Privatising Humanity: How Our Essential Human Needs Became Financial Assets

By Kate Bayliss

A powerful expos 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 devastating consequences of this model, which is contributing to deepening inequality.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1526182998
• ISBN13: 9781526182999
• Release Date: May 2026
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Length: 280 Pages