Geoff Mann

More than​ 43,000 people were killed with guns in the United States in 2023. That’s around one death every twelve minutes. More than half of those deaths were suicides or accidents, almost 19,000 were homicides, and guns were among the leading causes of death among children and teenagers. According to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as an incident resulting in...

It’s​ easy to forget that this isn’t the first time the world has seemed to teeter on a precipice. ‘To the question how shall we ever be able to extricate ourselves from the obvious insanity of this position, there is no answer,’ Hannah Arendt wrote fifty years ago, reflecting on the nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviet Union. Then, as now, an apocalyptic...

On​ 14 November 1968, New York University hosted a debate between the economists Walter Heller and Milton Friedman at the Graduate School of Business, a block from Wall Street. The event was advertised as a confrontation between two men engaged in a war for the soul of American economic policy. In retrospect, it might not sound like a clash of the titans – Milton Friedman versus who?...

It is hard to know​ how to talk about modern economies without talking about growth: productivity, entrepreneurial ‘risk-taking’ and the profit-driven cycle of expansion and accumulation. Economic growth is understood to be a natural or automatic process, its absence taken as evidence that we must somehow have got in its way. The purpose of economic policymaking is, accordingly,...

Economists ‘set themselves too easy, too useless a task’, Keynes said, ‘if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again’. But in the face of climate change, the long run – which remains the sacred temporality of economics – is a misleading guide not only to current affairs, but to the long run itself. There is no reason to expect the ocean to flatten again; we may be in for a permanent storm.