Economist Isabella Weber: make essentials affordable to counter far right

Economist Isabella Weber is urging her fellow economists to drop ideological purity and focus on making everyday essentials affordable, warning that inequality and the rise of the far right have put democracy at risk. Weber, 38, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an associate at Harvard's Fairbank Center, sets out the argument in her new book, Anti-Fascist Economics: In Defence of Affordability, Dignity and Democracy, published by Allen Lane, and discussed it with the Guardian at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

She borrows a comparison first drawn by John Maynard Keynes: economists, she says, should behave more like dentists, diagnosing symptoms rather than defending dogma. "The status quo for the majority is entirely unbearable," she says, pointing to extreme inequality and corporate concentration that she describes as "simply incompatible with democracy". She popularised the term "greedflation" to describe profiteering during recent cost of living crises.

Her central proposal is that governments should make housing, transport, food, water, energy and healthcare affordable, pulling whatever levers work. She rejects the idea that this amounts to more state intervention: "The goal isn't more state intervention, it's just a tool, as are profits and markets to ensure affordability."

From grain trading to grocery baskets

On food, she notes that four multinationals control between 70% and 90% of global grain trading, and proposes publicly owned buffer stocks that buy and sell grain to stabilise prices — an idea she traces back to Keynes. Because a global scheme would be a diplomatic nightmare, she advised South Africa to pool regional buying power, suggesting an African Union buffer stock system could secure better terms. At the retail end, she cites Mexico's canasta básica, under which retailers voluntarily cap the total price of a basket of two dozen essentials in return for tariff and tax relief.

Climate policy is central to her thinking. Weber argues that keeping essentials tethered to fossil fuels exposes ordinary people to oil and gas price swings that feed authoritarian politics, and calls for a stabilised "basic allowance" of fossil fuels alongside major public investment in green infrastructure. In 2022, publicly listed oil and gas companies made $916bn in global net income, she notes; research on the United States showed 50% of those profits went to the top 1% of households, while the bottom 50% received a 1% share.

Asked what she would advise in Britain, she says: "Renationalise water," invest in the NHS, introduce some form of rent controls, reimagine council houses as affordable, climate-friendly homes, adopt an affordable food basket, and make public transport very cheap or free in overcrowded cities.

Politicians already listening

Progressive politicians are drawing on her work. New York mayor Zohran Mamdani outlined at a mayors' meeting how her research, which he had followed for years, informed his affordability agenda: free buses, universal childcare, rent caps and public groceries. She has consulted US politicians including Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, and UK ministers including Ed Miliband, while Andy Burnham's speech to Labour conference last month echoed her messaging on broken-up and sold-off essentials.

Weber was raised in Nuremberg, once a focal point of Third Reich propaganda, and says she grew up with the threat of fascism, taking to the streets against resurgent neo-Nazis with her grandmother. After she floated price controls in the Guardian in 2021, she faced fierce criticism, with the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman calling her argument "truly stupid" before apologising. "It was a horrible time in my life," she says. "But what I was saying is now being proved right."

Source: The Guardian Business.