The book, Why We’re Getting Poorer: A Realist’s Guide to the Economy and How We Can Fix It, is written by Cahal Moran, a behavioural economist and Fellow at the London School of Economics. He is also the founder of the popular YouTube channel Unlearning Economics. This book was published in 2025, and it is a timely and accessible contribution to heterodox economic thought. The author opens with a candid autobiographical frame of his adult life that has been defined by a succession of economic crises, such as the 2007–9 Global Financial Crisis, austerity, Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic, supply chain disruptions, and the cost of living crisis. The writings state that this relentless sequence of shocks does not happen because of unavoidable accidents, but rather because of the systematic design of any economy. The book covers all these themes and sketches the alternatives as well.

This book consists of three parts, including the “Uneven Economy,” which highlights who is important for the economy and who gets the reward and, similarly, how the billionaires are protected with the consequences faced by society at large. The second part of the book includes the “Dysfunctional Economy.” In this section, the book explores the four areas where economies face failure, such as housing, money creation, inflation, and global supply chains. Similarly, the last part of the book is “Redefining the Economic Landscape,” which is a conclusion that both political and economic reforms are necessary for the overall progress and governance of any economy.

Why We’re Getting Poorer highlighted the idea that the economy consists of a complex web of practices, laws, and institutions that are shaped by the choices required. These choices have consistently and disproportionately favoured the already wealthy and powerful. The book’s title requires an immediate qualification that the author is quite careful to make. He does not argue that people are getting poorer in the absolute sense, though he acknowledges that many still are. His claim is more precise and arguably more troubling. According to him, most people across the globe are considerably poorer than they could and should be, given the productive capacity in accordance with a modern economy. The gap between what is possible and what most people actually experience is, for Moran, not an accident of nature but a failure of design.

Unpacking the Paradox: Undervalued Labor vs. Billionaire Influence

Moran is at his most persuasive in Part I, where he uses the Covid-19 pandemic as an organising lens. The coronavirus lockdowns made starkly visible what wage structures habitually conceal, without which labour society cannot survive, including healthcare workers, farmers, logistics drivers, sanitation workers, and food retailers. They are consistently among the worst-paid members of the workforce, earning on average some 15 per cent less than other workers in the US alone.

A major part of the economy is mainly derived from bankers and investors, whereas their absence does not attract public attention. These investors decide labour wages based on their working capacity; normally, we may say based on productivity. The juxtaposition of Goldman Sachs receiving $125 billion in public bailout funds while its CEO publicly claimed his employees were among the most productive people on earth provides a particularly sharp illustration of this........

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