Alexander Hagelüken's Die Ökonomie des Hasses — The Economics of Hate

In an era where right-wing populists from Donald Trump to Alice Weidel are reshaping economies and institutions across the Western world, few books attempt what Alexander Hagelüken's Die Ökonomie des Hasses ("The Economics of Hate") sets out to do: systematically catalogue the economic destruction that right-wing governance actually produces. Published by Dietz Verlag in 2025, this 272-page work arrives at a moment of acute urgency — in the aftermath of Trump's return to the White House, the AfD's emergence as the second-strongest force in the German Bundestag, and the continued advance of populist movements from Meloni's Italy to Kickl's Austria.

Hagelüken, a senior economics editor at the Süddeutsche Zeitung and winner of the Hans-Matthöfer Prize for Economic Journalism (2024), argues that the global rise of the right has been debated almost exclusively in political and moral terms. His provocation is to shift the frame: "It's the economy, stupid!" What happens to trade, jobs, migration, institutions, climate, and inequality when populists actually implement their agendas? The answer, Hagelüken contends, is an "economy of hate," a politics of negation that promises prosperity through nationalism and exclusion, but delivers the opposite: shrinking economies, deeper inequality, and enrichment of the few at the expense of the many.

The book unfolds in three parts: why so many people vote for the right, what the right does in power, and how the democratic center might win back voters. Drawing on interviews with leading economists, from Nobel laureate Daron Acemoğlu to inequality scholars Branko Milanovic and Charlotte Bartels, Kiel Institute president Moritz Schularick, and dozens of others, Hagelüken builds a data-driven case that is both accessible and alarming.

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Strongest Contributions of Alexander Hagelüken's Economics of Hate

The Economic Lens on Populism

Alexander Hagelüken's central and most valuable contribution in Economics of Hate is structural: he takes the scattered policy positions of right-wing populists, anti-trade, anti-EU, anti-migration, anti-institutional, anti-climate, pro-tax-cuts-for-the-rich, and examines each through its economic consequences. This chapter-by-chapter dissection forms the book's backbone. Trump's tariff wars are shrinking global trade. Brexit's devastating impact on British jobs and growth. The fiscal catastrophe of mass-deporting migrants, upon whom aging societies depend for caregiving and economic output. The wealth destruction that follows when democratic institutions are dismantled. The staggering long-term costs of climate inaction. The regressive tax policies funnel wealth upward while the majority stagnates.

Rather than treating populism as a purely cultural or identity-driven phenomenon, Hagelüken demonstrates, using data, that right-wing governance produces measurably harmful economic outcomes for the very voters who elect these parties. He draws powerfully on Christoph Trebesch's landmark study of populist leaders across 60 countries from 1900 to 2020, which found that populist governance reduces GDP by an average of 10 percent over time. Translated to Germany, that would mean roughly 400 billion euros in lost output, or 10,000 euros per worker. The punchline is devastating in its simplicity: those who vote for the right harm their own wallets.

The Neoliberal Root Cause Analysis

The book does not merely attack the right; it offers a thoughtful and self-critical diagnosis of why people turn to populism. Hagelüken traces the roots of the current crisis to the neoliberal turn of the 1980s under Reagan, Thatcher, and Kohl, and follows its consequences over four decades of stagnant wages, rising inequality, the hollowing out of public services, and a growing sense that the system is rigged against ordinary people.

He quotes Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's former Labor Secretary, who admits personal complicity: "A right-wing populist president like Donald Trump is the consequence of 50 years of neglect. And I say this very personally, because I was part of that failure." The rich got much richer while the poor got poorer, Reich observes. The middle class shrank. People grew angry and convinced that the system was manipulated against them.

The 2008 financial crisis is widely regarded as the catalytic moment when the neoliberal bargain was exposed. Citing Moritz Schularick's research, Hagelüken argues that the current wave of right-wing populism began precisely with the financial crisis, when deregulated elites crashed the global economy, and ordinary people paid the price through job losses, austerity, and debt. Trickle down? The emperor's new clothes turned out to be no clothes at all.

The Anatomy of "Anti-Politics"

Hagelüken coins a useful analytical framework by characterizing right-wing populism as fundamentally a politics of negation, a litany of "No!" Against free trade. Against the EU. Against migrants, homosexuals, and the unemployed. Against taxes for the rich. Against democratic institutions, independent courts, and free media. Against international cooperation. Against climate protection. Against the welfare state and trade unions.

"The No is so dominant that it overshadows what the right actually stands for," he writes. "They pursue an economy of hate, not an economy of improvement." This framing is analytically powerful because it reveals the intellectual emptiness behind the populist promise: these movements offer grievance without governance, anger without alternatives. They identify scapegoats, migrants, Brussels bureaucrats, and climate activists, but propose no constructive economics of their own.

Concrete Policy Proposals

Unlike many books that diagnose political crises without offering remedies, Hagelüken dedicates the final five chapters to concrete, costed policy proposals for winning back voters from the right. These include: a major reform of taxes and social contributions to relieve the middle class and lower earners; a "social contract for migration" that honestly addresses both the economic benefits and the integration costs of immigration; stronger collective bargaining rights and higher minimum wages; targeted investment in neglected, structurally weak regions; a climate compensation mechanism (Klimageld) to cushion the impact of rising CO₂ prices on ordinary households; and the idea of a "basic inheritance" (Grunderbe) of 20,000 euros for every young adult, funded by taxing large fortunes and inheritances.

The Grunderbe proposal alone, drawing on work by DIW economist Stefan Bach, would increase the wealth of the poorer half of the German population by 60-100 percent and halve the wealth gap between the richest 1 percent and the bottom half. At a cost of 15 billion euros per year, it is ambitious but financially grounded.

Critical Assessment: Shortcomings and Limitations

Argumentative One-Sidedness

The book's most significant weakness is its limited engagement with opposing perspectives. Hagelüken writes from a firmly center-left position, and while this is transparent, it constrains the book's persuasive reach among the very readers it claims to want to reach: those tempted by right-wing economic arguments. There is little serious engagement with conservative, ordoliberal, or libertarian economic thought. Concerns about regulatory overreach, fiscal sustainability, or the economic costs of certain climate policies are largely dismissed rather than seriously debated.

This matters because the book's own logic demands it. If the goal is to win back voters from the right, then the most effective approach would be to take their economic reasoning seriously, engage with it on its own terms, and demonstrate where it fails, rather than treating it as self-evidently wrong. By preaching primarily to the already converted, the book misses an opportunity to do what it says democratic politics urgently needs to do: persuade the persuadable.

The Short-Term Resilience Problem

Hagelüken's central claim, that right-wing populism produces economic catastrophe, rests heavily on Trebesch's long-term data showing GDP losses that accumulate over a decade. But this creates a credibility problem the book never adequately addresses: voters can look at Trump's America, Meloni's Italy, or Orbán's Hungary and see economies that have not collapsed. If the catastrophe takes ten years to materialize, and populists keep winning elections in the meantime, then the argument amounts to telling voters that the consequences they cannot yet see should outweigh the grievances they feel right now. That is a hard sell, and Hagelüken does not wrestle with how difficult it makes his own project.

A more rigorous treatment would have acknowledged this tension head-on: the damage is real but slow-burning, which is precisely why it is so politically dangerous. Instead, the book oscillates between predicting imminent disaster and citing long-term studies, leaving the reader uncertain about the actual timeline of consequences.

Feelings Versus Facts

The book reveals a fascinating tension that it never fully resolves. Hagelüken documents that AfD voters estimated inflation at 19 percent when the actual rate was 2 percent, a tenfold overestimation. Before the 2025 Bundestag election, only 10 percent of Germans rated their personal economic situation as poor, even as 44 percent rated the general economic situation negatively. These are remarkable findings. But Hagelüken reports them almost in passing, without confronting their radical implications for his own argument.

If the populist surge is driven primarily by distorted perceptions, amplified by social media algorithms and right-wing disinformation, rather than by actual material deprivation, then the policy response looks fundamentally different from what Hagelüken proposes. Better tax policy and higher minimum wages, however desirable in their own right, may be insufficient against an epistemic crisis. The book needed a chapter on the information environment that matched the depth of its economic analysis, and it does not have one.

The Missing Structural Critique

While Hagelüken rightly identifies neoliberalism as a root cause, his proposed solutions remain firmly within the social-democratic policy toolkit. There is no serious engagement with more structural critiques of capitalism, whether from post-Keynesian, institutionalist, or heterodox economic perspectives. The implicit assumption is that the same centrist parties that enabled four decades of neoliberalism can now reverse it, simply by adopting better communication and more generous social policy.

I find this unconvincing. When Hagelüken calls for centrist parties to foster "a sense of community," the irony is difficult to overlook: it was precisely these parties' decades of individualization, de-solidarization, and social coldness, their embrace of the neoliberal mantra of personal responsibility over collective solidarity, that eroded community in the first place. Asking the architects of the problem to become its solution requires a more compelling argument than the book provides.

The CDU/CSU Blind Spot

One of the book's most conspicuous omissions is its lenient treatment of the CDU/CSU. Hagelüken aptly describes the AfD as pursuing "FDP politics squared," a sharp characterization of its libertarian economic positions. But he barely interrogates how 16 years of Merkel-era conservatism contributed to the very neoliberal consensus he criticizes: wage stagnation, underinvestment in infrastructure and education, the refusal to tax wealth, and the erosion of the social safety net. Given that the CDU governed Germany for most of the period that created the conditions for the AfD's rise, this omission weakens the book's analytical credibility. A true reckoning with the failures of the democratic center cannot exempt its largest party.

Limited International Comparison

Although the book draws on examples from the US, UK, Italy, Hungary, and Austria, the analysis remains heavily Germany-centric. A deeper comparative treatment would have strengthened the argument considerably. Why have Nordic countries been more resistant to right-wing populism despite similar exposure to globalization? What can Portugal or Spain, countries that experienced severe austerity but elected left-wing rather than right-wing populists, teach us about the relationship between economic pain and political direction? How does left-populism in Latin America differ structurally from European right-populism? These questions go unasked, and the book is poorer for it.

Comparative Analysis

Hagelüken's book occupies a space between academic political economy and popular journalism. It invites comparison with several significant works in the field:

Branko Milanovic's Global Inequality (2016) and Capitalism, Alone (2019) offer a far more rigorous and globally comparative treatment of the inequality dynamics that drive populism. Milanovic's famous "elephant graph," which shows how globalization benefited the global poor and the global rich while squeezing Western middle classes, provides a deep empirical foundation for much of what Hagelüken describes, though with greater analytical precision and less political prescription.

Daron Acemoğlu and James A. Robinson's Why Nations Fail (2012) provides the theoretical scaffolding for Hagelüken's argument that destroying democratic institutions also destroys prosperity. Hagelüken cites Acemoğlu frequently, but does not match the depth of institutional analysis that makes Why Nations Fail so compelling.

Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) remains the definitive academic treatment of rising inequality in Western democracies. Hagelüken's discussion of wealth concentration echoes Piketty's findings but in a more accessible, journalistic register, and with a more explicit political agenda.

Among German-language works, Die Ökonomie des Hasses complements Marcel Fratzscher's Verteilungskampf (2016) on inequality in Germany and Philip Manow's Die Politische Ökonomie des Populismus (2018), which offers a more theoretically grounded analysis of populism's economic roots. What distinguishes Hagelüken's book is its sheer timeliness, written in the immediate wake of the 2024/25 elections, and its unusual emphasis on actionable policy rather than diagnosis alone.

Broader Implications

Die Ökonomie des Hasses arrives at a critical juncture for Western democracies. The Gothenburg-based V-Dem Institute reports that more countries are now autocracies than democracies, with nearly three-quarters of the world's population living under authoritarian rule, a level not seen since the Cold War era of the 1970s. Hagelüken's warning that populists are "survival artists" who, once in power, are twice as likely to be re-elected as non-populists, even despite delivering poor economic results, should alarm democrats everywhere.

The book's central structural insight that the economic harm caused by right-wing populism is systematic, measurable, and self-reinforcing deserves wide attention. If populist governance shrinks the economy, that economic pain creates more grievance, which in turn produces more populist votes, producing worse economic outcomes: a vicious cycle that becomes extraordinarily difficult to break once set in motion.

Yet the book also exposes a deeper paradox it does not fully resolve: if rational economic argument were sufficient to defeat populism, the populists would never have risen in the first place. The real battleground is not data but narrative, not what the economy does, but what people believe it does. And on that terrain, as Hagelüken himself documents, the right currently holds the commanding heights.

Final Verdict

Alexander Hagelüken has written an important, timely, and accessible book that fills a genuine gap in the public debate. By systematically cataloguing the economic destruction wrought by right-wing populism and tracing its roots to decades of neoliberal neglect, he provides a powerful counter-narrative to the populist promise of prosperity through nationalism and exclusion. The integration of leading economic research with vivid journalism makes for compelling reading, and the concrete policy proposals in the book's final third offer something rare in this genre: not just diagnosis, but a prescription.

However, the book is weakened by its one-sided argument, its reluctance to engage seriously with opposing economic perspectives, and its somewhat optimistic faith that centrist social-democratic policy reform can reverse a populist wave driven by deep structural forces and formidable disinformation ecosystems. The CDU/CSU blind spot is particularly notable for a book that claims to analyze the failures of the entire democratic center. And the fascinating data on distorted voter perceptions, AfD supporters overestimating inflation by a factor of 10, point to an epistemic crisis that Hagelüken's economic policy toolkit alone cannot address.

It is a book that preaches compellingly, but primarily to those already inclined to agree. For German readers navigating the turbulent politics of the mid-2020s, it is essential reading. For international audiences, it offers a valuable German-perspective window into a global phenomenon, though readers coming from Milanovic, Piketty, or Acemoğlu may find the analytical depth comparatively modest.

In the end, Hagelüken has written a rational, evidence-based argument against a political movement that thrives precisely on the irrelevance of rational, evidence-based arguments. Whether the economics of improvement can ultimately defeat the economics of hate remains the defining question of our time.

Rating

⭐⭐⭐½☆ Rating: 3.5 / 5

Pros: Timely and urgent, systematic economic analysis of populism, strong empirical grounding through interviews with leading economists (Acemoğlu, Milanovic, Schularick, Trebesch, Bartels), accessible and engaging journalism, concrete and costed policy proposals, effective "anti-politics" framework, honest neoliberal root cause diagnosis

Cons: Argumentative one-sidedness, limited engagement with conservative or heterodox counter-arguments, unresolved tension between perception-driven and material explanations of populism, conspicuous CDU/CSU blind spot, limited international comparison, optimistic faith in centrist reform capacity, does not adequately confront the short-term resilience of populist economies

Recommended for: Politically engaged readers, economic journalists, policy professionals, students of populism and democratic backsliding, German voters seeking data-driven counter-arguments to right-wing economic promises, social democrats looking for a policy playbook, and anyone interested in the economics of inequality and democratic erosion

Reservations: Not suited for readers seeking ideologically balanced analysis, those looking for deep academic rigor comparable to Piketty or Milanovic, libertarian or conservative readers who will find their perspectives caricatured rather than engaged, or those seeking genuinely structural alternatives beyond the neoliberal-social-democratic binary