Isabella Weber's core move is diagnostic, not ideological: if housing, food, energy, transport, healthcare, and water are unaffordable, people become desperate, and desperate electorates turn to whoever promises change — currently the far right. Her new book, Anti-Fascist Economics, argues that the economics profession's obsession with model purity has left it unable to respond to the material crises feeding authoritarian politics. The prescription is to make life's necessities affordable by any means that work, whether that's public buffer stocks, Mexican-style voluntary price caps, regional procurement pools, or green infrastructure investment. The argument has a specific intellectual lineage. Weber draws explicitly on Keynes — not the caricatured 'government spending' Keynes but the pragmatist who argued for commodity buffer stocks and compared economists unfavorably to dentists. She extends this through her own research on 'greedflation,' the term she popularised to describe corporate profiteering during supply shocks. The book's central claim is that fossil fuel dependency and corporate concentration don't just cause inequality — they create the exact economic volatility that authoritarian movements exploit. Weber is not writing from the margins. She's an associate professor at UMass Amherst, an associate at Harvard's Fairbank Center, and advises policymakers across three continents. New York mayor Zohran Mamdani credits her work with informing his affordability agenda — free buses, universal childcare, rent caps, public groceries. UK politicians including Ed Miliband have consulted her, and Andy Burnham's Labour conference speech last month read like a Weber brief: 'Homes. Water. Energy. Transport. Care. Broken up and sold off.' The numbers she marshals are stark. Four multinationals control 70-90% of global grain trading, with profits that thrive on volatility. In 2022, publicly listed oil and gas companies earned $916bn in global net income. Her research on the US showed 50% of those profits went to the top 1% of households; the bottom 50% received a 1% share. These aren't abstract complaints — they're the material conditions she argues produce electoral outcomes like AfD's milestone victory in Saxony-Anhalt, one of Germany's poorest regions. The policy proposals range from the ambitious to the immediately practical. Public buffer stock systems for grain — publicly owned entities that buy low and sell high to stabilise prices rather than maximise profits. She advised South Africa on pooling African Union buying power for better procurement terms. She cites Mexico's canasta básica, where retailers voluntarily cap prices on a basket of essential goods in exchange for favorable tariffs and tax relief, enforced partly through public shaming at weekly press conferences. Mexico's governing Morena party saw its vote share climb from 55% to 61% in the 2024 election. Where the book gets harder is on energy. Weber argues for stabilising a 'basic allowance' of fossil fuels for individual consumption while simultaneously investing massively in green infrastructure — without which, she acknowledges, it's a zero-sum game. She's also sitting on Germany's CDU-led commission on reforming fiscal rules, tasked with enabling higher borrowing for public investment, which she describes as going nowhere while the government implements 'severe social reforms against the will of voters.' The biographical detail matters here. Raised in Nuremberg, Weber grew up in literal proximity to Third Reich history. Her grandfather reportedly refused to hang a swastika in his church. During the 1990s, she and her grandmother counter-protested neo-Nazi marches through the city. This isn't performative framing — it's the lived experience that makes 'anti-fascist economics' something other than a provocative book title. Whether her big-tent pragmatism can actually overcome the ideological rigidity she diagnoses in her own profession is the open question the book raises but cannot, by its nature, answer.
