Privatising humanity : How our essential human needs became financial assets

A powerful exposé of how finance turns our basic human needs into assets.

We have entered a new era of turbo-charged financial extraction. Having amassed huge reserves, global finance capital is seeking out fresh areas for profitable investments. Virtually all aspects of our lives are now targeted by someone seeking to make a profit.

In Privatising humanity, Kate Bayliss shows how wealthy investors, including asset managers, target our essential services. When it comes to investments in these sectors, shareholder profits are funded by us, the end-users and tax-payers who simply wish to meet our basic human needs for water, warmth and shelter. We have no alternative but to pay into these structures that often generate massive returns for investors and dysfunctional systems for society.

Unpacking the details of these processes in three sectors in the UK - water, energy and housing - Bayliss exposes the harmful consequences of this model, which is contributing to deepening inequality.

MEDIA REVIEWS

‘As the things we need to live have been repurposed as vehicles for profit, shareholders have grown wealthy while those unable to pay have been forced to go without the basics. This is a sharp, empirically grounded account of how financial power reshapes everyday life and why reclaiming essential services is one of the most important challenges of our age.’Grace Blakeley, author of Vulture Capitalism

‘A forensic account of how private finance works and its impact on everyday lives by one of the top experts in the field.

’Gill Plimmer, Infrastructure Correspondent, Financial Times

‘Today’s privatised economy raises vitally important but complex issues of public policy. Kate Bayliss analyses them in a sophisticated, deeply informed and highly readable way. Her remarkable book is indispensable reading for anyone debating how society and the economy in the UK can recover from the destruction wrought by austerity and privatisation. The lessons learned are also of major relevance in many other countries.’Philip G. Alston, John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law, New York University