proposing to do here is publish summaries of my thinking on some of the major themes that I have addressed over the years.

Over time, I hope that these ideas, each of which should stand as an article in its own right, might contribute to the development of a series of connected thoughts on political economy, but that will inevitably take time.

Meanwhile, thank you for your interest. Let’s see what happens.