Podcast appearances and mentions of Karl Polanyi

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

Hello Interactors,This week, I've been reflecting on the themes of my last few essays — along with a pile of research that's been oddly in sync. Transit planning. Neuroscience. Happiness studies. Complexity theory. Strange mix, but it keeps pointing to the same thing: cities aren't just struggling with transportation or housing. They're struggling with connection. With meaning. With the simple question: what kind of happiness should a city make possible? And why don't we ask that more often?STRANGERS SHUNNED, SYSTEMS SIMULATEDThe urban century was supposed to bring us together. Denser cities, faster mobility, more connected lives — these were the promises of global urbanization. Yet in the shadow of those promises, a different kind of city has emerged in America with growing undertones elsewhere: one that increasingly seeks to eliminate the stranger, bypass friction, and privatize interaction.Whether through algorithmically optimized ride-sharing, private tunnels built to evade street life, or digital maps simulating place without presence for autonomous vehicles, a growing set of design logics work to render other people — especially unknown others — invisible, irrelevant, or avoidable.I admit, I too can get seduced by this comfort, technology, and efficiency. But cities aren't just systems of movement — they're systems of meaning. Space is never neutral; it's shaped by power and shapes behavior in return. This isn't new. Ancient cities like Teotihuacan (tay-oh-tee-wah-KAHN) in central Mexico, once one of the largest cities in the world, aligned their streets and pyramids with the stars. Chang'an (chahng-AHN), the capital of Tang Dynasty China, used strict cardinal grids and walled compounds to reflect Confucian ideals of order and hierarchy. And Uruk (OO-rook), in ancient Mesopotamia, organized civic life around temple complexes that stood at the spiritual and administrative heart of the city.These weren't just settlements — they were spatial arguments about how people should live together, and who should lead. Even Middle Eastern souks and hammams were more than markets or baths; they were civic infrastructure. Whether through temples or bus stops, the question is the same: What kind of social behavior is this space asking of us?Neuroscience points to answers. As Shane O'Mara argues, walking is not just transport — it's neurocognitive infrastructure. The hippocampus, which governs memory, orientation, and mood, activates when we move through physical space. Walking among others, perceiving spontaneous interactions, and attending to environmental cues strengthens our cognitive maps and emotional regulation.This makes city oriented around ‘stranger danger' not just unjust — but indeed dangerous. Because to eliminate friction is to undermine emergence — not only in the social sense, but in the economic and cultural ones too. Cities thrive on weak ties, on happenstance, on proximity without intention. Mark Granovetter's landmark paper, The Strength of Weak Ties, showed that it's those looser, peripheral relationships — not our inner circles — that drive opportunity, creativity, and mobility. Karl Polanyi called it embeddedness: the idea that markets don't float in space, they're grounded in the social fabric around them.You see it too in scale theory — in the work of Geoffrey West and Luís Bettencourt — where the productive and innovative energy of cities scales with density, interaction, and diversity. When you flatten all that into private tunnels and algorithmic efficiency, you don't just lose the texture — you lose the conditions for invention.As David Roberts, a climate and policy journalist known for his systems thinking and sharp urban critiques, puts it: this is “the anti-social dream of elite urbanism” — a vision where you never have to share space with anyone not like you. In conversation with him, Jarrett Walker, a transit planner and theorist who's spent decades helping cities design equitable bus networks, also pushes back against this logic. He warns that when cities build transit around avoidance — individualized rides, privatized tunnels, algorithmic sorting — they aren't just solving inefficiencies. They're hollowing out the very thing that makes transit (and cities) valuable and also public: the shared experience of strangers moving together.The question isn't just whether cities are efficient — but what kind of social beings they help us become. If we build cities to avoid each other, we shouldn't be surprised when they crumble as we all forget how to live together.COVERAGE, CARE, AND CIVIC CALMIf you follow urban and transit planning debates long enough, you'll hear the same argument come up again and again: Should we focus on ridership or coverage? High-frequency routes where lots of people travel, or wide access for people who live farther out — even if fewer use the service? For transit nerds, it's a policy question. For everyone else, it's about dignity.As Walker puts it, coverage isn't about efficiency — it's about “a sense of fairness.” It's about living in a place where your city hasn't written you off because you're not profitable to serve. Walker's point is that coverage isn't charity. It's a public good, one that tells people: You belong here.That same logic shows up in more surprising places — like the World Happiness Report. Year after year, Finland lands at the top. But as writer Molly Young found during her visit to Helsinki, Finnish “happiness” isn't about joy or euphoria. It's about something steadier: trust, safety, and institutional calm. What the report measures is evaluative happiness — how satisfied people are with their lives over time — not affective happiness, which is more about momentary joy or emotional highs.There's a Finnish word that captures this. It the feeling you get after a sauna: saunanjälkeinen raukeus (SOW-nahn-yell-kay-nen ROW-keh-oos) — the softened, slowed state of the body and mind. That's what cities like Helsinki seem to deliver: not bliss, but a stable, low-friction kind of contentment. And while that may lack sparkle, it makes people feel held.And infrastructure plays a big role. In Helsinki, the signs in the library don't say “Be Quiet.” They say, “Please let others work in peace.” It's a small thing, but it speaks volumes — less about control, more about shared responsibility. There are saunas in government buildings. Parents leave their babies sleeping in strollers outside cafés. Transit is clean, quiet, and frequent. As Young puts it, these aren't luxuries — they're part of a “bone-deep sense of trust” the city builds and reinforces. Not enforced from above, but sustained by expectation, habit, and care.My family once joined an organized walking tour of Copenhagen. The guide, who was from Spain, pointed to a clock in a town square and said, almost in passing, “The government has always made sure this clock runs on time — even during war.” It wasn't just about punctuality. It was about trust. About the quiet promise that the public realm would still hold, even when everything else felt uncertain. This, our guide noted from his Spanish perspective, is what what make Scandinavians so-called ‘happy'. They feel held.Studies show that most of what boosts long-term happiness isn't about dopamine hits — it's about relational trust. Feeling safe. Feeling seen. Knowing you won't be stranded if you don't have a car or a credit card. Knowing the city works, even if you don't make it work for you.In this way, transit frequency and subtle signs in Helsinki are doing the same thing. They're shaping behavior and reinforcing social norms. They're saying: we share space here. Don't be loud. Don't cut in line. Don't treat public space like it's only for you.That kind of city can't be built on metrics alone. It needs moral imagination — the kind that sees coverage, access, and slowness as features, not bugs. That's not some socialist's idea of utopia. It's just thoughtful. Built into the culture, yes, but also the design.But sometimes we're just stuck with whatever design is already in place. Even if it's not so thoughtful. Economists and social theorists have long used the concept of path dependence to explain why some systems — cities, institutions, even technologies — get stuck. The idea dates back to work in economics and political science in the 1980s, where it was used to show how early decisions, even small ones, can lock in patterns that are hard to reverse.Once you've laid train tracks, built freeways, zoned for single-family homes — you've shaped what comes next. Changing course isn't impossible, but it's costly, slow, and politically messy. The QWERTY keyboard is a textbook example: not the most efficient layout, but one that stuck because switching systems later would be harder than just adapting to what we've got.Urban scholars Michael Storper and Allen Scott brought this thinking into city studies. They've shown how economic geography and institutional inertia shape urban outcomes — how past planning decisions, labor markets, and infrastructure investments limit the options cities have today. If your city bet on car-centric growth decades ago, you're probably still paying for that decision, even if pivoting is palatable to the public.CONNECTIONS, COMPLEXITY, CITIES THAT CAREThere's a quote often attributed to Stephen Hawking that's made the rounds in complexity science circles: “The 21st century will be the century of complexity.” No one's entirely sure where he said it — it shows up in systems theory blogs, talks, and books — but it sticks. Probably because it feels true.If the last century was about physics — closed systems, force, motion, precision — then this one is about what happens when the pieces won't stay still. When the rules change mid-game. When causes ripple back as consequences. In other words: cities.Planners have tried to tame that complexity in all kinds of ways. Grids. Zoning codes. Dashboards. There's long been a kind of “physics envy” in both planning and economics — a belief that if we just had the right model, the right inputs, we could predict and control the city like a closed system. As a result, for much of the 20th century, cities were designed like machines — optimized for flow, separation, and predictability.But even the pushback followed a logic of control — cul-de-sacs and suburban pastoralism — wasn't a turn toward organic life or spontaneity. It was just a softer kind of order: winding roads and whispered rules meant to keep things calm, clean, and contained…and mostly white and moderately wealthy.If you think of cities like machines, it makes sense to want control. More data, tighter optimization, fewer surprises. That's how you'd tune an engine or write software. But cities aren't machines. They're messy, layered, and full of people doing unpredictable things. They're more like ecosystems — or weather patterns — than they are a carburetor. And that's where complexity science becomes useful.People like Paul Cilliers and Brian Castellani have argued for a more critical kind of complexity science — one that sees cities not just as networks or algorithms, but as places shaped by values, power, and conflict. Cilliers emphasized that complex systems, like cities, are open and dynamic: they don't have fixed boundaries, they adapt constantly, and they respond to feedback in ways no planner can fully predict. Castellani extends this by insisting that complexity isn't just technical — it's ethical. It demands we ask: Who benefits from a system's design? Who has room to adapt, and who gets constrained? In this view, small interventions — a zoning tweak, a route change — can set off ripple effects that reshape how people move, connect, and belong. A new path dependence.This is why certainty is dangerous in urban design. It breeds overconfidence. Humility is a better place to start. As Jarrett Walker puts it, “there are all kinds of ways to fake your way through this.” Agencies often adopt feel-good mission statements like “compete with the automobile by providing access for all” — which, he notes, is like “telling your taxi driver to turn left and right at the same time.” You can't do both. Not on a fixed budget.Walker pushes agencies to be honest: if you want to prioritize ridership, say so. If you want to prioritize broad geographic coverage, that's also valid — but know it will mean lower ridership. The key is not pretending you can have both at full strength. He says, “What I want is for board members… to make this decision consciously and not be surprised by the consequences”.These decisions matter. A budget cut can push riders off buses, which then leads to reduced service, which leads to more riders leaving — a feedback loop. On the flip side, small improvements — like better lighting, a public bench, a frequent bus — can set off positive loops too. Change emerges, often sideways.That means thinking about transit not just as a system of movement, but as a relational space. Same with libraries, parks, and sidewalks. These aren't neutral containers. They're environments that either support or suppress human connection. If you design a city to eliminate friction, you eliminate chance encounters — the stuff social trust is made of.I'm an introvert. I like quiet. I recharge alone. But I also live in a city — and I've learned that even for people like me, being around others still matters. Not in the chatty, get-to-know-your-neighbors way. But in the background hum of life around you. Sitting on a bus. Browsing in a bookstore. Walking down a street full of strangers, knowing you don't have to engage — but you're not invisible either.There's a name for this. Psychologists call it public solitude or sometimes energized privacy — the comfort of being alone among others. Not isolated, not exposed. Just held, lightly, in the weave of the crowd. And the research backs it up: introverts often seek out public spaces like cafés, libraries, or parks not to interact, but to feel present — connected without pressure.In the longest-running happiness study ever done, 80 years, Harvard psychologist Robert Waldinger found that strong relationships — not income, not status — were the best predictor of long-term well-being. More recently, studies have shown that even brief interactions with strangers — on a bus, in a coffee shop — can lift mood and reduce loneliness. But here's the catch: cities have to make those interactions possible.Or they don't.And that's the real test of infrastructure. We've spent decades designing systems to move people through. Fast. Clean. Efficient. But we've neglected the quiet spaces that let people just be. Sidewalks you're not rushed off of. Streets where kids can safely bike or play…or simply cross the street.Even pools — maybe especially pools. My wife runs a nonprofit called SplashForward that's working to build more public pools. Not just for fitness, but because pools are public space. You float next to people you may never talk to. And still, you're sharing something. Space. Water. Time.You see this clearly in places like Finland and Iceland, where pools and saunas are built into the rhythms of public life. They're not luxuries — they're civic necessities. People show up quietly, day after day, not to socialize loudly, but to be alone together. As one Finnish local told journalist Molly Young, “During this time, we don't have... colors.” It was about the long gray winter, sure — but also something deeper: a culture that values calm over spectacle. Stability over spark. A kind of contentment that doesn't perform.But cities don't have to choose between quiet and joy. We don't have to model every system on Helsinki in February. There's something beautiful in the American kind of happiness too — the loud, weird, spontaneous moments that erupt in public. The band on the subway. The dance party in the park. The loud kid at the pool. That kind of energy can be a nuisance, but it can also be joyful.Even Jarrett Walker, who's clear-eyed about transit, doesn't pretend it solves everything. Transit isn't always the answer. Sometimes a car is the right tool. What matters is whether everyone has a real choice — not just those with money or proximity or privilege. And he's quick to admit every city with effective transit has its local grievances.So no, I'm not arguing for perfection, or even socialism. I'm arguing for a city that knows how to hold difference. Fast and slow. Dense and quiet. A city that lets you step into the crowd, or sit at its edge, and still feel like you belong. A place to comfortably sit with the uncertainty of this great transformation emerging around us. Alone and together.REFERENCESCastellani, B. (2014). Complexity theory and the social sciences: The state of the art. Routledge.Cilliers, P. (1998). Complexity and postmodernism: Understanding complex systems. Routledge.David, P. A. (1985). Clio and the economics of QWERTY. The American Economic Review.Granovetter, M. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology.Hawking, S. (n.d.). The 21st century will be the century of complexity. [Attributed quote; primary source unavailable].O'Mara, S. (2019). In praise of walking: A new scientific exploration. W. W. Norton & Company.Roberts, D. (Host). (2025). Jarrett Walker on what makes good transit [Audio podcast episode]. In Volts.Storper, M., & Scott, A. J. (2016). Current debates in urban theory: A critical assessment. Urban Studies.Waldinger, R., & Schulz, M. (2023). The good life: Lessons from the world's longest scientific study of happiness. Simon & Schuster.Walker, J. (2011). Human transit: How clearer thinking about public transit can enrich our communities and our lives. Island Press.West, G., & Bettencourt, L. M. A. (2010). A unified theory of urban living. Nature.Young, M. (2025). My miserable week in the ‘happiest country on earth'. The New York Times Magazine. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Wie lässt sich aus der Krise der Marktordnung in den 1920er Jahren die Entstehung des Faschismus verstehen? Der Ökonom Karl Polanyi geht im Exil 1944 auf Spurensuche: Er sieht die Ursache in der großen Umwälzung im Marktsystem und die von ihm bestimmte Marktgesellschaft. Sie machen aus Arbeit, Boden und Geld „fiktive Waren“ und verfolgen mit staatlichen Mitteln die Utopie des selbstregulierenden Marktes. Alles soll auf der Basis von Angebot und Nachfrage gehandelt werden. Die Menschen werden sozial desintegriert. Das Bürgertum ist mit den Tatsachen des Arbeitsmarktes und des Weltmarktes konfrontiert und kann diese Prozesse nicht beherrschen. Es kommt zu Krisen und Sackgassen. Dies führt zu einer «Doppelbewegung», einer Suche nach Alternativen. Die Lösungen, die das Bürgertum dafür erfindet, führen nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg und mit dem Faschismus zur Zerstörung der Zivilisation. Polanyi will verhindern, dass nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg das ganze Unheil noch einmal beginnen würde. Er plädiert für einen Sozialismus, der Arbeit, Boden und Geld demokratisch kontrolliert und dem Markt entzieht. Im Gespräch mit Alex Demirović ist Claus Thomasberger, emeritierter Professor für Volkswirtschaftslehre, Wirtschaftspolitik an der HTW, Vorstandsmitglied der Karl Polanyi Gesellschaft und Autor vieler Texte zu Polanyi.

Trevor Jackson is an economic historian teaching at Berkeley. I talk to him about the current political situation of the universities and the science, and about his own research area, the history of capitalism, which has always been prone to crashes and other crises. The development of a capitalist economy is also the story of the elites learning to evade responsibility for the failures, while reaping the rewards of markets. What role does elite impunity play in the current crisis of political legitimacy? Could this be changed, and, if so, how? 

In this episode, we discuss the work of brilliant heterodox economist Karl Polanyi. We talk about his criticisms of neoclassical orthodoxy, his arguments against the commodification of land, labor, and money, and his critique of the dominance of markets in theory and in practice. Put markets in their place and regulate the hell out of them! We also consider his influence on recent leftist economic thought, and talk through what's at stake in the difference between Marxist and Polanyian approaches to history and politics. We think there are limits to the Polanyi line, but it's hard not to love an authentically humanist fellow traveler!leftofphilosophy.comReferences:Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014).Karl Polanyi, For a New West: Essays, 1919-1958, eds. Giorgio Resta and Mariavittoria Catanzariti (Malden: Polity Press, 2014).Fred Block, “Karl Polanyi and the Writing of ‘The Great Transformation'”, Theory and Society 32:3 (2003), 275-306.Music:“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN

Kan forskelle i arbejderklassens styrke forklare hvorfor lande har forskellige velfærdsstater? I denne bogklubs-episode af Sange om Merværdi snakker værterne Alex Arash Sand Kalaee og Lasse Skou Lindstad om bogen "The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism" af Gøsta Esping-Andersen om forholdet mellem klassekamp og velfærdsstater. De kommer bl.a. ind på hvorfor Danmark og USA har så forskellige velfærdsstater, hvad arbejderbevægelsens rolle er i kampen for velfærd og hvorfor Lasse tænker på den østrig-ungarske økonom Karl Polanyi, når han kigger på Trump. Lyt med!

Exceptionnellement, le nouvel épisode sort ce lundi matin au vu de la dinguerie d'hier soir.Bienvenue dans le 30ème épisode de "Chez Kevin Razy". Avec mon pote sociologue Dr. Hamza, on se réunit pour parler de ce qui se passe dans la vie comme dans un groupe WhatsApp. Entre humour et sociologie, on ne s'interdit aucun sujet.Pour soutenir notre podcast :https://fr.tipeee.com/ckr-podcast/Rejoins notre canal Telegram :https://t.me/CKRnews▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ON EN A PARLE▬▬▬▬▬▬▬Livres : "La Grande Transformation" de Karl Polanyi : https://amzn.to/3zcKUBJ"Le Front Populaire" édition Que sais-je ? de Jean Vigreux : https://amzn.to/3REa2rc"L'enjeu des retraites" de Bernard Friot : https://amzn.to/4c4fHix"Al-Muqaddima" de Ibn Khaldoun : https://amzn.to/4cerc6X"Le Livre des Exemples" de Ibn Khaldoun : https://amzn.to/4eE59Iv"Le voyage d'Occident et d'Orient" de Ibn Khaldoun : https://amzn.to/3RIeuW6"Ces guerres qui nous attendent" de La Red Team : https://amzn.to/45zP9TX"Crises et violences politique" de Alexandre Dorna : https://amzn.to/3KUawG3"La traîne des empires" de Gabriel Martinez-Gros : https://amzn.to/3VEsNfi▬▬▬▬▬▬ DANS CET EPISODE ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬➜ On lit vos commentaires !➜ C'est ma dernière semaine dans la pièce de théatre "Passeport"➜ HMD : La Cour suprême iranienne annule la condamnation à mort du rappeur Toomaj Salehi➜ Marion Maréchal a vidé les caisses d'Eric Zemmour➜ Les pleins pouvoirs pour Macron avec l'article 16 de la constitution➜ Le déficit de la France➜ Christian Tein, un Kanak amené en métropole pour être emprisonné➜ No Comment : Tsahal, "Les étrangers dehors" dans un bar à Rouen, Livraison d'armes de la France en Israël➜ Le coup d'Etat des milliardaires▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ LA TEAM ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬Host : Kevin RazyGuest: HamzaShowrunner : Mourad MoqaddemRéalisation & Montage : Gaëlle Cany Canian Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Sean Illing talks with economic historian Brad DeLong about his new book Slouching Towards Utopia. In it, DeLong claims that the "long twentieth century" was the most consequential period in human history, during which the institutions of rapid technological growth and globalization were created, setting humanity on a path towards improving life, defeating scarcity, and enabling real freedom. But... this ran into some problems. Sean and Brad talk about the power of markets, how the New Deal led to something approaching real social democracy, and why the Great Recession of 2008 and its aftermath signified the end of this momentous era. Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area Guest: J. Bradford DeLong (@delong), author; professor of economics, U.C. Berkeley References:  Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford DeLong (Basic; 2022) The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich von Hayek (1944) The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi (1944) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by Joseph Schumpeter (1942) "A Short History of Enclosure in Britain" by Simon Fairlie (This Land Magazine; 2009) "China's Great Leap Forward" by Clayton D. Brown (Association for Asian Studies; 2012) What Is Property? by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1840) The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle (Oxford University Press; 2022) Apple's "1984" ad (YouTube) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes (1936) "The spectacular ongoing implosion of crypto's biggest star, explained" by Emily Stewart (Vox; Nov. 18) "Did Greenspan Add to Subprime Woes? Gramlich Says Ex-Colleague Blocked Crackdown" by Greg Ip (Wall Street Journal; June 9, 2007) "Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same," from President Obama's 2010 State of the Union Address (Jan. 27, 2010) "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" by Karl Marx (1852) Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein (Simon & Schuster; 2020) The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion by Zac Gershberg and Sean Illing (U. Chicago; 2022)   Enjoyed this episode? Rate The Gray Area ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe for free. Be the first to hear the next episode of The Gray Area. Subscribe in your favorite podcast app. Support Vox Conversations by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts This episode was made by:  Producer: Erikk Geannikis Editor: Amy Drozdowska Engineer: Patrick Boyd Editorial Director, Vox Talk: A.M. Hall Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode of FEPS Talks, Professor Emerita Marguerite Mendell (Concordia University) shares some lessons from her long-term engagement with the development of the social economy in Quebec, but also her contribution to related discussions in Europe and various international organisations. In her view, a number of European countries offer remarkable examples of social economy transitions and experiments, and also at European Union level there have been important initiatives to develop the necessary ecosystem. The question that remains nevertheless is how to assure implementation within member countries. Going beyond a transatlantic comparison, she also mentions recent efforts from African countries. At the end of the conversation with FEPS Secretary General László Andor she explains the connection between her commitment to the social economy and the inspiration stemming from the study of the works of Karl Polanyi.

Philipp Ther erforscht Transformationen in der Geschichte. Der Wittgenstein Preis-Träger und Autor historischer mehrerer Bestseller beschäftigt sich besonders mit Phasen, in denen die Welt sich radikal verändert. Ich frage ihn, ob wir in der Gegenwart in so einer Phase sind, welche transformativen Momente in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten besonders zu unserer gegenwärtigen Situation beigetragen haben und ob das liberale Projekt sich totgelaufen hat.

durée : 00:29:00 - Avoir raison avec... - Comment penser une démocratie "véritablement humaine" grâce à Polanyi ? Que reste-t-il de sa pensée depuis sa mort en 1964 ? Et comment se libérer des mythes qu'impose l'économie de marché ? Retrouvons, au fil des crises du 20e et du 21e siècles, ce que Polanyi a laissé. - invités : Marguerite Mendell chercheuse à l'Université Concordia au Québec et directrice de l'Institut Karl Polanyi; Augustin Sersiron enseignant-chercheur à l'université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, docteur en philosophie politique et en économie; Catherine Aubertin Economiste de l'environnement, et directrice de recherche à l'Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD), affectée au Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle

durée : 00:28:51 - Avoir raison avec... - Pour mieux dénoncer la toute-puissance du marché dans les sociétés modernes, Polanyi explore l'économie des sociétés archaïques. Du code d'Hammurabi à Aristote, il montre que si les échanges commerciaux structuraient les sociétés, ils étaient régis par des lois toutes autres que celles du marché. - invités : Alain Caillé Économiste, sociologue; Alain Guéry Historien, directeur de recherche au CNRS

durée : 00:28:55 - Avoir raison avec... - Karl Polanyi affirme qu'en niant le caractère social de la vie en communauté, la société de marché ne pouvait qu'engendrer le chaos. Comment la société née du 19e siècle a-t-elle abouti au fascisme des années 1930 ? L'économie libérale est-elle nécessairement une menace pour la démocratie ? - invités : Nicolas Postel professeur d'économie à l'Université de Lille

durée : 00:28:58 - Avoir raison avec... - par : Aliette Hovine - En 1944, Karl Polanyi publie "La Grande Transformation", son œuvre la plus connue à ce jour. Il y expose les concepts fondateurs de sa pensée : désencastrement, avènement du marché autorégulateur, marchandisation fictive... Quels périls l'économiste a-t-il perçu dans l'Angleterre du 19e siècle ? - invités : Bernard Chavance Professeur émérite à l'Université Paris Diderot; Ophélie Siméon Maître de conférences en Civilisation britannique à l'université Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris 3)

durée : 00:30:33 - Avoir raison avec... - par : Aliette Hovine - Pourquoi Karl Polanyi (1886-1964), intellectuel a priori bien sous tous rapports, décide-t-il de consacrer son œuvre à critiquer la société de marché ? Retour sur la construction d'une pensée iconoclaste à travers les exils et les prises de position d'un économiste rebelle à la plume bien trempée. - invités : Jérôme Maucourant Maître de conférences en sciences économiques

For most of our ten thousand years on the planet, the vast majority of humanity endured lives of dire poverty and extreme material deprivation. Most people spent most of their time worrying about securing the bare minimum of food and shelter. The Industrial Revolution began to change that dynamic. Still, the British economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill was correct to question in the early 1870s whether “all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.” Soon after, however, the emergence of globalization, the industrial research laboratory, and the modern corporation made possible a rapid upward trajectory in human flourishing and an end to near-universal agrarian poverty. Another British economist, John Maynard Keynes, foresaw in 1930 that the continued progress of science and compound interest could mean that human beings, liberated from pressing economic cares, might find their real challenge to be how to occupy their leisure time and “live wisely and agreeably and well.” But the explosion of productivity and prosperity over the 140 years that followed the takeoff point in 1870 did not see humanity zooming toward Utopia; at best, we slouched fitfully in that direction. Brad DeLong, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has written a much-anticipated history of what he calls “the long twentieth century” from 1870 to 2010, entitled Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century. In it, he explains how we achieved economic breakthroughs that once would have been considered miraculous — and yet fell short of what that breakthrough promised. And DeLong also explains why he believes that the era of remarkable prosperity, for all its problems and inequities, has now ended. In this podcast discussion, Niskanen's Brink Lindsey and Geoff Kabaservice talk with DeLong about why the material abundance that resulted from the great acceleration after 1870 was unevenly distributed between nations and within them, why developmental social democracy failed its sustainability test, and how the long twentieth century was in a sense a contest between the ideas of the towering thinkers Friedrich Hayek and Karl Polanyi. The discussion also covers differing perspectives on “the neoliberal turn,” speculations about how to benefit from the best aspects of neoliberalism and social democracy while avoiding their pitfalls, and a hypothesis as to why capitalism is like the brooms in “The Sorcerer's Apprentice.”

Economia Underground, um podcast institucionalista Neste episódio damos sequência a nossa visitação ao encontro da AFEE de 2023, desta vez discutindo o texto de nosso queridíssimo Manuel Ramon em parceria com o prof. Ramon Fernandez. Viva aos Ramones! O trabalho em questão é intitulado "Expropriation and the Natural World: Some Reflections on Karl Polanyi and Thorstein Veblen", e compõe o número de junho de 2023 do nosso sempre presente Journal of Economic Issues. Neste texto, os Ramones exploram a relação entre capitalismo e o ambiente natural aravés da fusão de duas grande obras, "A Grande Transformação", do Polanyi e "Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times" do Veblen. A proposta é seguir as considerações de Nancy Fraser e Rahel Jaeggi no entendimento de que o capitalismo é um sistema exploratório e expropriativo. Nos siga no Instagram: @economiaunderground

Damit der Kapitalismus funktioniert, ist er auf einen Arbeitsmarkt angewiesen, denn auch die Arbeitskraft ist eine Ware. Heute ist das eine Selbstverständlichkeit, doch in den Anfängen des kapitalistischen Systems war dies keineswegs der Fall: Während Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts in England die Industrialisierung bereits rasant wuchs und ein bürgerliches Unternehmertum entstand, sorgte ein Armengesetz dafür, dass kein freier Arbeitsmarkt sich etablieren konnte. Es gab eine verwunderliche Gleichzeitigkeit von Fortschritt und Rückschritt zu beobachten, als 1795 Friedensrichter in Speenhamland in Berkshire ein Aufstockermodell ins Leben riefen, das die Landarbeiter vor Verarmung beschützen sollte. Dieses aus gutem Ansinnen erdachte System war ein letzter Ausläufer des feudalen Paternalismus, der gleichzeitig im krassen Gegensatz zu den allgemeinen Entwicklungen in den Städten und im Welthandel stand – denn die moderne Wirtschaftswelt gierte nach Arbeitskräften. Unternehmer suchten dringend Menschen, die ihre Subsistenzwirtschaft hinter sich ließen, um möglichst viel in Fabriken zu schuften. Das ging nur mit Zuckerbrot und Peitsche. Dem aber stand das Speenhamland-System im Wege, das noch bis 1834 galt. In der neuen Folge von „Wohlstand für Alle“ ergründen Ole Nymoen und Wolfgang M. Schmitt die Entstehung des modernen Arbeitsmarkts. 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 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/oleundwolfgang Steady: https://steadyhq.com/de/oleundwolfgang/about 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

İbrahim'le birlikte efsane serimiz Kapitalizm de yeni bölümüyle geri döndü. Ömer ve İbrahim bu bölümde Karl Polanyi neden liberallerin bizi kandırdığını düşünüyor? Serbest piyasa ekonomisinin tam olarak uygulanamamasının sebebi anti-liberal bir komplo mu? Adam Smith'in homo economicus'u gerçek mi? Neden devlet ekonomiden elini bir türlü çekemiyor? sorularını ve daha fazlasını tartışıyor.

Welcome to episode 143 of Activist #MMT. Today I talk with historian, author, and Harvard master's graduate, Emily Ruhl, on her new paper and master's thesis, In League with the Devine: How Religion Influenced Nazi Perpetrators of the Holocaust. This is the first of a three-part episode. You will find my full and detailed question list at the bottom of today's show notes. Also, be sure to see the list "audio chapters" in all three parts to find exactly where each topic is discussed. (Here are links to parts two and three. A list of the audio chapters in this episode can be found right below [above the full-question list].) (In order to preserve both my podcast and sanity as I proceed through the Torrens graduate program, I've decided to slow my podcast from one episode a week to once a month.) The Nazi Party started by trying to resist and reject all religion, but soon, religion became a fundamental part of the Party's strategy of coercing and propagandizing everybody, from members of the public, to the highest ranking figures in both religious and political institutions, into accepting the brutal and systematic murder of eleven-million souls. The Nazi religion took elements of Christianity, Protestantism, and Paganism, to make one geared not to brotherly love, but primarily to erasing non-Aryans from the Earth. This Nazi pseudo-religion served both as coercion – you must kill the unworthy, or at least stand back while others do – and also as a salve, to come to terms with what you've just done. As you'll hear in the cool quote for part two (the first minute before the opening music), that salve can make the difference between sanity and insanity, and life and death. The Nazi's didn't want to murder eleven million people, they had to, because God said they had to. It was "unfortunate, but necessary." My primary goal for this interview is to demonstrate how this is parallel to mainstream economics, which is also a tool to justify suffering, this time in the form of austerity. Instead of a gun to the head at point blank range, austerity is mass deprivation and exploitation, resulting in a slow and torturous death by despair, starvation, exposure, and untreated sickness and injury – not to mention wasted potential. We currently have the ability to provide all with what they desperately need, including healthcare, education, decent food and shelter, un-poisoned water, and breathable air. As illuminated by Kate Raworth's doughnut, if we are to continue existing as a species, then we must provide the desperate with what they most desperately need. At the same time, we also have to stop the very few on top from using the vast majority of our precious and limited resources to needlessly lavish themselves. Unfortunately, we are instead digging ourselves into an even deeper ecological crisis, when we should be getting off fossil fuels entirely, and restructuring society so we don't require as much. On our current path, in the not-too-distant future, it may indeed become unfortunate but necessary to choose who must be deprived in order for the rest to live. Of course, given our obscene and still growing inequality, the most powerful few will be the ones to make those decisions, and the least powerful many will be the sacrificed. This is the lifeboat economics of the tragedy of the tragedy of the commons. Instead of the around eleven million murdered by the Nazi Party, mainstream economics is little more than a religion to justify what may ultimately result in the death of not millions, but billions. Austerity is genocide at a slower pace. As if riding in a bus hurtling towards a cliff, we as a species currently face a binary choice, between having a terrible accident, and plunging off into oblivion. As Mark Twain said, "History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme." There is still time to learn from that history. We can choose another path. On a completely unrelated side note, while attending her master's program, writing her master's thesis and working full time, Emily also wrote… an entire fantasy novel. You can find out more about it, and read the entire first chapter, at her website, emilyruhlbooks.com. In order to preserve both my podcast and my sanity as I proceed through Torrens University and Modern Money Lab's graduate program in MMT and ecological economics (

Puntata dedicata al testo La Grande Trasformazione (1944) di Karl Polanyi. Polanyi, storico dell'economia, sociologo e antropologo, riflette sui pericoli del libero mercato, svincolato dalla società, sulla sua genesi e causa di sofferenze per le comunità, che poi reagiscono. Un socialdemocratico, figlio della Mitteleuropa, che ci avverte ancora oggi sui rischi di nascita di fascismi e radicalizzazioni se il mercato non viene inglobato nelle regole della società.

Jim talks with Brad DeLong about his book Slouching Toward Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century. They discuss how everything changed around 1870, the idea of a polycrisis, Friedrich von Hayek's affirmation of the market system, the calculation problem, Karl Polanyi's response, a quantitative index of technological knowledge, the pace of growth, the necessity of a grand narrative, Malthusianism, the lead-up to the Industrial Revolution, the invention of the industrial research lab, the Edison-Tesla fight, science as an institution, the transition away from force & fraud dominance, theories about the rise of global empires, communities of engineering practice, causes of World War I, Max Weber's German chauvinism, 30 glorious years of social democracy, the Macintosh launch commercial & the neoliberal turn, the evaporation of cultural conservatism, the liminal age, and much more. Episode Transcript Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, by Brad DeLong Local And Global Networks Of Immigrant Professionals In Silicon Valley, by AnnaLee Saxenian Brad DeLong is a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley. He was a deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury during the Clinton Administration. He is a New York Times instant bestselling author, for Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, which was called: “magisterial” by Paul Krugman, "required reading” by Larry Summers, “immense scope and depth” by Diane Coyle, and “impressive… written with wit and style and a formidable command of detail” by Ryan Avent. He has been too online since 1995, now in the form of a SubStack, formerly at TypePad.

In the latest episode of the podcast Crossroads we invite professor Brigitte Aulenbacher. She is a Professor of Sociological Theory and Social Analysis, the Head of the Department of the Theory of Society and Social Analyses at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz in Austria and a co-editor of Global Dialogue – the Magazine of the International Sociological Association. In addition, she is the vice-president of the International Karl Polanyi Society. Her fields of research include social inequalities and justice, and theoretical and empirical work on labour, care, marketization and science. She is a distinguished scholar and author of many academic publications whose work has made important contributions bridging theories of contemporary capitalism, Critical Theory and feminist theory. In 2019 she received the Kurt-Rothschild-Award for her work on Karl Polanyi. ► podcast was recorded at the studio Mr. Wombat ► sound mix Ondřej Bělíček ► sound design Ondřej Bělíček

Sean Illing talks with economic historian Brad DeLong about his new book Slouching Towards Utopia. In it, DeLong claims that the "long twentieth century" was the most consequential period in human history, during which the institutions of rapid technological growth and globalization were created, setting humanity on a path towards improving life, defeating scarcity, and enabling real freedom. But... this ran into some problems. Sean and Brad talk about the power of markets, how the New Deal led to something approaching real social democracy, and why the Great Recession of 2008 and its aftermath signified the end of this momentous era. Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area Guest: J. Bradford DeLong (@delong), author; professor of economics, U.C. Berkeley References:  Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford DeLong (Basic; 2022) The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich von Hayek (1944) The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi (1944) Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by Joseph Schumpeter (1942) "A Short History of Enclosure in Britain" by Simon Fairlie (This Land Magazine; 2009) "China's Great Leap Forward" by Clayton D. Brown (Association for Asian Studies; 2012) What Is Property? by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1840) The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle (Oxford University Press; 2022) Apple's "1984" ad (YouTube) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes (1936) "The spectacular ongoing implosion of crypto's biggest star, explained" by Emily Stewart (Vox; Nov. 18) "Did Greenspan Add to Subprime Woes? Gramlich Says Ex-Colleague Blocked Crackdown" by Greg Ip (Wall Street Journal; June 9, 2007) "Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same," from President Obama's 2010 State of the Union Address (Jan. 27, 2010) "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" by Karl Marx (1852) Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein (Simon & Schuster; 2020) The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion by Zac Gershberg and Sean Illing (U. Chicago; 2022)   Enjoyed this episode? Rate The Gray Area ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe for free. Be the first to hear the next episode of The Gray Area. Subscribe in your favorite podcast app. Support Vox Conversations by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts This episode was made by:  Producer: Erikk Geannikis Editor: Amy Drozdowska Engineer: Patrick Boyd Editorial Director, Vox Talk: A.M. Hall Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Economic changes bring prosperity, but not without cost. The globalization of how we produce and consume has left many American workers in dead end jobs without prospects for advancement. Some critics of this change have argued for the necessity of walls to protect American industries from global competition and labor exploitation. In his new book The Wall and The Bridge: Fear and Opportunity in Disruption's Wake, Glenn Hubbard argues for bridges to economic opportunity. We discuss themes from his book in today's episode. https://www.aei.org/profile/r-glenn-hubbard/ (Glenn Hubbard) https://glennhubbard.net/ (The Wall and the Bridge) https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo4138549.html (The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek) https://business.ucf.edu/person/kenneth-white/ (Ken White) https://nesa.org/about/ (Eagle Scout) https://www.adamsmith.org/the-wealth-of-nations (The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith) https://www.libertyfund.org/resources/adamsmithworks/ (Adam Smith Works - Liberty Fund) https://www.adamsmith.org/the-theory-of-moral-sentiments (The Theory of Moral Sentiments) https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/smith-on-sympathy-lauren-hall-12-1 (Smith's Idea of Mutual Sympathy) https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/laissezfaire.asp (Laissez-Faire Economy) https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/dignity-at-work-reimagining-talent-acquisition-and-retention-with-worker-dignity-at-the-center/ (Dignity at Work by Brent Orrell) https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/08/20040810-12.html (President Bush's High Growth Job Training Initiative) https://www.hudexchange.info/programs/cdbg-entitlement/cdbg-entitlement-program-eligibility-requirements/ (Block-Granting Entitlement Programs) https://www.brookings.edu/book/growing-fairly/ (Growing Fairly by Stephen Goldsmith and Kate Markin Coleman) https://commons.vccs.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=inquiry (One Counselor for Every 1,000 students - Northern Virginia) https://commons.vccs.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=inquiry (Community College System) https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/archive/1-31-03ui.htm (Personal Reemployment Accounts) https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-roots-of-american-industrialization-1790-1860/ (American Industrialization) https://www.texastribune.org/2022/04/11/texas-border-inspections-truckers-protest/ (Mexican Truck Drivers Situation) https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/training/tradeact#:~:text=The%20Trade%20Adjustment%20Assistance%20(TAA,a%20result%20of%20increased%20imports. (Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) Program) https://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal62-1326212 (Trade Expansion Act of 1962) https://guides.loc.gov/morrill-act (Morrill Act) https://www.aplu.org/about-us/history-of-aplu/what-is-a-land-grant-university/ (Land-Grant University) https://www.military.com/education/gi-bill (GI Bill) https://blog.newspapers.library.in.gov/go-west-young-man-the-mystery-behind-the-famous-phrase/ (“Go west, young man” by Horace Greeley) https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/features/polanyi/ (The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi) https://www.brookings.edu/multi-chapter-report/place-based-policies-for-shared-economic-growth/ (Place-Based Policies)

Key Insights:Since 1870, we humans have done amazingly astonishingly uniquely and unprecedentedly well at baking a sufficiently large economic pie.But the problems of slicing and tasting the pie—of equitably distributing it, and then using our technological powers to live lives wisely and well—continue to flummox us. The big reason we have been unable to build social institutions for equitably slicing and then properly tasting our now more-than-sufficiently-large economic pie is the sheer pace of economic transformation.Since 1870 humanity's technological competence has doubled every generationHence Schumpeterian creative destruction has taken hold.Our immensely increasing wealth has come at the price of the repeated destruction of industries, occupations, livelihoods, and communities.And we have been frantically trying to rewrite the sociological code running on top of our rapidly changing forces-of-production hardwareThe attempts to cobble together a sorta-running sociological software code have been a scorched-earth war between two factions.Faction 1: followers of Friedrich von Hayek, who say: "the market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market"Faction 2: followers of Karl Polanyi, who say: "the market was made for man; not man for the market"Let the market start destroying "society", and society will react by trying to destroy the market orderThus the task of governance and politics is to try to manage and perhaps one day supersede this dilemma. &, of course, HEXAPODIA!!Thank you for reading Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality. This post is public so feel free to share it.References:J. Bradford DeLong: Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century Robert Gordon: The Rise and Fall of American Growth Gary Gerstle: The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era Vaclav Smil: Creating the 20th Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact Vaclav Smil: Transforming the 20th Century: Technical Innovations and Their Consequences Friedrich von Hayek: The Road to Serfdom Karl Polanyi: The Great Transfomation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time John Maynard Keynes: The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money +, of course:Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep  Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe

The co-hosts welcome sociologist Gavin Rae, to discuss his critique of “Sociological Marxism,” which well-known left sociologists Erik Olin Wright and Michael Burawoy proposed two decades ago. They rejected Marx's theory of capitalist crisis, claiming that state economic management has caused capitalism to stabilize, and that the value theory underlying Marx's crisis theory is internally inconsistent. Gavin argues that the Great Recession soon showed that the notion of stable capitalism is dubious, and that the temporal single-system interpretation of Marx's value theory has made it untenable to uncritically repeat the charge of the internal inconsistency. He and the co-hosts also discuss Wright and Burawoy's embrace of Karl Polanyi's thought and his focus on markets instead of production. Gavin argues that Marx's crisis theory and the “dominance of production” can be incorporated into sociology, and he suggests several ways to do so. Current-events segment: New Mexico judge bars Capitol insurrectionist from holding office. Will more disqualifications follow?

Welcome to episode 125 of Activist #MMT. Today's the first in a six-part series with Texas Christian University (TCU) economics professor and Cowboy Economist, John Harvey. The first three parts are hosted by me, the final three by MMT researcher, Texas lawyer, and my previous guest, Johnathan Wilson. Jonathan and John talk about how MMT can apply to nations outside the US, using Russia as an example, and also some of the core theoretical and ideological differences between MMTers and mainstream economists, focusing on a recent critique of MMT by Drumetz and Pfeister. (You can hear my own interview with Jonathan in episodes 106 and 107.) (Here's a link to all six parts in this series: parts two and three with me, and parts four, five, and six with Jonathan. A list of the audio chapters in this episode can be found at the bottom of this post. For a link to every Activist #MMT interview with John, go here.) Regarding parts one to three, John and I talk about his chapter in the upcoming book called Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers. The book will be published by the UK-based Gower Institute for Modern Money Studies, or GIMMS; it's edited by L. Randall Wray and GIMMS; and is scheduled for January 2023 release. John is one of 15 authors. John's chapter is called "Modern Monetary Theory, the UK, and pound sterling". He was asked to write the chapter for two major reasons: First because there is not enough MMT-specific analysis on exchange rate determination, and second, to address the reality of the so-called sterling crisis in the United Kingdom. John and I don't specifically discuss the latter topic, but it is addressed in the paper. It addresses the following criticism of MMT (this is a quote from the chapter): "MMT-inspired policies will cause high rates of price inflation which will, in turn, lower the international value of a domestic currency – perhaps catastrophically." Importantly, the critique is based on the following three assumptions: The false idea that we are already, or soon will be, at full employment A fantastical theory of exchange rate determination A terrible and lazy mischaracterization of MMT John and I spend most of our time discussing the reality of these three assumptions. Surprisingly, however, the main insight I take from this conversation is a much clearer understanding of inflation in general. I'm going to describe that insight in the introduction to part two. The heart of our conversation is on the above three assumptions, but we start and end with mostly unrelated subjects. Part one begins with John describing his experience as chair of the economics department at TCU, he discusses the Russian-Ukrainian conflict only as it relates to exchange rate determination, and he also answers a question from an Activist #MMT patron, regarding his opinion of our possibility of experiencing a recession. At the end of part three, we talk about how, for most of those that most of us directly interact with, mainstream economic theory is not, in fact, a big conspiracy. We end by discussing the good and bad of math in economics. Thanks to the recommendation of a patron, with every episode of Activist #MMT as of several months ago, you can pinpoint any part of this interview by referring to the full list of audio chapters, which can be found at the bottom of the show notes. So, for example, if you wanted to skip over this introduction and go right to the beginning of the interview proper, now you can know exactly what timestamp to go to. And now, on to my conversation with John Harvey. Enjoy. Resources My previous interviews with John: Episode 43: John Harvey on John Harvey, discrimination, and aliens. Episodes 45 and 46: On inflation: mainstream versus Post Keynesian (and the MMT job guarantee) Episodes 72 and 73: The Battle of the Bulge (and the nitty gritty of Exchange Rate Determination) Books: Fred Lee's A History of Heterodox Economics (2006) Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (2001 edition, 1944) Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine (2007) Nancy Maclean's Democracy in Chains Audio chapters 6:02 - Attics, squeaky toys, dogs, and rats 8:51 - Economics chairmanship 16:21 - Being Post Keynesian chair in a mainstream department 21:04 - Patron question: Recession coming? 26:10 - Russia-Ukraine conflict 31:31 - My lawn mower runs out of gas 32:36 - Start of main questions 33:20 - Demand-pull inflation 44:39 - George Selgin 47:35 - Back to inflation 52:55 - Duplicate of introduction, but with no background music (for listeners sensitive to the opening music)

Welcome to episode 125 of Activist #MMT. Today's the first in a six-part series with Texas Christian University (TCU) economics professor and , John Harvey. The first three parts are hosted by me, the final three by MMT researcher, Texas lawyer, and my previous guest, Johnathan Wilson. Jonathan and John talk about how MMT can apply to nations outside the US, using Russia as an example, and also some of the core theoretical and ideological differences between MMTers and mainstream economists, focusing on a recent critique of MMT . (You can hear my own interview with Jonathan in episodes and .) (Here's a link to all six parts in this series: parts two and three with me, and parts four, five, and six with Jonathan. A list of the audio chapters in this episode can be found at the bottom of this post. For a link to every Activist #MMT interview with John, .) Regarding parts one to three, John and I talk about his chapter in the upcoming book called . The book will be published by the UK-based Gower Institute for Modern Money Studies, or GIMMS; it's edited by L. Randall Wray and GIMMS; and is scheduled for January 2023 release. John is one of 15 authors. John's chapter is called "Modern Monetary Theory, the UK, and pound sterling". He was asked to write the chapter for two major reasons: First because there is not enough MMT-specific analysis on exchange rate determination, and second, to address the reality of the so-called sterling crisis in the United Kingdom. John and I don't specifically discuss the latter topic, but it is addressed in the paper. It addresses the following criticism of MMT (this is a quote from the chapter): "MMT-inspired policies will cause high rates of price inflation which will, in turn, lower the international value of a domestic currency – perhaps catastrophically." Importantly, the critique is based on the following three assumptions: The false idea that we are already, or soon will be, at full employment A fantastical theory of exchange rate determination A terrible and lazy mischaracterization of MMT John and I spend most of our time discussing the reality of these three assumptions. Surprisingly, however, the main insight I take from this conversation is a much clearer understanding of inflation in general. I'm going to describe that insight in the introduction to part two. The heart of our conversation is on the above three assumptions, but we start and end with mostly unrelated subjects. Part one begins with John describing his experience as chair of the economics department at TCU, he discusses the Russian-Ukrainian conflict only as it relates to exchange rate determination, and he also answers a question from an Activist #MMT patron, regarding his opinion of our possibility of experiencing a recession. At the end of part three, we talk about how, for most of those that most of us directly interact with, mainstream economic theory is not, in fact, a big conspiracy. We end by discussing the good and bad of math in economics. Thanks to the recommendation of a patron, with every episode of Activist #MMT as of several months ago, you can pinpoint any part of this interview by referring to the full list of audio chapters, which can be found at the bottom of the show notes. So, for example, if you wanted to skip over this introduction and go right to the beginning of the interview proper, now you can know exactly what timestamp to go to. And now, on to my conversation with John Harvey. Enjoy. Resources My previous interviews with John: : John Harvey on John Harvey, discrimination, and aliens. Episodes and : On inflation: mainstream versus Post Keynesian (and the MMT job guarantee) Episodes and : The Battle of the Bulge (and the nitty gritty of Exchange Rate Determination) Books: Fred Lee's (2006) Karl Polanyi's (2001 edition, 1944) Naomi Klein's (2007) Nancy Maclean's Audio chapters 6:02 - Attics, squeaky toys, dogs, and rats 8:51 - Economics chairmanship 16:21 - Being Post...

Få fenomen har blivit så omdiskuterade de senaste åren som liberalismens kris. I den här essän funderar författaren Per Wirtén på om utvägen ur krisen kanske ligger dold i liberalismens historia. ESSÄ: Detta är en text där skribenten reflekterar över ett ämne eller ett verk. Åsikter som uttrycks är skribentens egna.De senaste trettio åren har varit liberalismens epok. Den har vunnit på alla fronter. Men om man ska vara mer korrekt, och det är viktigt i sammanhanget, så är det en specifik riktning inom den annars vittförgrenade liberalismen som dominerat, den så kallade nyliberalismen. Huvuddragen är vid det här laget välbekanta: privatiseringar, fria självreglerande marknader, individuell valfrihet i alla lägen och en krympande statsmakt.Men sedan några år har allt fler noterat att det liberala projektet drabbats av osäkerhet och förvirring. Liberalismens kris har blivit ett etablerat begrepp. Det som för trettio år sedan verkade så nytt och lovande uppfattas nu av många som slitet och tilltufsat. Först kom finanskraschen 2008 och sedan eurokrisen. Men det är så mycket mer som bidragit till diskussionerna om en liberalismens kris: envist hög arbetslöshet, växande inkomstskillnader och en utbredd känsla av att det gemensamma själva samhällsprojektet upplösts till förmån för ett race där de enskilda vinnarna tar allt.I början av 1900-talet stod liberalismen inför en lika djup kris som nu. Den ansågs uttjänt och omodern, svarslös inför dåtidens uppflammande klasskonflikter. Det utlöste en omtolkning av det liberala uppdraget på båda sidor om Atlanten.I USA skedde det genom den så kallade progressiva rörelsen där intellektuella och politiker gemensamt drog slutsatsen att i det storindustriella samhället behövde de liberala frihetsidealen garanteras och försvaras av en stark stat, ett nytt slags fördelningspolitik med progressiva skatter och en arbetslagstiftning som garanterade arbetarna viktiga rättigheter. Liberalerna lämnade helt enkelt sina tidigare dominerande doktriner om en minimal stat, fria marknader och begränsad rösträtt. Kanske kommer de som i framtiden ser tillbaka på vår tids samhällsomvandlingar ta fasta på de lika stora förändringar som skakade världen vid det förra sekelskiftet. Kanske kommer de att leta samband och undersöka skillnader mellan de utmaningar liberalismens idéer stod inför i början av 1900-talet och den hårda kritik den möter i dag. Då kom utmaningen från socialismen och arbetarrörelsen. Nu kommer den från ett helt annat håll: från den hårda konservatismens återkomst, från nationalismen och från auktoritära politiker. En del liberaler vill inte se några som helst problem i den förda politiken. De vill möta utmaningen med ännu fler avregleringar och skattesänkningar. Andra anpassar sig efter den nya konservativa nationalismens vindriktningar. Men inget av de båda vägvalen verkar kunna häva den liberala krisen.Möjligen är det något helt annat som behövs: en kritisk omorientering inifrån det liberala idéarvet, i likhet med den som skedde för drygt hundra år sedan. Det finns en pågående internationell debatt i den riktningen. För några år sedan drog till exempel den amerikanska journalisten James Traub en besk slutsats i boken "What was Liberalism?" om att det är liberalismen, så som den utformats under de här trettio åren, som berett vägen för den illiberala revolten. Som passionerad liberal menade Traub att räddningen ligger gömd i de liberala idéernas mångfacetterade historia.Liberalismen är ju som ett stort hus med många rum. Där har det alltid funnits konflikter och strider om hur den ska tolkas. Om de individuella friheterna är viktigare än demokratins majoritetsstyre. Om principen om fria marknader ska vara starkare än politikens försök att tämja dem.Nyliberalerna har i trettio år haft tolkningsmonopol på vad liberalism egentligen är. Men för att komma ur sin kris behöver liberaler antagligen gå tillbaka in i sitt eget hus, för att identifiera andra röster, andra texter och historiska erfarenheter.Ett viktigt bidrag finns i historikern Helena Rosenblatts uppmärksammade "The Lost History of Liberalism" där hon vänder sig till 1800-talets franska och tyska liberaler för en sådan omorientering. Hon framhåller till exempel de liberala pionjärerna Benjamin Constant och Madame de Staël. Hon visar hur de förkastade det individuella egenintresset som de kallade egoism till förmån för allmänintresset och det gemensamma ansvaret.Titeln på Rosenblatts bok är en riktningsgivare för nyorienteringen: Liberalismens förlorade historia. Något har tappats bort, eller i själva verket målmedvetet trängts undan, som nu behöver återfinnas. Det gäller framtiden.En liknande utgrävning gör holländska Annelien De Dijn i sin otroligt rika idéhistoria "Freedom" om det liberala frihetsbegreppet. Hon följer liberalernas långa brottning med idén om ett demokratiskt folkstyre, som de länge hade förvånansvärt svårt att acceptera. Hon ställer många frågor om vad begreppet liberal demokrati kan vara, men inte alltid varit.Så vad finns det då för liberala värderingar som kan omvärderas, men på fortsatt liberal grund? Poängen är inte att liberalismen ska förkastas utan återigen omtolkas i ny riktning ungefär som skedde i början av 1900-talet.Den första punkten är det meritokratiska idealet om att ge alla samma start i livet, för att sedan acceptera uppkomna ojämlikheter. Detta i motsats till socialdemokratin som kontinuerligt vill rätta till ojämlikheter under livscykeln. Men utan effektiva arvsskatter och enhetlig skola har ju den meritokratiska modellen tömts på reellt innehåll. I stället framträder nu en ny aristokrati som vilar på ärvda förmögenheter.Den andra punkten är den liberala antropologin, eller människosynen, där människor ses som helt självständiga individer på en valfrihetsmarknad utan några ömsesidiga beroenden. Det leder till just det samhälleliga sönderfall som den liberala pionjären Benjamin Constant befarade för över 200 år sedan. 1800-talets franska liberaler utvecklade därför en idé om mänsklig individualitet i stället för den antropologiska individualismen som de uppfattade som ren egoism. Liberaler behöver helt enkelt återskapa den ofta bortglömda liberala tanken om det gemsamma ansvaret för ett samhällsbygge, för det allmänna.Den tredje punkten är en uppgörelse med föreställningen om fria och självreglerande marknader. Där finns ju en lång och rik liberal tradition om en politiskt och socialt inbäddad kapitalism, med till exempel Karl Polanyi, Franklin D Roosevelt och John Maynard Keynes som framträdande representanter.Det är några exempel på hur vägen ut ur liberalismens kris kan ligga i en inventering och utvärdering av dess historia. Nycklarna till en möjlig ny liberal guldålder ligger i sådant fall gömda bland gamla historiska erfarenheter.En sådan kritisk omorientering behöver göras av just liberaler med sikte på att förändra den liberala politiken. Vi andra kan inskärpa betydelsen av en sådan, till exempel genom att peka på den liberala idéhistoriens rika möjligheter, men inte göra själva jobbet. Liberalismens kris angår alla, men den kan nog bara lösas av liberalerna själva.Per Wirtén, författareLitteraturHelena Rosenblatt: The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton University Press, 2018.Annelien de Dijn: Freedom: An Unruly History. Harvard University Press, 2020.James Traub: What Was Liberalism? The Past, Present, and Promise of a Noble Idea. Basic Books, 2019.BildenSex förgrundsfigurer ur liberalismens historia:James Madison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:James_Madison(cropped)(c).jpgMadame de Staël: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marie_El%C3%A9onore_Godefroid_-_Portrait_of_Mme_de_Sta%C3%ABl.jpgAdam Smith: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adam_Smith_The_Muir_portrait.jpgJohn Stuart Mill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stuart_Mill_G_F_Watts.jpgJohn Locke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John_Locke.jpgMary Wollstonecraft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mary_Wollstonecraft_by_John_Opie_(c._1797).jpg

Hello Interactors,Where, how, and when people work continues to shift. Meanwhile, scores of people are moving to urban regions in search of opportunities. Some of which are more accessible than others. It’s putting stresses on how cities plan, how we move, and what kinds of freedoms are afforded and to whom. But hidden in the complexities of societies are patterns of hope. As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…REMOTE CONTROLThe workplace will never be the same again. What it becomes won’t either. But don’t tell Elon Musk. He threw a temper tantrum last week accusing employees at Tesla of slacking off working from home. In a company-wide email he became the over-controlling parent and grounded everyone. He wrote, “Everyone at Tesla is required to spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week” and that they “must be where your actual colleagues are located, not some remote pseudo office.” He claimed had he not been on the factory floor “working alongside” his employees that Tesla would have “long ago gone bankrupt.” I’m sure every factory floor worker he has replaced by a robot might have something to say about that.Some work does require a physical presence. Teeth cleaning comes to mind. But there is something to coming together physically that is hard to replicate online. There are also many kinds of service jobs that require a physical presence, though some of those are getting replaced by robots. Last year, a Dallas restaurant turned to a Robot called Bella when they had trouble filling waiter jobs. The owner said, “They don’t complain and they’re happy to do it!” It even happily sings Happy Birthday.But even white-collar jobs require some together time. I heard one academic say he worked two years during COVID on a joint research project over Zoom. When the team finally came together physically, they accomplished more in a single day than they did in those two years.  Every company from Tesla to Target are feeling the reverberations of pandemic induced workplace alterations. Even Microsoft, a company that has long envisioned the promise of hybrid-work, is struggling through a new rhythm and workplace model. Mandatory in-office strategies like Musk tried aren’t practical. Even senior leaders are choosing to move to remote locations. Meanwhile, some high-tech teams were already distributed around the world. Despite these trends, companies continue to build new office space. Cranes loom on the horizon all around Seattle. While some of these high-rises will be housing, much of it is office space. What will they do with all this space?I met a new friend last week who is trying to figure that out. She works as a product designer for a company headquartered in Rotterdam called MapIQ. They build software and services that allow companies to optimize the space they have. She’s been busy conducting research. She talks to employees, facility managers, IT departments, human resources, and corporate realtors who are struggling with a new workplace reality. She told me one of the most acute issues for facility managers is space utilization. These companies pay a lot of money to have attractive and effective workplaces. Seeing them empty is troubling financially but also psychologically. She said, “Employees are struggling to know when it is best to come to the office. They don't want to be the only one at home in a hybrid meeting and they don't want to be in an empty office either.”Facility managers are scrambling to find ways to make the most of what they have. She said one popular outcome is subletting workspace. But even subletters will only use it occasionally and sporadically. They use software and sensors to better manage who is using it, when, and for how long. This was not how these buildings were designed and not how these companies were envisioned to be run. MapIQ has identified five trends emerging in the workplace:The office as standard. Most all employees work four or five days a week in the office.Local hybrid. Most people work two or three days a week in the office.Remote friendly. Most employees are in the office only once or twice a week.Remote first. Working in the office is completely optional with no geographic requirement.Fully distributed. There is no office at all and everyone works wherever they want.The nature of work in the foreseeable future is decidedly different than the past. It will take some time for optimizations to emerge. Meanwhile, how will this affect our built environment and how cities plan? Our roads, rails, wires, and spires, boulevards, buildings, drains and ditches were all planned and produced with a certain permanency and predictability that surrounds our economies, societies, and psychologies. These features of the physical and social landscape were assumed to be towering rocks anchored and resolute. But it turns out it was a mirage. They are made of sand and the winds of the pandemic has created a sandstorm. What shape these forms of fortune take is unknown and possibly unknowable.The landscape of living amidst this storm is hard to predict and control. The best way to know what direction we’re headed is to look where we came from. Only then can we understand how we got here. A lot has changed in how and where we live. Since the end of WWII, the world’s population has more than tripled. Over half alive right now live in urban areas and nearly three-quarters will by 2050. North America is one of the most urbanized regions in the world. In 2018 82% of the population lived in urban areas. And it’s growing every day. Europe is 74% urbanized and their cities are also growing. Half of the world’s population lives in Asia and half of those live in urban areas.Not all regions grow at the same rate. The fastest growing areas are projected to continue to be in low-income and middle-income nations. Thirty-three of the fastest growing countries between 2000 and 2020 were in Africa. Twelve were in Asia. But urbanization is both a blessing and a curse. Access to better public health, nutrition, and education improves the lives of those who suffer most, but puts increased strains on housing, transportation, energy, and other infrastructure systems. This is having widespread, varying, and compounding impacts on all who live in urban areas. But these growing pains are not equally felt by all. Understanding these sensitivities will be necessary if we’re going to find ways to solve them.SUPER SIZING THE SUPER RICH WITH SUPERLINEAR WEALTHUrban scientists have found naturally occurring mathematical patterns in growing cities. They mimic power-laws found across a diverse array of cities just as they do across plants and animals. For example, as cities grow in population their GDP, number of patents, and productivity grow at a predictable scale. However, congestion, crime, and contagious diseases also predictably grow. Doubling the size of a city will increase wages, wealth, and innovation (as measured by number of patents) by roughly 15 percent. But so will garbage and theft. Population growth has a predictable superlinear positive and negative effect on urban areas. It’s the great paradox of urbanity.There are big advantages to scale. With each doubling of population there’s also a 15 percent savings in total length of rail lines, electrical lines, water lines, and roads. This sublinear effect predictably leads to a city of 10 million people needing 15 percent less infrastructure than a city half its size. It pays to grow.But these numbers, as predictable as they are, can also be misleading. Whenever population datasets get crunched and averaged the analysis ends up crunching the realities of the average person. Hidden in the convenient clustering of ‘low-income‘, ‘middle-income’, and ‘high-income’ are varying degrees, durations, and directions as diverse as those lived experiences of the people behind the numbers. This realization has led some of those same urban scaling researchers to scrutinize their own findings. Increased wealth disparities, for example, got them wondering. If wage growth is so predictable compared to urban growth, and more people are predictably moving to urban areas, why aren’t all wages predictably growing?They wondered if there are similar scaling laws that predict income inequality based on city size. How are incomes different among the rich and the poor compared to the size of the city? After adjusting for cost-of-living differences, are poor people in a big city better off than poor people in a small city? Are rich people richer the bigger the city?To answer their questions, they broke down income brackets into percentiles. Traditional economic inequality research looks at dispersed distributions across income or wealth. Meaningful individual differences are hidden in these distributions. What they found is the wealth of the poorest 10% scales almost linearly with population size. In contrast, the top 10% shows superlinear growth. This means poor folks moving closer to the city in hopes of becoming wealthier may find themselves to be continually poor compared to those in higher income brackets. The rich get richer, and the poor stay poor.They conclude that “much has been written about the apparent increasing gains of large cities, such as greater GDP, higher wages, and more patents per capita.” But in the end, “the increasing benefits of city size are not evenly distributed to people within those cities.” For example, they found the ratio of housing costs to income is a function of city population size. The poorer the income brackets, the greater the proportion of income is spent on housing. This results in sharp increases in costs with city size. Meanwhile, in the wealthiest brackets the proportion of income spent on housing stays level.So whatever superlinear growth in GDP, innovation, and wage growth that comes with increased city size is highly concentrated in the upper income brackets. Existing research in urban scaling and innovation points to empirical evidence that these gains are due in large part to the increase in social interactions and sharing of ideas. Larger and more diverse pools of people co-located in urban areas results in an explosion of creativity, opportunity, and resources. The accumulation of shared knowledge and passion only increases the potential for innovation.This theory is found in the work of economist Karl Polanyi. In his landmark 1944 book, The Great Transformation, Polanyi gives this concept a name: embeddedness – those who share a common social context have an embedded relationship that drives a desire to provide for one another. Stanford economic sociologist, Mark Granovetter, reaffirmed the idea in his oft referenced 1973 paper, “The Strength of Weak Ties.”And one of the most influential economists in the 20th century, Austrian turned American, Joseph Shumpeter, described these acts of economic invention and innovation as ‘creative destruction’. For every new innovation that brings increased wealth another must be destroyed or devalued. Capitalists celebrate it as the unfortunate inevitability of social and economic progress while Socialists deride it as the inevitable annihilating force of capitalism.Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in their 1848 Communist Manifesto that, “Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells… In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.”This grim prognosis from one of Capitalisms only inciteful critics is, sadly, all too relatable these days. Marx would not at all be surprised to hear there’s now empirical evidence to back his 174-year-old theory. But he would probably also be shocked to see China rising as a global superpower by combining elements of Capitalism with Socialism. Markets seem to have a way of formalizing Polanyi’s notion of embeddedness. He believed we all have the desire and creative ability to contribute to each others success and well being as part of our livelihoods. It’s not just goods and services that need exchanged but also values, moral concerns, and relationships. But to do that we must remain connected.CONNECTING THE DOTS TO FREEDOMThose urban scaling researchers hypothesize that one of the reasons income inequalities are so pronounce and unfairly propagated in our wealthiest cities is because the various income brackets have become increasingly geographically and socially segregated. Like ecosystems, the less diversity there is the greater the propensity to collapse. These researchers warn that urban regions that “inhibit mixing between diverse populations, will underperform with respect to income scaling.” If lessening income inequality is a goal, the research suggests “cities that are better mixed, allowing diverse parts of the population to be exposed to one another, should be overperforming with respect to urban scaling.”Connecting diverse sets of people across urban regions seems a more productive, and fun, way to tackle income inequality than redistribution of wealth through a government program. Ricardo Hausmann is the founder and Director of Harvard University’s Growth Lab. They uncover international growth diagnostics and develop economic complexity research methodologies. In a recent interview he said,“In my mind, the real solution to inequality is not so much redistribution as inclusion – as incorporating people into the possibility of mixing what they are…that leads to a very different agenda for inequality reduction. Do you send people a check or do you connect them to the urban transport network?...Do you connect it to the labor market? Do you connect to the schooling system?”He was joined in this interview by J. Doyne Farmer. He is the Director of Complexity Economics at the Oxford Institute of New Economic Thinking. Farmer points out that when economists look at the distribution of productivity, they commonly use a statistical technique that lops off a chunk of a giant tail of the distribution curve that is seemingly inconsequential to their analysis. This gives them a distorted point of view of productivity. And to underline Hausmann’s point about the importance of diversity needed to be connected, he said, “that there's a huge diversity out there” hidden in the fat tails those distribution curves. He adds, “And we really have to cope with that because it's inherent to the economy.”   The question is, how connected physically do people have to be, how often, and for how long to achieve optimal productivity gains? These are questions being asked by companies around the world and firms like MapIQ are there to help answer them. But how many of these companies are already segregating themselves from the socio-economic diversity of their headquarters, satellite offices, or shared urban and suburban workspaces?Arjun Ramani, a Stanford economist and journalist for The Economist, said last year in an interview by Leesman, a leader in workplace research, that “people are now willing to live an hour away in exchange for a bigger house, because they don’t have to commute in every day.” He believes it’s leading to the ‘donuting’ of cities which I mentioned may be occurring in Des Moines, Iowa. Ramani also reminds us that in the 1800s 40% of workers were working from home. He said, “working from home was quite common. Workers would go into a city or to a market to get raw materials and goods and return home to work – for example in the manufacture of clothes.”Today that just may be a 3D printer in a suburban garage or a rural toolshed, but the materials would probably be delivered to their door or flown in on a drone. But there’s no question some segment of jobs will require a more centralized physical presence. I’m not yet ready to have my teeth cleaned by a robot, though it looks like that also may be around the corner too. Even farming is moving toward robots.Regardless of what kind of job is available or desired or how much physical presence needed, there is little question getting more people connected – regardless of where they live – increases the odds of diverse interactions. My own experience tells me, and mounds of research supports, diverse collections of people and ideas yield unexpectedly miraculous outcomes. It’s not always easy or pleasant working with people of differing backgrounds, beliefs, and inclinations, but out of contention come good ideas.It's also hard to imagine how we become more connected amidst increasing geographic segregation, political polarization, religious ideology, and economic disparities. This may be today’s most perplexing social dilemma. It seems each opportunity to come together is met with an excuse to move apart. Meanwhile, there are powerful forces alive today bent on suppressing individual freedoms. And yet we live in a time when personal freedoms to choose where to live and where work are reignited. But those freedoms are not afforded to all which is an unjust outcome of an unjust history. And so the struggle continues.It’s sometimes hard to remain optimistic as the sand dunes of our institutions are shaped by the unpredictable storms of change. But hidden in the complexities of distribution curves, growing populations, and the shifting sands of urbanity are predictable patterns that offer us clues – kernels of clarity and certainty; pathways to pursue, and lessons to learn. It’s the certainty we need if we want to uphold our freedoms.When Polanyi wrote about the great transformation occurring in 1944 it was during a dark time. He started the book during the depression in the 1930s and had lived through political and economic upheaval in England. A world war preceded his writing, and the book was published during a second. He recognized the complexity of society and spoke of the freedoms that come with it.In the final chapter titled, Freedom in a Complex Society, he writes,“Uncomplaining acceptance of the reality of society gives man indomitable courage and strength to remove all removable injustice and unfreedom. As long as he is true to his task of creating more abundant freedom for all, he need not fear that either power or planning will turn against him and destroy the freedom he is building by their instrumentality. This is the meaning of freedom in a complex society; it gives us all the certainty that we need.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Today Jeffrey Epstein talks with Asad Zaman about the 2001 edition of Karl Polanyi's 1944 book, The Great Transformation. Professor Zaman is a PhD economist based in Pakistan, with many lectures, papers, and posts on the topic. The Great Transformation reveals, essentially, that what we think to be a foundation of our economy and society is, in fact, an illusion. Specifically, Polanyi calls capitalism and its free or "self-regulating" market "a stark Utopia". By definition, a Utopia (an imagined place where everything is perfect) is impossible to achieve. However, the attempt to achieve it – to eliminate literally all market regulation – can result only in the complete destruction of all human life and the land they live on. This is evidenced by our increasingly likely extinction at the hands of a human-created ecological crisis, caused largely by unprecedented and still-growing levels of inequality and the mass exploitation of all natural resources, including most human beings.Here's Polanyi, on the first page of the first chapter:Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.Unfortunately, the only way to maintain the fiction of the self-regulating market, is to continue the mass exploitation of the poor. Instead of treating human beings as the infinitely precious and unique beings they are, they are rather treated as mere interchangeable and disposable cogs to run the Unending Greed Machines; most often under terrible conditions. Polanyi calls this grave maltreatment the commodification of labor.The only way to get human beings to submit to these terrible conditions, is to threaten them with an even more terrible condition: starvation and death. As quoted in the book, starvation "can tame even the wildest beast". Not even the strongest man can overcome it.How is this starvation made possible? By eliminating the possibility of self sufficiency. A major tool to do this was the invention of the concept of the private ownership of land. This justified the ejection of all former occupants, who must now, for example, in modern society, purchase our food at a distant store. We have to drive to that store, and the food, plus the car and its gas, must all be paid for with money, which in turn can only be obtained by laboring at the Greed Machines. What this all means is that the commodification of labor also requires the commodification of the land.Those being potentially annihilated by the destruction of the self-regulating market resist that destruction. This results in what Polanyi calls the double movement. This is the ideological battle that has raged for centuries, where one side tries to eliminate all market regulation, while the other tries to protect itself by imposing some. When the amount of regulations are only enough to moderately reduce that destruction, as is unfortunately most often the case, then the resistance can only perpetuate and further enable the pursuit of that stark Utopia.What underlies and justifies this horror is the most dominant religion in the world, which is greed. Without Polanyi's book and his work, this religion, and its byproducts of inequality and mass exploitation, are made to appear normal, inevitable, and unstoppable – in other words, natural. The truth that Polanyi's history reveals (and as is reinforced by my recent interview with Wesley Wiles)is that inequality, exploitation, and greed are not "unfortunate, but necessary", they're deliberate choices. Those who benefit most from the self-regulating market have incentive to deceive the rest of us into thinking that these terrible things are indeed natural. This is the role played by neoclassical economics: to provide that official, neutral, and natural-sounding justification.The core problem in our society is not "capitalism" or "the free market", per se, but rather the mass exploitation of the poor. Therefore, the core solution is to empower the poor. The nature of this empowerment is simple: provide them with what they desperately need: like healthcare, education, a job, un-poisoned water, and a world that doesn't threaten to collapse around them. These things all serve to empower the poor which ultimately reduces inequality – of both wealth and income.We will annihilate the fiction of the self-regulating market or it will annihilate us. There is no gray area. We will provide for those on the bottom or we will go extinct. The first step is to emancipate ourselves from the chains of false history and false economics, and from the idea that everything horrible is "unfortunate, but necessary". Only then can we take a step back and start thinking of alternatives.As a final note, you'll hear some of Professor Zaman's thoughts on the potential form a sustainable future society might take. These are not ideas from the book but his own, in an attempt to start a discussion on one of the greatest questions of our time: how do we resist and annihilate the self-regulating market, and what can and will society be like when we do? Perhaps you have some ideas of your own. Let's start that discussion.Chapters9:27 - Hellos10:35 - The commodification of labor - what it really means14:41 - The fantasy of power, to vent the frustration of being powerless17:01 - The self-regulating market is a fiction and a stark Utopia. The double movement19:41 - Movies- Don't Look Up and Encanto22:45 - How do you resist the self-regulating market and beat it, instead of perpetuate it?26:30 - Whatever the answer, it starts with you29:33 - Peace is a balance of power, but only in a belligerent world38:20 - Peace is controlled violence - violence by, not against, the powerful40:19 - Individual imbalance of power, fiction of nation states44:38 - Corporations are more powerful than nation states46:56 - The gold standard was the glue that held the world together but for a terrible reason (and mercantilism)54:48 - Fascism is not something in and of itself, rather it's something to fill in the vacuum left by the wreckage of the self-regulating market Get full access to Historic.ly at historicly.substack.com/subscribe

Today's part two of my two-part conversation with Jackson Winter, on the 2001 edition of Karl Polanyi's 1944 book, The Great Transformation. This is also part two of a larger four-part series on the book. Jackson is co-writer and editor for PEGS Institute, which is a project to demystify and explain some commonly misunderstood realities of the modern world. Here's their YouTube channel.(A list of the "audio chapters" in this episode can be found at the bottom of this post. A link to all four parts in the series can be found in Part 1I'll summarize the book in next week's introduction. Even experienced MMTers can't know this stuff. You think you understand the foundation of our economy and society, but you don't. As described in The Great Transformation, there's another foundation underneath it.(Before we start the interview, I'm making an announcement at the request of a patron, and that is: the podcast Pod Save America, which is hosted by former Obama staffers, has millions of followers, many of who like to think of themselves as progressives. Unfortunately, although the hosts say many smart things, they still live solidly in a pay-for, scarcity, zero-sum world. Please consider contacting the hosts via Twitter and urging them to interview an MMT guest such as Stephanie Kelton, Warren Mosler, Bill Mitchell, and Randy Wray. The Twitter handles for the podcast and its hosts can be found in the show notes, and in the social media shares for this episode. Thanks for your help in spreading the word!Here at the Twitter handles for Pod Save America and its hosts: Dan Pfiffer: [@danpfeiffer], Jon Favreau: [@jonfavs], Tommy Vietor: [@tvietor08], Jon Lovett: [@jonlovett])And now, let's get right back to my conversation with Jackson Winter. Enjoy.Audio chapters4:31 - Choosing to commodify other humans is a gamble that you won't become one of them7:37 - The gold standard was the glue that held the (belligerent and greedy) world together13:53 - Individual balance of power17:41 - Fascism is a consequence of the neglect and deprivation of neoliberalism20:41 - Thinking of a better economic and political system (and if we should)27:17 - Unregulated versus regulated teenager29:58 - Childhood memories and how we change31:59 - Protecting privilege, at all levels38:35 - We are all doing tiny little evils (because it's necessary in order to survive), that add up to a lot of evil.43:22 - Haute finance and arms dealers (I win capitalism)46:15 - My upcoming online course with Asad Zaman48:11 - Closing thoughts50:41 - Polanyi was a proto-MMTer52:48 - GoodbyesOther updates:Sorry for the delays. Our editor Esha Krishnaswamy fell on the subway platform and broke her nose. She is out of the hospital now, but unfortunately her insurance does not cover fixing her broken nose. So we are going to have to crowd source this. If you have already not become paid subscriber, please become one: You can also do a one off donation via paypal orVenmo Get full access to Historic.ly at historicly.substack.com/subscribe

Economia Underground, um podcast institucionalista No episódio de hoje, debateremos o tão presente monstro do fascismo pela ótica de Karl Polanyi, destacando as especificidades históricas e institucionais deste "câncer" social. Para que tratemos desta problemática, temos como base as considerações de Polanyi em duas oportunidades: no capítulo 19 e 20 de "A grande Transformação", intitulados, respectivamente "Governo Popular e Economia de Mercado" e "A história na Engrenagem da Mudança Social", e em "The Essence of Fascism" publicado como capítulo I do livro "Christianity and the Social Revolution (1933-1934). Livro mencionado pelo Manu: Dale, G. (2016) Karl Polanyi's Political and Economic Thought: A Critical Guide. Agenda Publishing. (capítulo 8) Nossas redes: Instagram: @economiaunderground Facebook: Economia Underground Podcast Twitter: @ecounderground

Professor da UFABC analisa o desenrolar da Guerra na Ucrânia, que completa seu primeiro mês. Inscreva-se no TUTAMÉIA TV e visite o site TUTAMÉIA, https://tutameia.jor.br, serviço jornalístico criado por Eleonora de Lucena e Rodolfo Lucena.

I join with Geoff Shullenberger of "Outsider Theory" to discuss the sweeping and challenging new book, "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" by David Graeber and David Wengrow. We consider the book's marshalling of new archaeological evidence to debunk mechanistic and deterministic assumptions about the rise of civilization, its deep rejection of Marxism, and its insistence on the human ability to imagine and create an infinite range of social and political futures. We examine the weaknesses and limitations of the book, including its over-emphasis on personal freedom, its gross inaccuracy with regard to the eighteenth century, and its blindspot regarding the profound powers of myth, ritual, and the natural environment, all of which deeply guide and shape societies in ways that Graeber & Wengrow ignore or casually discount. Please support this podcast to help keep it coming and hear patron-only lectures! -- www.patreon.com/user?u=5530632 Other books & authors mentioned: Marshall Sahlins, "The Original Affluent Society" Yuval Noah Harari, "Sapiens" James C. Scott, "Against the Grain" Claude Levi-Strauss, "The Savage Mind" Victor Turner, "The Ritual Process" Karl Wittfogel, "Oriental Despotism" John Rawls, "A Theory of Justice" Francoise de Graffigny, "Letters of a Peruvian Woman" Niccolo Machiavelli, "Discourses on Livy" Jared Diamond, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" JN Heard, "The Assimilation of Captives on the American Frontier in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," LSU thesis David Graeber, "On Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit," "Debt: The First 5000 Years" Karl Polanyi, "The Great Transformation" Mark Fisher, "Capitalist Realism" Orlando Patterson, "Slavery and Social Death" Bruno Latour, "We Have Never Been Modern" Roberto Calasso, "The Ruin of Kasch" Ivan Illich Rene Girard Richard Wolff Thomas Sowell Divya Cherian

Ethan Buchman is the co-founder of the Cosmos network and serves as the CEO of Informal Systems. Informal Systems is a member-driven worker's cooperative building software that enables trustworthy relationships between protocols and people to flourish. Ethan also serves as the President of the Interchain Foundation which funds and coordinates development of public goods in the Cosmos ecosystem.   Tune in to this discussion as we explore the current ‘moment' blockchain is experiencing and the implications of having a community computer. We also discuss the personal computer revolution, polycentricity, and how Informal Systems is organized to enable their employees to self-organize.     A full transcript of the episode can be found on our website: https://boundaryless.io/podcast/ethan-buchman/    Key highlights we discussed: > Where blockchain fits in with the the history of computing > The concept of embedded cooperativism > The role of sovereignty and multi-chain interoperability  > Standardization and commodification > How individuals can participate in structural change > How Informal Systems is structured through a high trust environment and ‘promises'     To find out more about Ethan's work:   > Twitter: https://twitter.com/buchmanster  > Website: https://ebuchman.github.io/        Other references and mentions:   > Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 1944: https://www.amazon.com/Great-Transformation-Political-Economic-Origins/dp/080705643X  > Informal Systems: https://informal.systems/ > Informal Systems Twitter: https://twitter.com/informalinc  > Informal Systems' internal organisation: workflow.informal.systems    > Cosmos: https://cosmos.network/    Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/   Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://boundaryless.io/podcast-music   Recorded on 16 February 2022.

Welcome to episode 112 of Activist #MMT. Today's part two of my two-part conversation with Asad Zaman, on the 2001 edition of Karl Polanyi's 1944 book, The Great Transformation. This is also the final part in a larger four-part series on the book. Parts one and two are with Jackson Winter. Jackson and I are two smart layperson MMTers trying to come to terms with the depth of what we just read, and connecting it to our lives and MMT. Parts three and four are with Professor Zaman, who is a PhD economist with many lectures, papers, and posts on the topic (all of which you can find in the show notes to part one with Professor Zaman). (A link to all four parts in the series can be found in part one with Jackson. A list of the audio chapters in this episode can be found at the bottom of this post.) Part one also contains a summary of the book. You think you understand the foundation of our economy and society, but as described in The Great Transformation, there's another foundation beneath it. If you like what you hear, then I hope you might consider becoming a monthly patron of Activist #MMT. Patrons have exclusive access to several full-length episodes, right now. A full list is here, each with a brief highlight. Patrons also get the opportunity to ask my academic guests questions (including my recent episode with Warren Mosler). They also support the development of my large and growing collection of learn MMT resources, and the course with Professor Zaman. To become a patron, you can start by going to patreon.com/activistmmt. Every little bit helps a little bit, and it all adds up to a lot. Thanks. And now, let's get right back to my conversation with Asad Zaman. Enjoy. Audio chapters 4:11 - Mercantilism 8:10 - Fascism is not something in and of itself, rather it's something to fill in the vacuum left by the wreckage of the self-regulating market 10:58 - The ideology and religion of greed 12:22 - Jane Austen- The poorest AMONG THE ARISTOCRACY (the movie Ever After) 15:43 - The importance of history to the study of economics. 22:28 - Those who benefit most from of capitalism want us to focus on the imaginary, not history. 24:08 - Entanglement- The methodology of Polanyi (history shapes our ideas which shapes history) 29:17 - "Government is bad", but the self-regulating market requires even more government to suppress the protestations of those suffering at the hand of the self-regulating market 34:47 - Average people serve as gatekeepers for the exploiters (protecting privilege) 39:21 - What do I tell my kids? 48:43 - Goodbyes 52:38 - Duplicate of introduction, but with no background music

Welcome to episode 112 of Activist #MMT. Today's part two of my two-part conversation with Asad Zaman, on the 2001 edition of Karl Polanyi's 1944 book, . This is also the final part in a larger four-part series on the book. Parts one and two are with Jackson Winter. Jackson and I are two smart layperson MMTers trying to come to terms with the depth of what we just read, and connecting it to our lives and MMT. Parts three and four are with Professor Zaman, who is a PhD economist with many lectures, papers, and posts on the topic (all of which you can find in the show notes to with Professor Zaman). (A link to all four parts in the series can be found in . A list of the audio chapters in this episode can be found at the bottom of this post.) Part one also contains a summary of the book. You think you understand the foundation of our economy and society, but as described in The Great Transformation, there's another foundation beneath it. If you like what you hear, then I hope you might consider becoming a monthly patron of Activist #MMT. Patrons have exclusive access to several full-length episodes, right now. A full list is , each with a brief highlight. Patrons also get the opportunity to ask my academic guests questions (including my recent episode ). They also support the development of my large and growing collection of , and the course with Professor Zaman. To become a patron, you can start by going to . Every little bit helps a little bit, and it all adds up to a lot. Thanks. And now, let's get right back to my conversation with Asad Zaman. Enjoy. Audio chapters 4:11 - Mercantilism 8:10 - Fascism is not something in and of itself, rather it's something to fill in the vacuum left by the wreckage of the self-regulating market 10:58 - The ideology and religion of greed 12:22 - Jane Austen- The poorest AMONG THE ARISTOCRACY (the movie Ever After) 15:43 - The importance of history to the study of economics. 22:28 - Those who benefit most from of capitalism want us to focus on the imaginary, not history. 24:08 - Entanglement- The methodology of Polanyi (history shapes our ideas which shapes history) 29:17 - "Government is bad", but the self-regulating market requires even more government to suppress the protestations of those suffering at the hand of the self-regulating market 34:47 - Average people serve as gatekeepers for the exploiters (protecting privilege) 39:21 - What do I tell my kids? 48:43 - Goodbyes 52:38 - Duplicate of introduction, but with no background music

Welcome to episode 111 of Activist #MMT. Today I talk with Asad Zaman about the 2001 edition of Karl Polanyi's 1944 book, The Great Transformation. Professor Zaman is a PhD economist based in Pakistan, with many lectures, papers, and posts on the topic. This is part one of a two-part episode, but it's also part three in a larger four-part series on Polanyi's book. Parts one and two are with Jackson Winter. Jackson and I are two smart layperson MMTers trying to come to terms with the depth of what we just read, and connecting it to our lives and MMT. (A link to all four parts in the series can be found in part one with Jackson. A list of the audio chapters in this episode can be found at the bottom of this post.) As I briefly describe in part one with Jackson, Professor Zaman and I are developing a free online course called "Historical Context for Real-World Economics". It's almost entirely through an MMT lens, but mostly, it's history, not directly MMT. However, it provides critical context for those who want to understand MMT better. The course is produced by Activist #MMT, and hosted by Bill Mitchell's MMTed and Esha Krishnaswamy's Historic-ly. There are five lecture chapters currently being developed, and I look forward to sharing them with you. The next seven lectures are all on Polanyi's Great Transformation. Links to the seven lectures, plus several related sources by Professor Zaman can be found [in the show notes.] in the "Resources" section at the bottom of this post. (The below summary and resources have been collected into this post: A summary of Polanyi's Great Transformation (with many sources to learn more)) The Great Transformation reveals, essentially, that what we think to be a foundation of our economy and society is, in fact, an illusion. Specifically, Polanyi calls capitalism and its free or "self-regulating" market "a stark Utopia". By definition, a Utopia (an imagined place where everything is perfect) is impossible to achieve. However, the attempt to achieve it – to eliminate literally all market regulation – can result only in the complete destruction of all human life and the land they live on. This is evidenced by our increasingly likely extinction at the hands of a human-created ecological crisis, caused largely by unprecedented and still-growing levels of inequality and the mass exploitation of all natural resources, including most human beings. Here's Polanyi, on the first page of the first chapter: Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. Unfortunately, the only way to maintain the fiction of the self-regulating market, is to continue the mass exploitation of the poor. Instead of treating human beings as the infinitely precious and unique beings they are, they are rather treated as mere interchangeable and disposable cogs to run the Unending Greed Machines; most often under terrible conditions. Polanyi calls this grave maltreatment the commodification of labor. The only way to get human beings to submit to these terrible conditions, is to threaten them with an even more terrible condition: starvation and death. As quoted in the book, starvation "can tame even the wildest beast". Not even the strongest man can overcome it. How is this starvation made possible? By eliminating the possibility of self sufficiency. A major tool to do this was the invention of the concept of the private ownership of land. This justified the ejection of all former occupants, who must now, for example, in modern society, purchase our food at a distant store. We have to drive to that store, and the food, plus the car and its gas, must all be paid for with money, which in turn can only be obtained by laboring at the Greed Machines. What this all means is that the commodification of labor also requires the commodification of the land. Those being potentially annihilated by the destruction of the self-regulating market resist that destruction. This results in what Polanyi calls the double movement. This is the ideological battle that has raged for centuries, where one side tries to eliminate all market regulation, while the other tries to protect itself by imposing some. When the amount of regulations are only enough to moderately reduce that destruction, as is unfortunately most often the case, then the resistance can only perpetuate and further enable the pursuit of that stark Utopia. What underlies and justifies this horror is the most dominant religion in the world, which is greed. Without Polanyi's book and his work, this religion, and its byproducts of inequality and mass exploitation, are made to appear normal, inevitable, and unstoppable – in other words, natural. The truth that Polanyi's history reveals (and as is reinforced by my recent interview with Wesley Wiles)is that inequality, exploitation, and greed are not "unfortunate, but necessary", they're deliberate choices. Those who benefit most from the self-regulating market have incentive to deceive the rest of us into thinking that these terrible things are indeed natural. This is the role played by neoclassical economics: to provide that official, neutral, and natural-sounding justification. The core problem in our society is not "capitalism" or "the free market", per se, but rather the mass exploitation of the poor. Therefore, the core solution is to empower the poor. The nature of this empowerment is simple: provide them with what they desperately need: like healthcare, education, a job, un-poisoned water, and a world that doesn't threaten to collapse around them. These things all serve to empower the poor which ultimately reduces inequality – of both wealth and income. We will annihilate the fiction of the self-regulating market or it will annihilate us. There is no gray area. We will provide for those on the bottom or we will go extinct. The first step is to emancipate ourselves from the chains of false history and false economics, and from the idea that everything horrible is "unfortunate, but necessary". Only then can we take a step back and start thinking of alternatives. As a final note, you'll hear some of Professor Zaman's thoughts on the potential form a sustainable future society might take. These are not ideas from the book but his own, in an attempt to start a discussion on one of the greatest questions of our time: how do we resist and annihilate the self-regulating market, and what can and will society be like when we do? Perhaps you have some ideas of your own. Let's start that discussion. If you like what you hear, then I hope you might consider becoming a monthly patron of Activist #MMT. Patrons have exclusive access to several full-length episodes, right now. A full list is here, each with a brief highlight. Patrons also get the opportunity to ask my academic guests questions, such as my recent patron-question episode with Warren Mosler. (A Patron question was also asked of Professor Zaman.) They also support the development of my large and growing collection of learn MMT resources, and the course with Professor Zaman. To become a patron, you can start by going to patreon.com/activistmmt. Every little bit helps a little bit, and it all adds up to a lot. Thanks. And now, onto my conversation with Asad Zaman. Enjoy Resources Bill Mitchell's 2022 blog post, To reclaim the state, we have to start with ourselves, which contains a substantial comment from Professor Zaman. For a good, short and basic introduction to the flaws of capitalism and its economics, Professor Zaman recommends this 17-minute 2020 TED talk by Nick Hanauer. Here are the seven lectures by Professor Zaman that will be used in the course : Adv Micro L13: Entanglement of History with Social Theories Adv Micro L14: Emergence of Economics Theories in Economic Context Adv Micro L15: 19th Century European Economic Ideas In Historical Context. Adv Micro L16: Economics from Hunter/Gatherer to World War 2 Adv Micro L17: Polanyi Great Transformation Part 2 Adv Micro L18: Polanyi TGT cont - part 3 Adv Micro L19: Polanyi TGT- Concluding Lecture Here's the overall curriculum from which these lectures come: 21st Century Economics: An Islamic Approach More from Professor Zaman on Polanyi: Video lecture summary and a written summary of The Great Transformation The Methodology of Polanyi's Great Transformation: video lecture, 2014 paper, response by Anne Mayhew Not directly related to Polanyi, but as important context (and s were briefly discussed), below are sources from the Professor on the topic of redefining "the poor" to mean the poorest among the aristocracy, such as in Jane Austen novels. I’ve provided the Professor’s full comments for context: …EJ1083726.pdf These just came up on a search, there is a lot of stuff on it which I haven't read …/kuwahara.pdf This might be the best: …/jane-austen-family-slavery-essay-devoney-looser/ Search term "Jane Austen and Colonial Politics" -- but "imperialism" would have worked too There is chapter in Edward Said "Culture and Imperialism" called: Jane Austen and Empire. This is bound to be good. I have not read the book, but it is on my reading list. Audio chapters 10:55 - The commodification of labor - what it really means 15:01 - The fantasy of power, to vent the frustration of being powerless 17:21 - The self-regulating market is a fiction and a stark Utopia. The double movement 20:01 - Movies- Don't Look Up and Encanto 23:04 - How do you resist the self-regulating market and beat it, instead of perpetuate it? 26:49 - Whatever the answer, it starts with you 29:52 - Peace is a balance of power, but only in a belligerent world 38:39 - Peace is controlled violence - violence by, not against, the powerful 40:39 - Individual imbalance of power, fiction of nation states 44:58 - Corporations are more powerful than nation states 47:15 - The gold standard was the glue that held the world together but for a terrible reason (and mercantilism) 55:07 - Fascism is not something in and of itself, rather it's something to fill in the vacuum left by the wreckage of the self-regulating market 59:40 - Duplicate of introduction, but with no background music

Welcome to episode 111 of Activist #MMT. Today I talk with Asad Zaman about the 2001 edition of Karl Polanyi's 1944 book, . Professor Zaman is a PhD economist based in Pakistan, with many lectures, papers, and posts on the topic. This is part one of a two-part episode, but it's also part three in a larger four-part series on Polanyi's book. Parts one and two are with Jackson Winter. Jackson and I are two smart layperson MMTers trying to come to terms with the depth of what we just read, and connecting it to our lives and MMT. (A link to all four parts in the series can be found in . A list of the audio chapters in this episode can be found at the bottom of this post.) As I briefly describe in part one with Jackson, Professor Zaman and I are developing a free online course called "Historical Context for Real-World Economics". It's almost entirely through an MMT lens, but mostly, it's history, not directly MMT. However, it provides critical context for those who want to understand MMT better. The course is produced by , and hosted by Bill Mitchell's and Esha Krishnaswamy's . There are five lecture chapters currently being developed, and I look forward to sharing them with you. The next seven lectures are all on Polanyi's Great Transformation. Links to the seven lectures, plus several related sources by Professor Zaman can be found [in the show notes.] in the "Resources" section at the bottom of this post. (The below summary and resources have been collected into this post: ) The Great Transformation reveals, essentially, that what we think to be a foundation of our economy and society is, in fact, an illusion. Specifically, Polanyi calls capitalism and its free or "self-regulating" market "a stark Utopia". By definition, a Utopia ( where everything is perfect) is impossible to achieve. However, the attempt to achieve it – to eliminate literally all market regulation – can result only in the complete destruction of all human life and the land they live on. This is evidenced by our increasingly likely extinction at the hands of a human-created ecological crisis, caused largely by unprecedented and still-growing levels of inequality and the mass exploitation of all natural resources, including most human beings. Here's Polanyi, on the first page of the first chapter: Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. Unfortunately, the only way to maintain the fiction of the self-regulating market, is to continue the mass exploitation of the poor. Instead of treating human beings as the infinitely precious and unique beings they are, they are rather treated as mere interchangeable and disposable cogs to run the Unending Greed Machines; most often under terrible conditions. Polanyi calls this grave maltreatment the commodification of labor. The only way to get human beings to submit to these terrible conditions, is to threaten them with an even more terrible condition: starvation and death. As quoted in the book, starvation "can tame even the wildest beast". Not even the strongest man can overcome it. How is this starvation made possible? By eliminating the possibility of self sufficiency. A major tool to do this was the invention of the concept of the private ownership of land. This justified the ejection of all former occupants, who must now, for example, in modern society, purchase our food at a distant store. We have to drive to that store, and the food, plus the car and its gas, must all be paid for with money, which in turn can only be obtained by laboring at the Greed Machines. What this all means is that the commodification of labor also requires the commodification of the land. Those being potentially annihilated by the destruction of the self-regulating market resist that...

Welcome to episode 110 of Activist #MMT. Today's part two of my two-part conversation with Jackson Winter, on the 2001 edition of Karl Polanyi's 1944 book, The Great Transformation. This is also part two of a larger four-part series on the book. Jackson is co-writer and editor for PEGS Institute, which is a project to demystify and explain some commonly misunderstood realities of the modern world. Here's their YouTube channel. Parts one and two with Jackson is two smart layperson MMTers trying to come to terms with the depth of what we just read, and connecting it to our lives and MMT. Parts three and four are with Asad Zaman, a PhD economist with many lectures, papers, and posts on the topic (links to which you can find in the show notes to part one with Professor Zaman, next week). (A list of the "audio chapters" in this episode can be found at the bottom of this post. A link to all four parts in the series can be found in part one.) I'll summarize the book in next week's introduction. Even experienced MMTers can't know this stuff. You think you understand the foundation of our economy and society, but you don't. As described in The Great Transformation, there's another foundation underneath it. (Before we start the interview, I'm making an announcement at the request of a patron, and that is: the podcast Pod Save America, which is hosted by former Obama staffers, has millions of followers, many of who like to think of themselves as progressives. Unfortunately, although the hosts say many smart things, they still live solidly in a pay-for, scarcity, zero-sum world. Please consider contacting the hosts via Twitter and urging them to interview an MMT guest such as Stephanie Kelton, Warren Mosler, Bill Mitchell, and Randy Wray. The Twitter handles for the podcast and its hosts can be found in the show notes, and in the social media shares for this episode. Thanks for your help in spreading the word! Here at the Twitter handles for Pod Save America [@PodSaveAmerica] and its hosts: Dan Pfiffer: [@danpfeiffer], Jon Favreau: [@jonfavs], Tommy Vietor: [@tvietor08], Jon Lovett: [@jonlovett]) And now, let's get right back to my conversation with Jackson Winter. Enjoy. Audio chapters 4:31 - Choosing to commodify other humans is a gamble that you won't become one of them 7:37 - The gold standard was the glue that held the (belligerent and greedy) world together 13:53 - Individual balance of power 17:41 - Fascism is a consequence of the neglect and deprivation of neoliberalism 20:41 - Thinking of a better economic and political system (and if we should) 27:17 - Unregulated versus regulated teenager 29:58 - Childhood memories and how we change 31:59 - Protecting privilege, at all levels 38:35 - We're all doing tiny little evils (because it's necessary in order to survive), that add up to a lot of evil. 43:22 - Haute finance and arms dealers (I win capitalism) 46:15 - My upcoming online course with Asad Zaman 48:11 - Closing thoughts 50:41 - Polanyi was a proto-MMTer 52:48 - Goodbyes 57:06 - Duplicate of introduction, but with no background music

Welcome to episode 109 of Activist #MMT. Today I talk with Jackson Winter, about the 2001 edition of Karl Polanyi's 1944 book, . Jackson is co-writer and editor for , which is a project to demystify and explain some commonly misunderstood realities of the modern world. Here's . (A list of the "audio chapters" in this episode can be found at the bottom of this post. Here are links to all four episodes in the series about Polanyi's Great Transformation: with Jackson, and parts and with Asad Zaman.) (Here are my , after having read only the forward, introduction, and first chapter [be sure to see the show notes for a disclaimer]. It comes from an unreleased episode, with Jonathan Wilson.) This is part one of a two-part conversation with Jackson, but it's also the first in a larger four-part series on Polanyi's book. Jackson and I are two smart layperson MMTers, trying to come to terms with the depth of what we just read, and connecting it to our lives and MMT. Parts three and four are with Asad Zaman, a PhD economist with many lectures, papers, and posts on the topic. I'll summarize the book more at the beginning of part one with Professor Zaman, but very briefly: The Great Transformation is the centuries-long history of how our current rentier capitalism came to be, and what preceded it. It reveals that much of what we believe to be inevitable and unchangeable – natural – about our society is, in fact, a deliberate choice. Those who most benefit from this system (the rentiers, those who collect rent) would like nothing more than for the rest of us (those who pay rent) to believe this system – and their unending greed – to be natural, inevitable, unchangeable and, indeed, best for everyone. I'd like to describe my journey to the book and this interview. I first interviewed Professor Zaman in November 2020, in episodes and . Our topic was his personal story, and, after decades immersed in neoclassical economics, his journey to MMT and real-world economics. For the past year, I've been working with the Professor to create a free online course, centered around his many video lectures. Each lecture is split into fifteen-minute segments, and each segment is accompanied by a very substantial five-to-eight question quiz. I compose the quizzes with lots of assistance and support from my recent guest, Jonathan Wilson [episodes and ]. The course is titled "Historical Context for Real-World Economics", which is produced by Activist #MMT and hosted by Bill Mitchell's and Esha Krishnaswamy's . I look forward to sharing it with you. As we get closer, I'll release part three with Jonathan, where we spend the entire time talking about the course. (Patrons of Activist #MMT can hear the whole thing right now. .) The first five lecture-chapters for the course are completed, but four remain in draft form and still require a good amount of work. I'm currently resolving detailed feedback I've received from the Professor. However, we've already decided on the next seven chapters for the course, which are all on Polanyi's book. You'll find a link to the seven video lectures, plus several additional resources by Professor Zaman, in the show notes of part one with the Professor, coming in two weeks. I purchased the 2001 edition of the book and read the forward, introduction, and first chapter. It blew me away. What most of us think is the foundation of our society and economy is actually not the foundation. There's another one below it. A few days ago, I released , after having read only this much. At that same time, I saw Jackson on Twitter say he's studying the history of commodification of labor. (Very briefly, commodification of labor is threatening the poor with starvation and death unless they work the Unending Greed Machines of the rich.) I told Jackson to consider Polanyi's book as a critical source on the topic. Jackson said he would add it to his infinite reading list. I urged him just read the forward and intro. Two days...

Welcome to episode 109 of Activist #MMT. Today I talk with Jackson Winter, about the 2001 edition of Karl Polanyi's 1944 book, The Great Transformation. Jackson is co-writer and editor for PEGS Institute, which is a project to demystify and explain some commonly misunderstood realities of the modern world. Here's their YouTube channel. (A list of the "audio chapters" in this episode can be found at the bottom of this post. Here are links to all four episodes in the series about Polanyi's Great Transformation: part two with Jackson, and parts one and two with Asad Zaman.) (Here are my first impressions of the book, after having read only the forward, introduction, and first chapter [be sure to see the show notes for a disclaimer]. It comes from an unreleased episode, with Jonathan Wilson.) This is part one of a two-part conversation with Jackson, but it's also the first in a larger four-part series on Polanyi's book. Jackson and I are two smart layperson MMTers, trying to come to terms with the depth of what we just read, and connecting it to our lives and MMT. Parts three and four are with Asad Zaman, a PhD economist with many lectures, papers, and posts on the topic. I'll summarize the book more at the beginning of part one with Professor Zaman, but very briefly: The Great Transformation is the centuries-long history of how our current rentier capitalism came to be, and what preceded it. It reveals that much of what we believe to be inevitable and unchangeable – natural – about our society is, in fact, a deliberate choice. Those who most benefit from this system (the rentiers, those who collect rent) would like nothing more than for the rest of us (those who pay rent) to believe this system – and their unending greed – to be natural, inevitable, unchangeable and, indeed, best for everyone. I'd like to describe my journey to the book and this interview. I first interviewed Professor Zaman in November 2020, in episodes 56 and 57. Our topic was his personal story, and, after decades immersed in neoclassical economics, his journey to MMT and real-world economics. For the past year, I've been working with the Professor to create a free online course, centered around his many video lectures. Each lecture is split into fifteen-minute segments, and each segment is accompanied by a very substantial five-to-eight question quiz. I compose the quizzes with lots of assistance and support from my recent guest, Jonathan Wilson [episodes 106 and 107]. The course is titled "Historical Context for Real-World Economics", which is produced by Activist #MMT and hosted by Bill Mitchell's MMTed and Esha Krishnaswamy's Historic-ly. I look forward to sharing it with you. As we get closer, I'll release part three with Jonathan, where we spend the entire time talking about the course. (Patrons of Activist #MMT can hear the whole thing right now. Hint hint.) The first five lecture-chapters for the course are completed, but four remain in draft form and still require a good amount of work. I'm currently resolving detailed feedback I've received from the Professor. However, we've already decided on the next seven chapters for the course, which are all on Polanyi's book. You'll find a link to the seven video lectures, plus several additional resources by Professor Zaman, in the show notes of part one with the Professor, coming in two weeks. I purchased the 2001 edition of the book and read the forward, introduction, and first chapter. It blew me away. What most of us think is the foundation of our society and economy is actually not the foundation. There's another one below it. A few days ago, I released a snippet of my first impressions, after having read only this much. At that same time, I saw Jackson on Twitter say he's studying the history of commodification of labor. (Very briefly, commodification of labor is threatening the poor with starvation and death unless they work the Unending Greed Machines of the rich.) I told Jackson to consider Polanyi's book as a critical source on the topic. Jackson said he would add it to his infinite reading list. I urged him just read the forward and intro. Two days later, he finished the book. I was still only at chapter one! But now that he had thrown down the gauntlet, I was determined to finish. We scheduled an interview for five days later, on Wednesday morning my time. (He's sixteen hours ahead of me. I'm on the west coast of the US, he's in Australia. I was also on winter break.) Because reading the book was also in preparation for the course, I had to write lots of notes. By Monday morning, I knew there was no way I was going to finish. We postponed by fifteen hours, from 8 AM my time to 11 PM. I went into reading hibernation for two days straight, and my family slid pizza slices under my bedroom door every few hours. I finished the book at 9 PM, two hours before our scheduled start time. If you like what you hear, then I hope you might consider becoming a monthly patron of Activist #MMT. Patrons have exclusive access to several full-length episodes, right now. A full list is here, each with a brief highlight.Patrons also get the opportunity to ask my academic guests questions (including my recent patron-question episode with Warren Mosler). They also support the development of my large and growing collection of learn MMT resources, and the course with Professor Zaman. To become a patron, you can start by going to patreon.com/activistmmt. Every little bit helps a little bit, and it all adds up to a lot. Thanks. And now, onto my conversation with Jackson Winter. Enjoy. Audio chapters 8:20 - Jackson introduces himself 10:13 - Journey to the book and other reading 12:59 - First impressions 17:12 - Interview postponed 17:52 - Speenhamland 20:38 - Unemployed versus unemployable 26:43 - Speenhamland's place in history 31:11 - Threaten starvation – tame even the strongest beast (natural) 32:46 - The problem is not the Industrial Revolution but self-gain (greed, hedonism) 34:19 - "Anti-government" 40:14 - Commodification 43:23 - George W. Bush, Satanic mill 44:06 - Commodification of labor 47:49 - Every level commodities the level below (venting their frustrations) 51:39 - Cultural hegemony, the Queen of England 54:19 - Death to the few versus death to the many 59:20 - Duplicate of introduction, but with no background music

This snippet comes from Activist #MMT, part three with Jonathan Wilson, which is called "Historical Context for Real-World Economics (new online course!)". It starts at around the 18-minute, 30-second mark of the interview proper. This snippet documents my first impressions of (the 2001 edition of) Karl Polanyi's 1944 book, , after having read only the forward, introduction, and first chapter. More importantly, this is before talking about the book with Asad Zaman, who is a PhD with many lectures, papers, and posts on the topic (which we do in episodes 111 and 112). (Part three with Jonathan is delayed, but the next four episodes of Activist #MMT are dedicated to Polanyi's book.) Important note The idea that "you can't overthrow capitalism because something that doesn't exist can't be overthrown" is, at best, a highly misguided way to say it. The primary reason is that many potential allies believe passionately that "capitalism" does indeed exist and must be (for lack of a better term) defeated or overthrown. A more accurate and much less inflammatory version of my statement can be found in an upcoming post that will accompany my upcoming episodes with Asad Zaman. It's a full general summary of the book, approved by Professor Zaman. However, there is another aspect of this argument from a very different point of view, as discussed in the February, 2022 episode of Superstructure (of Money on the Left) entitled, no less, . I am pretty sure our (final, corrected) views are roughly compatible, but I'm not going to be foolish enough to attempt to summarize the precise differences :).

This snippet comes from Activist #MMT, part three with Jonathan Wilson, which is called "Historical Context for Real-World Economics (new online course!)". It starts at around the 18-minute, 30-second mark of the interview proper. This snippet documents my first impressions of (the 2001 edition of) Karl Polanyi's 1944 book, The Great Transformation, after having read only the forward, introduction, and first chapter. More importantly, this is before talking about the book with Asad Zaman, who is a PhD with many lectures, papers, and posts on the topic (which we do in episodes 111 and 112). (Part three with Jonathan is delayed, but the next four episodes of Activist #MMT are dedicated to Polanyi's book.) Important note The idea that "you can't overthrow capitalism because something that doesn't exist can't be overthrown" is, at best, a highly misguided way to say it. The primary reason is that many potential allies believe passionately that "capitalism" does indeed exist and must be (for lack of a better term) defeated or overthrown. A more accurate and much less inflammatory version of my statement can be found in an upcoming post that will accompany my upcoming episodes with Asad Zaman. It's a full general summary of the book, approved by Professor Zaman. However, there is another aspect of this argument from a very different point of view, as discussed in the February, 2022 episode of Superstructure (of Money on the Left) entitled, no less, Capitalism Does Not Exist. I am pretty sure our (final, corrected) views are roughly compatible, but I'm not going to be foolish enough to attempt to summarize the precise differences :).

Fan of the show? https://www.patreon.com/newleftradio (Support us on Patreon)! What is to be learned from social upheaval and revolution? How do existing movements play into social change? Through the exploration of recent revolutions, political and otherwise, we can learn what conditions are necessary to drive change and how to make it lasting. About Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age This ambitious volume examines revolutionary situations during a non-revolutionary historical conjuncture--the neoliberal era. The last three decades have seen an increase in the number of political upheavals that challenge existing power structures, many of them taking the form of urban revolts. This book compellingly explores a series of such upheavals--in Eastern Europe, South Africa, Indonesia, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, sub-Saharan Africa (including Congo, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso) and Egypt. Each chapter studies the ways in which protest movements developed into insurgent challenges to state power, and the strategies that regimes have deployed to contain and repress revolt. In addition to empirical chapters, the book engages in theorization of revolution, dealing with questions such as the patterning of revolution in contemporary history, the relationship between class struggle and social movements, and the prospects of socialist revolution in the twenty-first century. https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1653-revolutionary-rehearsals-in-the-neoliberal-age (Buy the Book) About Gareth Dale Gareth is Associate Head of the Department of Social and Political Sciences. He worked at Birkbeck, the LSE, and Swansea University before joining Brunel in 2005. His most recent books are the edited collections Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age (2021) and Exploring the Thought of Karl Polanyi (2019). In 2016 he published Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left and Reconstructing Karl Polanyi: Excavation and Critique, and a critique of ‘Green Growth'. Previous publications include books on Karl Polanyi (2010), the political economy of Eastern Europe, migrant labour in the European Union, and a trilogy on East Germany (its economic history, protest movements, and 1989 revolution). https://twitter.com/gareth_dale (Follow Gareth Dale on Twitter) Stay connected with the latest from New Left Radio by https://newleft.us6.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=8227a4372fe8dc22bdbf0e3db&id=e99d6c70b4 (joining our mailing list) today! _________

Episode #88 Notes0:45 - Alan's issues of synthetic biology and GMO.9:15 - On gene editing, CRISPR, and defining synthetic biology.22:00 - How these technologies work and how they're deployed in food production.27:00 - Who is funding these technologies in food production?38:00 - The Commons as a response to consolidated agricultural land ownership.42:00 - On GMO's in Africa.Book RecommendationThe Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi

Ein reicher Geist in freier Assoziation. Alexander Kluge zu Freiheit, Kooperation, Planwirtschaft und den Möglichkeiten des Gesamtarbeiters. Shownotes Alexander Kluges Website: https://www.kluge-alexander.de/ dctp.tv – Das webTV von Alexander Kluge: https://www.dctp.tv/ Festival der Kooperationen mit Alexander Kluge & friends: https://www.literaturhaus.net/projekte/festival-der-kooperationen-mit-alexander-kluge-friends-der-elefant-im-dunkeln Event "Prélude utopique: Denken nach vorn und aus dem Futur II zurück!", Gespräch moderiert von Jan Groos im Rahmen des Festival der Kooperationen: https://www.literaturhaus-berlin.de/archiv/prelude-utopique-denken-nach-vorn-und-aus-dem-futur-ii-zurueck  Wiki zu Alexander Kluge: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Kluge weitere Materialien: Buch "Beziehungsweise Revolution" (2017) von Bini Adamczak: https://www.suhrkamp.de/buch/bini-adamczak-beziehungsweise-revolution-t-9783518127216 Forschungsprojekt Das Regieren der Algorithmen – Eine Soziologie algorithmischer Regierungskunst: https://www.st.uni-kiel.de/de/forschung Wiki zu Karl Polanyi: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Polanyi Wiki zu Rosa Luxemburg: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Luxemburg Wiki zu Adam Smith: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith Wiki zu Warenfetisch, Karl Marx: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warenfetisch Wiki zu Joseph Vogl: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Vogl Wiki zum Passagen-Werk von Walter Benjamin in Zusammenhang mit der Methode des Echolots und der Montage: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Passagen-Werk Wiki zu Friederike Mayröcker: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friederike_Mayr%C3%B6cker Wiki zu Ann Cotten: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Cotten verwandte Future Histories Episoden: Eva von Redecker zur Revolution für das Leben: https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s01/e37-eva-von-redecker-zur-revolution-fuer-das-leben/ Joseph Vogl zur Krise des Regierens: https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s01/e25-joseph-vogl-zur-krise-des-regierens/ Katharina Hoppe zur Kraft der Revision: https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s02/e01-katharina-hoppe-zur-kraft-der-revision/ Urs Stäheli zu Entnetzung: https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s01/e54-urs-staeheli-zu-entnetzung/ Jasper Bernes on Planning and Anarchy: https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s01/e58-jasper-bernes-on-planning-and-anarchy/   Wenn euch Future Histories gefällt, dann erwägt doch bitte eine Unterstützung auf Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/FutureHistories? Schreibt mir unter office@futurehistories.today und diskutiert mit auf Twitter (#FutureHistories): https://twitter.com/FutureHpodcast oder auf Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/FutureHistories/ www.futurehistories.today   Episode Keywords: #AlexanderKluge, #JanGroos, #FutureHistories, #Podcast, #Interview, #FestivalderKooperationen, #Kluge, #LiteraturhausBerlin, #Kooperationen, #DasRegierenDerAlgorithmen, #Soziologie, #Zukunft, #Zukünfte, #DerElefantimDunkeln, #HelgeSchneider, #Krisenpolitik, #Herrschaftstechnologien, #Demokratie, #Kapitalismus, #Planwirtschaft, #FreiePlanwirtschaft, #Sozialismus, #Liberalismus, #Konkurrenz, #konkurrenzbasierteKooperation, #Echolot

Economia Underground, um podcast institucionalista Neste episódio discutimos “a nossa obsoleta mentalidade de mercado” de Karl Polanyi, explorando as consequências da internalização de hábitos mercadológicos em nossas vidas. Como opera a sociedade de mercado? De que forma absorvemos o determinismo econômico e quais as consequências disto para a nossa liberdade na sociedade industrial? Estes são alguns do temas que discutimos! Nossas redes Twitter: @ecounderground Instagram: @economiaunderground Facebook: Economia Underground Podcast

For this week's episode I spoke with Ethan Buchman (@buchmanster), the founder of Cosmos and the CEO of  Informal Systems, a worker-owned cooperative helping build the infrastructure of the Cosmos Network. Cosmos is a particular blockchain with the goal of creating the internet of blockchains by creating a layer that facilitates interoperability between different blockchains. During the interview we talk about Ethan's own heterodox political views, synthesizing the works of the Austrian school and Karl Polanyi among others for creating what he calls "sustainability existentialism." We also talk about how these politics influenced the creation of Cosmos, his fears of the current state of the crypto ecosystem, and  the difference between DeFi degens and regens.Here are some more sources to learn more about Ethan's heterodox political views:Reconsidering the Factors of ProductionThread on AustriansDistributed StateIf you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit and Discord to join the discussion.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist)

Hello Interactors,My wife and I took our daughter on a trip down Interstate 5 earlier this week so she could tour the University of Oregon. It’s a beautiful lush campus in a funky college town that is speckled with fancy new structures financed largely by Nike founder and alum, Phil Knight. Upon the completion of the new track stadium last year, his total contributions to the school is nearing one billion dollars. Where did it all come from? As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…TIGER TRACK TREADSHe dominated his races. He’d jump far in the lead at the sound of the gun challenging his competitors to keep up as his fans chanted “GO PRE, GO PRE, GO PRE”. They’d often be wearing the pervasive shirts that said the same. At the end of one race he grabbed a shirt from sarcastic fan and stretched over his sweaty chest for his victory lap; it read, “STOP PRE!”Running for the University of Oregon between 1970-1973, Steve Prefontaine never lost a collegiate race in the 3 mile, 5,000 meter, 6 mile, or 10,000 meter events. But internationally he wasn’t so fortunate. He came in a disappointing fourth at the 1972 Munich Olympics in the 5K. Afterwards he said, “I felt exhausted. They didn't allow me to run the race the way I had planned to, I was chasing them all the way."He lost three times in his senior year in the one mile event. This same year he challenged the Amateur Athletics Union (AAU) that ruled athletes representing the United States at the Olympics must not receive payment or be endorsed. Prefontaine, a charismatic athlete on and off the track, grew huge crowds wherever he ran. He knew companies would benefit from his abilities, so why shouldn’t he? He also knew he was receiving free shoes and clothes from another Eugene legend – Nike.By the mid-70s Nike was a decade old and was just getting rolling. Prefontaine’s coach, Bill Bowerman, was the co-founder and a legend in his own right. Preferring to be called teacher instead of coach, Bowerman taught 33 Olympians, 38 conference champions, and 64 all-Americans in his 24 years as head coach. He retired at the end of Prefontaine’s senior year. One of his runners was Nike founder, Phil Knight.Knight was a middle distance runner at the university until graduating in 1959. While he ran a respectable personal best of 4 minutes 13 seconds, he was not the best runner on the team. Which made him a good candidate for testing the shoes his coach was experimenting with.Bowerman was obsessed with athletic performance and was frustrated by the poor quality of American running shoes. So, he made his own and asked his athletes to be subjects in his experimental pursuit of the perfect shoe. Sometimes they’d make their feet run faster and sometimes they’d make them bleed. Bowerman didn’t want to risk injuring his top runners, so Knight was often a subject.The shoe fetish must have rubbed off on the young Phil Knight. After graduating from the University of Oregon he went on to get his MBA at Stanford. There he learned how Japanese companies were overtaking the camera market from Europeans and wrote a paper about how they were about to do the same for the shoe market.After earning his MBA in 1962, he worked as an accountant while tinkering on the weekend with the idea of being a shoe distributor. He hopped on a plane to Japan to visit shoemaker, Onitsuka after seeing their Tiger brand at the Olympics. He presented his Stanford paper and they were impressed. They wanted to break into the U.S. market and saw this as their chance. When asked what the name of his company was, Knight invented the name on the spot recalling the ribbons he had won competing as a kid – Blue Ribbon Sports.In 1964 the first shoes arrived and Knight sent a couple of pairs to his shoe sorcerer and former coach, Bill Bowerman. The two shook on a deal to become business partners; Phil would run the business and Bill would design a shoe with just the right stiffness. By 1970 Knight was selling Tiger shoes across the country. As the Japanese Tiger shoe started to dominate the U.S. market, Knight cut ties with Onitsuka, renamed his company Nike, asked a Portland State University graphic designer to design the now ubiquitous ‘swoosh’, and grabbed Bowerman’s first attempt at a Nike shoe, the Nike Cortez.The shoe was released at the height of the 1972 Olympics after the world witnessed the USA Track and Field team wearing the shoe. Knight and Bowerman made $800,000 selling the Cortez, a 100% increase over selling the Onitsuka Tiger. In 1980, the year they went public, Nike already had 50% of the U.S. market. Today the company is valued at $32 billion and is the largest supplier of athletic equipment in the world.PHIL AND BILL SPLIT THE BILLPhil Knight and Bowerman’s success are now enshrined in what I claim is the most beautifully designed sports facility in the country – Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon. Eugene is known as Track Town USA because of the success of Bowerman, Prefontaine, and the string of track and cross country athletes the University of Oregon has cranked out over the years. It all happened on Hayward field. A $270 million renovation opened last year and Phil Knight led the funding.We were just there last weekend on a campus visit with our daughter. You don’t have to look far to see the financial impact Phil Knight has had on that campus. Outside of the oval track crowned jewel he contributed $27 million for a major library renovation that now bears his name, $25 million for new law school building that also endows 27 chairs and professorships, numerous upgrades to the football stadium, $500 million pledged for the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact, and another $41.7 million for a student-athlete tutoring center. And don’t forget the basketball arena named after his son who died unexpectedly in a scuba accident, the Matthew Knight Arena.That initial collaboration between Knight and Bowerman led to one of the most successful companies in the world. What they did together is a perfect example of two of the most critical ingredients to a dynamic economy: innovation and entrepreneurship.Innovation is invention with impact. Bowerman personifies the image of the mad scientist tinkering in the garage in pursuit of the perfect solution. He spent so many hours breathing the toxic fumes emanating from his exploratory rubber compounds that he eventually succumbed to nerve damage. The man who wrote a best selling book on jogging in the 1970s became unable to follow his own advise due to the loss of control in his limbs. He sacrificed the speed of his own feet for the swiftness of others.Phil Knight was born a competitor and entrepreneur. As a teen his dad refused to hire him at the newspaper he ran. He wanted Phil to struggle to find his own job. So he did. He took a job at his dad’s competing newspaper running seven miles each way to get to work. In graduate school he had a sixth sense that the Japanese approach to product development was worth emulating.He was also savvy enough to make sure his partnership with Bowerman gave him a 51% stake in the business and Bowerman 49%. He knew he could use that leverage to make sure it was a business they were running and not laboratory for running shoes.ECONOMOUS ANONYMOUSThe role of place should not be overlooked in their collaboration. Economic geographers point to the trust and norms that develop between individuals through close collaboration among local social networks. Personal relationships don’t adhere to a higher order economic structure, they emerge from an accumulation of shared knowledge and passion that increases the potential for innovation.The idea stems from the great economist Karl Polanyi. In his landmark 1944 book, The Great Transformation, Polanyi gives this concept a name: embeddedness. Stanford economic sociologist, Mark Granovetter, reaffirmed the idea in his oft referenced 1973 paper, “The Strength of Weak Ties.”Phil and Bill were also participating in an act of creative destruction. This term comes from one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, Austrian turned American, Joseph Shumpeter. Shumpeter pointed out that for an invention to become an innovation, it has to have impact through capital investment and also lead to the rise of new businesses. Blue Ribbon Sports started in Bowerman’s garage with a rubber sole made from his wife’s waffle iron and a $500 loan from Knight’s dad. But as Nike they outsource manufacturing to factories around the world, thus avoiding having to spend capital dollars owning a single building or piece of equipment.Had these two been tinkering in Eugene two or three decades earlier, it’s likely Eugene would have become the Detroit of athletic equipment and apparel. Known in economic circles as Fordism, Henry Ford perfected the practice of building mass produced products systematically using locally sourced labor, usually men, who could theoretically earn enough to afford the products they were assembling. This wasn’t always the case. Women, especially women of color, were often forced to take side jobs to make ends meet.But Nike was emerging in the Post-Fordist era of the 1960s and Phil Knight had already clued into the manufacturing advantages Japan had pioneered after WWII. In post-war Japan, the government played a critical role in shaping their industries. They controlled imports and exports, but also “national systems of innovation” by creating “formal and informal institutions” to facilitate the “coordination and promotion of technology transfer.”(Economic Geography), A national form of embeddedness.  But as Japanese companies were growing, they were also getting pressure to maximize profits. A popular way to do this is to pay workers less. So during the sluggish stagflation of the 1970s, Japan introduced ‘non-regular employment’; or more generally, the temporary worker. Which, by in large, were, and still are, adult women.These workers are not only paid less, they “have much less job security than regular employees,” have “no considerable protection from dismissal”, their “average job tenure is significantly lower than for regular employees”, and they “have limited access to on-the-job or formal training and weak career prospects.” Karl Marx once noted in the 1800s that capitalism always seeks to eliminate the worker. Nike achieved this by sourcing near slave labor in poor countries so far away from the customer that the worker appears to have been eliminated. They let some poor nameless and faceless woman in a foreign land risk nerve damage making their shoes, so they, or their fellow community members, wouldn’t have to.Much has been written about the overseas Nike sweatshops since they were exposed in the 1990s. The CBS program “48 Hours” did a piece titled, “Just Do It – Or Else”, where they showed workers in Viet Nam getting swatted over the head by their supervisors for making errors in the stitching of a Nike garment.Or how about the 1997 New York Times article where they revealed Vietnamese workers were exposed to the odorless carcinogenic chemical toluene at 177 times the legal limit. And who can forget the Life Magazine photo of the 12 year old Pakistani boy stitching the laces into a Nike soccer ball? Just Do It.FACE THE FACELESS, EMPOWER THE POWERLESS, HEED THE GREEDSeeking cheap labor in regions far away from the eyes of consumers not only hid these exploits from Nike customers, but it absolved Phil Knight of responsibility. By outsourcing capitalism to a faraway land, Nike abstracts it way and disassociates from it. Clemson University political and moral philosopher, Todd May, puts it like this,“It is of the character of transnational capitalism that the source of economic oppression is often thousands of miles away, separated from those it exploits by many levels of bureaucracy, language, and national borders.”In 2001 a Nike representative reacted this way to accusations of reported worker abuse, “It’s not within our scope to investigate. We’re about sports, not manufacturing 101.”Nike has tried to curb these abuses. In 2005, they were the first apparel manufacturer to disclose the names and locations of its nearly 500 plants. They’ve created watchdog groups in many of these locations to monitor progress, but many contractors and subcontractors pack up and move to a different location away from the surveillance.One effective way to draw attention to these exploits is to empower employees to pool their knowledge, organize, and act; a united worker’s rebellious version of embeddedness.Companies like Nike can fold up shop at the spur of the moment and find a new supplier. They don’t own the equipment, nor do they have any obligation to the plight of the workers or effects on the local communities. Workers are cluing into this reality and instead put pressure on local, regional, and national governments to do the protesting of exploitive capitalism on their behalf.Here’s how Thai activist and labor organizer Junya Lek Yimprasert describes it,“We found out that the factory and the equipment already belonged to the bank. If the workers were to demand a share of the proceeds of the sale, they would get zero, so they decided to change the strategy. First they would hold the employer responsible; second the government; and finally the brands they had produced for.”It seems to be working. In Sri Lanka, one union organizer observed,“Auditors from Nike visited the factory and finally the company recognised our union. It had an impact on all [of the] free trade zones. The Board of Investment governing the zones amended its guidelines to allow for unions and make employers recognise them.”Back in the 70s when Prefontaine was squabbling with the AAU, he was demanding athletes be recognized and compensated for their labor. And just a couple weeks ago, Phil Knight helped organize a company called Division Street, Inc., that will help Oregon student athletes monetize their own name, image, and brand.I can’t help but be impressed with the new buildings and support Phil Knight is lavishing on his alma mater. Especially, the Hayward Field renovation. But I also feel discomfort knowing it all came at the expense of near slave labor at the hands of nameless and voiceless humans, mostly women, tucked away in a sweatshop.And I’ve grown weary of public universities, and city governments, begging billionaires to throw us some spare change in hopes of making our communities as rich as they are. Celebrating philanthropy, the contributions of great men, and even star athletes only accentuates the socioeconomic malaise that divides us and unsettles us.I have an idea. What if instead of lavishing the Oregon campus with another chunk of change or fancy building, Phil Knight took a stand. What would happen if, in an homage to Steve Prefontaine’s “STOP PRE” self-effacing sardonic strut, Phil grabbed a shirt from a Nike fan, pulled it over his suit as the crowd chanted “NI-KEE, NI-KEE, NI-KEE”, and he ran a victory lap around Hayward Field in a bright green Nike shirt with neon yellow lettering that read: “STOP GREED!” Subscribe at interplace.io

Nesse episódio, Gabriel Carvalho (Ciências Sociais - UNIVASF) recebe mais uma vez Demian Melo, historiador pela Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, mestre e doutor em história pela Universidade Federal Fluminense e professor adjunto de história contemporânea da faculdade de políticas públicas da UFF, para falar sobre Karl Polanyi, pensador húngaro crítico da economia liberal, e sua principal obra, A Grande Transformação, a respeito das convulsões sociais na época da consolidação do capitalismo.

Welche Möglichkeitsräume eröffnen sich, wenn man Ökonomie als Kultur betrachtet?   Shownotes Ute Tellmann: Auf der Seite der Technischen Universität Darmstadt: https://www.ifs.tu-darmstadt.de/institut_ifs/mitarbeitende_ifs/tellmann_ifs/index.de.jsp Buch "Life & Money. The Genealogy of the Liberal Economy and the Displacement of Politics" (2017): https://cup.columbia.edu/book/life-and-money/9780231182263 “Europe's Materialism: Infrastructures and Political Space” (mit Sven Opitz) https://limn.it/articles/europes-materialism-infrastructures-and-political-space-2/ Artikel "Immunisieren – Über die politischen Praktiken der digitalen Finanzökonomie" (2021) im Behemoth Journal: https://ojs.ub.uni-freiburg.de/behemoth/article/view/1053 (als PDF verfügbar) Aufsatz "Ökonomie als Kultur" (2019) im Handbuch Kultursoziologie: https://www.springerprofessional.de/oekonomie-als-kultur/16686056 Artikel "Beyond performativity: Material futures of finance" (2020) in "Economy & Society": https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03085147.2020.1736837?journalCode=reso20 Weiteres: Buch "Capitalist Realism" (2009) von Mark Fisher: https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/capitalist-realism Thomas Malthus: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus John Maynard Keynes: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (full PDF) http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf Karl Polanyi & "The Great Transformation" (Zitat "Laissez-faire was planned, planning was not."): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Polanyi; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Transformation_(book)   thematisch angrenzende Future Histories Episoden: Joseph Vogl zur Krise des Regierens: https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s01/e25-joseph-vogl-zur-krise-des-regierens/ Jakob Kapeller zu pluraler Ökonomik u.v.m. (Teil 1 und 2): https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s01/e07-interview-mit-jakob-kapeller-zu-pluraler-oekonomik-u.v.m-teil-1/; https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s01/e08-interview-mit-jakob-kapeller-zu-pluraler-oekonomik-u.v.m-teil-2/ Silja Graupe zu alternativen politischen Ökonomien: https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s01/e57-silja-graupe-zu-alternativen-politischen-oekonomien/ Frieder Vogelmann zu alternativen Regierungskünsten: https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s01/e11-frieder-vogelmann-zu-alternativen-regierungskuensten/   Wenn euch Future Histories gefällt, dann erwägt doch bitte eine Unterstützung auf Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/FutureHistories? Schreibt mir unter office@futurehistories.today und diskutiert mit auf Twitter (#FutureHistories): https://twitter.com/FutureHpodcast oder auf Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/FutureHistories/ www.futurehistories.today   Episode Keywords #UteTellmann, #FutureHistories, #Podcast, #Interview, #ÖkonomieAlsKultur, #Ökonomie, #Neoliberalismus, #PluraleÖkonomik, #Keynes, #Liberalismus, #PolitischeÖkonomie, #hetorodoxeÖkonomie, #Kulturwissenschaft, #Soziologie, #AlternativeRegierungskunst, #Gouvernementalität, #Foucault, #Geldpolitik, #CommonsAsInfrastructure, #Ordnungspolitik

Ce billet vient clôturer notre sous-thématique de la dette avec un “hors série”. Il s'agit d'une version audio du film documentaire “Capitalisme” réalisé par Ilan Ziv. De ce film diffusé sur Arte dans le courant 2018, nous avons extrait le volet intitulé “Karl Polanyi, le facteur humain”, pour en faire cette version audio que nous vous proposons.

Ecological economics is about finding ways to transform our societies to move onto an environmentally and socially sustainable path. Many of the criticisms ecological economists express and the solutions they advocate can be rooted back to Karl Polanyi whose book The Great Transformation provided a well-argued case against mainstream economics already in the 1940s. Today's guests are Pedar Kirby and Logan Strenchock and we will talk about using Polányi's insights for a sustainability transition.

(Rediffusions d'été, 2021) -- Ré-encastrer le capitalisme de plateforme : l'apport de Karl Polanyi -- Corinne Vercher-Chaptal, Université Sorbonne Paris-Nord

Ré-encastrer le capitalisme de plateforme : l'apport de Karl Polanyi -- Corinne Vercher-Chaptal, Université Paris Nord

Karl Polanyi pour penser le capitalisme d'aujourd'hui -- Corinne Vercher-Chaptal, Université Paris Nord

Steven Kelts is a Lecturer at Princeton University’s Politics Department and University Center for Human Values. A historian of political thought, he is now teaching a seminar titled “Money, Markets, and Morals.” In this interview, Prof. Kelts explains the recent saga of GameStop trades, its connections with historical market fluctuations, and the important normative considerations about market fairness and regulation posed by great intellectuals like John Locke, Bertrand Harcourt, Milton Friedman, and Karl Polanyi. r/WallStreetBets, a forum hosted on Reddit that is described as 4chan meeting Bloomberg Terminal, was the birthplace of the Gamestop Short Squeeze. What started off as a brilliant way of organizing retail traders to drive up stock prices quickly evolved into a nation-wide political debate posed as a “proletariat revolution” by retail traders against the Wall Street establishment. We trace all the way back to works by John Locke and the Medieval times when identifiable features of modern markets began to emerge. Prof. Kelts explains why our current way of understanding the market is a new invention. Even though the ballooning of credit and finance is a more recent invention, it is questionable whether markets have indeed become more "free" now than in the past, even though we’re constantly told so. Prof. Kelts explains to us that markets have not always been thought of in the way they are by neo-classical economists like Milton Friedman or neoliberals like Gary Becker. To think of markets in that way (self-regulating, almost natural, and “functioning best when they are regulated least”) is a choice, and it may not capture the actual practices of market exchange any better (or worse) than a scholastic thinker of the late 1500’s would have captured actual practices. The Gamestop incident generates questions on the moral foundations of market structures. It helps to point out that even if people today harbor some notion that a market is structured around individual choice, they do so because they think that gives life to a norm of fairness. People would be appalled if the clearinghouses (as individual businesses) made deals with the hedge funds (as individual businesses) to stop processing orders for “meme stocks” like GameStop. But as in 2008, they also would be appalled if the clearinghouses had extremely low capital requirements for meeting margin calls, essentially allowing players like Robinhood to make uncovered bets and expose us all to systemic risk. So what people want, as Prof. Kelts argues, is a market that’s regulated in the right way, oriented towards fairness to all market participants – not an unregulated market. Nevertheless, it turns out that creating a regulated market also creates all sorts of quirks and oddities within the market, like the capitalization requirements that tripped up the GameStop traders. What Prof. Kelts finds most interesting about GameStop are the puzzles people now raise about why markets are structured in the way that they are. People assume that markets are structured around some sort of unfettered choice to exchange individually; and he wants his work to demonstrate that this idea of markets is a very modern, and perhaps unrealistic, conceptualization of what a market really is. This is a far-reaching conversation that touches on many fundamental issues in political theory and the history of political thought. We hope to show you that while the GameStop incident may seem novel and shocking, it is also an old tale of self-regulating markets. It should not change our faith that markets will hold just fine.

Ellen, Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi och György Lukács är alla överens om att Lars Noréns skildringar av shopping är det viktigaste vi har. Kim har skrivit en avhandling om de tre företagstyperna chaotic evil disrupters, socialmoderata, och Åsa-Nisse/Bert Karlsson. Ring inte oss, vi ringer er, Centrum för näringslivshistoria.Punkten i programmet: 801Producent: Sally ErikssonAnsvarig utgivare: Ellen Theander

Katharina Pistor is Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law and the director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation at Columbia University. Her most recent book, "The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality," examines how assets such as land, private debt, business organizations, or knowledge are transformed into capital through contract law, property rights, collateral law, and trust, corporate, and bankruptcy law. "The Code of Capital" was named one of the best books of 2019 by the Financial Times and Business Insider. She is a leading scholar and writer on corporate governance, money and finance, property rights, comparative law, and legal institutions. There is no shortage of books explaining issues of inequality in 2020, but they fail to address some of the more fundamental questions about the genesis of capital: How is wealth created in the first place? And, relatedly, why does capital often survive economic cycles and shocks that leave so many others adrift, deprived of the gains they had made earlier? “The Code of Capital” seeks to uncover the relationship between capital and law and the impacts such a relationship has on inequality. The legal code took tangible and illiquid assets, such as land, and made them into intangible and liquid assets, such as patents, copyrights, and securities. Prof. Pistor explains the essential properties of assets in order to be transformed into capital: priority, durability, universality, and convertibility. How have these modules influenced the code and the nature of capital over the centuries? Underpinned by the wave of globalization and financialization since the 1980s, derivatives, collaterals, trusts, and many other forms of institutions and instruments emerged, and lawyers could easily pick the laws and legal systems for each specific client in order to protect their capital. The status quo legal structure engenders inequality, and reforms are desperately needed. Insightfully, Prof. Pistor wrote that “what makes the concepts of capital and capitalism so confusing is that the outward appearance of capital has changed dramatically over time, as have the social relations that underpin it.” It’s much easier for one to understand how the physical and intangible representations of capital have transformed over the centuries, but much harder to realize that there are social relations embedded within capital. Here, we try to define such social relations, and we go in depth explaining the views on capital and capitalism by two intellectuals – Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi. Marx explained the commodification process of goods and labor, while Polanyi disagreed with Marx about classifying them as commodities. In his famous book “The Great Transformation,“ Polanyi talked about this important concept of “social embeddedness.” He wrote the book between 1940 and 1944 and believed that the market economy had to be socially embedded. Even Piketty devoted huge paragraphs in his book ”Capital & Ideology” to explain Polanyi’s vision: “In the case of the labor market, this meant that wage setting, worker training, limits on labor mobility, and collectively financed wage supplements were all matters to be settled by social and political negotiation outside the sphere of the market.” How would Prof. Pistor characterize the legal embeddedness of markets? Or the social/financial embeddedness of the legal system? Lastly, we also touch on digital and cryptocurrency and the political theory of money. In Prof. Pistor’s article “Facebook’s Libra Must Be Stopped,” she wrote that “Facebook has now unveiled a cryptocurrency and payment system that could take down the entire global economy.” Why does she think that one new digital currency could wreak havoc on the international economy? What’s Facebook and Libra’s plan? How can we respond to the Libra threat? Here, we also cite Georgetown Professor Stefan Eich’s fascinating works in political theory of money.

En La gran transformación, Karl Polanyi considera que un parteaguas para la configuración del orden económico liberal fue considerar como bienes de mercado tanto la tierra como el trabajo. Intersticios

Critique of Karl Polanyi's book, "The Great Transformation"

Karl Polanyi, Historian, Political Economist & Anthropologist

Critique of Karl Polanyi's book

Dans son ouvrage majeur « La Grande Transformation », publié en 1944, l'économiste hongrois Karl Polanyi estime que la société de marché a « désencastré » les relations économiques des relations sociales. Alors que la pandémie de coronavirus repose la question de « choisir entre l'économie et la santé », comment cette théorie éclaire-t-elle notre temps ?Jacques Sapir et Clément Ollivier reçoivent Jérôme Maucourant, économiste, maître de conférences à l'université Jean-Monnet de Saint-Étienne et spécialiste de la pensée de Karl Polanyi. Il a notamment publié « Avez-vous lu Polanyi ? » (Flammarion/Champs, rééd. 2011).

Dans son ouvrage majeur « La Grande Transformation », publié en 1944, l’économiste hongrois Karl Polanyi estime que la société de marché a « désencastré » les relations économiques des relations sociales. Alors que la pandémie de coronavirus repose la question de « choisir entre l’économie et la santé », comment cette théorie éclaire-t-elle notre temps ? Russeurope Express Jacques Sapir et Clément Ollivier reçoivent Jérôme Maucourant, économiste, maître de conférences à l’université Jean-Monnet de Saint-Étienne et spécialiste de la pensée de Karl Polanyi. Il a notamment publié « Avez-vous lu Polanyi ? » (Flammarion/Champs, 2011). Retrouvez tous les numéros de #RusseuropeExpress sur le site de Sputnik : https://fr.sputniknews.com/radio_sapir Abonnez-vous au podcast pour ne jamais manquer un épisode : ▶ iTunes : https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/russeurope-express/id1460834246 ▶ Google Podcasts : https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mci5zcHV0bmlrbmV3cy5jb20vZXhwb3J0L3JzczIvcG9kY2FzdC9yYWRpb19zYXBpci8%3D ▶ Spotify : https://open.spotify.com/show/3myZ9T0TgFs38kWzso3mai ▶ Deezer : https://www.deezer.com/fr/show/363002 ▶ YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFEnc2rjQFCFjbsK8gweN_rzjykLqKWcG ▶ Ou copiez l’adresse du flux RSS dans votre application de podcast : https://fr.sputniknews.com/export/rss2/podcast/radio_sapir/

Dans son ouvrage majeur «La Grande Transformation», publié en 1944, l’économiste hongrois Karl Polanyi estime que la société de marché a «désencastré» les relations économiques des relations sociales. Alors que la pandémie de coronavirus repose la question de «choisir entre l’économie et la santé», comment cette théorie éclaire-t-elle notre temps?

Is Elantris Marxist propaganda? Are the Laws of Supply and Demand hardwired into people? Alan digs into the humor of Chapter 8, the Great Chain of Being, and Serene’s feminist Marxist tendencies. Lots of pretentious words in this one!Pretentious Word BINGO:CoalitionTheologySavvyNeoclassicalSubstantivismIntrinsicAffective LaborPrimitive AccumulationMarxismEthosPredicatedPapal InfallibilityWhat is a Neoclassical Economics??Karl Polanyi thought that economies were relational and not rational, and that the economy was not some pure sphere of material exchange. The way we trade was expressed in every part of the culture, which was one unified artifact- not purified stations like Religion, The Market, Home Life, etc.Shiloh Whitney’s Academic paper on the idea that affective labor includes raising families, and other unpaid labor that has been the domain of women throughout history.The Great Chain of Being???My theme song is Celtic Rock by TexasBrotherThe Physical Realm theme is Energetic Alternative Dirty Rock by DenisDrummer85The Cognitive Realm theme is Action Taiko Drums by MidnightSnapThe Spiritual Realm theme is Cinematic American Rock by OctoSoundFollow the show on Twitter @RealmaticPI and send long-form feedback with the email contact@hallowedgroundmedia.com

In this episode, we talk about the shift taking place, thanks party to Fridays for Future, from finding the right price for climate action to an ethical argument. Community renewables can benefit from this shift because community energy might not always be the cheapest -- but we don't have to do what's cheapest. And without community renewables, climate action will be more difficult. The first time someone said "we have ten years to act": https://apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 The first time someone said 2.0°C might be the goal: http://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/365/1/WP-75-063.pdf Quote from Tim Carney from this podcast: https://www.vox.com/podcasts/2020/2/24/21147042/tim-carney-donald-trump-white-america-the-ezra-klein-show https://pca.st/episode/064292b6-635c-47df-82c2-8547ed09b93f?t=2639 The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Transformation_(book)?oldformat=true Produced by Germany's Renewable Energy Agency (the AEE) for the Local Community Renewables Project (LECo). The Project is funded by the European Union's Northern Periphery and Arctic Programme 2014 – 2020, which is supported by the European Regional Development Fund.

“We are at a moment of truth, which is to decide whether the European Union is a political project or just a market project. I think it’s a political project… We need financial transfers and solidarity, if only so that Europe holds on”, French President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview with the Financial Times. In yesterday’s virtual EU Council Meeting, the EU tried to rise to this challenge. But did it succeed? Host Mark Leonard is joined by Henrik Enderlein, President at the Hertie School & Director of the Jacques Delors Centre think tank and Jana Puglierin, head of ECFR’s Berlin Office: what have been the expectations for and conclusion of the meeting? What happened to the swirling coronabonds discussion? And what’s Germany’s take on Macron’s vision and way forward for Europe? This podcast was recorded on 24 April 2020 Bookshelf - "Macron, Merkel, and Europe's 'moment of truth'" by Tara Varma and Jonathan Hackenbroich https://www.ecfr.eu/article/commentary_merkron_no_more - "The Great Transformation" by Karl Polanyi, "The New Progressivism: A Grassroots Alternative to the Populism of our Times" by David Amiel & Ismael Emelien

Befinden wir uns in einer Krise des Regieren? Und wenn ja, was macht diese aus und wie kann ihr begegnet werden?   Nützliche Informationen & Links: "Das Gespenst des Kapitals" von Joseph Vogl: https://www.diaphanes.net/titel/das-gespenst-des-kapitals-198 "Der Souveränitätseffekt" von Joseph Vogl: https://www.diaphanes.net/titel/der-souveraenitaetseffekt-1717 Zitat in Anmod gefunden in "Gouvernementalität der Gegenwart" Hrsg. Lemke/Bröckling/Krasmann (Suhrkamp): https://www.suhrkamp.de/buecher/gouvernementalitaet_der_gegenwart-_29090.html Zitat in Anmod ursprünglich aus "Der Mensch ist ein Erfahrungstier - Gespräch mit Ducio Trombadori" Michel Foucault (Suhrkamp): https://www.suhrkamp.de/buecher/der_mensch_ist_ein_erfahrungstier-michel_foucault_28874.html spätere Zitate aus Michel Foucault "Kritik des Regierens - Schriften zur Politik" (Suhrkamp): https://www.suhrkamp.de/buecher/kritik_des_regierens-michel_foucault_29533.html Gilles Deleuze "Postskriptum über die Kontrollgesellschaften": https://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/netzkritik/postskriptum.html Wiki zu Bretton Woods Abkommen: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton-Woods-System Buch "Digitaler Kapitalismus" von Philipp Staab: https://www.suhrkamp.de/buecher/digitaler_kapitalismus-philipp_staab_7515.html Buch "Platform Capitalism" von Nick Srnicek: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32999998-platform-capitalism Artikel "Digital Socialism" Evgeny Morozov: https://newleftreview.org/issues/II116/articles/evgeny-morozov-digital-socialism Wiki zu Karl Polanyi: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Polanyi Communications Decency Act, 47 U.S.C. §230: http://www.columbia.edu/~mr2651/ecommerce3/2nd/statutes/CommunicationsDecencyAct.pdf Wiki zur Eurogruppe: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro-Gruppe Adam Smith "Wealth of Nations" beim Project Gutenberg (kostenloser Download) http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3300 Future Histories S01E11 mit Frieder Vogelmann zu alternativen Regierungskünsten: https://castbox.fm/episode/S01E11---Frieder-Vogelmann-zu-alternativen-Regierungsk%C3%BCnsten-id2228584-id187608520?country=de Wiki zu Oskar Morgenstern (im Zusammenhang mit ergodischer Wahrscheinlichkeit erwähnt): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Morgenstern   Wenn euch Future Histories gefällt, dann erwägt doch bitte eine Unterstützung auf Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/FutureHistories? Schreibt mir unter office@futurehistories.today und diskutiert mit auf Twitter (#FutureHistories): https://twitter.com/FutureHpodcast oder auf Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/FutureHistories/  www.futurehistories.today

A second installment of our discussion on historical capitalism and why we teach it. Historical Capitalism Part 2 Friedrich Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England (1844/45), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (1990) Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day (1999), Chapters 1 & 2 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (1975) Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (1987) Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1990) V.I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1 (1867), Chapters 27-33, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (1990) Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (2000) Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944), Chapter 1 Walter Rodney, How Europe Undeveloped Africa (1973), Chapters 5 & 6 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), Chapters 7-10 Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism (1999)

Angélica Fontella, Bruno Garcia e Rodrigo Elias conversam sobre um texto clássico do filósofo, historiador e economista austríaco Karl Polanyi, publicado originalmente em 1944, “A Grande Transformação: As origens políticas e econômicas de nosso tempo.” ( https://adobe.ly/2vsOmY1 )

I thought this book was be good; I was wrong. Free market fundamentalism is bad, to be sure, but what Karl Polanyi offers isn't better, and his analysis is dated. (The written version of this review, in web, PDF, and ebook formats, can be found here.)

Un format un peu atypique, dans prososociopopée nous faisons s'entretenir deux penseurs... morts. Dans cet épisode c'est Karl Polanyi et Sel... Friedrich Hayek qui discutent de leurs conceptions du monde, de l'économie et de la société.

Premier épisode de la maquette de Sociodyssée un projet de vulgarisation sociologique. Cet épisode présente une partie du voyage du concept d'encastrement ; de Karl Polanyi et son utilisation pour une histoire sociale de l'économie jusqu’à Mark Granovetter et son usage plus pratique du concept , nous verrons comme Ronan Le Velly parvient à réconcilier ces deux directions. Une bibliographie pour aller plus loin : -Granovetter Mark, Getting a job: a study of contacts and careers. Harvard University Press, 1974. ISBN : 978-0-226-30581-3. -Le Velly Ronan, Sociologie du marché. La Découverte, 2012. ISBN : 9782707171245. URL : https://www.cairn.info/sociologie-du-marche--9782707171245.htm -Le Velly, Ronan, « La notion d’encastrement : une sociologie des échanges marchands » Sociologie du Travail, 2002. Vol. 44, n° 1, pp. 37‑53. Disponible à l’adresse : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00452120/document -Le velly, Ronan, « Le problème du désencastrement ». Revue du MAUSS, 2007. Vol. 29, n° 1, pp. 241‑256. Disponible à l’adresse : https://www.cairn.info/revue-du-mauss-2007-1-page-241.htm]. -Polanyi Karl, La Grande Transformation. Aux origines politiques et économiques de notre temps, Paris, Gallimard, [1944] 1983. ISBN : 9782070124749.

Europa definiert sich neu. Wie der Aufstieg nationalistischer Demagogen und Umbruch in der Wirtschaft zusammenhängen. Braucht unsere Marktwirtschaft mehr Kontrolle, um den Nationalismus in die Schranken zu weisen, wie das einst der linke Vordenker Karl Polanyi vertreten hat? Zu hören: der Industrielle und ehemalige SPÖ-Vizekanzler Hannes Androsch, die Soziologin und Universitätsprofessorin Brigitte Aulenbacher und FALTER-Herausgeber Armin Thurnher. Lesen Sie den FALTER vier Wochen lang kostenlos: https://abo.falter.at/gratis  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

------------------Support the channel------------ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thedissenter PayPal: paypal.me/thedissenter ------------------Follow me on--------------------- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedissenteryt/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheDissenterYT Dr. Filipe Nobre Faria currently works as a post-doctoral researcher in ethics and political philosophy at the Institute for Philosophy of the Nova University of Lisbon (IFILNOVA). Furthermore, he lectures on subjects of his expertise at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences/Nova. Previously, he earned his PhD in Political Theory (2016) from King's College London and his master degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (2011) from the University of East Anglia. He also taught within the areas of political theory and political economy at King's College London. His main research interest lies in applying the insights of the behavioural and evolutionary sciences to issues in social and political philosophy. In this episode, we talk about the relationship between evolutionary theory, philosophy, ethics and politics. We refer to the role of philosophy in a scientific world; the importance of selfishness and altruism in moral philosophy; evolutionary processes like kin selection, reciprocal altruism and group selection; how our moral values are influences by our personality and other innate proclivities; what is mora important for societies; the is-ought dichotomy, and if the naturalistic fallacy really exists; and also about the work of Friedrich Hayek, Karl Polanyi, and the positive aspects and limitations of market liberal morality, both at the individual and collective levels. Time Links: 01:32 How to apply evolutionary theory to philosophy, ethics and politics 08:11 Philosophy in a scientific world 15:16 Selfishness and altruism in ethics and morality 20:14 Kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and group selection 31:02 Does it really matter if we behave well, but for selfish reasons? 35:06 Personality and preferences in morality 38:51 If we have to choose, what is more important in a society? Stability, or humanism? 45:09 The is-ought dichotomy, and the naturalistic fallacy 49:33 Is there really a naturalistic fallacy? 53:44 Philosophy, innateness, and political correctness 57:38 Friedrich Hayek, Karl Polanyi, and the evolutionary bases of market liberal morality 1:18:43 Biological and moral arguments for markets and liberalism (including group identity, selfishness, birth rates, and so on) 1:32:51 Follow Dr. Nobre Faria's work! -- Follow Dr. Nobre Faria's work: Faculty page: https://tinyurl.com/ydcomgnj Articles on Researchgate: https://tinyurl.com/y7jakylj Twitter handle: @filipefaria -- A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, JUNOS, SCIMED, PER HELGE HAAKSTD LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, RUI BELEZA, MIGUEL ESTRADA, ANTÓNIO CUNHA, CHANTEL GELINAS, JIM FRANK, JERRY MULLER, FRANCIS FORD, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BRIAN RIVERA, ADRIANO ANDRADE, BERNARDO DO VALE CARIA, YEVHEN BODRENKO, SERGIU CODREANU AND ADAM BJERRE! A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY FIRST PRODUCER, Yzar Wehbe! I also leave you with the link to a recent montage video I did with the interviews I have released until the end of June 2018: https://youtu.be/efdb18WdZUo And check out my playlists on: PSYCHOLOGY:

In this episode (recorded some time ago) we discuss the ongoing insight and relevance of Karl Polanyi, whose brilliant work The Great Transformation continues to shed light on modern political economy.

Guest: Gareth Dale, Brunel University Hosted and produced by Reinhard Schumacher In this episode, Gareth Dale talks about his biography “Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left”, which has recently been published in paperback. We discuss Polanyi’s childhood and youth in Budapest, his move to Vienna after the First World War, his escape from Austrofascism to first England and later North America, where he would write his main work The Great Transformation. We also talk about Polanyi’s relationship with his wife Ilona Duczyńska and his brother Michael Polanyi. We end the interview with some challenges of writing a biography. Gareth is a social scientist and senior lecturer at Brunel University. Besides Polanyi, his research interests include the political economy of the environment, the growth paradigm, the history of East Germany, the political economy of Eastern Europe, social movement theory, and international migration. Gareth has been working on Karl Polanyi for more than a decade. His research has resulted in several papers as well as the following four books on Polanyi, which are mentioned in the episode: Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left. 2016. New York: Columbia University Press. Reconstructing Karl Polanyi: Excavation and Critique. 2016 London: Pluto Press. Karl Polanyi: The Hungarian Writings [edited volume]. 2016. Manchester University Press. Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market. 2010. Cambridge: Polity Press.

The conventional wisdom is that markets reflect how people act…that it's our nature to be greedy and competitive, but what if it's the market that makes us act that way?  We take a look at the Capitalism documentary series with the work of Political Economist, Karl Polanyi.   The post Behind the News – Capitalism appeared first on KPFA.

What stage of capitalism are we in, and what processes of commodification are associated with it? Michael Burawoy isn't fond of the term “neoliberalism”; he thinks we're experiencing the third wave of marketization. Burawoy draws upon the ideas of Karl Polanyi and others to examine the past and evaluate the present. The post Marketization and Inequality appeared first on KPFA.

Prof. Mariana Mazzucato. Professor Mazzucato's talk will look at the limits of market failure theory for addressing the role of policy in creating growth that is more ’smart’ (innovation-led), sustainable (more green) and inclusive (less inequality). It will focus on the lessons from the work of Karl Polanyi, evolutionary economics, and the innovation literature on ‘mission-oriented’ policy. Rather than seeing the role of policy as fixing different types of market failures (problems related to ‘public goods’, and positive and negative externalities), the role of policy will be posited in terms of the active shaping and creating of markets. Markets will be discussed in terms of ‘outcomes’ of interactions between heterogeneous agents (including different types of public and private organisations). After a theoretical discussion, the talk will focus on the implications of this approach for addressing key challenges around energy innovation, financial market reform, and inequality. Professor Mariana Mazzucato (PhD) holds the RM Phillips chair in the Economics of Innovation at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) in the University of Sussex. Her recent book The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths (Anthem, 2013) was on the 2013 Books of the Year list of the Financial Times. It focuses on the need to develop new frameworks to understand the role of the state in economic growth—and how to enable rewards from innovation to be just as ‘social’ as the risks taken. She is winner of the New Statesman SPERI Prize in Political Economy and in 2013 the New Republic called her one of the 'three most important thinkers about innovation'. She advises policymakers around the world on innovation-led growth and is a member of the Scottish Government’s Council of Economic Advisors; a member of the World Economic Forum’s Council on the Economics of Innovation; and a permanent member of the European Commission’s expert group on Innovation for Growth (RISE). This seminar is co-hosted with the Industrial Development and Policy Research Cluster - SOAS IDP, Department of Economics. Speaker(s): Mariana Mazzucato (University of Sussex), Alfredo Saad Filho (SOAS), Ben Fine (SOAS) Organiser: Professor Alfredo Saad Filho or Dr Feyzi Ismail Event Date: 19 January 2016 Released by: SOAS Economics Podcast

The recent US election, following on the heels of the UK's referendum on Brexit and the rise of right-wing movements throughout Europe, has been widely attributed to a rise in populism. This talk examines the concept of populism in its various historic manifestations, while also situating its recent reemergence within the theoretical tradition of Karl Polanyi's work on the politically destabilizing nature of self-regulating markets, a.k.a., the thirty year experiment known as neo-liberal globalization. Speaker: Dr. Trevor Harrison Dr. Trevor Harrison is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Lethbridge and Director of Parkland Institute. He was born and raised in Edmonton. He holds a B.A. from the University of Winnipeg, an M.A. from the University of Calgary, and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Alberta. His broad areas of specialty include political sociology, political economy, and public policy. In addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters, Dr. Harrison is the author, co-author, or co-editor of nine books. His op-ed columns frequently appear in both local and national newspapers Moderator: Terry Shillington Date: Thursday, February 2, 2017 Time: Noon - 1:30 PM (30 minutes each for presentation, lunch and Q & A) Location: Country Kitchen Catering (Lower level of The Keg) 1715 Mayor Magrath Dr. S Cost: $12.00 (includes lunch) or $2.00 (includes coffee/tea) Visit the SACPA website: http://www.sacpa.ca

The recent US election, following on the heels of the UK's referendum on Brexit and the rise of right-wing movements throughout Europe, has been widely attributed to a rise in populism. This talk examines the concept of populism in its various historic manifestations, while also situating its recent reemergence within the theoretical tradition of Karl Polanyi's work on the politically destabilizing nature of self-regulating markets, a.k.a., the thirty year experiment known as neo-liberal globalization. Speaker: Dr. Trevor Harrison Dr. Trevor Harrison is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Lethbridge and Director of Parkland Institute. He was born and raised in Edmonton. He holds a B.A. from the University of Winnipeg, an M.A. from the University of Calgary, and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Alberta. His broad areas of specialty include political sociology, political economy, and public policy. In addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters, Dr. Harrison is the author, co-author, or co-editor of nine books. His op-ed columns frequently appear in both local and national newspapers Moderator: Terry Shillington Date: Thursday, February 2, 2017 Time: Noon - 1:30 PM (30 minutes each for presentation, lunch and Q & A) Location: Country Kitchen Catering (Lower level of The Keg) 1715 Mayor Magrath Dr. S Cost: $12.00 (includes lunch) or $2.00 (includes coffee/tea) Visit the SACPA website: http://www.sacpa.ca

The recent US election, following on the heels of the UK's referendum on Brexit and the rise of right-wing movements throughout Europe, has been widely attributed to a rise in populism. This talk examines the concept of populism in its various historic manifestations, while also situating its recent reemergence within the theoretical tradition of Karl Polanyi's work on the politically destabilizing nature of self-regulating markets, a.k.a., the thirty year experiment known as neo-liberal globalization. Speaker: Dr. Trevor Harrison Dr. Trevor Harrison is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Lethbridge and Director of Parkland Institute. He was born and raised in Edmonton. He holds a B.A. from the University of Winnipeg, an M.A. from the University of Calgary, and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Alberta. His broad areas of specialty include political sociology, political economy, and public policy. In addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters, Dr. Harrison is the author, co-author, or co-editor of nine books. His op-ed columns frequently appear in both local and national newspapers Moderator: Terry Shillington Date: Thursday, February 2, 2017 Time: Noon - 1:30 PM (30 minutes each for presentation, lunch and Q & A) Location: Country Kitchen Catering (Lower level of The Keg) 1715 Mayor Magrath Dr. S Cost: $12.00 (includes lunch) or $2.00 (includes coffee/tea) Visit the SACPA website: http://www.sacpa.ca

On Friday 7th November 2014, Manchester Metropolitan University and the Centre for the Study of Football and its Communities hosted a conference entitled ‘Football and Culture 2014.’ The event aimed to explore the relationship and interaction between football and wider forms of cultural representation, with papers exploring topics as diverse as fanzines, commemorative statues, fictional representations of the game, and emerging online phenomena. Pod Academy’s Christopher Daley was the co-organiser of the event and he managed to find time to conduct a series of interviews with some of the speakers. Below you can find further information about each of the speakers featured in the above podcast. David Goldblatt Conference paper: England is Paradise? The Meaning of Football since Thatcherism David Goldblatt is a writer, academic and broadcaster. He has published widely on world football and his new book, The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football, explores the recent history of the English game. In the podcast he discusses some of the themes in his new work, whilst also touching upon the specific transformations within the sport since the reign of Margaret Thatcher and the establishment of the English Premier League in 1992. David Webber Conference paper: Karl Polanyi and the Cultural ‘Everyday’ Political Economy of English Football David Webber is a Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick and spoke at both the conference and to Pod Academy about the work of the political economist Karl Polanyi and how his ideas might be applied to a critical analysis of the everyday experience of watching and following football. Joel Rookwood Joel is a Senior Lecturer in Sport Management at Liverpool Hope University. At the conference he screened his short film Rio: Football and Favelas, which was followed by an informative talk. He spoke to Pod Academy about his time in Brazil and his experience of visiting a favela in Rio during the 2014 World Cup. You can watch Joel’s film here. Ronnie Close Conference paper: Filming Sublime Conflict in Contemporary Football Ronnie Close is an artist and filmmaker and he treated the conference to a screening of his most recent film, Serious Games, which also focused on the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Ronnie spoke to us about this recent project but also touched upon his broader reasons for selecting football as the focal point for many of his films. You can see clips from Ronnie’s films through his website, which can be found here. For further information about this event, visit the Football and Culture webpage. Pod Academy has a podcast on Racism in the Beautiful Game in which Mark Doidge of the University of Brighton talks to Alex Burd.