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In this landmark book, the author of The New Enclosure, winner of the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize, provides a forensic examination of twenty-first-century capitalism. Brett Christophers styles this as “rentier capitalism,” in which ownership of key types of scarce assets—land, intellectual property, natural resources, and digital platforms—is all-important and dominated by a few unfathomably wealthy companies and individuals. If a small elite owns today’s economy, everybody else foots the bill. Nowhere is this divergence starker than in the United Kingdom, where the prototypical ills of rentier capitalism—vast inequalities combined with entrenched economic stagnation—are on full display and led the country inexorably to Brexit.
With profound lessons for other countries subject to rentier dominance, Christophers’ examination of the UK case is indispensable to those wanting not just to understand this insidious economic phenomenon but to overcome it.
Description
In this landmark book, the author of The New Enclosure, winner of the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize, provides a forensic examination of twenty-first-century capitalism. Brett Christophers styles this as “rentier capitalism,” in which ownership of key types of scarce assets—land, intellectual property, natural resources, and digital platforms—is all-important and dominated by a few unfathomably wealthy companies and individuals. If a small elite owns today’s economy, everybody else foots the bill. Nowhere is this divergence starker than in the United Kingdom, where the prototypical ills of rentier capitalism—vast inequalities combined with entrenched economic stagnation—are on full display and led the country inexorably to Brexit.
With profound lessons for other countries subject to rentier dominance, Christophers’ examination of the UK case is indispensable to those wanting not just to understand this insidious economic phenomenon but to overcome it.
