What Do People Want? Unscrambling Populism

Abstract

Abstract:Should a discussion of populism be concerned with populism, along with revulsion of its various extremisms, or should it rather be concerned with the failure of institutions and the misbehavior of elites in a world in which eight billionaires own as much as half the world population? The former option will yield a totally different and probably somewhat more predictable discussion than the latter, which may include “from bad to worse.” A third option is that different types of market economies yield different types of populism, including pluto-populism. This discussion follows the latter two options.