Podcast appearances and mentions of Joan Robinson

Yesterday, the self-styled San Francisco “progressive” Joan Williams was on the show arguing that Democrats need to relearn the language of the American working class. But, as some of you have noted, Williams seems oblivious to the fact that politics is about more than simply aping other people's language. What you say matters, and the language of American working class, like all industrial working classes, is rooted in a critique of capitalism. She should probably read the New Yorker staff writer John Cassidy's excellent new book, Capitalism and its Critics, which traces capitalism's evolution and criticism from the East India Company through modern times. He defines capitalism as production for profit by privately-owned companies in markets, encompassing various forms from Chinese state capitalism to hyper-globalization. The book examines capitalism's most articulate critics including the Luddites, Marx, Engels, Thomas Carlisle, Adam Smith, Rosa Luxemburg, Keynes & Hayek, and contemporary figures like Sylvia Federici and Thomas Piketty. Cassidy explores how major economists were often critics of their era's dominant capitalist model, and untangles capitalism's complicated relationship with colonialism, slavery and AI which he regards as a potentially unprecedented economic disruption. This should be essential listening for all Democrats seeking to reinvent a post Biden-Harris party and message. 5 key takeaways* Capitalism has many forms - From Chinese state capitalism to Keynesian managed capitalism to hyper-globalization, all fitting the basic definition of production for profit by privately-owned companies in markets.* Great economists are typically critics - Smith criticized mercantile capitalism, Keynes critiqued laissez-faire capitalism, and Hayek/Friedman opposed managed capitalism. Each generation's leading economists challenge their era's dominant model.* Modern corporate structure has deep roots - The East India Company was essentially a modern multinational corporation with headquarters, board of directors, stockholders, and even a private army - showing capitalism's organizational continuity across centuries.* Capitalism is intertwined with colonialism and slavery - Industrial capitalism was built on pre-existing colonial and slave systems, particularly through the cotton industry and plantation economies.* AI represents a potentially unprecedented disruption - Unlike previous technological waves, AI may substitute rather than complement human labor on a massive scale, potentially creating political backlash exceeding even the "China shock" that contributed to Trump's rise.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Full TranscriptAndrew Keen: Hello, everybody. A couple of days ago, we did a show with Joan Williams. She has a new book out, "Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back." A book about language, about how to talk to the American working class. She also had a piece in Jacobin Magazine, an anti-capitalist magazine, about how the left needs to speak to what she calls average American values. We talked, of course, about Bernie Sanders and AOC and their language of fighting oligarchy, and the New York Times followed that up with "The Enduring Power of Anti-Capitalism in American Politics."But of course, that brings the question: what exactly is capitalism? I did a little bit of research. We can find definitions of capitalism from AI, from Wikipedia, even from online dictionaries, but I thought we might do a little better than relying on Wikipedia and come to a man who's given capitalism and its critics a great deal of thought. John Cassidy is well known as a staff writer at The New Yorker. He's the author of a wonderful book, the best book, actually, on the dot-com insanity. And his new book, "Capitalism and its Critics," is out this week. John, congratulations on the book.So I've got to be a bit of a schoolmaster with you, John, and get some definitions first. What exactly is capitalism before we get to criticism of it?John Cassidy: Yeah, I mean, it's a very good question, Andrew. Obviously, through the decades, even the centuries, there have been many different definitions of the term capitalism and there are different types of capitalism. To not be sort of too ideological about it, the working definition I use is basically production for profit—that could be production of goods or mostly in the new and, you know, in today's economy, production of services—for profit by companies which are privately owned in markets. That's a very sort of all-encompassing definition.Within that, you can have all sorts of different types of capitalism. You can have Chinese state capitalism, you can have the old mercantilism, which industrial capitalism came after, which Trump seems to be trying to resurrect. You can have Keynesian managed capitalism that we had for 30 or 40 years after the Second World War, which I grew up in in the UK. Or you can have sort of hyper-globalization, hyper-capitalism that we've tried for the last 30 years. There are all those different varieties of capitalism consistent with a basic definition, I think.Andrew Keen: That keeps you busy, John. I know you started this project, which is a big book and it's a wonderful book. I read it. I don't always read all the books I have on the show, but I read from cover to cover full of remarkable stories of the critics of capitalism. You note in the beginning that you began this in 2016 with the beginnings of Trump. What was it about the 2016 election that triggered a book about capitalism and its critics?John Cassidy: Well, I was reporting on it at the time for The New Yorker and it struck me—I covered, I basically covered the economy in various forms for various publications since the late 80s, early 90s. In fact, one of my first big stories was the stock market crash of '87. So yes, I am that old. But it seemed to me in 2016 when you had Bernie Sanders running from the left and Trump running from the right, but both in some way offering very sort of similar critiques of capitalism. People forget that Trump in 2016 actually was running from the left of the Republican Party. He was attacking big business. He was attacking Wall Street. He doesn't do that these days very much, but at the time he was very much posing as the sort of outsider here to protect the interests of the average working man.And it seemed to me that when you had this sort of pincer movement against the then ruling model, this wasn't just a one-off. It seemed to me it was a sort of an emerging crisis of legitimacy for the system. And I thought there could be a good book written about how we got to here. And originally I thought it would be a relatively short book just based on the last sort of 20 or 30 years since the collapse of the Cold War and the sort of triumphalism of the early 90s.But as I got into it more and more, I realized that so many of the issues which had been raised, things like globalization, rising inequality, monopoly power, exploitation, even pollution and climate change, these issues go back to the very start of the capitalist system or the industrial capitalist system back in sort of late 18th century, early 19th century Britain. So I thought, in the end, I thought, you know what, let's just do the whole thing soup to nuts through the eyes of the critics.There have obviously been many, many histories of capitalism written. I thought that an original way to do it, or hopefully original, would be to do a sort of a narrative through the lives and the critiques of the critics of various stages. So that's, I hope, what sets it apart from other books on the subject, and also provides a sort of narrative frame because, you know, I am a New Yorker writer, I realize if you want people to read things, you've got to make it readable. Easiest way to make things readable is to center them around people. People love reading about other people. So that's sort of the narrative frame. I start off with a whistleblower from the East India Company back in the—Andrew Keen: Yeah, I want to come to that. But before, John, my sense is that to simplify what you're saying, this is a labor of love. You're originally from Leeds, the heart of Yorkshire, the center of the very industrial revolution, the first industrial revolution where, in your historical analysis, capitalism was born. Is it a labor of love? What's your family relationship with capitalism? How long was the family in Leeds?John Cassidy: Right, I mean that's a very good question. It is a labor of love in a way, but it's not—our family doesn't go—I'm from an Irish family, family of Irish immigrants who moved to England in the 1940s and 1950s. So my father actually did start working in a big mill, the Kirkstall Forge in Leeds, which is a big steel mill, and he left after seeing one of his co-workers have his arms chopped off in one of the machinery, so he decided it wasn't for him and he spent his life working in the construction industry, which was dominated by immigrants as it is here now.So I don't have a—it's not like I go back to sort of the start of the industrial revolution, but I did grow up in the middle of Leeds, very working class, very industrial neighborhood. And what a sort of irony is, I'll point out, I used to, when I was a kid, I used to play golf on a municipal golf course called Gotts Park in Leeds, which—you know, most golf courses in America are sort of in the affluent suburbs, country clubs. This was right in the middle of Armley in Leeds, which is where the Victorian jail is and a very rough neighborhood. There's a small bit of land which they built a golf course on. It turns out it was named after one of the very first industrialists, Benjamin Gott, who was a wool and textile industrialist, and who played a part in the Luddite movement, which I mention.So it turns out, I was there when I was 11 or 12, just learning how to play golf on this scrappy golf course. And here I am, 50 years later, writing about Benjamin Gott at the start of the Industrial Revolution. So yeah, no, sure. I think it speaks to me in a way that perhaps it wouldn't to somebody else from a different background.Andrew Keen: We did a show with William Dalrymple, actually, a couple of years ago. He's been on actually since, the Anglo or Scottish Indian historian. His book on the East India Company, "The Anarchy," is a classic. You begin in some ways your history of capitalism with the East India Company. What was it about the East India Company, John, that makes it different from other for-profit organizations in economic, Western economic history?John Cassidy: I mean, I read that. It's a great book, by the way. That was actually quoted in my chapter on these. Yeah, I remember. I mean, the reason I focused on it was for two reasons. Number one, I was looking for a start, a narrative start to the book. And it seemed to me, you know, the obvious place to start is with the start of the industrial revolution. If you look at economics history textbooks, that's where they always start with Arkwright and all the inventors, you know, who were the sort of techno-entrepreneurs of their time, the sort of British Silicon Valley, if you could think of it as, in Lancashire and Derbyshire in the late 18th century.So I knew I had to sort of start there in some way, but I thought that's a bit pat. Is there another way into it? And it turns out that in 1772 in England, there was a huge bailout of the East India Company, very much like the sort of 2008, 2009 bailout of Wall Street. The company got into trouble. So I thought, you know, maybe there's something there. And I eventually found this guy, William Bolts, who worked for the East India Company, turned into a whistleblower after he was fired for finagling in India like lots of the people who worked for the company did.So that gave me two things. Number one, it gave me—you know, I'm a writer, so it gave me something to focus on a narrative. His personal history is very interesting. But number two, it gave me a sort of foundation because industrial capitalism didn't come from nowhere. You know, it was built on top of a pre-existing form of capitalism, which we now call mercantile capitalism, which was very protectionist, which speaks to us now. But also it had these big monopolistic multinational companies.The East India Company, in some ways, was a very modern corporation. It had a headquarters in Leadenhall Street in the city of London. It had a board of directors, it had stockholders, the company sent out very detailed instructions to the people in the field in India and Indonesia and Malaysia who were traders who bought things from the locals there, brought them back to England on their company ships. They had a company army even to enforce—to protect their operations there. It was an incredible multinational corporation.So that was also, I think, fascinating because it showed that even in the pre-existing system, you know, big corporations existed, there were monopolies, they had royal monopolies given—first the East India Company got one from Queen Elizabeth. But in some ways, they were very similar to modern monopolistic corporations. And they had some of the problems we've seen with modern monopolistic corporations, the way they acted. And Bolts was the sort of first corporate whistleblower, I thought. Yeah, that was a way of sort of getting into the story, I think. Hopefully, you know, it's just a good read, I think.William Bolts's story because he was—he came from nowhere, he was Dutch, he wasn't even English and he joined the company as a sort of impoverished young man, went to India like a lot of English minor aristocrats did to sort of make your fortune. The way the company worked, you had to sort of work on company time and make as much money as you could for the company, but then in your spare time you're allowed to trade for yourself. So a lot of the—without getting into too much detail, but you know, English aristocracy was based on—you know, the eldest child inherits everything, so if you were the younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk, you actually didn't inherit anything. So all of these minor aristocrats, so major aristocrats, but who weren't first born, joined the East India Company, went out to India and made a fortune, and then came back and built huge houses. Lots of the great manor houses in southern England were built by people from the East India Company and they were known as Nabobs, which is an Indian term. So they were the sort of, you know, billionaires of their time, and it was based on—as I say, it wasn't based on industrial capitalism, it was based on mercantile capitalism.Andrew Keen: Yeah, the beginning of the book, which focuses on Bolts and the East India Company, brings to mind for me two things. Firstly, the intimacy of modern capitalism, modern industrial capitalism with colonialism and of course slavery—lots of books have been written on that. Touch on this and also the relationship between the birth of capitalism and the birth of liberalism or democracy. John Stuart Mill, of course, the father in many ways of Western democracy. His day job, ironically enough, or perhaps not ironically, was at the East India Company. So how do those two things connect, or is it just coincidental?John Cassidy: Well, I don't think it is entirely coincidental, I mean, J.S. Mill—his father, James Mill, was also a well-known philosopher in the sort of, obviously, in the earlier generation, earlier than him. And he actually wrote the official history of the East India Company. And I think they gave his son, the sort of brilliant protégé, J.S. Mill, a job as largely as a sort of sinecure, I think. But he did go in and work there in the offices three or four days a week.But I think it does show how sort of integral—the sort of—as you say, the inheritor and the servant in Britain, particularly, of colonial capitalism was. So the East India Company was, you know, it was in decline by that stage in the middle of the 19th century, but it didn't actually give up its monopoly. It wasn't forced to give up its monopoly on the Indian trade until 1857, after, you know, some notorious massacres and there was a sort of public outcry.So yeah, no, that's—it's very interesting that the British—it's sort of unique to Britain in a way, but it's interesting that industrial capitalism arose alongside this pre-existing capitalist structure and somebody like Mill is a sort of paradoxical figure because actually he was quite critical of aspects of industrial capitalism and supported sort of taxes on the rich, even though he's known as the great, you know, one of the great apostles of the free market and free market liberalism. And his day job, as you say, he was working for the East India Company.Andrew Keen: What about the relationship between the birth of industrial capitalism, colonialism and slavery? Those are big questions and I know you deal with them in some—John Cassidy: I think you can't just write an economic history of capitalism now just starting with the cotton industry and say, you know, it was all about—it was all about just technical progress and gadgets, etc. It was built on a sort of pre-existing system which was colonial and, you know, the slave trade was a central element of that. Now, as you say, there have been lots and lots of books written about it, the whole 1619 project got an incredible amount of attention a few years ago. So I didn't really want to rehash all that, but I did want to acknowledge the sort of role of slavery, especially in the rise of the cotton industry because of course, a lot of the raw cotton was grown in the plantations in the American South.So the way I actually ended up doing that was by writing a chapter about Eric Williams, a Trinidadian writer who ended up as the Prime Minister of Trinidad when it became independent in the 1960s. But when he was younger, he wrote a book which is now regarded as a classic. He went to Oxford to do a PhD, won a scholarship. He was very smart. I won a sort of Oxford scholarship myself but 50 years before that, he came across the Atlantic and did an undergraduate degree in history and then did a PhD there and his PhD thesis was on slavery and capitalism.And at the time, in the 1930s, the link really wasn't acknowledged. You could read any sort of standard economic history written by British historians, and they completely ignored that. He made the argument that, you know, slavery was integral to the rise of capitalism and he basically started an argument which has been raging ever since the 1930s and, you know, if you want to study economic history now you have to sort of—you know, have to have to address that. And the way I thought, even though the—it's called the Williams thesis is very famous. I don't think many people knew much about where it came from. So I thought I'd do a chapter on—Andrew Keen: Yeah, that chapter is excellent. You mentioned earlier the Luddites, you're from Yorkshire where Luddism in some ways was born. One of the early chapters is on the Luddites. We did a show with Brian Merchant, his book, "Blood in the Machine," has done very well, I'm sure you're familiar with it. I always understood the Luddites as being against industrialization, against the machine, as opposed to being against capitalism. But did those two things get muddled together in the history of the Luddites?John Cassidy: I think they did. I mean, you know, Luddites, when we grew up, I mean you're English too, you know to be called a Luddite was a term of abuse, right? You know, you were sort of antediluvian, anti-technology, you're stupid. It was only, I think, with the sort of computer revolution, the tech revolution of the last 30, 40 years and the sort of disruptions it's caused, that people have started to look back at the Luddites and say, perhaps they had a point.For them, they were basically pre-industrial capitalism artisans. They worked for profit-making concerns, small workshops. Some of them worked for themselves, so they were sort of sole proprietor capitalists. Or they worked in small venues, but the rise of industrial capitalism, factory capitalism or whatever, basically took away their livelihoods progressively. So they associated capitalism with new technology. In their minds it was the same. But their argument wasn't really a technological one or even an economic one, it was more a moral one. They basically made the moral argument that capitalists shouldn't have the right to just take away their livelihoods with no sort of recompense for them.At the time they didn't have any parliamentary representation. You know, they weren't revolutionaries. The first thing they did was create petitions to try and get parliament to step in, sort of introduce some regulation here. They got turned down repeatedly by the sort of—even though it was a very aristocratic parliament, places like Manchester and Leeds didn't have any representation at all. So it was only after that that they sort of turned violent and started, you know, smashing machines and machines, I think, were sort of symbols of the system, which they saw as morally unjust.And I think that's sort of what—obviously, there's, you know, a lot of technological disruption now, so we can, especially as it starts to come for the educated cognitive class, we can sort of sympathize with them more. But I think the sort of moral critique that there's this, you know, underneath the sort of great creativity and economic growth that capitalism produces, there is also a lot of destruction and a lot of victims. And I think that message, you know, is becoming a lot more—that's why I think why they've been rediscovered in the last five or ten years and I'm one of the people I guess contributing to that rediscovery.Andrew Keen: There's obviously many critiques of capitalism politically. I want to come to Marx in a second, but your chapter, I thought, on Thomas Carlyle and this nostalgic conservatism was very important and there are other conservatives as well. John, do you think that—and you mentioned Trump earlier, who is essentially a nostalgist for a—I don't know, some sort of bizarre pre-capitalist age in America. Is there something particularly powerful about the anti-capitalism of romantics like Carlyle, 19th century Englishman, there were many others of course.John Cassidy: Well, I think so. I mean, I think what is—conservatism, when we were young anyway, was associated with Thatcherism and Reaganism, which, you know, lionized the free market and free market capitalism and was a reaction against the pre-existing form of capitalism, Keynesian capitalism of the sort of 40s to the 80s. But I think what got lost in that era was the fact that there have always been—you've got Hayek up there, obviously—Andrew Keen: And then Keynes and Hayek, the two—John Cassidy: Right, it goes to the end of that. They had a great debate in the 1930s about these issues. But Hayek really wasn't a conservative person, and neither was Milton Friedman. They were sort of free market revolutionaries, really, that you'd let the market rip and it does good things. And I think that that sort of a view, you know, it just became very powerful. But we sort of lost sight of the fact that there was also a much older tradition of sort of suspicion of radical changes of any type. And that was what conservatism was about to some extent. If you think about Baldwin in Britain, for example.And there was a sort of—during the Industrial Revolution, some of the strongest supporters of factory acts to reduce hours and hourly wages for women and kids were actually conservatives, Tories, as they were called at the time, like Ashley. That tradition, Carlyle was a sort of extreme representative of that. I mean, Carlyle was a sort of proto-fascist, let's not romanticize him, he lionized strongmen, Frederick the Great, and he didn't really believe in democracy. But he also had—he was appalled by the sort of, you know, the—like, what's the phrase I'm looking for? The sort of destructive aspects of industrial capitalism, both on the workers, you know, he said it was a dehumanizing system, sounded like Marx in some ways. That it dehumanized the workers, but also it destroyed the environment.He was an early environmentalist. He venerated the environment, was actually very strongly linked to the transcendentalists in America, people like Thoreau, who went to visit him when he visited Britain and he saw the sort of destructive impact that capitalism was having locally in places like Manchester, which were filthy with filthy rivers, etc. So he just saw the whole system as sort of morally bankrupt and he was a great writer, Carlyle, whatever you think of him. Great user of language, so he has these great ringing phrases like, you know, the cash nexus or calling it the Gospel of Mammonism, the shabbiest gospel ever preached under the sun was industrial capitalism.So, again, you know, that's a sort of paradoxical thing, because I think for so long conservatism was associated with, you know, with support for the free market and still is in most of the Republican Party, but then along comes Trump and sort of conquers the party with a, you know, more skeptical, as you say, romantic, not really based on any reality, but a sort of romantic view that America can stand by itself in the world. I mean, I see Trump actually as a sort of an effort to sort of throw back to mercantile capitalism in a way. You know, which was not just pre-industrial, but was also pre-democracy, run by monarchs, which I'm sure appeals to him, and it was based on, you know, large—there were large tariffs. You couldn't import things in the UK. If you want to import anything to the UK, you have to send it on a British ship because of the navigation laws. It was a very protectionist system and it's actually, you know, as I said, had a lot of parallels with what Trump's trying to do or tries to do until he backs off.Andrew Keen: You cheat a little bit in the book in the sense that you—everyone has their own chapter. We'll talk a little bit about Hayek and Smith and Lenin and Friedman. You do have one chapter on Marx, but you also have a chapter on Engels. So you kind of cheat. You combine the two. Is it possible, though, to do—and you've just written this book, so you know this as well as anyone. How do you write a book about capitalism and its critics and only really give one chapter to Marx, who is so dominant? I mean, you've got lots of Marxists in the book, including Lenin and Luxemburg. How fundamental is Marx to a criticism of capitalism? Is most criticism, especially from the left, from progressives, is it really just all a footnote to Marx?John Cassidy: I wouldn't go that far, but I think obviously on the left he is the central figure. But there's an element of sort of trying to rebuild Engels a bit in this. I mean, I think of Engels and Marx—I mean obviously Marx wrote the great classic "Capital," etc. But in the 1840s, when they both started writing about capitalism, Engels was sort of ahead of Marx in some ways. I mean, the sort of materialist concept, the idea that economics rules everything, Engels actually was the first one to come up with that in an essay in the 1840s which Marx then published in one of his—in the German newspaper he worked for at the time, radical newspaper, and he acknowledged openly that that was really what got him thinking seriously about economics, and even in the late—in 20, 25 years later when he wrote "Capital," all three volumes of it and the Grundrisse, just these enormous outpourings of analysis on capitalism.He acknowledged Engels's role in that and obviously Engels wrote the first draft of the Communist Manifesto in 1848 too, which Marx then topped and tailed and—he was a better writer obviously, Marx, and he gave it the dramatic language that we all know it for. So I think Engels and Marx together obviously are the central sort of figures in the sort of left-wing critique. But they didn't start out like that. I mean, they were very obscure, you've got to remember.You know, they were—when they were writing, Marx was writing "Capital" in London, it never even got published in English for another 20 years. It was just published in German. He was basically an expat. He had been thrown out of Germany, he had been thrown out of France, so England was last resort and the British didn't consider him a threat so they were happy to let him and the rest of the German sort of left in there. I think it became—it became the sort of epochal figure after his death really, I think, when he was picked up by the left-wing parties, which are especially the SPD in Germany, which was the first sort of socialist mass party and was officially Marxist until the First World War and there were great internal debates.And then of course, because Lenin and the Russians came out of that tradition too, Marxism then became the official doctrine of the Soviet Union when they adopted a version of it. And again there were massive internal arguments about what Marx really meant, and in fact, you know, one interpretation of the last 150 years of left-wing sort of intellectual development is as a sort of argument about what did Marx really mean and what are the important bits of it, what are the less essential bits of it. It's a bit like the "what did Keynes really mean" that you get in liberal circles.So yeah, Marx, obviously, this is basically an intellectual history of critiques of capitalism. In that frame, he is absolutely a central figure. Why didn't I give him more space than a chapter and a chapter and a half with Engels? There have been a million books written about Marx. I mean, it's not that—it's not that he's an unknown figure. You know, there's a best-selling book written in Britain about 20 years ago about him and then I was quoting, in my biographical research, I relied on some more recent, more scholarly biographies. So he's an endlessly fascinating figure but I didn't want him to dominate the book so I gave him basically the same space as everybody else.Andrew Keen: You've got, as I said, you've got a chapter on Adam Smith who's often considered the father of economics. You've got a chapter on Keynes. You've got a chapter on Friedman. And you've got a chapter on Hayek, all the great modern economists. Is it possible, John, to be a distinguished economist one way or the other and not be a critic of capitalism?John Cassidy: Well, I don't—I mean, I think history would suggest that the greatest economists have been critics of capitalism in their own time. People would say to me, what the hell have you got Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek in a book about critics of capitalism? They were great exponents, defenders of capitalism. They loved the system. That is perfectly true. But in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, middle of the 20th century, they were actually arch-critics of the ruling form of capitalism at the time, which was what I call managed capitalism. What some people call Keynesianism, what other people call European social democracy, whatever you call it, it was a model of a mixed economy in which the government played a large role both in propping up demand and in providing an extensive social safety net in the UK and providing public healthcare and public education. It was a sort of hybrid model.Most of the economy in terms of the businesses remained in private hands. So most production was capitalistic. It was a capitalist system. They didn't go to the Soviet model of nationalizing everything and Britain did nationalize some businesses, but most places didn't. The US of course didn't but it was a form of managed capitalism. And Hayek and Friedman were both great critics of that and wanted to sort of move back to 19th century laissez-faire model.Keynes was a—was actually a great, I view him anyway, as really a sort of late Victorian liberal and was trying to protect as much of the sort of J.S. Mill view of the world as he could, but he thought capitalism had one fatal flaw: that it tended to fall into recessions and then they can snowball and the whole system can collapse which is what had basically happened in the early 1930s until Keynesian policies were adopted. Keynes sort of differed from a lot of his followers—I have a chapter on Joan Robinson in there, who were pretty left-wing and wanted to sort of use Keynesianism as a way to shift the economy quite far to the left. Keynes didn't really believe in that. He has a famous quote that, you know, once you get to full employment, you can then rely on the free market to sort of take care of things. He was still a liberal at heart.Going back to Adam Smith, why is he in a book on criticism of capitalism? And again, it goes back to what I said at the beginning. He actually wrote "The Wealth of Nations"—he explains in the introduction—as a critique of mercantile capitalism. His argument was that he was a pro-free trader, pro-small business, free enterprise. His argument was if you get the government out of the way, we don't need these government-sponsored monopolies like the East India Company. If you just rely on the market, the sort of market forces and competition will produce a good outcome. So then he was seen as a great—you know, he is then seen as the apostle of free market capitalism. I mean when I started as a young reporter, when I used to report in Washington, all the conservatives used to wear Adam Smith badges. You don't see Donald Trump wearing an Adam Smith badge, but that was the case.He was also—the other aspect of Smith, which I highlight, which is not often remarked on—he's also a critic of big business. He has a famous section where he discusses the sort of tendency of any group of more than three businessmen when they get together to try and raise prices and conspire against consumers. And he was very suspicious of, as I say, large companies, monopolies. I think if Adam Smith existed today, I mean, I think he would be a big supporter of Lina Khan and the sort of antitrust movement, he would say capitalism is great as long as you have competition, but if you don't have competition it becomes, you know, exploitative.Andrew Keen: Yeah, if Smith came back to live today, you have a chapter on Thomas Piketty, maybe he may not be French, but he may be taking that position about how the rich benefit from the structure of investment. Piketty's core—I've never had Piketty on the show, but I've had some of his followers like Emmanuel Saez from Berkeley. Yeah. How powerful is Piketty's critique of capitalism within the context of the classical economic analysis from Hayek and Friedman? Yeah, it's a very good question.John Cassidy: It's a very good question. I mean, he's a very paradoxical figure, Piketty, in that he obviously shot to world fame and stardom with his book on capital in the 21st century, which in some ways he obviously used the capital as a way of linking himself to Marx, even though he said he never read Marx. But he was basically making the same argument that if you leave capitalism unrestrained and don't do anything about monopolies etc. or wealth, you're going to get massive inequality and he—I think his great contribution, Piketty and the school of people, one of them you mentioned, around him was we sort of had a vague idea that inequality was going up and that, you know, wages were stagnating, etc.What he and his colleagues did is they produced these sort of scientific empirical studies showing in very simple to understand terms how the sort of share of income and wealth of the top 10 percent, the top 5 percent, the top 1 percent and the top 0.1 percent basically skyrocketed from the 1970s to about 2010. And it was, you know, he was an MIT PhD. Saez, who you mentioned, is a Berkeley professor. They were schooled in neoclassical economics at Harvard and MIT and places like that. So the right couldn't dismiss them as sort of, you know, lefties or Trots or whatever who're just sort of making this stuff up. They had to acknowledge that this was actually an empirical reality.I think it did change the whole basis of the debate and it was sort of part of this reaction against capitalism in the 2010s. You know it was obviously linked to the sort of Sanders and the Occupy Wall Street movement at the time. It came out of the—you know, the financial crisis as well when Wall Street disgraced itself. I mean, I wrote a previous book on all that, but people have sort of, I think, forgotten the great reaction against that a decade ago, which I think even Trump sort of exploited, as I say, by using anti-banker rhetoric at the time.So, Piketty was a great figure, I think, from, you know, I was thinking, who are the most influential critics of capitalism in the 21st century? And I think you'd have to put him up there on the list. I'm not saying he's the only one or the most eminent one. But I think he is a central figure. Now, of course, you'd think, well, this is a really powerful critic of capitalism, and nobody's going to pick up, and Bernie's going to take off and everything. But here we are a decade later now. It seems to be what the backlash has produced is a swing to the right, not a swing to the left. So that's, again, a sort of paradox.Andrew Keen: One person I didn't expect to come up in the book, John, and I was fascinated with this chapter, is Silvia Federici. I've tried to get her on the show. We've had some books about her writing and her kind of—I don't know, you treat her critique as a feminist one. The role of women. Why did you choose to write a chapter about Federici and that feminist critique of capitalism?John Cassidy: Right, right. Well, I don't think it was just feminist. I'll explain what I think it was. Two reasons. Number one, I wanted to get more women into the book. I mean, it's in some sense, it is a history of economics and economic critiques. And they are overwhelmingly written by men and women were sort of written out of the narrative of capitalism for a very long time. So I tried to include as many sort of women as actual thinkers as I could and I have a couple of early socialist feminist thinkers, Anna Wheeler and Flora Tristan and then I cover some of the—I cover Rosa Luxemburg as the great sort of tribune of the left revolutionary socialist, communist whatever you want to call it. Anti-capitalist I think is probably also important to note about. Yeah, and then I also have Joan Robinson, but I wanted somebody to do something in the modern era, and I thought Federici, in the world of the Wages for Housework movement, is very interesting from two perspectives.Number one, Federici herself is a Marxist, and I think she probably would still consider herself a revolutionary. She's based in New York, as you know now. She lived in New York for 50 years, but she came from—she's originally Italian and came out of the Italian left in the 1960s, which was very radical. Do you know her? Did you talk to her? I didn't talk to her on this. No, she—I basically relied on, there has been a lot of, as you say, there's been a lot of stuff written about her over the years. She's written, you know, she's given various long interviews and she's written a book herself, a version, a history of housework, so I figured it was all there and it was just a matter of pulling it together.But I think the critique, why the critique is interesting, most of the book is a sort of critique of how capitalism works, you know, in the production or you know, in factories or in offices or you know, wherever capitalist operations are working, but her critique is sort of domestic reproduction, as she calls it, the role of unpaid labor in supporting capitalism. I mean it goes back a long way actually. There was this moment, I sort of trace it back to the 1940s and 1950s when there were feminists in America who were demonstrating outside factories and making the point that you know, the factory workers and the operations of the factory, it couldn't—there's one of the famous sort of tire factory in California demonstrations where the women made the argument, look this factory can't continue to operate unless we feed and clothe the workers and provide the next generation of workers. You know, that's domestic reproduction. So their argument was that housework should be paid and Federici took that idea and a couple of her colleagues, she founded the—it's a global movement, but she founded the most famous branch in New York City in the 1970s. In Park Slope near where I live actually.And they were—you call it feminists, they were feminists in a way, but they were rejected by the sort of mainstream feminist movement, the sort of Gloria Steinems of the world, who Federici was very critical of because she said they ignored, they really just wanted to get women ahead in the sort of capitalist economy and they ignored the sort of underlying from her perspective, the underlying sort of illegitimacy and exploitation of that system. So they were never accepted as part of the feminist movement. They're to the left of the Feminist Movement.Andrew Keen: You mentioned Keynes, of course, so central in all this, particularly his analysis of the role of automation in capitalism. We did a show recently with Robert Skidelsky and I'm sure you're familiar—John Cassidy: Yeah, yeah, great, great biography of Keynes.Andrew Keen: Yeah, the great biographer of Keynes, whose latest book is "Mindless: The Human Condition in the Age of AI." You yourself wrote a brilliant book on the last tech mania and dot-com capitalism. I used it in a lot of my writing and books. What's your analysis of AI in this latest mania and the role generally of manias in the history of capitalism and indeed in critiquing capitalism? Is AI just the next chapter of the dot-com boom?John Cassidy: I think it's a very deep question. I think I'd give two answers to it. In one sense it is just the latest mania the way—I mean, the way capitalism works is we have these, I go back to Kondratiev, one of my Russian economists who ended up being killed by Stalin. He was the sort of inventor of the long wave theory of capitalism. We have these short waves where you have sort of booms and busts driven by finance and debt etc. But we also have long waves driven by technology.And obviously, in the last 40, 50 years, the two big ones are the original deployment of the internet and microchip technology in the sort of 80s and 90s culminating in the dot-com boom of the late 90s, which as you say, I wrote about. Thanks very much for your kind comments on the book. If you just sort of compare it from a financial basis I think they are very similar just in terms of the sort of role of hype from Wall Street in hyping up these companies. The sort of FOMO aspect of it among investors that they you know, you can't miss out. So just buy the companies blindly. And the sort of lionization in the press and the media of, you know, of AI as the sort of great wave of the future.So if you take a sort of skeptical market based approach, I would say, yeah, this is just another sort of another mania which will eventually burst and it looked like it had burst for a few weeks when Trump put the tariffs up, now the market seemed to be recovering. But I think there is, there may be something new about it. I am not, I don't pretend to be a technical expert. I try to rely on the evidence of or the testimony of people who know the systems well and also economists who have studied it. It seems to me the closer you get to it the more alarming it is in terms of the potential shock value that there is there.I mean Trump and the sort of reaction to a larger extent can be traced back to the China shock where we had this global shock to American manufacturing and sort of hollowed out a lot of the industrial areas much of it, like industrial Britain was hollowed out in the 80s. If you, you know, even people like Altman and Elon Musk, they seem to think that this is going to be on a much larger scale than that and will basically, you know, get rid of the professions as they exist. Which would be a huge, huge shock. And I think a lot of the economists who studied this, who four or five years ago were relatively optimistic, people like Daron Acemoglu, David Autor—Andrew Keen: Simon Johnson, of course, who just won the Nobel Prize, and he's from England.John Cassidy: Simon, I did an event with Simon earlier this week. You know they've studied this a lot more closely than I have but I do interview them and I think five, six years ago they were sort of optimistic that you know this could just be a new steam engine or could be a microchip which would lead to sort of a lot more growth, rising productivity, rising productivity is usually associated with rising wages so sure there'd be short-term costs but ultimately it would be a good thing. Now, I think if you speak to them, they see since the, you know, obviously, the OpenAI—the original launch and now there's just this huge arms race with no government involvement at all I think they're coming to the conclusion that rather than being developed to sort of complement human labor, all these systems are just being rushed out to substitute for human labor. And it's just going, if current trends persist, it's going to be a China shock on an even bigger scale.You know what is going to, if that, if they're right, that is going to produce some huge political backlash at some point, that's inevitable. So I know—the thing when the dot-com bubble burst, it didn't really have that much long-term impact on the economy. People lost the sort of fake money they thought they'd made. And then the companies, obviously some of the companies like Amazon and you know Google were real genuine profit-making companies and if you bought them early you made a fortune. But AI does seem a sort of bigger, scarier phenomenon to me. I don't know. I mean, you're close to it. What do you think?Andrew Keen: Well, I'm waiting for a book, John, from you. I think you can combine dot-com and capitalism and its critics. We need you probably to cover it—you know more about it than me. Final question, I mean, it's a wonderful book and we haven't even scratched the surface everyone needs to get it. I enjoyed the chapter, for example, on Karl Polanyi and so much more. I mean, it's a big book. But my final question, John, is do you have any regrets about anyone you left out? The one person I would have liked to have been included was Rawls because of his sort of treatment of capitalism and luck as a kind of casino. I'm not sure whether you gave any thought to Rawls, but is there someone in retrospect you should have had a chapter on that you left out?John Cassidy: There are lots of people I left out. I mean, that's the problem. I mean there have been hundreds and hundreds of critics of capitalism. Rawls, of course, incredibly influential and his idea of the sort of, you know, the veil of ignorance that you should judge things not knowing where you are in the income distribution and then—Andrew Keen: And it's luck. I mean the idea of some people get lucky and some people don't.John Cassidy: It is the luck of the draw, obviously, what card you pull. I think that is a very powerful critique, but I just—because I am more of an expert on economics, I tended to leave out philosophers and sociologists. I mean, you know, you could say, where's Max Weber? Where are the anarchists? You know, where's Emma Goldman? Where's John Kenneth Galbraith, the sort of great mid-century critic of American industrial capitalism? There's so many people that you could include. I mean, I could have written 10 volumes. In fact, I refer in the book to, you know, there's always been a problem. G.D.H. Cole, a famous English historian, wrote a history of socialism back in the 1960s and 70s. You know, just getting to 1850 took him six volumes. So, you've got to pick and choose, and I don't claim this is the history of capitalism and its critics. That would be a ridiculous claim to make. I just claim it's a history written by me, and hopefully the people are interested in it, and they're sufficiently diverse that you can address all the big questions.Andrew Keen: Well it's certainly incredibly timely. Capitalism and its critics—more and more of them. Sometimes they don't even describe themselves as critics of capitalism when they're talking about oligarchs or billionaires, they're really criticizing capitalism. A must read from one of America's leading journalists. And would you call yourself a critic of capitalism, John?John Cassidy: Yeah, I guess I am, to some extent, sure. I mean, I'm not a—you know, I'm not on the far left, but I'd say I'm a center-left critic of capitalism. Yes, definitely, that would be fair.Andrew Keen: And does the left need to learn? Does everyone on the left need to read the book and learn the language of anti-capitalism in a more coherent and honest way?John Cassidy: I hope so. I mean, obviously, I'd be talking my own book there, as they say, but I hope that people on the left, but not just people on the left. I really did try to sort of be fair to the sort of right-wing critiques as well. I included the Carlyle chapter particularly, obviously, but in the later chapters, I also sort of refer to this emerging critique on the right, the sort of economic nationalist critique. So hopefully, I think people on the right could read it to understand the critiques from the left, and people on the left could read it to understand some of the critiques on the right as well.Andrew Keen: Well, it's a lovely book. It's enormously erudite and simultaneously readable. Anyone who likes John Cassidy's work from The New Yorker will love it. Congratulations, John, on the new book, and I'd love to get you back on the show as anti-capitalism in America picks up steam and perhaps manifests itself in the 2028 election. Thank you so much.John Cassidy: Thanks very much for inviting me on, it was fun.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

This is the second episode in a miniseries on heterodox economists—people who embrace completely different approaches to economics than the standard thinkers. Adam and Cameron describe the life and work of Joan Robinson, who worked with John Maynard Keynes on his hugely influential macroeconomics book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money—but came to regard Keynesianism as a failed revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Die EU erwägt die Einführung von Strafzöllen gegen chinesische E-Autos. Damit folgt Brüssel Washington, wo US-Präsident Biden Strafzölle in Höhe von 100 Prozent auf E-Moblität made in China verhängt hat. Ganz so hoch sollen die Zölle in der EU nicht ausfallen, dennoch ist die Tendenz eindeutig: Der Protektionismus, der noch unter Donald Trump von der hiesigen Presse vollmundig verdammt wurde, ist jetzt von konservativ bis linksliberal beliebt. Der Westen will Chinas Wirtschaftswachstum bremsen, um die Vormachtstellung halten zu können. Dafür nimmt man auch eigene Verluste in Kauf. Zudem schwächt man so erheblich den Klimaschutz. Das Prinzip ist uralt und hat einen Namen: „Beggar thy neighbour“. Schon Adam Smith schrieb über dieses verhängnisvolle Prinzip, das Handelsstreitigkeiten verschärft und im Ganzen den Wohlstand mindert. 1937 wird Joan Robinson in einem Aufsatz die Waffen von „Beggar thy neighbour“ erläutern und vor diesem Wirtschaftsnationalismus warnen. In der neuen Folge von „Wohlstand für Alle“ erklären Ole Nymoen und Wolfgang M. Schmitt wer hier wen und warum ruinieren will. Literatur: Douglas A. Irwin, Petros C. Mavroidis, Alan O. Sykes: The Genesis of the GATT: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/genesis-of-the-gatt/796EE0ABCE00A2F8DD46812AFD9DD0CC Michael Pettis: „China's problem is excess savings, not too much capacity“, FT: https://www.ft.com/content/879f5de7-cd9b-4987-9c2b-8b23cf0f3800 Joan Robinson: „Beggar-My-Neighbour. Remedies for Unemployment“, in: Dies.: Essay in the Theory of Employment, Oxford 1947. Adam Smith: Der Wohlstand der Nationen. Kapitel 3: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book04/ch03b.htm Denis Wilmann über billige Autos in China, „Business Insider“: https://www.businessinsider.de/wirtschaft/warum-elektroautos-in-china-so-viel-guenstiger-sind-als-in-europa/ Unser Kinderbuch namens "Die kleinen Holzdiebe" ist nun vorbestellbar! Alle Informationen findet ihr unter: https://www.suhrkamp.de/buch/die-kleinen-holzdiebe-und-das-raetsel-des-juggernaut-t-9783458644774 Unsere Zusatzinhalte könnt ihr bei Steady und Patreon hören. Vielen Dank! Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/oleundwolfgang Steady: https://steadyhq.com/de/oleundwolfgang/about Ihr könnt uns unterstützen - herzlichen Dank! Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/oleundwolfgang Konto: Wolfgang M. Schmitt, Ole Nymoen Betreff: Wohlstand fuer Alle IBAN: DE67 5745 0120 0130 7996 12 BIC: MALADE51NWD Social Media: Instagram: Unser gemeinsamer Kanal: https://www.instagram.com/oleundwolfgang/ Ole: https://www.instagram.com/ole.nymoen/ Wolfgang: https://www.instagram.com/wolfgangmschmitt/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@oleundwolfgang Twitter: Unser gemeinsamer Kanal: https://twitter.com/OleUndWolfgang Ole: twitter.com/nymoen_ole Wolfgang: twitter.com/SchmittJunior Die gesamte WfA-Literaturliste: https://wohlstand-fuer-alle.netlify.app

Fresh Economic Thinking exists to elevate the quality of economic discussion. This is why I write detailed articles about influential economic ideas—I want to help progress the discipline. Please consider a paid subscription to support these efforts. Like many well-trained economists, I took Adam Smith's argument about productivity gains being caused by the division of labour at face value. It wasn't until I read Joan Robinson dismiss the argument in her 1973 textbook An Introduction to Modern Economics that I began to put the effort into understanding the division of labour. I realised it was an incoherent explanation for productivity gains.But I also realised that the pin factory story could provide valuable lessons about economics nonetheless.Robinson dismisses Smith by suggesting that people can equally divide their labour across different tasks through time. The 18 distinct operations Smith recounts at the pin factory could just as easily be conducted by the same labourer on 18 different days to generate the same output per person over 18 days as in the case where labour is divided between workers.Further, the fact that relatively unskilled labour could perform any of these tasks adds to the case that it is not specialist skills from the division of labour at play in generating productivity gains. One-way causality from the division of labour to productivity gains is a highly problematic story.But that leaves open the question about the actual mechanism that provided the enormous productivity gains in the pin factories of the mid-1700s.Instead of Smith's division of labour hypothesis, let me propose a capital investment hypothesis to explain the productivity of his pin factory. This hypothesis suggests that it is the technical nature of capital that determines the way labour will be divided across tasks to maximise output and that the division of labour is a response to this capital investment. The causality goes from capital investment to labour division.To guide my inquiry I use the structured approach I have described in the past for confronting economic issues by first asking questions about aggregation. For example, why are there 18 tasks to make a pin, not 5, 9, 16, or 37? Why are 18 workers in one pin factory and not 9 in one factory and 9 in another owned by a different entity? The answer to these questions is capital. The image above shows the tools and equipment used in the pin factories described by Smith. Notice that the tools and machines in the picture have been designed to more efficiently perform distinct parts of the pin-making process. It is the way the tools have been designed to efficiently break down the task of making pins that leads to the labour division to man the tools.Smith came close to instead presenting the capital investment hypothesis. He says…a workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade), nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. [my emphasis]He suggests that the division of labour probably gave rise to the machines, rather than the machines themselves giving rise to the division of labour. This seems very strange to me.And this logic comes undone later in the paragraph, even though he ignores the inconsistency in his argument. …the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. [my emphasis]Even based on Smith's observations it is the tools and machines that generate the 18 tasks. People can, and do, perform more than one of them. So how exactly did the division of labour give rise to the invention of the necessary machines that generate 18 tasks with only ten men?If it was the division of labour that led to increased productivity, labour could just as easily be divided between firms. The fact that pin factories, even with only ten men, still performed all 18 tasks, instead of specialising in just 10 tasks, is clear evidence that there is something special and coordinated about the tasks themselves that arise from the particular capital investments. The tools and machines are designed to be compatible with each other, and if part of the process is done outside the firm, each of the two firms would inevitably be tied to the same compatible capital equipment, and would therefore find gains by merging into a single firm. The next step in a structured inquiry is to ask questions about timing to see if we can more sharply distinguish between the division of labour and capital hypotheses. If it was only after the machines were introduced that labour was divided in a particular way, then that is evidence for the capital hypothesis. If labour was divided into 18 tasks before the investment in machines, achieving the same tasks in the absence of those specialist tools, then the division of labour hypothesis holds. Quite clearly when we look at timing, the capital investment hypothesis comes out ahead. The third and final step in our inquiry is to think about prediction. The capital investment hypothesis predicts that labour task specialisation can respond to capital investments in either direction—either with more division of labour or by adding to the tasks done by a single labourer.A modern test of these predictions could be garbage collection. With rear-loading trucks, labour is divided between driving the truck and loading the bins. But with more advanced side-loading trucks with robotic arms, the labour is once again undivided between driving the truck and collecting the bins. The progression of capital technology determines the division of tasks.The same would be true in the pin factory. If new tools were invented to get the same result with 5 steps instead of 18, that would be a huge efficiency gain but a major reversal of labour specialisation. Where is the confusion arising?What is strange to me is that increasing the number of possible production tasks in an economy means that each person does more tasks rather than fewer—the opposite of labour division. Imagine a tribe of 50 people that can undertake 100 productive tasks. Then with the invention of new tools, the number of possible tasks the tribe can undertake expands to 150. The average tribe member is now doing three instead of two tasks each.That doesn't seem like labour division. I think the confusion arises partly because of labelling conventions about roles in society rather than actual units of labour being devoted to fewer clearly defined tasks.Here is a minimal example of mixing up socially-labelled productive roles (i.e. butcher, baker etc.) with actual tasks (baking, mixing, filleting etc.).Inspired by stories about how the division of labour was part of early human tool-making in tribes of Jordan, my example is a six-person tribe that undertakes six defined tasks, of which the two named roles undertake three tasks each. Thinking in terms of roles there are three hunters and three gatherers. That is, two types of specialist. But in terms of tasks, there are six tasks to be done. Each hunter must be able to track, kill and clean the game. Each gatherer must collect, prepare, and cook the fruits and vegetables. You might want to argue that the way I define tasks is open to limitless ad hoc classifications. Tracking an animal could be further divided into a team pursuit with specific sub-tasks for each member. Same with cleaning an animal. But this is kind of the point. Any defined task will be a bundle of sub-tasks. But to understand the division of labour we need to keep track of tasks at any one particular level of aggregation and not fall into the trap of calling something specialisation when it is just a different bundling of more tasks into one job.One of the tribe members now invents the spear and woomera. Regular production of these tools requires three additional tasks to be undertaken by the new toolmaker role in the tribe. One former hunter becomes a tool maker, and one former gatherer becomes a tool maker. Now, after this new capital invention, we have more roles and fewer people in each of them. Exactly as predicted by the division of labour story!But if we instead look at the tasks, we have more tasks per person. Instead of being able to specialise in one task, like tracking, each hunter must now undertake more than one task on average as there are only two hunters available for three tasks—the same for our gatherers. What we see as specialisation in roles is the automatic result, not the cause, of increasing productive capacities. What has happened is that the invention of new production techniques has allowed more tasks to be undertaken by each person leading to fewer people in each role. Here, we again see that it is the nature of capital that defines both roles and available tasks at a societal level, just as within a pin factory the nature of the capital equipment defines the roles and available tasks. At the macro level, the most productive countries are not full of people doing repetitive narrowly defined non-skilled tasks, but highly educated people doing specialist roles involving a hierarchy of complex and interrelated tasks that require specialist capital and training to master.So what?Like many stories in economics, the division of labour as a productivity enhancer has been approached far too narrowly. There are many economic lessons in the story of the pin factory, and if we probed deeper we could understand more about what considerations determine the boundaries of firms, why firms are internally not structured around market principles, and other important questions about how we coordinate productive activities. There is also a big question about the incentives to invest in new capital equipment and experiment with new technologies. Although economics has a focus on technology as a productivity enhancer, there is really limited coherent theory on what causes faster or slower capital investment. Had we taken a different lesson from Smith about his pin factory, perhaps our knowledge of capital investment incentives would be better today than it is, and we would likely understand the process of economic growth and productivity gain much better than we do. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

Our guests this week, Faith & Ian Anderson, and Joan & Campbell Robinson, represent the excellent  brass band tradition for which The Salvation Army is justly famous.Plus, Joan Robinson reveals a remarkable connection to the very beginnings of William Booth's Army.Also, the Grammys? The Emmys? The Oscars? Forget 'em. This is the coveted Barry Tone Award. The envelope, please...Thanks for listening. Share with your friends. Find this and more at cheynemusic.com/podcast.

*SPECIAL EDITION ECONOMIC SERIES RELEASE*Are you curious about why not all economists are rich? It might seem surprising given their reputation for possessing great insights into the workings of the economy. But fear not, we've got the answers you're looking for in this episode.We've gathered notable quotes from some of the most renowned economists of the 20th century, including Joan Robinson, Laurence Peter, John Galbraith, John Maynard Keyes, and F.A. Hayek. And we're not just reciting them – we'll be diving deep into their insights to explain why they matter and what they can teach us about the world we live in.So if you want to gain a better understanding of the economy and the people who study it, tune in to this episode. Don't miss out on the chance to learn from some of the greatest economic minds of the past century. Listen now, and let us convince you that their insights are truly invaluable.Thanks to our sponsor, S.E.E.D. Planning Group! S.E.E.D. is a fee-only financial planning firm with a fiduciary obligation to put your best interest first. Schedule your free discovery meeting at www.seedpg.com

Tom and Don chat about some books and shows, including Robert Musil, Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle, Karamustafa, J.M. Coetzee, Joan Robinson, Wolf Hall, Copenhagen Cowboy and The Last of Us.   Mentioned: The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musil The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk God's Unruly Friends by Ahmet T. Karamustafa The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee Economic Philosophy by Joan Robinson

Teddy's Adventures continue! Written by Joan Robinson

Teddy's adventures continue with this story by Joan Robinson

Teddy's adventures continue! Written by Joan Robinson

Darin eine Hörerfrage zum Produktionspotenzial. Außerdem Inflation, Taylor-Regel, Gaspreise (Dulliens Deckel), Wasserbetteffekt, Mindestlohn, Joan Robinson, Monopson (Produktivität in Ostdeutschland) Paper: Dustmann et al: Reallocation Effects of the Minimum Wage Drechsel-Grau: Macroeconomic and Distributional Effects of Higher Minimum Wages Bachmann, Bayer et al: Why East Germany has not Converged

Darin eine Hörerfrage zum Produktionspotenzial. Außerdem Inflation, Taylor-Regel, Gaspreise (Dulliens Deckel), Wasserbetteffekt, Mindestlohn, Joan Robinson, Monopson (Produktivität in Ostdeutschland) Paper: Dustmann et al: Reallocation Effects of the Minimum Wage Drechsel-Grau: Macroeconomic and Distributional Effects of Higher Minimum Wages Bachmann, Bayer et al: Why East Germany has not Converged

This podcast discusses vaccines against COVID-19 as they pertain to pediatric patients. The podcast provides background information on vaccine development and types of vaccines, then answers many common questions about vaccines via an interview with Dr. Joan Robinson, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at the Stollery Children's Hospital in Edmonton, Alberta. The podcast was developed by Dr.  Gauri Shah, a pediatrician who completed a fellowship in pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Alberta. Its development was supported by Dr. Robinson.

durée : 00:59:16 - Entendez-vous l'éco ? - par : Tiphaine de Rocquigny - Disciple keynésienne et virulente critique des néoclassiques, Joan Robinson s'éloignera finalement de la pensée de son maître après la Seconde Guerre mondiale pour tenter d'en faire une synthèse avec l'analyse marxiste de l'économie. - invités : Marlyse Pouchol Maître de conférences émérite de l'Université de Reims, membre du laboratoire Clersé (Centre Lillois d'Etudes et de Recherches Sociologiques et Economiques) et membre du Comité éditorial de la Revue d'histoire de la pensée économique; Louis-Philippe Rochon Professeur d'économie à l'Université Laurentienne et directeur en chef de la revue Review of political economy; Yara Zeineddine Docteure en sciences économiques

In this podcast, listeners will learn about the peer review process of Paediatrics & Child Health, the official journal of the Canadian Paediatric Society. This was developed by Louise Ing, a paediatric resident at the University of Calgary, Subhrata Verma, a paediatric resident at Western University in London, Ontario, and Katie Girgulis, a paediatric resident at the IWK Health Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia, along with Dr. Shazeen Suleman and Dr. Joan Robinson.

This podcast discusses the presentation, investigations, and management of COVID-19 in children. It was created by Dr. Gauri Shah, a pediatrician who completed a fellowship in pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Alberta, with support from Dr. Joan Robinson, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at the Stollery Children's Hospital in Edmonton, Canada.

Former Boeing Executive Engineer Joan Robinson- Berry speaks candidly with Host Pastor Dan Pore to dispel some common myths behind living out ones destiny, and living successful lives as God had planned for each of us. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/daniel-por351/message

durée : 00:58:26 - Entendez-vous l'éco ? - par : Tiphaine de Rocquigny, Marguerite Catton - Disciple keynésienne et virulente critique des néoclassiques, Joan Robinson s’éloignera finalement de la pensée de son maître après la Seconde Guerre mondiale pour tenter d’en faire une synthèse avec l’analyse marxiste de l’économie. - réalisation : Anne Depelchin, Philippe Baudouin - invités : Marlyse Pouchol Maître de conférences émérite de l’Université de Reims, membre du laboratoire Clersé (Centre Lillois d'Etudes et de Recherches Sociologiques et Economiques) et membre du Comité éditorial de la Revue d’histoire de la pensée économique; Louis-Philippe Rochon Professeur d’économie à l’Université Laurentienne et directeur en chef de la revue Review of political economy; Yara Zeineddine Docteure en sciences économiques

New research out of the University of Alberta is helping shed light on the telltale symptoms of COVID-19 in children. Dr. Joan Robinson specializes in pediatric infectious diseases and joins us to share the findings and offer up her big takeaways for parents and school administrators. Also on this episode, time-strapped moms and dads are turning to Tiktok for advice. A rise in therapists, psychologists and counsellors are now sharing their tips on social media. The list includes Jax Anderson. She is a mental health therapist and a Tiktok celebrity with more than 10 million likes. She shares her journey to TikTok, and we also have some advice for parents before scrolling. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Guest: Dr. Joan Robinson, Pediatric infectious disease specialist - Professor & Divisional Director in the Department of Pediatrics in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Alberta. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Keynes: The Return of the Master by Robert Skidelsky (Allen Lane, 2009) Keynesianism dominated economics and economic policy roughly between 1936 and 1973. The neoliberal crusade lead by Milton Friedman made use of the phenomenon of stagflation to demolish Keynesianism. It was swept to the margins of economic theory. It was taken over by ideas such as rational expectations, real business cycle theory, the efficient market hypothesis, and public choice theory. Two schools built on these foundations the neoclassicals and the neokeynesians (whom Joan Robinson called bastardised Keynesianism) provided theoretical backing for the bubble that produced the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Only Keynes could save the day. He had to be brought back, and is with us until today. From Obama's gigantic fiscal stimulus to the expansion of the FED's balance sheet, through Quantitative Easing in both America and in Europe, to Abenomics in Japan, and massive countercyclical demand management by the Communist Party of China, everyone is doing demand management nowadays. The Master is Back!

This podcast covers congenital syphilis covers congenital syphilis, including epidemiology, pathophysiology, impacts on mothers and infants, prenatal screening, bloodwork and follow-up for infants exposed in utero.  This podcast was developed by Stephanie Unrau, a third year medical student at the University of Alberta with Dr. Joan Robinson, who is a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton, Alberta.

The school year is just around the corner and provincial governments across Canada have been rolling out their school reopening plans. But questions remain on whether the various plans are appropriate or protective enough of children and the wider community during this pandemic. On this episode of This Is Why, we look into the pediatric evidence of COVID-19's effects on children and what that could mean for school reopenings. Contact: Adam Toy - @Adam_Toy on Twitter Dave McIvor - @d_mac1519 on Twitter This is Why - @ThisIsWhy on Twitter Email us - thisiswhy@globalnews.ca Guests: Dr. Joan Robinson, division director of pediatric infectious disease at the University of Alberta, and a pediatric infectious disease physician at Edmonton’s Stollery Children’s Hospital See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

George Bernard Shaw once noted: ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’ What George forgot though was unreasonable women and when it comes to Economics, Joan Robinson was the unreasonable, brilliant woman and wow…did she make progress! Sadly in the male dominated economics world, she’s rather over-looked and this needs to change. She changed the way we thought about markets, she challenged economic orthodoxy, was part of Keynes’ inner circle and offered up her own growth theories. In this new podcast, you will find out all this and more! Guiding you through as always are Pete and Gav, your friendly neighbourhood economists with technical support from Nic (check out his app – cheeky fingers). Music comes from Jukedeck and you can create your own at jukedeck.com. PS Apologies for a brief sound outage that occurs around the 20 minute mark. You might think the podcast is over at this point but fear not you have another hour of fun/learning about the great Joan to go....

This podcast reviews the CPS guideline on salmonella infection in Canadian children, including epidemiology, presentation, investigation, therapy and prevention.  It was developed by Dr. Michael Prodanuk, a pediatric resident at the University of Toronto and the Hospital for Sick Children and Dr. Joan Robinson, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Alberta and author of the practice point.

İktisadi düşünce tarihi geneli itibari ile epistemolojik olarak iki ayrı okula ayrılabilir. Bunlardan ilki "Klasik İktisat Geleneği" olarak nitelendirilen, öncüllüğünü Adam Smith, David Ricardo ve Karl Marx’ın yaptığı, 20. yy’da ise John M. Keynes ve Michal Kalecki gibi isimler başta olmak üzere takip… Seslendiren: Ekin Baran Sunar

This video presents an approach to varicella (commonly known as chickenpox). The clinical presentation, pathogenesis, prevention, and treatment of varicella will be covered. The video was developed by Dr. Gauri Shah, a pediatrician who completed a fellowship in Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of Alberta, and Dr. Joan Robinson, a Pediatric Infectious Disease specialist at the Stollery Children's Hospital in Edmonton, Canada.

This podcast presents an approach to varicella (commonly known as chickenpox). The clinical presentation, pathogenesis, prevention, and treatment of varicella will be covered. The podcast was developed by Dr. Gauri Shah, a pediatrician who completed a fellowship in Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of Alberta, and Dr. Joan Robinson, a Pediatric Infectious Disease specialist at the Stollery Children's Hospital in Edmonton, Canada.

We've got the 'voice of God' and an economist with quite the life story. Barbara Jordan https://www.britannica.com/biography/Barbara-Jordan 1972 Keynote Speech at DNC - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKfFJc37jjQ 1974 Watergate Speech - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrqVBclJVco LBJ Oral History - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5iWyv-FeyM Joan Robinson https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joan-Robinson https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Robinson.html

This podcast reviews the Canadian Paediatric Society (CPS) position statement "Urinary tract infections in infants and children: Diagnosis and management."  This podcast was developed by Dr. Chris Novak, a third-year pediatric resident at the Stollery Children's Hospital in Edmonton, AB, and Dr. Joan Robinson, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the Stollery Children's Hospital and the lead author of this position statement.  

Joan Robinson was one of the most important contributors to economics in the 20th Century. She used theory and graphs, but she also used poetry to expound the great debates between capitalism and socialism over the 20th Century. This is part II of a two-part series on the life of Cambridge economist Joan Robinson.

In 1933, Joan Robinson popularised a word. That word was monopsony. It’s when you have only a single person or business that can buy something. This theory was outlined in Joan Robinson’s 1933 book, The Economics of Imperfect Competition.

This podcast was produced by PedsCases and the Canadian Paediatric Society (CPS), and aims to summarize the 2017 CPS Practice Point: Update on invasive meningococcal vaccination for Canadian children and youth. In this episode, listeners will learn the clinical presentation and epidemiology of Neisseria meningitidis in Canada, the current vaccination schedule and guidelines for vaccination, and how to identify children and adolescents who may need extra vaccinations. This podcast was developed by Dr. Sarah Johnson, a first-year paediatrics resident at the Stollery Children’s Hospital at the University of Alberta, in collaboration with Dr. Joan Robinson, a paediatric infectious diseases specialist and associate professor at the University of Alberta.   

Ashley speaks with Carl and Joan Robinson, nutritional experts and yogu gurus about a new study that says one in five people will be obese by the year 2025.  They discuss fad diets and de-toxins and the mistakes people often make trying to lose weight.

Tema: Premio Nobel per l'Economia - la grande assente Joan Robinson Motivazione: (---ascoltate la puntata!---) Intervista: Maria Cristina Marcuzzo Docente di Economia Politica Università La Sapienza di Roma Durata: 4'06'' In onda: Sabato 1 Novembre 2008

How can you travel for ten weeks with one suitcase? Rick says it is important to travel light, and to pack only one carry-on's worth of clothes and accessories. He shares packing tips for different climates, and learns about packing light for women from Joan Robinson, who leads frequent workshops on the topic. Also, Rick talks to one of his mentors in the field of travel writing, South Pacific guidebook author David Stanley. For more information on Travel with Rick Steves - including episode descriptions, program archives and related details - visit www.ricksteves.com.

Bei der Festsetzung des Lohnsatzes für eine bestimmte Tätigkeit wird die Unternehmung den Lohnsatz weder unnötig hoch wählen noch so gering , dass es unwahrscheinlich wird, eine geeignete Arbeitskraft zu finden. So werden die Lohnsätze unter Berücksichtigung ihres Einflusses auf die Wahrscheinlichkeit einer erfolgreichen Stellenbesetzung optimal fixiert. Wenn Indikatoren wie Geschlecht oder Rasse typischerweise mit unterschiedlichem Angebotsverhalten verknüpft sind, wird die Lohnsetzung der Unternehmung zu Diskriminierung gemäß diesen Indikatoren führen. Der Ansatz kann als eine moderne Neuformulierung der Diskriminierungstheorie von Joan Robinson verstanden werden. Er führt zu mathematisch identischen Gleichgewichtsbedingungen, allerdings mit abweichender Interpretation und unter Vermeidung einiger Schwierigkeiten des ursprünglichen Ansatzes. Innerhalb des entwickelten Rahmens lässt sich die Möglichkeit langfristig anhaltender Diskriminierung aufweisen und so ein Beitrag zur Erklärung eines Phänomens leisten, das für andere Ansätze (Joan Robinson's eingeschlossen) gewisse Schwierigkeiten bietet