Economists Against Economics

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, June 11, 2026

 

It was an exhibition in moral blackmail masquerading as an argument. It made no attempt at persuasion. Rather, it was a fundraising pitch aimed at the already converted.

 

That explains why the article published Wednesday in The Guardian by Thomas Piketty, Joseph Stiglitz, and their four other left-wing economist co-authors made such a splash.

 

The very first sentence of the article, which contends in its headline that “growth” (bracketed with scare-quotes) is “a doomed strategy,” fatally undermines its premise: “We live in an age of manufactured scarcity.”

 

No, we don’t.

 

Globally, households consume roughly $40 trillion more today in goods and services than they did at the turn of the century, and not because those goods and services have become more expensive.

 

In that same period, the average price of consumer electronics collapsed. The cost of important but nevertheless discretionary goods like clothing, furnishings, and new cars is essentially flat. It’s in markets where there is substantial state intervention — food and housing, childcare and medical care, and education — that consumer costs have ballooned over the last quarter century.

 

But state-managed capitalism, to the extent that oxymoronic phenomenon exists, is the model these economists advocate.

 

Not only does one-tenth of the world languish in extreme poverty while 90 percent do not, but these economists also mourn that climate change will invariably condemn us to a brutish squabble over the world’s diminishing resources. “These are not separate crises,” they write. “They are symptoms of an economic model that has reached the end of the road.”

 

It wouldn’t have to be this way if the West could only kick its addiction to wealth generation.

 

The “simple” formula in which wealth creation would reduce poverty has failed, the authors contend. “Growth has become decoupled from shared prosperity.”

 

It is entirely unclear what the authors are talking about here.

 

Extreme destitution, as defined by the World Bank as subsisting on less than $3 per day, fell off a cliff with the implosion of what was once the world’s foremost poverty generator, Soviet-style Marxism. In 1981, over 47 percent of the world’s population qualified as extremely impoverished. By 2018, that figure had declined to about 11 percent. Even the Covid-19 pandemic couldn’t reverse these trends.

 

“Using a poverty line of $4.2 per day, the pandemic slowed down the poverty rate reduction but it did not halt it,” the International Labour Organization reported last year, “meaning in 2020 the global poverty rate was still lower than two years before.”

 

Ah, but what about that 11 percent, the majority of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa? These economists contend that only wealth-transfer schemes “from the global north and south” stand a chance of alleviating their suffering. That is unlikely. After all, so many of the governments under which the extremely poor live don’t need Thomas Piketty to tell them that anti-growth policies are the way to go.

 

“What is different today is that the majority of the world’s poorest people are stuck in economies that have been stagnating for a long time,” wrote Our World in Data’s Max Roser.

 

Countries like Madagascar cannot redistribute their way to wealth because there is little to distribute. Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo have stagnated for decades as they cling to policies that discourage foreign investment and domestic enterprise. The Central African Republic cannot attract wealth because it is beset by the corruption and caprice that flourishes in state-managed economies that are more vertically than horizontally structured.

 

The Guardian’s cavalcade of progressive economists accurately note that sticky poverty is a product of “policy choices.” After all, “If governments can manufacture poverty, they can also dismantle it.” They’re right, as the post–Cold War era has amply proven. But they’re not talking about the governments who maladminister their countries and deprive their people of the opportunity to flourish. They’re talking about the Western world, which they assume (there is no effort to prove the claim) owes its largess to the exploitation of the developing world.

 

At this point, the article devolves into a dog’s breakfast of Marxian tropes and appeals to global proletarian camaraderie.

 

At a “planetary” level, the plight of the poor can only be addressed through “employment guarantees,” “workplace democracy,” compensating “unpaid care work,” and “universal public provisioning.” What does all that mean? Nobody knows. But we do know what it will take to deliver us into the sunlit uplands of history: The “public control of strategic assets” to prop up “the social and solidarity economy.”

 

“International solidarity is therefore a legal and moral obligation rooted in the historical reality that many rich countries built their wealth by impoverishing the south,” read a sentence that could have been composed by the Comintern in 1921, “through patterns of extraction that continue today in new forms.”

 

By the final paragraphs, the reader is wading hip-deep through a fetid cesspool of socialist buzzwords. The West must commit to “debt justice,” which in practice leaves Western taxpayers on the hook for profligacy and mismanagement in the developing world. Another wealth transfer in the form of “reparative climate finance” would also be nice. And this isn’t just sound economic policy, these ostensibly economic minds contend. It’s a “moral obligation rooted in the historical reality that many rich countries built their wealth by impoverishing the south.”

 

“Around the world,” the authors conclude, “Indigenous struggles, feminist organizing, trade unions, and climate justice movements are defending and building alternative futures rooted in collective care and territorial rights.”

 

Are you ready to fly the red banners and storm the Winter Palace yet? No? Then perhaps you weren’t the intended audience for this one.

 

Indeed, it’s not clear who this article is for save the Leninist deadenders who do not need to be convinced that the panacea to what ails the planet is the forcible expropriation of wealth. One must wonder whether the authors have ever encountered a skeptical audience. Fermenting as they do in a bath of unalloyed praise from the commanding heights of culture and politics, perhaps these economists have allowed their persuasion muscles to atrophy.

 

The point here was not to convince the persuadable. Rather, it was to radicalize the already persuaded, to destroy rather than to build. If there is a saving grace, it is in the feebleness of their case in favor of their fashionably bespoke Bolshevism.