Ah, Paul Mason. Channel 4’s resident communist hero-worshipper has taken some time out of spinning for Syriza to write this gem for the New Statesman‘s ironically titled “saying the unsayable” series:

“It’s becoming just about sayable, though to howls of pain, that neoliberal economics is nonsense. And that the neoliberal model is broken. What’s hard for the economics profession to accept is what this means: that capitalism itself could be past its best. The traditional escape mechanism – adaptation through high-value job creation and the creation of new technologies – becomes hard to maintain once information technology pervades everything, tanking production costs. So we are stuck: we fear automating en masse because we can’t imagine what jobs people will do who are displaced. This is the clearest sign that we might be living through a 500-year turning point, not just a 50-year one, with the exhaustion of a model and a financial crash.”

How exactly has the “neoliberal model” – or capitalism, as more rational people call it – fared in the last 40 years? Well it has delivered an 80% decline in world poverty for starters:

Does that really look like a “broken” model?