Things fall apart

Decline of communities and local economies : globalization leads to the fragmentation and hollowing out of local economies, and the urban and rural communities they support, as multinational corporations move operations around the planet in order to increase profit margins and as they make it increasingly difficult for locally owned business to... See more

In the 1950s, U.S. GDP was about equal to the value of assets. Today assets are valued at five times GDP. To keep those assets growing, more and more wealth is transferred upwards to the top 1 percent.

In current economic data, the growing wealth and income of the FIRE sector are added to GDP as economic growth, even though they in fact take the form of a steepening liability for households and businesses in the rest of the economy, leaving less income for consumption or productive investment. “This financialized overhead is not real growth,”... See more

asset-price gains in the FIRE sector – Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate – far outpaced the gains (or shrinkage) in reported GDP.

Financialization – the diversion of financial flows away from production and consumption towards asset markets in pursuit of capital gains

Governments know that building public infrastructure makes the value of the nearby land go up, and that the extra value goes directly to private landowners. In fact, they’ve even write reports on it — a TfL study looked at eight new infrastructure projects (including Crossrail and Crossrail 2) and their effect on nearby house prices. They found... See more

According to the Behavioural Insights Team in a report commissioned by the GLA’s Violence Reduction Unit, the strongest predictor of crime in London is income deprivation, with 80 per cent of recorded crimes in London occurring in the most income-deprived areas.

Moreover, for those on modest and low incomes, the imposition of austerity policies from 2010 has meant that residents continue to experience lowering standards of living due to the considerable scaling back of essential programmes, services and support that was hitherto provided by councils. [4] In the context of this inequality, cash-strapped... See more