James Surowiecki in The Yale Review:
This is a pivotal moment for American capitalism. Even though GDP and household incomes have grown steadily in this century, most Americans say they feel dissatisfied with the state of the economy and believe that the country’s economic future will be worse than its past. There is a deep sense of discontent with capitalism, and a conviction that the two paradigms of political economy that have dominated the West since World War II—Keynesian social democracy on the one hand and free-market-centered neoliberalism on the other—no longer work. And while politicians like Bernie Sanders, with his left-wing populism, and Donald Trump, with his right-wing nationalism, have tapped into this discontent, what the new order will ultimately look like remains wholly unclear.
This is, then, a perfect moment for John Cassidy’s new book, Capitalism and Its Critics, which takes, as its title suggests, a wide-ranging look at the history of capitalism through the eyes of some of its foremost critics. Cassidy includes not just the obvious ones—Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Thorstein Veblen, and Thomas Piketty, for instance—but also lesser-known yet extraordinarily interesting writers, such as the Irish proto-socialist William Thompson, the French Peruvian feminist socialist Flora Tristan, and the Indian economist J. C. Kumarappa.
More here.
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