Populism’s great replacement of economics

Popular choice: Flower petals are thrown to welcome Modi (wearing a waistcoat), as he arrives at a public rally in Guwahati. He is campaigning to be re-elected for a third five-year term in India’s next general elections in April this year. — AP

IN 1944, as World War II neared its end, the exiled Hungarian economic sociologist Karl Polanyi published The Great Transfor-mation, a treatise that focused on the dangers of trying to separate economic systems from the societies they inhabit.

Eighty years on, Polanyi’s warnings about a market economy unleashed from human needs and relations may prove prescient.