threats of renewed financial panic. In both the Scottish independence and Brexit referendums, the threat of losing what you have was used as a weapon to defend the status quo. Across central and eastern Europe, fear of migrants destroying “our” culture became the motivating meme.
You can’t expect real people – neither synthetic representative agents nor imaginary median voters – to put up with these disconnects forever. Eventually the gap between how we experience the world and the economic model used by elites to explain and justify it becomes too large to ignore and self-serving elites get called out. Welcome to that calling, the world of “angrynomics”, where real people are angry and have every reason to be.
Thinking and living in an angrynomics world
Anger, the most powerful human emotion, has become the arc that connects the dry, statistical world described by technocrats, policy wonks and politicians with the world as we experience it. Economics becomes angrynomics when on a macro level the system crashes and exposes the faultlines that have been covered up for so long.
This book explores how our political economy has given rise to anger: public anger, both moral outrage and tribal rage, and private anger. Together these forms of anger help us to understand the themes in this book. If economics describes the way the economy is supposed to work, angrynomics reveals what we actually experience, and why it matters to us. It helps us to make sense of global politics, tells us what to listen to, what to be beware of, and how we might seek to fix a broken economy.
The first distinction that we make is between public and private anger. Much research treats the two as equivalent, but in fact they are opposites. Public anger is often worn like a badge of honour. Icelanders protesting against a corrupt political class are emboldened by virtue. They railed against corruption and sought moral redress. Extinction Rebellion is fueled by the anger of righteousness. When people are publicly angry, because they are wronged, or they witness wrong-doing, they want it to be recognized and addressed. This is moral outrage.
Private anger resembles its opposite. It is often characterized by shame. People who are angry in their private lives, often seek counseling, rather than retribution. An angry colleague, a stressed parent, or an enraged driver – these are people in need of help, not deserving of redress.
But public anger itself is also two-sided. If moral outrage is its positive form, reinforcing and generating tribal identity is its opposite. Tribal rage is a primitive emotion, one that puts aside our moral compass in the name of action and to close ranks for protection against some other group. Think of a local derby match between fierce rivals. Chances are you’ll see an angry minority. Why are they there? Because they are the truest of fans. They wear their badge of loyalty aggressively. Indeed not only do they threaten the opposition fans or players, they can as easily turn on their own, demanding greater loyalty and commitment. Angry fans regulate their own tribe.
Moral outrage, the positive face of public anger, seeks redress. It is a call to be listened to, that enough is enough, and a wrong must be righted. But in its contrasting form, tribal anger seeks to threaten in order to dominate, suppress, and at its most violent, to destroy. Seen this way, the different types of public anger serve different functions: to enforce ethical norms and to regulate tribal identity. This is how anger and the economy become combined. Today, cynical politicians effortlessly play on both forms of anger to garner support. By using these notions of public and private anger, of moral outrage and tribal energy, we can better understand the actions of politicians and identify what to resist. The challenge for politics today is to listen carefully to, and redress, the legitimate anger of moral outrage while exposing and not inciting, the violent anger of tribes.
Whereas public forms of anger often take the form of a proud expression of moral legitimacy or tribal allegiance, private anger is associated with internal struggle. The root causes of private anger – increased personal anxiety, stress, insecurity, and our feelings of powerlessness in the face of apparently inevitable external change – are tied to the micro- and macroeconomic trends and economic outcomes that we discuss in this book. Specifically, we argue that while rapid economic and technological change may be necessary to deliver growth in productivity and output to address environmental, social and demographic needs, the transition and disruption to get there creates stress, anxiety, and something that humans are particularly bad at dealing with: uncertainty.
We don’t like living with uncertainty and try as much as possible to minimize it. But the economy that we have built over the past 30 years demands that we embrace it, at the same time as governments have progressively abandoned their commitments to provide their citizens with protection from it. Combine that with a world where the maps guiding our actions seem to be both less accurate and decidedly skewed to the interests of an entrenched elite, and we shift from economics as imagined to angrynomics in practice.
The threat we feel from rapid and seemingly ever-accelerating economic change means that listening to private and public anger is critical to a deeper understanding of what we actually experience in our daily lives, and how to address those anxieties. A fundamental tension is clear. Aging societies such as ours need more technology, not less. It is not to be feared. It is to be embraced. Prosperity is increased by innovation which augments productivity. Innovation is the root cause of material advancement and it increases our collective resources. Unfortunately, it also gives us Instagram. Change can be exciting, particularly for the immediate beneficiaries, or those with little to lose. But for most people it is disconcerting if not frightening. Most of us crave security, stability and certainty. When rapid changes are accompanied by real income losses, or we perceive that one person’s gain is another’s loss, quite reasonably, we get angry. This expresses itself in both moral outrage – that the wrong be righted – and in tribalism – as we seek to blame the “other” that must be responsible.
Recognizing this core dilemma – how to profit from uncertainty while hating it – is a precondition for progress in making us all less angry so that we can seriously address the social, economic and environmental challenges of our time. We think that with the right approach to this simple fact of life we can live longer, be healthier, and perhaps even be happier. But to do that we need to shift our perspective from economics to understanding angrynomics: an economy of heightened uncertainty and anger, where faith in the workings of markets and politics has been undermined. We explain why this has happened and what to do about it.
Why read this book and what’s unusual about it?
This book is written not for our academic and professional colleagues. They will find the lack of footnotes and the lack of “rigour” unsettling. Moreover, it is written as a dialogue between the two authors, which is decidedly unscholarly. We also think the system is broken. We do not think that the current order can be “nudged” back into stability. And simply going back to the politics of the early 2000s is not, and should not, be an option. Neither is a return to the 1970s.
As we elaborate later in the book, we think of capitalism as a computer that has just had a massive crash. However, only a small software patch was installed to get it up and running again when what it really needs is a whole new operating system. Populism – of the left and right – is a recognition of that. Populists are the rogue code-writers of politics that thrive on anger. Unfortunately, they are shitty programmers. We hope to motivate the search for a better operating system.
Angrynomics is here and now. It is determining elections. It is recasting party politics across the world – not just Trump and Brexit, but in countries as diverse as Germany, Brazil and Ukraine, and in the revival of nationalism in Hungary and Poland, Russia’s foreign policy, Turkey’s growing anti-Europeanism, and in the collapse of traditional centre parties everywhere. We see anger at the stressors we are all exposed to being hijacked by the media and political classes to detrimental ends. Tribalism – and its regulating energy, anger – is a natural reflex, but it is always based upon myths and is ultimately self-defeating.
