Riccardo Staglianò, a renowned journalist for Venerdì di Repubblica, engages in a dialogue with Clara Mattei, one of the most authoritative economists on the international scene. This conversation aims to reflect on the dimensions, reasons, and responsibilities behind the growing economic and social inequalities in Italy, and how we can, and must, repoliticize the economy—or rather, democratize it again—to reclaim control over the most important decisions that shape the foundations of our lives.

The Book:

This book challenges the conventional narrative of the economy that has intoxicated us. It reveals, by retracing a long history from fascism to the present day, how much politics is hidden behind economic choices.

Clara Mattei is a young Italian economist who has been living and working in New York for years, where she teaches at the prestigious New School for Social Research. In 2022, she wrote a book in English (The Capital Order), which the Financial Times listed among the ten most influential publications of the year on economic topics. Her analysis powerfully revives and reaffirms the lessons of the great classical economists, from Smith to Ricardo to Marx, forcefully attacking the notion that economics is a pure, exact science defined by mathematical models we can do nothing about but adapt to. After all, we've been taught that our economic system represents the best of all possible worlds—the most exceptional way to produce wealth and well-being. But the time has come to expose the falsehoods inherent in this view.

This book, enriched by the contributions of three prominent international economists—Thomas Piketty, Branko Milanović, and Adam Tooze—introduces a new emancipatory perspective. It reveals the hidden web behind the central economic issues in public debate: from austerity to inflation, unemployment to growth, competition to debt, and the relationship between the state and the market, among many other topics. With the precision and incisiveness that Mattei possesses, it is eye-opening to see how political power has built a profoundly undemocratic system over time, one deliberately designed to enrich a privileged few while impoverishing the majority of the population, turning citizens into subjects. Knowledge is the first step toward imagining a different world, and toward working to make it possible.

The Author:

Clara Mattei teaches Economics at the New School for Social Research in New York and was a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 2018 to 2019. Her research contributes to the history of capitalism and deeply investigates the relationship between economic ideas and technocratic policies. Her recent book, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (University of Chicago Press, 2022), has been translated into Italian by Einaudi under the title Operazione Austerità: Come gli economisti hanno aperto la strada al fascismo.