Welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of InCompass.

Go to InCompass-Hevon-Europe.com for free access to all our podcasts to date.

This is Paul Adamson and I'm in conversation with Martin Sanbu.

Martin Sanbu is The Economics Commentator at the Financial Times and author of a new book,

The Economics of Belonging.

We're going to spend most of this conversation, Martin, talking about your new book,

and it's tantalizing prescriptions as well as the analysis.

But before that, I want to run something by you.

In the not so recent past, the kind of a tax or reappraisal of capitalism

was the kind of property of sort of center-left, left-wing public intellectuals and writers and

thought leaders such as Thomas Pickety, Marianna Matsukatu, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz,

but now it seems becoming more mainstream.

There are people like yourself working for the financial time.

The economists regularly writes about the new kind of capitalism, the BRT, the Business Roundtable in Washington

is talking about a repurposing of the corporation.

And all this talk about a new kind of compassionate capitalism,

inclusive capitalism, stakeholder capitalism. Is this the new reality that everybody's now

talking about the need, the urgent need to rethink capitalism?

I think you're right. I mean you mentioned the FT. My newspaper ran ran an editorial a couple months ago saying that we need to rethink the social contract and this whole language of the social contract is very much at the center of the conversation now. I think one reason why it's become mainstream even before the COVID crisis is, you know, it's sort of the pitchfork reason.

People were seeing that it was the thinkers and the movements on the extremes who were

calling for radical change and being heard and clearly answering a need among voters.

And it's not just the sort of sensible but radical left-wing think as you talked

...