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How has this mess been created? The mismanagement of the crisis by the coalition government means it has to bear significant blame, but the main cause lies in the nature of the economic model that the UK has pursued for three decades.

However, the underlying economic model remained intact; the New Labour thinking was that we should let the City maximise its profits by minimising regulation, and then help the poor with the taxes on those profits. There was no realisation that the financial system itself may be a problem.

Of course, all of these policies are supposed to have been backed up by scientifically proved economic theories – saying that markets are best left alone, that making the rich richer makes everyone richer, that welfare spending and protection of worker rights only make people lazy and dependent, and so on. Most people have accepted these theories without much questioning because they are based on "expert" advice.However, all these economic theories are at least debatable and often highly questionable. Contrary to what professional economists will typically tell you, economics is not a science. All economic theories have underlying political and ethical assumptions, which make it impossible to prove them right or wrong in the way we can with theories in physics or chemistry. This is why there are a dozen or so schools in economics, with their respective strengths and weaknesses, with three varieties for free-market economics alone – classical, neoclassical, and the Austrian

Here again, he seems to be talking about physical volumes of capital, augmented year after year by profit and saving.

The basic neoclassical theory holds that the rate of return on capital depends on its (marginal) productivity. In that case, we must be thinking of physical capital—and this (again) appears to be Piketty’s view. But the effort to build a theory of physical capital with a technological rate-of-return collapsed long ago, under a withering challenge from critics based in Cambridge, England in the 1950s and 1960s, notably Joan Robinson, Piero Sraffa, and Luigi Pasinetti.

There is no reason to think that financial capitalization bears any close relationship to economic development. Most of the Asian countries, including Korea, Japan, and China, did very well for decades without financialization; so did continental Europe in the postwar years, and for that matter so did the United States before 1970.

As one read the first sections of the book, who wouldn’t have? I am an admirer and remain one. Here was an economist widely respected in the mainstream telling us point blank that the rich earned far more than they deserved, that economic theory regarding labor markets failed, that the most respected economists had little sense of the real world, and that inheritance was a source of persistent inequality.

The empirical analysis in the new book went further. It showed that the equality that existed since World War II and began to reverse in the early 1980s had been an aberration. Capital usually grew faster than incomes throughout history. And it would likely continue to do so! Piketty found that this relation in which r, the rate of return on capital, exceeded g, the growth rate of the economy, seemed permanently etched into not merely history but the future.

Early critics included James Galbaith and Dean Baker. Galbraith was perhaps the first to question his empirical findings, arguing that Piketty mixed up the price of capital with actual physical capital. Even if Piketty’s right about capital, he and Dean Baker argued early on that there were many other way was to keep capital from rising so fast than to levy taxes. These included financial regulations, anti-trust enforcement, and weakened copyright laws.

The message underlying this use of the term customer for so many different kinds of human activity is that in all almost all our daily activities we are operating as consumers in a market – and this truth has been brought in not by chance but through managerial instruction and the thoroughgoing renaming of institutional practices. The mandatory exercise of "free choice" – of a GP, of a hospital, of schools for one's children – then becomes also a lesson in social identity, affirming on each occasion our consumer identity.

Another word that reinforces neoliberal common sense is "growth", currently deemed to be the entire aim of our economy.

Instead of an unrelenting quest for growth, might we not ask the question, in the end: "What is an economy for?", "What do we want it to provide?"

The elementary unit of social life is the individual human action. To explain social institutions and social change is to show how they arise as the result of the actions and interaction of individuals.

It appears to be a version of the physicist’s preference for reduction to ensembles of simple homogeneous "atoms" transported to the social and behavioral sciences. This demand for reduction might take the form of conceptual reduction or compositional reduction. The latter takes the form of demonstrations of how higher level properties are made up of lower level systems. The conceptual reduction program didn't work out well, any more than Carnap's phenomenological physics did.

In addition to this bias derived from positivist philosophy of science, there was also a political subtext in some formulations of the theory in the 1950s. Karl Popper and JWN Watkins advocated for MI because they thought this methodology was less conducive to the "collectivist" theories of Marx and the socialists. If collectivities don't exist, then collectivism is foolish.

The problem with this reactionary stance is that attempts to base economics on the “real” economy focusing on technology and universals are so materialistic as to be non-historical and lacking in the political element of property and finance.

A “real” economic analysis focusing on their common denominators would miss the distinct ways in which each accumulated wealth in the hands of (or under the management of) a ruling elite different modes of property and finance, and hence with what the classical economists came to classify as “unearned income.”

For classical and Progressive Era economists, the word “reform” meant taxing economic rent or minimizing it. Today it means giving away public enterprise to kleptocrats and political insiders, or simply for indebted governments to conduct a pre-bankruptcy sale of the public domain to buyers (who in turn buy on credit, subtracting their interest payments from their taxable income).

What’s that new paradigm? We can’t go back to old-style communism–for instance, Stalinism. Absolutely not. I would be the first one to object…Let me put it very succinctly to you: I would be in the gulag under that regime. People like me would be in the gulag and people like Hillary Clinton would be in the Politburo.

This also poses questions about the latest manifestation of ‘neoliberalism’. The fact that it is social media that is facilitating this new form of state power, that it is social networks that are the object of its gaze, may indicate that neoliberal government no longer places quite so much emphasis on the market, as a mechanism for organizing knowledge, regulating freedom and achieving transparency.

States play an important role in making ‘society’ visible and measurable, through collecting and publishing large quantities of statistics. But the claim of social theorists and sociologists in the tradition of Emile Durkheim is that ‘society’ has some reality, over and above the particular statistics through which we come to know it.

The social hovers as a paradox, between a space of state coercion governed by law, and a space of market spontaneity governed by individual incentives and price. When acting socially we are both rule-bound and free at the same time. And it was precisely this mysterious and contradictory nature that led pioneering neoliberal thinkers, such as Friedrich Von Hayek, to pour scorn on the very idea. The term ‘social’, he argued, is a “weasel-word par excellence. Nobody knows what it actually means”.