This pandemic has exposed the uselessness of orthodox economics | Jonathan Aldred

Post Covid-19, our priority should be to build resilient systems explicitly designed to withstand worst-case scenarios

Even before the pandemic came along, the world economy faced a set of deepening crises: a climate emergency, extreme inequality and huge disruption to the world of work, with robots and AI systems replacing humans.

Conventional economic theories have had little to offer. On the contrary, they have acted like a cage around our thinking, vetoing a range of progressive policy ideas as unaffordable, counter-productive, incompatible with free markets, and so on. Worse than that, economics has led us, in a subtle, insidious way, to internalise a set of values and ways of seeing the world that prevents us even imagining various forms of radical change.