In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels writes:
‘And what a dispiriting, unnerving influence this uncertainty of his position in life, consequent upon the unceasing progress of machinery, must exercise upon the worker, whose lot is precarious enough without it!’
Far from imagining a borderless world, modern-day globalisation has generated a proliferation of borders where labour and capital are built on a ceaseless flow. There is an unsettling irony in the current economic moment. Never before has growth been so incessantly invoked, yet never has prosperity felt so structurally beyond reach. Cahel Moran’s diagnosis of “why we’re getting poorer” offers a useful starting point, but the deeper crisis, it seems, is not merely economic. The very narratives through which we make sense of the economy have solidified, leaving us clinging to growth models that no longer interpret the world they insist on describing.
Moran’s Focal Point
‘Financialisation’, one of Moran’s central themes, is no longer simply a process through which finance gains dominance over the real economy, but in the wake of its process becomes its own epistemology. The world becomes collateralisable, where homes, rivers, education, and even climate risk are rendered into futures markets and carbon derivatives. What appears as increased vulnerability among households is less a deviation and more an expression of finance’s colonisation of everyday life. Under such a regime, precarity becomes an ambient condition, not an anomaly.
This is where Amitav Ghosh proves prophetic. In The Great Derangement, Ghosh wrote about the incapacity of modern imagination to register non-linear crises such as climate change. Financialisation reinforces this paralysis, whereby it replaces narrative with prediction and meaning with risk modelling. Moran’s argument about the unevenness of global integration finds its mirror in Ghosh’s critique. Both identify a system that no longer possesses the imaginative bandwidth to respond to the crises it generates. What appears as a technical malfunction, in truth, is a narrative collapse.
Dysfuntion within Globalisation
The fragile promise of global economic integration was meant to democratise opportunity. In practice, it has produced intricate supply chains whose disruptions cast long shadows across local economies. Moran points out that these vulnerabilities, in the form of concentration of production, the offshoring of labour, and the externalisation of ecological and social costs, are embedded in financialisation’s DNA. When shocks occur (and they increasingly do), the global South absorbs the blow, while the global North absorbs the profit.
The novelist in Ghosh would insist that such a system is not only unjust but fundamentally unreadable: its logic is incompatible with the everyday narrative time in which most people live. Markets move faster than human capacity to interpret them. The result is a form of impoverishment that is both material and cognitive.
Addressal towards Environment & Artificial Intelligence
Environmental breakdown, then, is not an externality but an indictment. Moran’s argument that traditional growth models have reached ecological limits resonates with Mary Oliver’s insistence that attention itself is a form of resistance. Under financialised capitalism, human and nonhuman worlds alike are reduced to extractive potential. If anything has made us poorer, it is this: the systematic erasure of the world’s intrinsic value in favour of its instrumental one. Jared Diamond’s stark warning, “The only question is whether the world’s environmental problems will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice,” serves as our compass through this landscape, urging us to confront the implications of our choices.
This becomes most acute in Moran’s discussion of AI and automation, whose double-edged promise exposes the hollowness of contemporary optimism. The “future of work” is less a future than a consolidation of the present: precarious, flexible, optimised; insecure.
This raises the question Moran gestures towards but does not fully resolve: What would it mean to build an economy grounded not in efficiency but in resilience? The solutions he proposes (like investing in public goods, taxing wealth, or socialising technological gains) are necessary but insufficient without a larger reorientation of economic thought.
Conclusion
The real challenge is that the economy has ceased to recognise itself as embedded in the world. Jason W. Moore’s intellectualisation of the “Capitalocene” (a proposed epoch as an alternative to the “Anthropocene”) elucidates how conflicts over resource allocation and the recognition of ecological beingness have historically shaped social, political, and economic structures. (Moore 2015). In this context, then, the shift of wealth being tied to land productivity to labour productivity underscores the exploitation inherent in a capitalist system, whereby it becomes difficult to trace the roots of this exploitation for those exploited. We are getting poorer because our economic models no longer articulate what it means to live well in a deteriorating world.
And structurally, we shall remain poor until we are willing to abandon growth as theology and rediscover the possibility of economies oriented toward care, durability, and shared flourishing. In the end, in a world built on ceaseless flows of labour and capital, can those who have no power really determine themselves?
Written by – Sanandita
Edited by – Anjali Khimasiya
The post Why We Are Getting Poorer: An Economy That No Longer Remembers Its People appeared first on The Economic Transcript.
