Rent Unmasked: How to Save the Global Economy and Build a Sustainable Future

2016 | Business & Finance

Rent Unmasked explores the new economic paradigm that policy-makers need to solve global problems in the post-2008 era. With conventional economic theories discredited, the new model must equip governments with tools to re-stabilise societies in a dangerous world. Rent Unmasked explains why one paradigm only qualifies to serve this purpose: the dynamic model that reinstates time and space back into economic theorising. The Flat Earth economics of the neo-classical school is analysed by the 13 contributors to this volume, which honours the seminal role played by Mason Gaffney, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of California (Riverside), in exposing the way in which classical economics was debased to serve rent-seeking interests. In a world divided by dangerously misleading theories of governance, Rent Unmasked recovers the concepts that integrate macro-economics with the common good; interrogates the interface between private incomes and public revenue; and identifies strategies for lifting the stalled global economy out of the low-growth straightjacket that is blocking the rise of real wages and capital formation to levels that deliver sustainable growth.The authors are drawn from the legal and property professions and from universities around the world.

They evaluate the key contributions from Mason Gaffney, the Ultimate Heterodox economist, and they apply the new insights to current challenges. The issues confronted in Rent Unmasked range from corporate tax evasion to the rise of irrational forces within democratic societies; the housing crisis to the fractured politics of the Eurozone; the misdemeanours in the banking sector to the way in which financial policies must be framed if economics is to be harmonised with ethics. The social science branded as "dismal" because of the ideological prejudices of past exponents is shown to be empowering for problem-solvers in the 21st century.

Fred Harrison (Author)