About Paul Mason

Paul Mason is a leading British writer and broadcaster and author of Postcapitalism — A Guide to Our Future.

Reject Kaczyński’s Attack On The Rule Of Law In Poland

by Paul Mason on 16 February 2018

I want to start with some advice from George Orwell. In 1940, during the Dunkirk crisis, as the British elite made one blunder after another, Orwell wrote in his diary that, for about 10 years, left wing intellectuals had been able to predict events better than the Cabinet. Orwell said: it was not about any power to […]

Remain And Renegotiate! How To Stop The Brexit Bandwagon

by Paul Mason on 15 June 2016

Three Labour figures — Tom Watson, Ed Balls and Tristram Hunt — have, in the past 24 hours, called for a revision to the EU free movement rules. This needs to be translated into an immediate offer aimed at swinging the referendum for Remain. Labour has to explicitly embrace renegotiation of the EU Treaty. Currently the Leave vote is […]

IMF Plots New “Credit Event” For Greece

by Paul Mason on 3 April 2016

The International Monetary Fund has been caught, red handed, plotting to stage a “credit event” that forces Greece to the edge of bankruptcy, using the pretext of the Brexit referendum. No, this is not the plot of the next Bond movie. It is the transcript of a teleconference between the IMF’s chief negotiator, Poul Thomsen and Delia […]

PostCapitalism: The Economy Of The Future?

by Paul Mason on 26 October 2015

Over the past two centuries or so, capitalism has undergone continual change – economic cycles that lurch from boom to bust – and has always emerged transformed and strengthened. Surveying this turbulent history, journalist and Channel 4 economics news editor Paul Mason wonders whether this time capitalism itself has reached its limits and is changing […]

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The Positive Economic Impact Of Germany's Statutory Minimum Wage

With the empirical analyses of the macroeconomic effects of the introduction of the statutory minimum wage in Germany, the IMK tries to determine the short-term and expected medium- to long-term growth, price and employment effects with the help of a macro-econometric model. As a result, economic growth tended to be stimulated by the introduction of the minimum wage. This was mainly due to the higher wages of the minimum wage beneficiaries and a spillover effect on adjoining wage groups. In particular, this benefited people whose low savings rate led to a particularly strong increase in real private consumption. The price increases triggered were negligible on a macroeconomic scale.

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New Social Europe Book

Is an unconditional basic income without means-test or work-test compatible with social justice and individual self-worth? Does it open up the space for an end to demeaning labour and a resurgence of voluntary work and cultural life? Is it affordable? This collection of short but compelling essays, all previously published in Social Europe, allows both proponents and opponents to make their case and is designed to extend this vital discussion to a wider audience.

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Multi-employer bargaining under pressure

This edited volume maps different trajectories in national collective bargaining systems in Europe since the Great Recession. Since the start of the crisis in 2008, wage setting and collective bargaining systems in many EU countries have been under tremendous pressure to follow the logic of companies and market imperatives. Fostering decentralization of collective bargaining has been one of the key objectives of the New European Economic Governance.

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Employment and working conditions of selected types of platform work

Platform work, understood as the matching of the supply of and demand for paid work through an online platform, is still relatively small in scale but is developing rapidly in the EU and becoming increasingly important for the digital economy. This new report identifies 10 common types of platform work, which cover most platform workers in the EU. It highlights the diverse nature of platform work as one of the main reasons that it has been so challenging to define and regulate, and identifies some actions that can be taken to not just harness the potential of platform work for economic development, but also to ensure that it develops in a way that respects workers' rights and is fair and sustainable for business.

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Social Europe Edition Book

Zygmunt Bauman was a towering intellectual who saw and analysed – right up to his death in early 2017 – the great socio-political changes, often convulsive, in modern western society long before his peers. Here we highlight his prescient insights into what he dubbed ‘liquid modernity’ with 24 chapters on topics ranging from online loneliness via precarity/poverty/inequality to migration, fear of the ‘Other’ and the decline of the nation state. Chronicle of Crisis, 2011-16, written by one of the great chroniclers of our times, will be read and re-read for decades and more to come.