![]() True to form, businesses blamed labor shortages and idle workers for skyrocketing prices, and revered economic experts like Larry Summers claimed we need to fire more workers in order to fight inflation. In explaining the trend, ExxonMobil reached instead for euphemisms, claiming that energy consumers’ woes are “largely as a result of a supply-demand imbalance.” What’s responsible for untenable energy prices? Ignore the fact that the oil and gas industry is more profitable than at any point in its history and has been doling out cash to its investors instead of producing more to increase supply. Meanwhile, gas prices in the United States last summer went off the charts, and energy prices left the poor in the UK out in the cold through the winter. They typically say nothing about increased concentration of the rental market by corporations, landlords withholding units to manufacture lower supply and raise prices, or property owners colluding to keep rents high. A glance at mainstream news outlets gives the impression that skyrocketing rents are a mechanical and inevitable result of inflation. ![]() Since the beginning of the pandemic, capitalists and their allies have blatantly instrumentalized economic concepts like inflation, recession, labor shortages, and supply chain shortages to justify ripping off consumers, raising rents and evicting tenants, and depressing wages and firing workers - and to dismiss anyone who objects to these practices as economically illiterate.Īssigning blame for social problems to abstract economic phenomena lets the real culprits off the hook. Recent years of economic and social upheaval have brought to brighter light how capitalists use the esoteric language of economics to sell the public on class warfare. Once you create this body of knowledge, which is not accessible to other people, you can basically bully other people into accepting your argument because other people cannot understand you. So if you don’t speak economics, you cannot participate in any debate.īut of course they are not going to let you speak it - in the exact same way that the Vatican banned the translation of the Bible into local languages in the medieval times. ![]() In the talk, Ha-Joon Chang, a South Korean economics professor at the University of Cambridge, says:Įconomics has become a bit like Catholic theology in medieval Europe. ![]() A few weeks ago, an obscure video of a years-old lecture delivered in a stuffy Oxford University library resurfaced and made the rounds on TikTok. ![]()
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