Neoliberalism

• Quote of the Day: Cornell West

  I think a post-Obama America is an America in post-traumatic depression. Because the levels of disillusionment are so deep. Thank God for the new wave of young and prophetic leadership, as with Rev. William Barber, Philip Agnew, and others. But look who’s around the presidential corner. Oh my God, here comes another neo-liberal opportunist par

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• Silicon Valley Progressivism

  "And when you walk thru Uber’s HQ in San Francisco, the place is pulsating with young, brilliant and dedicated employees who believe they are part of doing something historic and meaningful and won’t take no for an answer. It’s a feeling I’ve been fortunate to experience previously and feel incredibly lucky to be surrounded by

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• Learning from Our Grandparents

  Or great-granparents, as the case may be. I want to spend some time with Polanyi in part because he has a fundamentally conservative temperament and POV. I'd argue that he's more of a Burkean conservative than most to the conservative intellectuals who are obsessed with the tyrannic threats posed by big government. I like reading

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• What Is More Natural Than Markets?

  Reflections on The Great Transformation, Chapter Three: "Habitation versus Improvement" Central to Polanyi's argument is that markets are not natural, that contrary to the assumptions of classical economists, to "truck and barter"  is not something that has been a central element in human social activity for thousands of years. He argues that the market economy is

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• The Great Transformation

  Several months ago I announced that I was going to post a piece entitled "1848". It's probably not going to happen, but my reason for it was that I saw it as the year that the music died, so to say, the year that materialism and disenchantment became the dominant motif in the West. When

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• Concentration of Power

  Presents a greater danger to the public good than concentrations of wealth, but where there is concentration of wealth, concentration of power follows. Libertarians get upset with the idea of power concentrated in governments–and that can be a very serious problem–but the real problem in America has always been the way power concentrates in the

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• Rising Inequality and Rising Temperatures

  Interesting article by Paul Rosenberg this monring at Salon talking about Thomas Piketty and Elizabeth Warren. The question that's in the back of my head as I read this, though, is what difference does it make if even a three quarters of the country understands what's happening if there isn't the will to overcome the

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• The Dismal Science

  First this from Krugmnan'a NYRB  review of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century: But even those [economists] willing to discuss inequality generally focused on the gap between the poor or the working class and the merely well-off, not the truly rich—on college graduates whose wage gains outpaced those of less-educated workers, or on the

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• The Spirit of Classical Liberalism

  In brief, for classical liberalism, the human world consisted of self-contained individual atoms with certain built-in passions and drives, each seeking above all to maximize his satisfactions and minimze his dissatisfactions, equal in this to all others, and 'naturally' recognizing no limits or rights of interference with his urges. In other words, each man was

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• Identity Economics

  A threat Marx downplayed has accelerated the concentration of wealth among the very richest. As Michael Hudson has noted, Marx recognized the destructive potential of financial capitalism, but thought it was inconceivable that it would become dominant. He believed the industrialists would succeed in keeping the bankers in check. They have not. As income disparity has widened enormously

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