We're in a situation in which the violence of the economy has reached a very, very obscene peak.

We have actually 12 people in the world owning more than the bottom 4 billion people.

We've built it. We need to see how the systemic forces trap us and shape us.

But we're the architect. So there is space for alternatives if we build them.

How do you actually think change would happen?

Are you a revolutionary?

Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World. I'm Christian Giri Murthy, and this is the podcast

where we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their lives and the

events that have helped shape them. My guest this week is an economist who wants us to rethink

the idea that capitalism is simply the natural order of things. Clara Matai is an author and

professor of economics whose work explores how economic ideas become tools of power, shaping policy while masking the political

decisions beneath. Her new book, Escape from capitalism, argues that many of the problems that we see

as inevitable, poverty, unemployment, inflation are built into the system and shored up by models

and theories designed to convince us that there is no

alternative. Welcome to the podcast. It's such a pleasure. I mean, how can you escape capitalism?

I mean, we are all brought up to believe or to think that it is just the way of the world.

It is human nature to want to accumulate things and wealth

and to have the freedom to choose what you want and what your destiny is.

So the first point is to escape the mental trap that naturalizes the system, that makes

us think exactly what you just said, which is that we have a spontaneous

tendency towards this capitalist economy. What I show in the book is that capitalism is far from

spontaneous. It requires constant, violent enforcement of those policies of austerity to preserve

...