How to get the fair go most of us want

It is claimed the neoliberal, free-market regime has resulted in unprecedented prosperity, but it has not. Growth has been consistently lower and unemployment much higher than in the postwar decades. Wealth has become much more concentrated, with an attendant rise in systemic corruption, in which governments routinely favour the interests of wealthy donors against the clear will of the public.

We are told we can’t return to the bad old days of government ‘intervention’ and protectionism, but they worked a lot better through the 1950s and 60s than neoliberalism has since.

The reason voters around the world are rebelling is that the great neoliberal experiment in social engineering has been a resounding failure.

Even if the disruptions to people’s security and wellbeing are acknowledged the blame is deflected onto the supposedly irresistible forces of globalisation and automation. Well the globalisation was engineered and can be restrained. Automation is nothing new, what is important is how it is managed – do many people lose their jobs or do we all have less work to do?

It doesn’t have to be this way. If we reverse the many rorts by which wealth is unfairly captured by the few we will be able to see everyone gets a good living.

We can innovate our way to a healthier lifestyle. People are figuring out how to profitably recycle many more materials, so we can reduce the quantities we extract from the world and dump back into it. We know how to grow clean, local food. Despite the best efforts of the coal lobby, coal is losing out to clean energy.

The means to re-create the fair go are available. There is no magic in this, we just have to cut through a lot of misguided ideology. We can have a more stable, cooperative society with stronger families and healthier communities. We can even nurture a healthy land and mitigate the big global challenges we face.