How power becomes virtue, virtue becomes influence, and influence becomes power.
Reading time: about 8 minutes.
In this essay
- The invisible hand has a surname
- The moral stock exchange
- The industrial production of common sense
- The political economy of outrage
- Populism: the people™
- The economy of the good citizen
- Can clout be redistributed?
- The Clout Economics hypothesis
There is a remarkable feature of the Indian economy: almost everything can be inherited except the credit for having inherited it.
Property is inherited. Social networks are inherited. Caste advantage is reproduced across generations. Access to education, language, employment and political institutions remains deeply unequal.
Yet, by the time these advantages appear in public life, they have undergone a miraculous transformation.
They are now called merit.
Welcome to Clout Economics, an investigation into how economic and social power acquire the appearance of moral legitimacy.
1. The invisible hand has a surname
Adam Smith gave us the invisible hand of the market.
India made a small adjustment: the invisible hand sometimes belongs to your grandfather.
This is not to say that every successful person owes their position entirely to inheritance. It is to say that markets do not operate independently of society.
They inherit its institutions, hierarchies, property relations and exclusions.
Caste is particularly important here. As B. R. Ambedkar understood, caste is not simply a system of prejudice. It is an organisation of social and economic life, sustained through graded inequality.
The market does not automatically abolish these relations. It can reproduce them in new forms.
An inherited advantage becomes an educational qualification. The qualification becomes a professional credential. The credential becomes authority. Authority becomes an opinion about why the system is fair.
At the end of this process, history has disappeared.
Only talent remains.
Clout Economics studies this disappearance.
2. The moral stock exchange
Capitalism does not simply distribute wealth. It also produces ideas about who deserves wealth, who deserves authority, and whose suffering deserves attention.
This is where clout enters the picture.
Clout is the social recognition that allows certain people, institutions and ideas to exercise influence beyond their immediate economic position.
It can be produced through education, caste status, professional credentials, religious authority, political affiliation, media visibility or cultural prestige.
It can also be exchanged.
Economic capital finances cultural institutions. Cultural prestige attracts political access. Political access creates economic opportunities. Moral authority helps legitimise the entire arrangement.
The exchange rates are not fixed.
A university degree may carry enormous authority in one setting and very little in another. Religious legitimacy may outweigh professional expertise. Online popularity may translate into electoral influence, or fail completely.
The important point is that these forms of power are connected.
Clout is not merely popularity. It is the capacity to convert social recognition into material or institutional advantage.
3. The industrial production of common sense
Every durable system of power requires more than force.
It requires a convincing explanation of why things are the way they are.
Antonio Gramsci called attention to the production of hegemony: the process through which particular interests come to be experienced as common sense.
In India, words such as merit, development, tradition, national interest and social harmony do considerable political work.
They are not meaningless words. Their meanings are contested, and they can serve emancipatory purposes.
But they can also make unequal arrangements appear natural or necessary.
A dispute over land becomes a question of development.
A demand for redistribution becomes a threat to economic growth.
A struggle against caste hierarchy becomes an accusation of dividing society.
A criticism of state power becomes a test of national loyalty.
Notice what has happened.
The original conflict has not been resolved. It has been translated into a moral vocabulary that changes who appears reasonable and who appears dangerous.
The economy has acquired a public relations department.
It is called common sense.
4. The political economy of outrage
The internet introduces another market into this arrangement: the market for attention.
Digital platforms reward content according to systems of engagement, advertising and recommendation.
This does not mean every platform rewards exactly the same behaviour. It means public discourse increasingly takes place within infrastructures that assign measurable value to visibility.
Anger travels. Identification travels. Humiliation travels. So do humour, solidarity and genuine political information.
But circulation is not the same as transformation.
A political movement may achieve enormous visibility without acquiring organisational capacity. Conversely, a movement may exercise substantial material influence through unions, local associations and sustained collective action without dominating the internet.
This creates a fundamental distinction:
The attention economy measures circulation. Political economy asks what that circulation actually changes.
A million views cannot tell us whether wages increased, land changed hands, discriminatory institutions were dismantled or democratic accountability improved.
For those questions, we need to examine power beyond the screen.
5. Populism: the people™
Populism offers a particularly interesting case.
Its central political operation is to construct a division between the people and those presented as their enemies or betrayers.
But the people are not a single economic class, caste or political interest.
They are a political construction.
Ernesto Laclau understood that populist movements bring different demands together under shared symbols and identities.
The question for Clout Economics is what happens to material differences within that unity.
What happens when the billionaire and the unemployed worker are asked to imagine themselves as members of the same injured national community?
What happens when economic insecurity is expressed through religious or cultural grievance?
What happens when the promise of collective dignity substitutes for the redistribution of resources?
These questions matter particularly in India, where caste, religion, class and nationalism intersect in the formation of political identities.
The genius of populist politics is not necessarily that it eliminates inequality.
It is that it can reorganise how inequality is understood.
One may remain economically powerless while acquiring an intensely satisfying sense of political belonging.
Unfortunately, belonging is not legal tender.
6. The economy of the good citizen
Every political order produces an ideal citizen.
Under neoliberalism, this citizen is entrepreneurial, adaptable, productive and individually responsible.
Under majoritarian nationalism, the ideal citizen may also be required to demonstrate cultural authenticity, loyalty and obedience to particular narratives of national history.
These models can coexist.
The citizen must compete in the market while submitting to the nation.
Economic failure becomes a personal shortcoming. Political disagreement becomes a moral defect.
The structural conditions that produce insecurity are displaced onto individual character or collective identity.
Michel Foucault's account of governmentality helps explain how power operates not only through prohibitions but through the production of subjects who regulate themselves.
The question is no longer simply what the state forces people to do.
It is what people come to believe they must become in order to deserve recognition.
Clout Economics examines the production of the deserving subject.
7. Can clout be redistributed?
If clout is socially produced, it can also be politically contested.
This requires distinguishing between visibility and representation, representation and accountability, accountability and actual changes in material power.
The aim is not to abolish influence, expertise or public recognition.
It is to ask how they are produced, whose interests they serve, and what forms of collective power they make possible.
Can political movements develop authority without reproducing inherited hierarchies?
Can digital networks strengthen organisations rather than replace them?
Can cultural institutions distribute resources and decision-making power rather than merely recognise inequality?
Can democracy produce forms of legitimacy that do not depend on wealth, caste status or proximity to the state?
These are not questions of personal virtue.
They are questions of institutional design, political organisation and economic structure.
The Clout Economics hypothesis
Power does not merely accumulate resources. It produces the standards by which its accumulation appears legitimate.
Economic advantage can become social prestige.
Social prestige can become moral authority.
Moral authority can become political influence.
Political influence can protect economic advantage.
And the cycle begins again.
The task of Clout Economics is to make these conversions visible, examine where they fail, and ask how they might be interrupted.
Because the most successful form of power is not the power that announces itself.
It is the power that convinces everyone it has simply earned its place.
Welcome to Clout Economics.
The market is free. Terms and conditions were inherited.
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