The trouble with economists, Isabella Weber believes, is they do not behave like dentists. They obsess over ideological purity and are inflexible when searching for solutions, regardless of society’s symptoms. Dentists have no such pretensions – patients have little patience for dogma when in insufferable pain.
John Maynard Keynes, Weber clarifies in the canteen of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Berlin’s Institute for Advanced Study), was the first to draw this dental comparison – and she is running with it. As she sees it, the symptoms could not be more severe. This is exacerbated by a climate crisis that “generates massive windfall profits” for big business as the “ecological foundations of our lives disintegrate”.
All the while the far right is making hay. This analysis echoes much mainstream liberal and left-leaning thinking. But Weber is concerned that her peers in the economic establishment act as if they are oblivious.
She reels off disturbing statistics that highlight the growing disparities between haves and have nots. People’s dignity, and democracy, is at stake.” In progressive circles, Weber, 38, is quickly becoming one of the most sought-after economists of her generation. An associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an associate at Harvard’s Fairbank Center, she advises policymakers in the US, Europe and Latin America.
She popularised the term “greedflation” to describe profiteering during recent cost of living crises. Her new book, Anti-Fascist Economics, is the culmination of years of research into inequality and inflation, and a lifelong commitment to fighting fascism. As she writes: “If we understand economics as the study of the material foundations of society, then economics is key to averting the catastrophes in front of us.” Weber is calling on fellow economists to “abandon ideology” and develop a “big tent economic policy” that can counter an ascendant far right.
Their gains, she argues, are not the result of a particularly compelling offer, but a direct consequence of traditional political parties refusing to acknowledge the endemic hardship facing their constituents, and the absence of a coherent economic vision from progressives, liberals and the centre right. That is housing, transport, food, water, energy, healthcare: the stuff humanity depends on. At a meeting of city mayors last month, the New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani, outlined how Weber’s work, which he had followed for years, had informed his affordability agenda in the city: free buses, universal childcare, rent caps, public groceries.
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