Fred Harrison – Corruption of Economics 2nd Edition

Today we welcome Fred Harrison back to the podcast. In this interview, we talk about The Corruption of Economics, a book Fred co-wrote with the late, great Professor Mason Gaffney (with an additional contribution from Dr. Kris Feder). Corruption of Economics was released in 1994 but as part of our focus is on the classics in the Shepheard-Walwyn library, we are re-releasing it as an eBook with a new introduction from Fred. 

Whilst it may seem that a book published in 1994 may not have much to say about today’s economic and political challenges, we hope you’ll hear in this podcast how relevant it is to the challenges we face today. 

The papers are currently crammed with the Russian oligarchs and how unfair they are. All this is true but it’s no more true than our oligarchs. In this podcast, Fred explains why we have an economic system and philosophy that guarantees the creation of oligarchs, and that the same things that were done over 100 years ago to eliminate Henry George and the fairer economic ideas from the textbooks were done in Russia in the 1990s to ensure that Russia did not create a fairer economic system but that they had a “shock therapy” approach that created gross income inequality. Fast forward 30 years and we are chasing Russian billionaires around the Mediterranean trying to take their super-yachts from them.