Otro capitalismo tiene que ser posible

In November 2008, as the global financial meltdown deepened, the then octogenarian Queen Elizabeth visited the London School of Economics and surprised the prestigious academics gathered there with an innocent but very pointed question: given the magnitude of the crisis, why that no one had warned her? The question went straight to the heart of two great failures: that of Western capitalism, which has not yet recovered, and that of the economists, who did not understand what was happening. This book deals with this double failure and proposes completely innovative solutions. It is clear that the current system does not work: households are in debt because they cannot cover their basic expenses, unemployment affects more and more young people, the gap between those who have the most and those who have the least, between the bubbles of the financial sector, is widening. and the stagnation of the real economy. We need to think about another capitalism from the foundations, so that the objective is not only to redistribute but to create wealth and value, in a virtuous and sustainable cycle. How to do it? To find solutions, the authors -the best contemporary economists- propose putting aside the orthodox theories that underpin most current policies, recipes that do not allow us to understand how modern capitalism works and, therefore, will never achieve work better. These recipes, however, are widespread and dominate public debate, because they are based on idealized and simplistic visions of markets. The chapters of this book, full of ideas and proposals, begin by dismantling one by one the commonplaces of orthodoxy that are heard all the time: that public investment drives out private investment, that taxes discourage the creation of wealth and work, that governments should not try to direct or regulate markets, that public services must be outsourced, that fiscal austerity is the master key to reducing the deficit. With boldness, empirical evidence and originality to build an approach that contemplates the real actors of the economy and society, this book lays bare that the outdated orthodoxy that still decides the course of many countries had and has nothing to contribute. The failure of capitalism is not inevitable, and this is a masterful contribution to identifying what policies could shape a different future.