Any discussion of the state of capitalism in America hinges in large part on how it got to where it is today. For anyone who would criticize or reform the system, a grasp of the past is indispensable. There are as many different stories about capitalism as there are storytellers—and many of them depart sharply from the lived experience of participants in the capitalist system, including general managers, inventors, investors, workers, suppliers, and consumers. One must be a discriminating consumer of the histories of capitalism. William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”[1] George Santayana wrote that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” To that I would add that those who do remember the past are more likely to know what to preserve and what to repair. Wittingly or not, the good, bad, and ugly of past experience shapes the way we view the present and future. For these and other reasons, I encourage businesspeople (and students) to study the history of capitalism.
In this post, I recommend seven books that plot the development of capitalism in America and lay a foundation for an outlook to the future. I chose these seven based on four criteria: a) published relatively recently, b) well-researched, c) well-written, and d) convey compelling points of view. I have avoided histories that obviously aim to anger, inflame envy, or lure the reader into a false satisfaction about capitalism—the reader can easily find such commentaries on the Internet. Collectively, the histories here address the astonishing story of capitalism in America and the hugely important debate over whether the country can regain its economic mojo.
Bhu Srinivasan, 2017. Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism, New York, NY: Penguin, 492 pages. The author organizes the book around 35 “next big things” in American economic history from 1620 to 2020. Big things included the advent of seagoing trade, the steam engine, railroads, the Bessemer process for steel production, aviation, automobiles, Internet, and many others. This is a focus on “punctuations” and turning points in economic development, rather than on periods of relative stasis. Such a focus grasps better than most histories the dynamism in US economic history originating from technological change, new products, new markets, and new institutions. And Srinivasan’s attention to human agency, the massive role played by leaders, entrepreneurs, and inventors, reminds us that the broad sweep of capitalist history is not strictly due to large social forces (as Karl Marx would have it).
I wish Srinivasan said more about the linkage among the “next big things” –for instance, that the steam engine enabled manufactured textiles and the railroads and that distributed electric power enabled the Second Industrial Revolution and technologies such as radio, television, and the Internet. There is connectivity among pivotal technologies that would be useful to spell out for the reader. Furthermore, the book gives rather less attention to the episodes of shock, crisis, decline, and depression—the destructive parts of “creative destruction.” The economist, Joseph Schumpeter, argued that these setbacks plant the seeds for the next advances. Finally, I wish Srinivasan had more to say about the development of democracy in America, in parallel with the country’s economic development: the two developments reinforced each other. But at 492 pages, Srinivasan had to stop somewhere. But this remains a good complement to other narratives of American capitalism.
The editors of The Economist commended this as one of the best books about the history of capitalism because of its novel focus on important turning-points, its depth of discussion, and its engaging style of writing. You could start here if you are embarking on a tour of several of the books on my list. This one is easily accessible for general-interest readers and those who haven’t been reading much history.
Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge, 2018. Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States, New York, NY: Penguin. 450 pages. More than other authors featured here who write about history, this book is co-authored by an economic leader who also made history. Alan Greenspan was Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006. First appointed by President Ronald Reagan, Greenspan was reappointed every four years by presidents of both parties until he retired. A major influence in his thinking was Ayn Rand, a writer whose ideas advanced libertarianism. His coauthor, Adrian Wooldridge, was a senior journalist and columnist at the Economist magazine and works at Bloomberg Opinion as Global Business Columnist.
Three themes dominate this historical narrative. First, the authors highlight the fading dynamism of the U.S. economy, as apparent in the declining rates of productivity growth. “Productivity is the ultimate measure of economic success,” they write.[2]
The second major theme is the decline in creative destruction, on which the authors blame the lost dynamism in the economy. They argue that “creative destruction creates a more productive economy”[3] as seen in history by the emergence of better business processes, in the adoption of new technologies, in the more efficient use of inputs, and generally in the better allocation of capital. The downside of creative destruction is the uncertainty and costs it imposes on society. The authors point out that more than other countries, the U.S. has enjoyed a comparative advantage in its tolerance for creative destruction and its benefits of dynamism and greater productivity. They wrote, “You can’t create a new world without destroying some of the old one.”[4]
The third theme in the book is politics, which they say has diverted the economy away from creative destruction. The trend in government policy in the 20th century was to reduce risk for the American population: social security, Medicare, safety nets for groups in the population. Corporations and industries also benefited from risk reduction, thanks to subsidies, preferential treatment (such as tariff protection and “Buy American” laws), regulatory enforcement that discouraged new entrants, and the infamous “Iron Triangle” in business-government relations. These risk reductions enshrined industrial laggards and sustained zombie firms that would not otherwise survive without government support. As for the situation today, the authors conclude that “America’s problems are problems of poor policy rather than senescent technology.”[5] They advocate new public policies to restore economic dynamism. However, when dealing in specifics, they offer only entitlement reform and reform of the financial system.
Their narrative of the history of capitalism in the U.S. is highly accessible to the general reader and loaded with interesting facts and arguments. For instance, they offer that the invention of limited liability for corporate investors was the dominant innovation in the U.S. history of capitalism.[6] Hmmm, do they mean that the LLC was more significant than the invention or application of new industrial technologies? More important than the development of modern capital markets? A bigger deal than globalization and the spread of global trade? Their proposition would mobilize a spirited debate among students or professionals—and that is what a good history of capitalism should do.
Robert J. Gordon, 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 762 pages. Gordon, an economics professor at Northwestern University, has written the definitive history of the American economic growth since the Civil War. This is not so much a narrative history as it is a wonkish decade-by-decade and industry-by-industry account of America’s explosive growth in standard of living followed by malaise of more recent decades. This is the go-to authority on why the American economy grew rapidly for a while and then slackened. He explains the burst of productivity in the two decades after World War II as the result of the destructive episodes of depression and war—this was creative destruction at work. Old methods, processes, products, and services were pushed aside by the need to respond to the two emergencies. He highlights research that finds that the years of the Great Depression amounted to a “great leap forward” in inventiveness and productivity. And World War II demanded that business and government “learn by doing”—to experiment rapidly–rather than try to plan first and act later.
This book is an economic history of the U.S. at the level of 90,000 feet. I wish he had more to say about actual people, inventors, investors, general managers, consumers, workers, and government leaders who made a difference during the 160 years of the study. Yet this book is an impressive complement to other histories recommended here because of its massive compilation of empirical data.
Finally, Gordon’s book is significant for its concluding point of view. More than other historians, Gordon believes the age of faster growth is over for America. “Long-Run American Economic Growth Slows to a Crawl” is the title of the final chapter. His conclusions remain sobering and provocative. He writes,
“What is remarkable about the American experience is not that growth is slowing down but that it was so rapid for so long and that the United States has maintained its productivity leadership over the leading nations of western Europe since the late 19th century. Instead, the rise and fall of growth are inevitable when we recognize that progress occurs more rapidly in some time intervals than in others. There was virtually no economic growth for millennia—until 1770—slow growth in the transition century before 1870, and for the United States, remarkably rapid growth in the revolutionary century ending in 1970, followed by slower growth since then. American growth slowed down after 1970 not because inventors had lost their spark or were devoid of new ideas, but because the basic elements of a modern standard of living had by then already been achieved along so many dimensions, including food, clothing, housing, transportation, entertainment, communication, health, and working conditions. The 1870-1970 century was unique: Many of these inventions could only happen once, and others reached natural limits.”[7]
He points to four “headwinds”:
- Rising economic inequality due to globalization which has shifted meaningful manufacturing jobs overseas; the declining power of labor unions to bargain on behalf of workers; the erosion of the minimum wage; and automation, which has placed a premium on higher educational outcomes.
- Declining educational outcomes. Gordon writes, “Education is the chief source of this spreading out of the income distribution, for growth in the compensation of those who complete a four-year college degree has far outpaced those who drop out of high school.”[8] The proficiency trends in K-12 education in the U.S. frame an emergency of the first order. As the saying goes, if you aren’t outraged, you aren’t paying attention.
- Demography. The retirement of the Baby Boomer generation will reduce hours per person worked from now to 2034—but that only explains half of the projected decline. The other half is attributed to people simply dropping out of the workforce.
- Rising debt burdens. Growing levels of debt for households, businesses, and governments will curtail the robustness and resilience with which the U.S. economy must confront recessions, financial crises, national security challenges (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea), rising social safety net requirements,[9] and not least, the ability to finance revolutionary new technologies.
Gordon’s pessimism based on history is well-documented. But how sure can he be that the future holds no promise for breakout rates of growth? He wrote his book before the advent of Artificial Intelligence, the rapid sequencing of the Covid virus, the growing promise of quantum computing, before the full implications of fracking technology were apparent, and other breakthroughs that might herald a new age. Here too, we have another promising basis for debate. This book will remain a hallmark of the history of economic growth and is a valuable complement to other histories listed here.
Ruchir Sharma, 2024. What Went Wrong with Capitalism, New York: Simon & Schuster, 289 pages. The author served as Chief Global Strategist for Morgan Stanley Investment Management from 2016 to 2021 and thus brings to his narrative a perspective on capital markets and finance. He cannot be accused of “burying the lede”[10] as the title telegraphs the core theme of the book: capitalism produced for America the world’s highest standard of living, but in recent decades has faltered. His historical narratives focus mainly on the past century and a quarter. He points to high and steady growth rates in productivity during the 19th century, followed by declining productivity growth in the late 20th century, and near zero in the 21st.
Sharma argues that the cause is not capitalism itself, but government interventions in markets and firms. He writes,
“Capitalism is not working for any generation, however, because it has been twisted into a distorted form. An unlimited state is restricting economic freedom and individual opportunity worldwide, but the decline is most jarring in America. The U.S. has dropped in the Heritage Foundation ranking for economic freedom to twenty-fifth in the world, down from fourth in the 2000s. The reasons include multiplying regulations and exploding debt, which will limit the freedom of younger Americans to spend as they choose in the future. The Capitalist spirit is beleaguered.”[11]
He argues that decades of government intervention in firms and markets, though a well-intentioned effort to dampen risks for workers and companies, has depressed dynamism, prompted excessive growth in debt, led to the creation of zombie companies, encouraged the growth of oligopolies and monopolies, prompted the explosion in government debt, and crippled competition in markets. He acknowledges the existence of market failures in capitalism, economic inequality, and inordinate corporate power, but argues that if markets were allowed to function properly, they would break up concentrations of power and restore growing productivity.
The data and narratives that Sharma offers recall Ronald Reagan’s argument that “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”[12] But as with most problems in history, there may be other factors at work as well. Here are three. First, can you get an elephant to dash? Perhaps the size of an economy is an influence on agility and future growth. The bigger you are, the bigger the productivity enhancements must be to continue the trend. Second, economic development is rife with lagging effects and inefficiencies that can dampen breakout expansions in activity. Thomas Newcomen invented the steam engine in 1712; but the Great Industrial Revolution, which sprang from the steam engine (and other innovations) did not commence until about 1770. In 1987, Robert Solow, the Nobel Laureate in economics, bemoaned the productivity paradox raised by the revolution in information technology, the apparent divide between the spread of IT and economic growth. He said, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”[13] Arguably, the good impact of the digital revolution on growth is still showing up, later and in unexpected ways than the models may have predicted. And third is the mystery of culture: do Americans want to work as hard as did former generations? Has corporate inventiveness been bureaucratized? These other possibilities should caution us that even if we correct the intrusiveness of government in markets and firms, other factors may still dampen the gains in productivity.
In sum, Sharma’s book is stimulating and well-written, founded on data and economic analysis, and loaded with edgy argument. His argument that government is the problem is grist for yet another debate. The book is a worthy complement to critics who blame capitalism itself for the productivity malaise.
Martin Wolf, 2023. The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, London, UK: Penguin Press, 382 pages. Wolf is the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, whom Larry Summers has called “the world’s pre-eminent financial journalist.”[14] Wolf is not satisfied to explore capitalism alone, but rather, widens his discussion to “democratic capitalism,” the intersection between the economic system and the political system. I found this to be a refreshing perspective—and an important one, since it is difficult to say much about the malaise in one system without commenting on the other. And what a malaise: in the preface, Wolf acknowledges that he is especially pessimistic about the future of democratic capitalism. By the end of the book, it is clear that Wolf is most concerned about the fate of democracy in the world and that he views capitalism as a troublesome co-dependent. He wrote:
“This book is a response to this new and troubling era. Its central argument is simple: when we look closely at what is happening in our economies and our polities, we must recognize the need for substantial change if core Western values of freedom, democracy, and the Enlightenment are to survive. But in so doing, we must also remember that reform is not revolution, but its opposite. …The health of our societies depends on sustaining a delicate balance between the economic and the political, the individual and the collective, the national and the global. But that balance is broken. Our economy has destabilized our politics and vice versa. We are no longer able to combine the operations of the market economy with stable liberal democracy. A big part of the reason for this is that the economy is not delivering the security and widely shared prosperity expected by large parts of our societies. One symptom of this disappointment is a widespread loss of confidence in elites. Another is rising populism and authoritarianism. Another is the rise of identity politics of both left and right. Yet another is loss of trust in the notion of truth.”[15]
Wolf’s tour of history from 10,000 BCE to the present argues that the rise of market exchange and competition summoned the development of democratic rule. The association of high-income countries with market economies is not happenstance, since democracy and capitalism reinforce each other. The Great Industrial Revolution spawned the democratization of wealthy countries. The market economy lifted the well-being of the world’s population: 200 years ago, 80 percent of the global population lived in utter poverty; today, that portion is about 10 percent, despite the population being six times larger.[16] He wrote,
“The value of a dynamic market economy lies not only in the prosperity it has created and the longer lives it has allowed us to live. It lies also in the sort of lives it allows people to lead. Markets allow people to use their imagination, skills, and efforts to better themselves, without approval from a higher authority. They need only find someone interested in paying for what they create. In this respect, markets are egalitarian. They do not have egalitarian outcomes, but the ability to engage in the market is not dependent on social status. …. Furthermore, markets impart information. Market incentives will influence everybody in the market. The alternative is some form of top-down command and control. Quite apart from the coercion this would require, a central planner will never know all the possibilities as people operating independently can. They can, above all, never know what is in everybody’s head…Of course this does not mean markets are perfect. On the contrary, the strongest justification for markets is that they encourage independent trial and error in an environment of fundamental uncertainty. They are pluralist. If we enjoyed perfect information about the future, markets would be far less valuable…If they are to work well, both economically and socially, markets need careful design and regulation and must not be dominated by a small number of oligarchs. But they remain an essential social instrument.”[17]
The danger is that “capitalism may lead to democracy…but may then destroy it.”[18] Wolf explores several of the public’s grievances: hollowing out of the middle classes, growing inequality, soaring executive pay, the impact of money in politics, slowing economic growth, declining social mobility, deindustrialization, financial crises, declining growth in productivity, rising household indebtedness, and rising polarization. At the heart of populist anger is the sense that the economic and political systems have become rigged to favor the wealthy and powerful. Populists are dangerous antagonists of democracy. They deal in identity politics to reject democratic rules of the game, deny the legitimacy of political opponents, encourage violence, and the curtailment of civil liberties. Wolf decries the rise of a “cancel culture” on the progressive left, and the efforts of others on the right to create rulers above the law. The ensuing social strains produce a loss of trust in the institutions of government.
What to do? Wolf advocates renewing capitalism by “piecemeal social engineering” that targets specific problems, rather than by revolutionary upheaval. He calls for a new New Deal that should aim for durable prosperity, defined by 1) macroeconomic stability; 2) investment and innovation; 3) sustainability; and 4) sensible openness to the world economy. He concludes,
“Democracy and competitive capitalism make a difficult, but precious marriage of complementary opposites. A market economy that operates under trustworthy rules, rather than the whims of the powerful, underpins prosperity and lowers the stakes of politics. In return, a competitive democracy induces politicians to offer policies that will improve the performance of the economy and so the welfare of the people. Beyond these practical reasons for the marriage of liberal democracy and market economy, there is also a moral one: both are founded on a belief in the value of human agency—people have a right to do the best they can for themselves; people have a similar right to exercise a voice in public decisions. At bottom, both are complementary aspects of human freedom and dignity.”[19]
Bradford De Long, 2022. Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, New York, NY: Basic Books. 535 pages. The author, an economics professor at University of California, Berkeley, has written an impressive synthesis of what he terms the “long twentieth century,” lasting from 1870 to 2010. The first 100 years witnessed the emergence of the U.S. as the world’s industrial powerhouse, fueled by abundant resources, globalization of trade, technological breakthroughs, gains from growing literacy and education, and some geopolitical luck. Then after 1970 the performance of the U.S. economy began to subside. Governments mismanaged the turbulent competitive markets that capitalism had yielded, leading to declining prosperity and opportunity, and rising inequality—these trends in turn spawned tyrannies. He wrote this book “to engrave these lessons on our collective memories.”[20]
To illustrate the tensions within American democratic capitalism, De Long contrasts the views of two influential thinkers at mid-twentieth century. One was Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian economist who became an avatar of conservative economics. His book, the Road to Serfdom became a best-seller based on his criticism of central planning. Hayek argued that competitive markets produce more efficient outcomes for society than do other systems. Since economic freedom and political freedom are closely linked, to impair the one inevitably impairs the other. But De Long is no defender of Hayek, whom he charges as the godfather of neoliberalism, a set of theories that gained prominence around the time that America’s productivity began to decline.
The other thinker was Karl Polanyi, who argued that “the market is made for man, not man for the market.”[21] He argued that land, labor, and finance were “fictious commodities” and needed to be managed by the commonwealth, rather than by the cold logic of property rights and the impersonal dictates of a market. Like Hayek, Polanyi extends his analysis of capitalism into democracy and argues that left unfettered will morph into fascism—thus, he argues, the state should regulate capitalism. Polanyi’s book, The Great Transformation, was published the same year (1944) as Hayek’s Road to Serfdom—the two books embodied the tension brewing in democratic capitalism since 1870.
As a rhetorical device, De Long’s caricatures of Hayek and Polanyi illuminate the tensions latent in American democratic capitalism. But his frequent references to these two theorists give the book more of an academic flavor than the narrative needs. And De Long is prone to overstate things: “The market economy believes that the only rights that matter are property rights and the only property rights that matter are those that produce things for which the rich have high demand.”[22] This is extreme. The market economy would not survive without paying attention to the wants of most participants in the market. And it values not just property rights, but all civil rights and institutions including rule of law, sanctity of contract, freedom of speech, religion, and assembly, etc. And though De Long highlights the role of human agency, at times he sounds like a determinist: “From 1870 to 1914, we can see global economic history as following a logic that was, if not inevitable, at least probable or at least explicable after the fact.”[23] De Long concludes,
“I see the history of the long 20th Century as primarily the history of four things: technology-fueled growth, globalization, exceptional America, and confidence that humanity could at least slouch toward utopia as governments solved political-economic problems. Before 1870 optimists such as Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill envisioned utopias. After 1870, the relative decline of the Global South compared to North, two world wars, the Great Depression challenged optimism.” (De Long (2024) page 524.)
He argues that the era of buoyant, beneficent capitalism is gone. Four developments together ended the time span of the long 20th Century: 1) challenges to American exceptionalism by Japan and Germany; 2) religious fanaticism; 3) the crises of 2008-2010 and the Great Recession; and 4) the failure to combat global warming. This book is a serious counterpoint to techno optimists and believers in unerring upward development.
Jonathan Levy, 2021. Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States, New York, NY: Random House. 741 pages. Levy is a history professor at the University of Chicago and the author of several works about capitalism. This book is another grand synthesis, this time based on John Maynard Keynes’s notion of monetary liquidity, that a liquid money supply can be used to a) buy goods and services, b) harbor resources against downturns and risks, and c) speculate on asset price appreciation. As liquidity rises and falls, the ages of American capitalism have waxed and waned. Levy outlines four ages in the history of American capitalism.
First, the Age of Commerce (1660-1860) characterized the economic development of the nation, as it grew from a resource-based export economy to a country with its own internal markets and manufacturing strength. British mercantilism delivered slavery to North America seeding the tension that culminated in the Civil War. Doubts about finance capitalism led to experiments and doubts about interstate banking, as did the periodic financial crises, which Levy discusses better than other of the major histories here. The outcome of the Civil War marked the end of slavery and the beginning of major industrialization.
Second, the Age of Capital (1860-1932) covers the period of extraordinary industrial expansion, the transformation of American society from rural to urban, and the second industrial revolution. Railroads became, in Levy’s words, “a new industrial investment multiplier” in spurring economic growth. His insights about the network economics of railroads trigger interesting reflections about modern-day information technology. His profiles of industrialists help to illuminate the entrepreneurial impetus of this age. And his coverage of labor struggles during the Gilded Age helps to set the stage for the deep political tides that began to move as the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth and then worsened with the onset of the Great Depression.
Third, the Age of Control (1932-1980) begins with the response to the Great Depression by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945). Levy’s argument is that FDR’s policies reined in the excesses of market capitalism and restored liquidity to an economy that was desperate for economic relief. FDR took the US off the gold standard and demonstrated a commitment to inflating farm and other prices. Then, with World War II, the US emerged as the world’s hegemon, imposing international rules through multilateral organizations such as the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. And it became the world’s creditor through loans and programs such as the Marshall Plan. Eventually, social engineering in the 1960s (LBJ’s “Great Society”) and the Vietnam War proved too costly for the nation to bear. By 1980, the US had sustained a miserable decade of stagflation.
Finally, the Age of Chaos (1980 to the present) attributes periods of rapid growth and sharp recession to neoliberalism, the emergence of the “new capitalism.” In this final section of the book, Levy’s tone loses its focus on capitalism per se and emphasizes public policy and its shortcomings. But the chief culprit for the difficulties of this age, says Levy, were excessive market advocacy and greed—hence the reference to an age of chaos. But looking at the past 44 years, it is hard to argue that this period has been more chaotic than, say, 1784-1787 (America’s first Great Depression), the Civil War/Gilded Age era, the Roaring Twenties/Great Depression? Levy harshly criticizes the Fed’s interventions to quell the crisis of 2008 (especially the rescues of financial institutions) without saying what he would have done instead and how that would have played out.
Levy concludes that
“In American history, what has always brought about new ages of capitalism—whether it was the British Empire’s commercial colonization of North America, the rise of the Republican Party and Civil War, the election of FDR and the coming of the new Deal, or the Volcker Shock and the presidency of Ronald Reagan—has been state action. In the Age of Chaos, vast sums of capital and credit have rushed around the world in digitized bits every millisecond. Capital moves fast, but politics, in turn, have remained always at least one step behind, chasing events. State action lags: it is responsive, not generative.”[25]
Coda
These recommended readings span a range of criticism and endearment of capitalism. I have highlighted differences in (1) the reliance on abstraction versus the real lived experience in the capitalist system, (2) the emphasis on determinism (big social forces) to explain the path of history as opposed to human agency, the actions of individual leaders and risk-takers, and (3) the debatable questions such histories raise. All of these histories seize our attention with urgency and pessimism to varying degrees. Srinivasan, Sharma, Wolf, and Greenspan-Wooldridge see capitalism as a rather benign instrument for social welfare. De Long and Levy portray capitalism as a rather broken and corrupting influence. And Gordon, while taking no implicit stand pro or con, certainly reinforces an outlook of malaise.
Is the downbeat theme in these histories justified? I am reminded that intellectuals have forecasted the demise of capitalism repeatedly over the years, only to see capitalism strengthen.[26] But we all make bets—explicitly or implicitly—on the future. The reader can sharpen one’s own outlook by understanding how we got to where we are.
My advice is to:
- Pick at least two books, one from each side of the spectrum of histories. Doing so is guaranteed to get you out of the ideological echo chamber that one tends to inhabit.
- Read them critically. This means checking the author’s arguments against your own common sense, the assumptions and data that the author has employed (or conveniently ignored), and your own lived experience.
- Talk with someone about the books—maybe even read the books together with someone. As teachers everywhere know, you don’t really understand something until you can explain it to someone else.
My own dive into the history of capitalism summons other reflections, which will be the focus of the next few posts. What does the word, “capitalism,” mean? I will show it to be one of the more difficult words to define, freighted with ambiguity and ideological frisson. Given all the criticism of capitalism, how “broken” is it? And answers to such questions invite a final one, important to educators (and the public in general): how should we teach capitalism?
I wish you good reading!
End Notes
[1] William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, page 73.
[2] Greenspan and Wooldridge 2018, page 13.
[3] Greenspan and Wooldridge, 2018, page 14.
[4] Greenspan and Wooldridge 2018, page 421.
[5] Greenspan and Wooldridge, 2018, page 449.
[6] They quote Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, who opined, “the limited liability corporation is the greatest single discovery of modern times, whether you judge it by its social, by its ethical, by its industrial, or, in the long run—after we understand it and know how to use it—by its political, effects. Even steam and electricity are far less important than the limited liability corporation and would have been reduced to comparative impotence without it.” (Greenspan and Wooldridge, 2018, page 133.)
[7] Gordon 2016, page 641.
[8] Gordon 2016, page 620.
[9] The Medicare trust fund is predicted to run out by 2026. And the social security trust fund is projected for depletion by 2034.
[10] To “bury the lede” is a journalists’ idiom that means to fail to highlight the most important element of a story (the leader or “lede”) at the beginning of the article.
[11] Sharma (2024) page 272.
[12] Ronald Reagan, 1981. Inaugural Address.
[13] Robert Solow, “We’d better watch out”, New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1987, page 36.
[14] “Fixing Global Finance with Martin Wolf”. The Levin Institute. 2009..
[15] Wolf, 2023, pages xviii to xx.
[16] Wolf 2023, page 223.
[17] Wolf 2023, pages 225-6.
[18] Wolf 2023 page 31.
[19] Wolf, 2023 page 371.
[20] De Long (2024) page 24.
[21] De Long (2024), page 94.
[22] De Long (2024) page 95.
[23] De Long (2024) page 161.
[24] De Long (2024) page 524.
[25] Levy 2021, page 739.
[26] See, for instance, Marx, Das Kapital (1865, 1885, 1894), Spengler Decline of the West (1918, 1922), Schumpeter Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), and more recently, Streeck, (2016) How Will Capitalism End?, and Boldizzoni, (2020) Foretelling the End of Capitalism.