When Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009, she drew unprecedented attention to the Bloomington school of institutional analysis, a wide-ranging research program in institutional economics and political economy. The well-deserved award was the culmination of over 50 years of inquiry, institution building, and hard work (Tarko 2017). Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom, the founders and most impactful contributors to the Bloomington school research program, saw themselves as artisans. They both studied diverse forms of institutional design and practiced what they preached by building up research teams and their self-directed Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University in Bloomington. In a 2006 interview, Elinor described their study: “Learning science at a university was very much like learning a craft … We teach our students the best of what we know. Essentially it's a form of artisanship” (Zagorski 2006).

This ongoing and complex research program has developed advanced analytical tools for the study of the production of public goods in metropolitan areas, such as studies of police services and the role of police within communities; problems of federalism, such as how the balance of powers between the multiple overlapping governments that exist around the world can possibly be negotiated; and tragedy of commons challenges in communities of different sizes, from small-scale fishing villages to global-scale climate change. Alongside fellow Nobelists Ronald Coase, Douglass North and Oliver Williamson, Elinor Ostrom's contributions helped form what is now called “new institutional economics”. Further, this research program has long been considered one of the main three schools of public choice economics, alongside the Rochester School, associated with the work of William Riker and Anthony Downs, and the Virginia School, as developed by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. Throughout the volume, the contributors discuss many other disciplines that have been influenced by the Bloomington school.

The openness and creative potential of the Bloomington approach is on full display in these chapters. Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom consistently rejected the idea of there being strict divisions within the interdependent, interconnected world of humans and their projects.

In 2020 the Manchester United star Marcus Rashford successfully persuaded the UK government to reverse its stance on the provision of vouchers for free meals to children in poorer families during the school holidays. Rashford's experience of poverty during his own childhood motivated his campaign and his status as a football star gave him the platform to effect change at the highest level. Although football is organized around clubs and national teams, the footballers themselves are the celebrities. They have the power to pull in spectators and to gain the support of media and the general public. Players have taken a leading role in the fight against racism, not just in football but in society more generally. The practice of “taking the knee” before the start of matches in support of the Black Lives Matter movement highlighted the symbolic importance of football and the players themselves as a force for social change.

A club's success is dependent on the acquisition and deployment of skilled talent, encompassing coaches and support staff as well as players. As Szymanski observes, “The main activity of a professional football club is the acquisition of playing talent” (Szymanski 2015: 29). This is an expensive activity, and “since 1992, the average cost of a player has risen 565%” (Tomkins et al.: 10). Transfer fees have continued to rise, as have wages. Accounts for 2018/19 showed that total income in the Championship was L796 million but the wages paid were L855 million.

Assessing the skill level of any one player is no easy matter, however. Agents put together videos featuring a player's outstanding moments, but these are no guide to how a player will perform over a gruelling season. Football is a team sport and it is not easy to estimate how a player will fit into a team and whether they will be a disruptive influence in the dressing room. Some players turn out to be injury prone, but that is difficult to forecast, although sometimes clubs will take a risk on a player with an injury record who can be bought at a discount and whose problems might be resolved with better medical attention.

As transfer fees and wages rise relative to inflation, clubs have attempted to become more sophisticated in the judgements they make about players.

A record 11.7 million viewers tuned in to see England's 2019 Women's World Cup semi-final loss to the United States; 38,262 supporters watched the North London derby between Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal in November 2019. In the summer of 2020 Women's Super League (WSL) clubs made a number of signings of key players from the United States and from leading French club Lyon. Chelsea completed a world record deal of around L300,000 for Danish attacker Pernille Harder. It could justifiably be claimed that “women's football is going through seismic change on an unprecedented scale, as men's clubs and commercial partners finally begin to get serious about it” (Brewin 2020: 55).

Referring to women's football implies that it is something unusual and different from the men's game. A controversial question is, “why should women's and men's football be kept separate? … What is it about sociocultural understandings of women's and men's bodies that mean it is impossible for them to appear – officially – on the same field of play?” (Caudwell 2011: 339). As it is, the whole history of women's football “is a story of repression and exclusion” (Koller & Brändle 2015: 276). This is in large part because the presence of women in football is seen to challenge traditional notions of masculinity. One of the oldest clichés in football is that it is a “man's game”. Hence, “the foundational fact that football was a locus of masculine self-representation changed very little. Football remained a starkly masculine sport” (Koller & Brändle 2015: 266). Many of the standard treatments of the economics of football either do not mention the women's game at all or only do so in passing.

Even when women have been present, they have often been largely invisible, as was the case for female fans for much of the period when football was a popular spectator sport

This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother, Lucy May (1872– 1956), who was its original inspiration. Until I undertook the research for this book, I was puzzled by this otherwise Victorian lady's interest in football, but I did not realize how early women's football developed in this country. She was particularly interested in questions of promotion and relegation, but considered one had to look beyond the manager and the teams, important though those were, to explore longer-term socioeconomic trends which is what I have done in this book.

I am a long-standing fan of Charlton Athletic where I am a regular contributor to the fanzine. At my local non-league club, Leamington, I am secretary of the Vice-Presidents’ Club and write an article in each home match programme. I have therefore been able to observe changes in football from two ends of the spectrum. Both Charlton and Leamington have had troubled histories, losing their grounds. Leamington disappeared altogether as a club for over a decade and was only revived due to the tireless efforts of fans. Hence, I have direct personal experience of the struggles faced by clubs and their fans to survive, let alone succeed.

Football is being transformed by forces outside the control of the ordinary fan. These may be summarized by one word that offers a central theme of this book: globalization. Clubs are increasingly controlled by foreign owners who usually have no personal or emotional link with the club. They have a variety of motives, ranging from prestige and political protection to making money. Not all foreign owners are bad, indeed the “rogue owner” problem often occurs domestically. However, as the owner of a football club you are a trustee for a community asset and many owners do not understand that.

While this book is written by a football fan, my working life has been as an academic with a broad interest in what has been termed “political economy”. In particular, one area of interest has been in the way in which the excesses of a capitalist market economy may be tempered by regulation. Indeed, regulation may be necessary to prevent a market economy destroying itself and its potential benefits.

The Bloomington school and the new economic sociology both attempt to understand how and why people actually act and interact, rather than pursuing single explanatory factors to explain human behavior. Both posit that an individual's economic action is embedded in their social relations, their social context, their social norms, their community, but that people are individuals who think freely and deeply, reflecting on their choices, and are not guided entirely by formal and informal rules. Both schools also share an important intellectual foundation in the work of Alexis de Tocqueville. Bringing together thought from these schools will show what each can offer the other, strengthening their shared ideas and opening up areas of research where knowledge from both can be combined to explore new and old puzzles. Economic sociology, as Emile Durkheim ([1909] 1978) described, is the application of the sociological perspective to the study of economic phenomena.

Economic sociology, thus, approaches the study of economic phenomena with an appreciation that social factors, forces and structures can affect economic phenomena and that in turn economic phenomena can impact social factors, forces and structures. Max Weber (1949) has, similarly, explained that the field of economic sociology, or Sozialokonomik as he called it, is principally concerned with pure economic phenomena like prices, consumers and firms, economically relevant phenomena like religion which can shape the economic behavior of adherents, and economically conditioned phenomena like the family whose structure can be shaped by economic outcomes. Consider, for instance, Max Weber's ([1905] 1998) most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, where he explores how Protestantism offered an ethical foundation for the particular spirit of enterprise that animates modern capitalism in the West. More recently, Viviana Zelizer (1978) has explained how a shift in attitudes about life insurance, from something that was stigmatized to something that was celebrated, changed the prospects of that industry.

Most early political economists, such as Adam Smith and Karl Marx, could be quite accurately described as economic sociologists, although the term didn't come to be used until the late nineteenth century, with thinkers such as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber (Smelser & Swedberg 1994: 8).

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the British Covid-19 crisis is the extent to which the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish governments, and the English regions, allowed strategy to be decided by Westminster, delaying the implementation of public health measures until the first UK-wide lockdown was declared on 23 March 2020. Health and social care are devolved, and this national epidemic is not homogeneous. It has been and continues to be made up of hundreds, if not thousands, of outbreaks, each at a different stage, ongoing in different local areas throughout the country. England had its first confirmed case on 30 January, Wales on 28 February and Scotland on 1 March. Some areas – such as Rutland, Hartlepool, Blackpool, the Isle of Wight, Tyneside, Durham, Orkney, the Western Isles – had no reported cases until late March; and London in the second phase, until December 2020, had relatively few cases compared with other areas, such as the north-west and south-west, which had far fewer cases six months ago but now appear to have more cases.

Because infection is transmitted between individuals, local knowledge of both communities and their living circumstances and individuals is key not only for understanding and managing the risk of spread but also for putting in place protective measures.

We are all vulnerable to Covid-19, but income levels, housing, living conditions, ethnicity, age, overall health and gender are all significant factors in determining the impact of the virus on different people. The conclusion is clear: as well as a revised approach to the NHS, the United Kingdom also needs revised policies in social care, housing and poverty, and – perhaps most importantly of all – better understanding of the realities of living beyond the “Westminster bubble”.

Vulnerability

National lockdown in March 2020 emptied cities and streets of almost all people, the vast majority having retreated to their homes, where they awaited – with some trepidation – the government's daily press briefings. However, the reality is that the risk of dying or becoming seriously ill from Covid-19 is not the same for everyone in the country. We have also seen stark differences in infection rates and mortality between countries.

Since the Second World War, attempts to deliver the social democratic goal of a more equal society have centred on a more comprehensive benefit system paid for by progressive taxation. It was a strategy that contributed to the peak equality achieved in the mid-1970s. Since then the strength of such “income redistribution” has been steadily weakened. The tax system has become regressive, taking a bigger slice of low than of high incomes, while working-age benefit levels have been sharply eroded. Alongside these changes, a series of shocks, many self-inflicted – from ever deeper recessions, deindustrialization and a decade of austerity to accelerating automation, Covid-19 and Brexit – have played havoc with family finances, livelihoods and pay. Today we have a mean and patchy benefit system pitched against a greatly heightened risk of poverty.

Britain needs a more equalizing tax/benefit system. But even a more progressive system of income redistribution would not be enough to tackle today's entrenched drivers of inequality. An effective anti-poverty and pro-equality strategy requires new measures of “asset redistribution” aimed at sharing the rising pool of wealth more equally. Wealth – which plays an increasingly central role in what the French economist Thomas Piketty has called a “force for divergence” – has long been the elephant in the room of anti-inequality policy.

Britain is an asset-rich nation, yet the revenue from capital taxes has been steadily falling and now raises a fraction of the total tax take. Outstripping the growth of incomes, the total level of national wealth has surged from around three times the size of the economy in the 1960s to approaching seven times today. Official data put personal wealth holdings at some L14. trillion, holdings that are increasingly concentrated at the top, reversing the long-term trends prior to the 1980s. They are a primary driver of today's institutionalized inequality. This is because the considerable returns from ownership (in the form of profits, rents and dividends) – returns that have for decades exceeded the growth rate of the economy – accrue disproportionately to the already rich. A tenth of UK households own 45 per cent of the nation's privately held wealth, while the least wealthy half own just 9 per cent.

When I first went to China at the start of the 1980s it was a very poor country, poorer than much of the rest of Asia. Everyone was dressed in drab blues and greens, food and most consumer products – to the extent there were any – were rationed, and the traffic of the cities comprised throngs of many thousands of bicycles. The World Bank development indicators placed China in the late 1970s among the poorest countries in the world with a per capita income about the average for Sub-Saharan Africa.

Poor as China was, this was also an exciting time. The “Gang of Four”, which was led by Mao Zedong's wife Jiang Qing and blamed for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution had been put on trial, and China was embarking on economic reforms. Markets were reviving, China was re-engaging with the world, minds were reopening, and the Chinese people were beginning to experience a new world of economic and personal freedoms they had not known for decades. At Nanjing University where I studied between 1982 and 1985, for example, all sorts of “salons” (shalong) sprouted up to debate western philosophies and theories, and the departments of sociology and psychology among others were restarted. Young Chinese were again going abroad in search of knowledge to serve China.

Fast forward 40 years and we arrive in a very different China, one with an upper-middle-income economy, which has a large urban middle class who can afford overseas holidays, modern cities and infrastructure, and whose political leaders are aggressively wanting to stamp China's vision on the future of the world economy and the system of global governance. The personal freedoms that had blossomed in the first three decades of reform after 1978 have been curtailed increasingly after 2008–09. The Communist Party of China (CPC) under General Secretary Xi Jinping has reasserted the authority of the party in all areas of life, preoccupied as it is with “stability maintenance” (weiwen) and its survival. Since 2011 the internal security budget has even exceeded that of defence, such is the party's fear of internal dissent (Shambaugh 2016: 63).

China's economy today is a hybrid capitalism. The private or nonstate sector is the primary driver of economic growth: the most profitable, the most innovative and the major employer that has delivered the stellar growth of recent decades. Yet state sector firms remain important, especially in sectors vital to the interests of the party-state. They are the largest firms in many sectors of the economy and the biggest are included on the Fortune Global 500. But their contribution to employment has vastly diminished, their inefficiency holds back potential growth, and their lacklustre innovative capacity puts at risks China's aspirations has to become an advanced economy. Despite these deficiencies the state sector is privileged; their leaders are at the centre of the party-state, both corporate titans and powerful party officials, who profoundly influence the country's industrial policy.

Explanation for these contradictions rest in the dominance of the Communist Party of China (CPC) over business and economic life. Although the state abandoned economic planning in the 1980s and stepped back from day-to-day involvement in the economy, in what Barry Naughton (1995) called “growing out of the plan”, still everywhere the party-state's hand is at work in shaping the economy and the business opportunities of firms and individuals. And that hand has strengthened. Under Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the CPC, the appetite for reform has waned during the 2010s and support for the state sector increased, or as the Chinese would put it: “the state advances, the private sector retreats (guo jin min tui)”. Few countries highlight as clearly as China the tension between the role of the state and that of the market in economic development. For this reason, the chapter begins with an overview of the organization of the government administration and the CPC.

This contemporary business configuration described above is not a simple story of a dual economy. Both state sector and private firms are tied together in complex webs of social networks based on personal and particularistic relationships that are a central trait of Chinese societies and indeed of most of Asia.

The simultaneous shocks to human and economic health caused by the threat of a potentially deadly physical illness leave many households vulnerable to rapidly deteriorating financial security and stress. This combination of biological threat and social rupture have shaken the foundations of the macroeconomy. So far the response has been a huge monetary stimulus and fiscal rescue packaged for global corporations and national industries. This chapter makes the case for coordinated monetary and fiscal measures to provide debt relief targeted at households, not markets. Since the advent of neoliberal state policy in the 1980s, financial crises have become a regular feature of macroeconomic governance. Each successive crisis has brought more targeted interventions, initially to shore up markets, and then with systemic interventions to prevent economic collapse. Crisis intervention began with cutting interest rates and basic debt restructuring (i.e. Brady bonds) and gradually developed into large-scale liquidity injections (bailouts) and mass asset buybacks, which were rolled together as quantitative easing. The onset of the pandemic and the subsequent first lockdown created a new type of economic crisis, with origins in the human population, not imperfect markets. Yet the same set of unconventional monetary policies were immediately activated in response to the economic shock: interest rates cuts, direct liquidity injections and the mass selling of government debt as a safe asset. Unlike in the previous crisis, the UK government undertook a massive fiscal response, with the introduction of the furlough scheme, in which the government guaranteed up to 80 per cent of wages, and smaller programmes, such as the “Eat out to help out scheme” offering cash incentives to shore up demand in the hospitality industry.

This chapter explains how household debt relief provides a more effective way of stabilizing the macroeconomy in the short term, allowing medium-term structural reforms to shift the United Kingdom away from its long-standing dependence on debt-led growth. Providing debt relief for households involves the simple re-engineering of existing monetary and fiscal measures to target households, not markets, for state intervention. The monetary and fiscal measures outlined here can produce comprehensive debt relief for households struggling with debt repayments as a result of the pandemic. Debt relief will reduce individual hardship while generating a general uplift in the economy.