The Expendables: how the middle class got screwed by globalisation

We are constantly being told that globalisation is good for the economy and good for us, but it’s actually the opposite, argues bestselling author Jeff Rubin in this provocative, timely book.

In the pre-coronavirus world, governments and economists bragged that GDP was growing and unemployment was down. But even then, real wages had been stagnant for decades, union membership had collapsed, and full-time employment no longer guaranteed you could pay the bills.

When we emerge from the virus, it would be nice to think that living in a country that’s getting richer means that you’re getting richer too, but that’s not the way it works anymore. Falling tariffs, low interest rates, global deregulation, and tax policies that benefit only the rich have all had the same effect: the erosion of the ‘expendable’ middle class. The result, growing global inequality, is a problem of our own making. And solving it won’t be easy if we draw on the same ideas about capital and labour, right and left, that led us to this cliff.

Articulating a vision that, remarkably, dovetails with the ideas of both Naomi Klein and Donald Trump, The Expendables is an exhilaratingly fresh perspective that is at once humane and irascible, fearless and rigorous.