Guy Standing

Guy Standing is Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London, a Fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences, and co-founder and now honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), an international NGO that promotes basic income.

He was previously Professor of Development Studies in SOAS, Professor of Economic Security at the University of Bath (UK), Professor of Labour Economics at Monash University (Australia), and Director of the International Labour Organisation’s Socio-Economic Security Programme. He has also been a consultant for many governments and international bodies, including the United Nations and its agencies, the European Commission, the OECD, and the World Bank.

His latest book is Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen (2017). Other recent books are The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay (2016); with others, Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India (2015); A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens (2014); and The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011), which has been translated into 19 languages. 

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The Precariat under Rentier Capitalism

Paper Conference paper | | Oct 2017

The Precariat under Rentier Capitalism Guy Standing We are in the midst of a Global Transformation, analogous to Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation described in his seminal 1944 book. Whereas Polanyi’s Transformation was about constructing national market systems, today’s is about the painful construction of a global market system. To use Polanyi’s term, the ‘dis-embedded’ phase has been dominated by an ideology of market liberalisation, commodification and privatisation, orchestrated by financial interests, as in his model. The similarities also extend to today’s fundamental challenge, how to construct a ‘re-embedded’ phase, with new systems of regulation, distribution and social protection.

Featuring this expert

Reawakening

From the Origins of Economic Ideas to the Challenges of Our Time

Event Plenary | Oct 21–23, 2017

INET gathered hundreds of new economic thinkers in Edinburgh to discuss the past, present, and future of the economics profession.