The Case for the Green New Deal

Please join Ann Pettifor, Nick Taylor and Aeron Davis for an event to launch Ann’s new book The Case for the Green New Deal (Verso, 2019). To protect the future of life on earth, we need to do more than just reimagine the economy—we have to change everything. One of the seminal thinkers of the program that helped ignite the US Green New Deal campaign, Ann Pettifor explains how we can afford what we can do, and what we need to do, before it is too late. The Case for the Green New Deal argues that economic change is wholly possible, based on the understanding that finance, the economy and the ecosystem are all tightly bound together. The GND demands total decarbonisation and a commitment to an economy based on fairness and social justice. It proposes a radical new understanding of the international monetary system. Pettifor offers a roadmap for financial reform both nationally and globally, taking the economy back from the 1%. This is a radical, urgent manifesto that we must act on now.

Ann Pettifor is a political economist, author and campaigner. She is Director of Policy Research at PRIME, a fellow of both the New Economics Foundation and CITYPERC, Chair of Goldsmiths Political Economy Research Centre (PERC), and on the Labour Party’s Economic Advisory Committee. Ann was a co-founder of the Jubilee 2000 campaign for the cancellation of poor country debt. In the early 2000s she was one of the few economists to predict the forthcoming 2007-08 global financial crisis. In 2008, she was a founding member of the UK Green New Deal group of economists and activists. She is the author of a number of important books, including The Real World Economic Outlook (2003, Palgrave), The Coming First World Debt Crisis (2006, Palgrave), Just Money (2014, Commonwealth) and The Production of Money (2017, Verso).

Nick Taylor is a CUSP research fellow and Lecturer in Political Economy, working with Will Davies in the Political Economy Research Centre (PERC) at Goldsmiths. Before that he was the coordinator of the IPE Research Cluster at Warwick. He is a political economist with research interests in the history of the welfare state, history of economic thought and international political economy. His recent work focuses on how climate change is being managed as a risk in the financial sector, especially by intermediaries working for insurers and pension funds.

Aeron Davis is Professor of Political Communication and Co-Director of Goldsmiths PERC. Throughout his career he has researched the cultures, decision-making and practices of economic elites, including City fund managers, FTSE 100 CEOs and Treasury chancellors, ministers and civil servants. He has published widely on these topics and is the author or editor of 8 books, including most recently (with Karel Williams) Elites and Power After Financialization (2017, Sage), Reckless Opportunists (2018, MUP), and Political Communication: A New Introduction for Crisis Times (2019, Polity). He is currently writing an inside history of the Treasury since 1976.