Rich Burkmar

Varoufakis, Y. (2017). Talking to my daughter: a brief history of capitalism. Random House. Yanis Varoufakis is a progressive politician and economist who negotiated on behalf of the Greek government during the Greek debt crisis of 2009-2018. He has a gift for communication and here has written an economics book that is unusually accessible. As far…

Lucas, C. (2015). Honourable friends?: Parliament and the fight for change. Portobello Books. Although this is, to a degree, a memoir of Carloline Lucas’ first parliamentary term from 2010 to 2015, it is also much more than that; it is a searing critique of democracy as exercised through our early 21st century parliamentary system. If you…

Bullough, O. (2018). Moneyland: why thieves and crooks now rule the world and how to take it back. Profile Books. At the heart of this book lies a simple dichotomy: In an often jaw-dropping tour of the murky world of big money – Oliver Bullough shows how this relationship between law and money is systematically exploited…

Ambler, L., Earle, J., Scott, N. (2022). Reclaiming Economics for Future Generations. United Kingdom: Manchester University Press. This is a book written predominately by young economists who refuse to submit meekly to the received wisdom of mainstream (neoclassical) economics which dominates the academic and cultural framing of economics in the world today. They argue that neoclassical economics is largely responsible for the environmental, social…

Jackson, T. (2021). Post Growth: Life After Capitalism. United Kingdom: Wiley. Whilst the degrowth/post-growth literature, by definition, confronts the hegemony of growthism, it sometimes fights shy of directly challenging capitalism. But as the subtitle of Tim Jackson’s latest book makes clear, Post Growth does not suffer from any such coyness. In the second chapter- Who Killed Capitalism? – Jackson asserts…

Jackson, T. (2016). Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis. This is the second edition of a book first published in 2009 which was itself a reworked version of a report published earlier that year for the UK Sustainable Development Commission (still available here). In the prologue to the second edition, Jackson describes…