Episode 579: John Cassidy
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Dissecting Capitalism's Critics From the Industrial Revolution to AI
It’s not hard to find critics of capitalism in the current moment but this has always been true: as long as we have had capitalism we have had critics of capitalism. What are the recurring themes of these critiques and how have they helped to shape the economics profession and capitalism itself?
John Cassidy is an author at the New Yorker magazine and also the author of several books. His most recent two are Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI and How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities.
Greg and John discuss the multifaceted and varied criticisms of capitalism throughout history. Over the course of the conversation, Greg recounts how John’s books have investigated economic crises, the behavioral finance revolution, and the diverse critiques of capitalism from both the left and right. John brings up several examples of historical economic figures, from Adam Smith to Marx, and examines how crises have shaped economic thought and policy. Greg and John also make a point to highlight lesser-known critics and movements, underscoring their unsung importance of economic history.
*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*
Episode Quotes:
When both the left and the right turn against capitalism
04:05: In 2016, when Trump was running for the Republican nomination and Bernie Sanders was running for the Democratic nomination, I thought, if you go back into history, it's a long time since we've had sort of major candidates running for office as critics of capitalism from the right and the left. Bernie, of course, has always been a critic of capitalism. He's independent socialist—I'd call him a social democrat, but we can get into what those terms mean if you want. But what's really new was Trump, running from the right with a critique. I mean, people have sort of forgotten now, but when he started out, he was criticizing the banks. He was criticizing big businesses for offshoring. He was running with a critique of capitalism from the right. So that got me thinking about maybe there's a book in how we got here. How can America, sort of world capital of capitalism and always very supportive of the system, come to this state of affairs where the two major candidates are running against it basically?
A historical approach to capitalism
12:21: Capitalism means anything involving large-scale production on the basis of privately owned assets. Private means of production. And if you adopt that broad definition, then mercantile capitalism, slavery, the plantation economies is a form of capitalism.
Why economists often miss the real economy
09:51: I realized in sort of maybe the late nineties, early 2000s, that if you want to speak to an economist about what was going on in the economy and what's happening in Washington, there really wasn't much point in calling up Harvard or MIT or Chicago or whatever, because the economics department would say, "Well, we don't really have anybody who covers that. You need to go to the business school, or you need to go to the business economists." So I think maybe there's been a backlash against that since the Great Financial Crisis. I know there's been a lot of efforts inside various universities, especially in Europe, to make the syllabuses more relevant, more sort of real-world based. But I still think at the higher levels of the subject, it's still extremely abstract.