The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews Sebastian, Four Mothers, Restless, and The Most Precious of Cargoes
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Illusions of the Ponzi circus
WILL PODMORE takes issue with a faulty analysis of capitalist crisis that cannot see the wood for the trees
ponzi
JOHN GREEN explores the argument that psychiatry needs to move away from the idea of just seeing and treating the individual
SYLVIA HIKINS applauds a polemic against “cleanfluencers” and considers radical alternatives to current inequalities of housework
RUTH AYLETT admires the blunt honesty with which a woman’s experience is recorded, but detects the unexamined privilege that underlies it
IAN SINCLAIR draws attention to the powerful role that literature plays in foreseeing the way humanity will deal with climate crisis
High quality pulp, rollicking online murders, Abnorman Britain, and high skates drama: reviews of The Get Off, Everyone In The Group Chat Dies, Pagans and First To Fall
DENNIS BROE notes what happens to content when the streaming giants incorporate AI and deregulation into their economic models
You always hurt the one you love: central banks and the murder of capitalism
Bernard Connolly
Unicorn, £30
BERNARD CONNOLLY is the excellent economist who wrote the brilliant critique of the euro, The Rotten Heart Of Europe. In this fine book, he analyses what he calls “the global Ponzi scheme” that is present-day capitalism.
He acknowledges that “there has been extractive behaviour (what Marxists would call exploitation) on a massive scale... What has happened in Western economies in this century in terms of financial crises and massive inequalities of income and particularly, wealth, can appear to validate Marxist predictions.”
As he notes, Marx believed that crisis was inherent in the nature of capitalism and wanted the crisis to be resolved by instituting a socialist system. Friedrich von Hayek, by contrast, believed that recurrent crises in capitalism were caused not by the nature of private property but by monetary mismanagement, and wanted crises to be resolved in a way that preserved capitalism.
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