Owned

How to win back power from the new financial elite.

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Owned is a clarion call against the economics of wealth and power, and for a new economy run by and for ordinary people.

What links the housing crisis, the rising inequality across all major economies, the growth of the new class of super-rich billionaires, the power of finance, and proliferations of insecure work for the many? Each is powered by the growth of rentierism. The key driver our economic system is the self-reinforcing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of 'rentiers': people who extract wealth from others via control of assets (such as land, natural resources, public utilities and the money supply itself) rather than creating it through productive activity.

Owned offers a guided tour of this new world of extractive landlord power, and offers a hopeful way out of it. That the current economic system is broken is increasingly understood by many, but the solutions offered usually focus on increasing public expenditure and ending austerity. Economist and journalist Christine Berry argues that instead we need to fundamentally re-orient our economic system, breaking the back of landlord power and replacing it with new forms of democratic ownership.