The Useless Man: A Political Economy of Populism

Today, the “wretched of the earth” are no longer those oppressed by colonization, but rather the unemployed and the working poor, migrants and refugees, landless peasants depending on public or familial assistance to survive—in a word, the economically useless. Uselessness is the most pernicious form of inequality, because it drives these men and women into traps of poverty from which escape is all but impossible. Drawing on economic theory, political philosophy, and demographic and scienti...