laissez-faire capitalism

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Free Money for All: A Basic Income Guarantee Solution for the Twenty-First Century by Mark Walker

3D printing, 8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, commoditize, confounding variable, driverless car, financial independence, full employment, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, industrial robot, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, longitudinal study, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, plutocrats, precariat, printed gun, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, working poor

The most prominent welfare liberal is John Rawls. In his magisterial A Theory of Justice and other works, Rawls provides a defense of many aspects of the current welfare state.15 Like Marx, Rawls sees that capitalism has helped increase the material prosperity of society as a whole. However, according to Rawls, a laissez-faire capitalism is not justified. Rather, a conditional form of capitalism is justified. Private ownership and the profit motive are justified to the extent that they improve the material well-being of the most economically disadvantaged. This is Rawls’s famous “difference principle”: “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged.”16 We will postpone examining whether Rawls is justified on this point.

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A tax on income to provide relief for the poor or for other social goods is in effect forced labor: it requires the handing over of money, which is often equivalent to giving over some of one’s labor. Since the paying of taxes is not voluntary but coerced, it follows, says Nozick, this is forced labor or slavery (of a limited sort). I hope to show that the argument only appears persuasive as an apology for laissez-faire capitalism because it turns on an equivocation of the term “rights.” In order for us to accept the second premise, the term “rights” must be understood in a very strong way, in terms of what I shall call “Lockean rights.” But once we see how strong rights must be understood in the second premise, we can see that the first premise is not particularly plausible.

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Locke proposes that they should not pool their property in this fashion. They ought to have a competitive market to increase the efficiency of their camping trip. Suppose the rest are unmoved by Locke’s argument and propose to continue their camping trip in the spirit of camaraderie rather than laissez-faire capitalism. They argue that this camping competition will only induce animosity among the campers rather than encourage a relaxing and fun vacation. On Lockean principles, the others could not force Locke to join the camping-collective: this would violate his right to self-ownership. So, if the other seven campers compel Locke to contribute his fishing bounty to the group, then his rights will have been violated.

Capitalism: the unknown ideal by Ayn Rand

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, data science, East Village, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, profit motive, the market place, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

It is a collection of essays on the moral aspects of capitalism. Our approach can best be summarized by my statement in the first issue of The Objectivist Newsletter (January 1962): “Objectivism is a philosophical movement; since politics is a branch of philosophy, Objectivism advocates certain political principles—specifically, those of laissez-faire capitalism—as the consequence and the ultimate practical application of its fundamental philosophical principles. It does not regard politics as a separate or primary goal, that is: as a goal that can be achieved without a wider ideological context. “Politics is based on three other philosophical disciplines: metaphysics, epistemology and ethics—on a theory of man’s nature and of man’s relationship to existence.

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(In fact, the United States lost, economically, even though it won the war: it was left with an enormous national debt, augmented by the grotesquely futile policy of supporting former allies and enemies to this day.) Yet it is capitalism that today’s peace-lovers oppose and statism that they advocate—in the name of peace. Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships. By the nature of its basic principles and interests, it is the only system fundamentally opposed to war. Men who are free to produce have no incentive to loot; they have nothing to gain from war and a great deal to lose.

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The American businessmen, as a class, have demonstrated the greatest productive genius and the most spectacular achievements ever recorded in the economic history of mankind. What reward did they receive from our culture and its intellectuals? The position of a hated, persecuted minority. The position of a scapegoat for the evils of the bureaucrats. A system of pure, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism has never yet existed anywhere. What did exist were only so-called mixed economies, which means: a mixture, in varying degrees, of freedom and controls, of voluntary choice and government coercion, of capitalism and statism. America was the freest country on earth, but elements of statism were present in her economy from the start.

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis by Anatole Kaletsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, eat what you kill, Edward Glaeser, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, global rebalancing, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peak oil, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical model, systems thinking, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

The first of these great transitions—the period of social and economic upheaval that started with the political revolutions in America and France and the industrial revolution in England—created the first era of modern capitalism, running roughly from the British victory over Napoleon in 1815 until the First World War. This long period of relative systemic stability and rising prosperity ended with the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and finally the Great Depression in the United States. These unprecedented political and economic traumas destroyed the classical laissez-faire capitalism of the nineteenth century and created a different version of the capitalist system, embracing Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and the British and European welfare states. Then, forty years after the Great Depression, another enormous economic crisis—the global inflation of the late 1960s and 1970s—inspired the free-market revolution of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, creating a third version of capitalism, clearly distinct from the previous two.

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And after each of these evolutions, the capitalist system has emerged stronger than it was before. To understand the new politico-economic model emerging from the crisis, it helps to consider the changing relationships of governments and markets in these three previous phases. In the classical laissez-faire capitalism that dominated the world from the early nineteenth century until 1930, politics and economics were essentially distinct spheres. The interactions of government and markets were confined to collecting taxes, mainly to pay for wars, and erecting tariff barriers, mostly to protect powerful political interests.

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Those of us who have looked to the self-interest [of private companies to promote the capitalist system]—myself especially—are in a state of shocked disbelief.”1 Appropriately enough, the nature of this flaw was identified by Ayn Rand herself in an essay on her objectivist philosophy that had inspired Greenspan and other American conservatives for two generations: “The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism . . . In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.”2 Most serious political philosophers, sociologists, and economic historians have long realized that the opposite is true.

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought by Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, Peter Schwartz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business process, cuban missile crisis, haute cuisine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Plato's cave, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, source of truth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Part 11 ends with a pair of my lectures on the American educational system. One documents the anti-Americanism rampant in our universities (Chapter 19); the other, the anti-conceptual methodology that is wrecking our grade schools (Chapter 20). Part III, Politics, considers a number of political issues from the standpoint of an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism. It includes attacks on the quota system (Chapter 21), public TV (Chapter 22), antitrust legislation (Chapter 24), foreign aid (Chapter 25), and socialized medicine (Chapters 29 and 30). It also offers a practical proposal to break up the government’s monopoly in the field of education (Chapter 23); a discussion of the role of wealth in an industrial economy (Chapter 27); an identification of the cause of world hunger (Chapter 28); and an explanation of Ayn Rand’s view that a rational woman would not desire to serve as president of the United States (Chapter 26).

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Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life. 4. The ideal political—economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others.

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In the popular, political usage of today, the term “liberal” is generally understood to mean an advocate of greater government control over the country’s economy, or, loosely, an advocate of socialism—while the term “conservative” is generally understood to mean an opponent of government controls, or an advocate of capitalism. But this was not the original, historical meaning of the two terms, or their use in the nineteenth century. Originally, the term “liberal” meant an advocate of individual rights, of political freedom, of laissez-faire capitalism, and an opponent of the authoritarian state—while the term “conservative” meant an advocate of the state’s authority, of tradition, of the established political order, of the status quo, and an opponent of individual rights. It has been observed many times that the term “liberal” today means the opposite of its nineteenth-century meaning.

I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, off-the-grid, Own Your Own Home, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, value at risk

He had charge of the Federal Reserve under four presidents, from Ronald Reagan, who appointed him in 1987, to the second President Bush, whom he served until his retirement in 2006, and during that time he oversaw the response to several crises, from the crash of October 1987 (during which share prices fell 20 percent in a single day) through the recession of 1991, the implosion of LTCM in 1998, and the dot-com bust of 2001. For most of this time, Greenspan’s militant advocacy of deregulation and laissez-faire capitalism seemed to be an effective intellectual underpinning of his policies. Greenspan was a close friend and disciple of Ayn Rand, the Russian-born philosopher who advocated a philosophy she called “Objectivism” (she wanted to call it “Existentialism,” but some pesky Euros had already bagged that name).* Objectivism is undergoing a vogue on the Internet at the moment, perhaps because its libertarian ideology appeals to a certain type of computer nerd.

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Rand’s central ideas focused on her belief that society must get out of the way of great men. Man is “a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life,” and the only good society is capitalism, which Rand glossed as follows: “When I say ‘capitalism,’ I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism.”3 Today Objectivism seems a sophomoric belief system, whose main truth lies in its unexpressed but profound longing for the world to be a much simpler place than it is. Still, there’s no denying Objectivism’s impact on the world, thanks to its direct influence on the most economically powerful man alive, Alan Greenspan.

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Posner, is that “We are learning from [the crisis] that we need a more active and intelligent government to keep our model of a capitalist economy from running off the rails. The movement to deregulate the financial industry went too far by exaggerating the resilience—the self-healing powers—of laissez-faire capitalism.”5 The financial industry caused the crisis, but it could not have happened without the help of the governments, which spent decades committed to the idea of pure laissezfaire capitalism. What that ideology did, in practice, was essentially to allow bankers to write their own rules—or their lack of rules.

The New Depression: The Breakdown of the Paper Money Economy by Richard Duncan

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bretton Woods, business cycle, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, deindustrialization, diversification, diversified portfolio, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, inflation targeting, It's morning again in America, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization

Once that is understood, the policy options available within this system become clearer. The rest of the chapter outlines a strategy that could avert economic breakdown by making use of the new policy tools our current economic system makes possible. Capitalism and the Laissez-Faire Method Laissez-faire capitalism did not survive World War I. In Europe, the belligerent nations suspended the convertibility of their currencies into gold in order to finance the war with government debt and fiat money creation. The classical gold standard was thus one of the first victims of the war. The United States did not leave the gold standard at that time, but the U.S. economy was destabilized by Europe’s abandonment of the gold standard nevertheless.

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In other words, the economy—and the evolution of the economic system from capitalism to creditism—have been driven by the government without being planned by the government. It is necessary to understand how great the role of the government has been in the economy and how far removed our economic system is now from laissez-faire capitalism in order to understand the nature of this crisis and the options that are available to resolve it. Cutting government spending and allowing market forces to reestablish a market-determined equilibrium are not among those options. Reallocating government spending away from consumption and toward investment is.

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.: bond sales and cut by Federal Reserve to encourage credit expansion money supply and quantitative easing and trade balances and International Monetary Fund Ireland Jackson, Andrew Japan Johnson, Lyndon JP Morgan JPMorgan Chase Keynes, John Maynard Korea Labor market, changes in marginal cost of wages in. See also Unemployment Laissez-faire capitalism, evolution to credit-based, government-directed economic system Lehman Brothers Libertarian Party Life insurance companies, credit supply and Maiden Lane I, I, and III Marx, Karl Merrill Lynch Military sector, in New Great Depression Mitchell, Wesley Monetarism Monetary aggregates Monetary History of the United States, 1967–1960, A (Friedman and Schwartz) Money market funds, credit supply and Money multiplier Money supply, during Great Depression Morgan Stanley Mutual funds, credit supply and Net worth, credit expansion’s effect on New Deal New Depression banking sector and global trade imbalances and policy responses to private sector debt and New Great Depression.

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, household responsibility system, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

To illustrate the differences between a Soviet-style command economy and these various forms of capitalism, imagine a football game or soccer match. Command economics is a game in which the state tries to predetermine the final score by ensuring that all players, referees, and spectators faithfully perform their pre-assigned roles. It’s more a pageant than a sport. Post-Soviet Russian-style laissez-faire capitalism is a blood sport with few rules and referees who represent the competing interests of the spectators who wagered most on the outcome. The strongest dominate, and everyone else loses. Free-market capitalism is a game with referees who exist only to ensure proper enforcement of recognized rules and with players involved in genuine competition.

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Individuals and privately owned institutions make most of the decisions on what to buy and how much to pay, what to make and how much to charge, how much to save and where to invest. Collectively, these decisions create and sustain markets. But even this broader (simplistic) definition allows for variations, differences that are determined by the extent of government involvement in all these decisions. Those who believe in pure or laissez-faire capitalism argue that while the buyers and sellers are buying and selling, the state should mind its own business. Beyond enforcing contracts and protecting property rights, governments enable capitalism by staying out of its way. Adam Smith, the oft-quoted father of modern capitalism, wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776) of the unintended benefits that society derived from individual greed:By directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.1 Some students of Smith’s writings might qualify this point with a reference to his earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), in which he argues thatthere are evidently some principles in [man’s] nature which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it.2 Advocates of pure capitalism insist that the “invisible hand” must be allowed to work its magic—and that any effort by government to guide its actions can only burden markets and distort their natural operation.

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For Rothbard, state capitalism was the economic equivalent of political tyranny—and an invention that could only survive within a totalitarian political system. He argued that free-market capitalism is to state capitalism as “voluntary mutual exchange” is to a “hold-up at gunpoint.” He considered laissez-faire capitalism an efficient and self-replenishing network of small exchanges of goods or services based on free will, including a buyer’s right to refuse new exchanges if the first one left him unsatisfied. All taxation was “purely and pristinely robbery.” He forecast the inevitable self-destruction of central economic planning and insisted that free-market capitalism was “the only moral and by far the most productive system [and] the only viable system for mankind in the industrial era.”8 Beyond Rothbard, there are three ways in which the term state capitalism has been used over the years within the free-market world.

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

The Great Backlashes: Fascism, Communism, and New Deal Capitalism At the dawn of the twentieth century, it was plain to all that automation and globalization represented the way of the future—the way to permanently improve the human condition. But the upheavals and backlashes highlighted problems. Many thinkers viewed laissez-faire capitalism as the wrong way to govern the progress, the wrong way to complete the Great Transformation. Leaving the momentous social and economic choices to capital owners and individual entrepreneurship—guided only by market forces—was the wrong way to harness the promise. Labor markets were the fundamental issue since people are what society is all about and “labor” is what we call people in an economic setting.

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The degree of economic control that this implied required absolute political control, so communism soon slipped into a form of dictatorship. Fascism, another radical alternative tried at about the same time, also led to dictatorships. The Fascist Manifesto was published in 1919.12 Many at the time viewed fascism as a sensible way of smoothing out the roughest edges of laissez-faire capitalism while avoiding the radical changes of communism. Indeed, for much of the early 1900s, one key justification for supporting fascism was that it was the only real alternative to communism. The Manifesto called for voting rights for all, including women; proportional representation in parliament; abolition of the wealth-dominated Italian senate; implementation of an eight-hour workday for all workers; and a progressive tax on capital.

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Remember that fascism in the 1930s was as yet untarnished by its current association with the horrors of Hitler-ism. The University of Lausanne, for example, awarded the Italian fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, an honorary doctorate in 1937. More generally, the fascist response to the backlash against laissez-faire capitalism was to stay with the market for many things but to remove the uncertainty by relying on cooperation instead of competition. Capitalists, labor, and government would work together for the betterment of all in what was called the “corporatist model.” Class conflict was out; class cooperation was in.

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery by Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Curtis, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job polarisation, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, proprietary trading, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population

Central to the new philosophy was a belief in efficient and self-regulating markets. In the UK from the early 1980s, the commitments of managed capitalism to full employment, progressive taxation and inclusive welfare were dropped. Of course, the effect of this process was not a return to the much more laissez faire capitalism of the 1920s. Even by the mid-1990s, the state retained a major role in the running of the economy, with higher levels of public spending as a share of output than in the 1950s and 1960s. Nevertheless, most elements of the post-war ideological settlement—and its belief in economic fine-tuning, greater equality and a strong state—were scaled back.

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In the five years to 2008, Abbey, Lloyds and RBS cut their staff levels by 39,000.185 Although shareholder value was initially shunned in those nations most wedded to a ‘social market’, notably Germany and Japan, a weaker version of the new supercapitalism spread, if gingerly, elsewhere. Parts of Asia—from Hong Kong to Singapore—embraced the new capitalism in full. Milton Friedman once described Hong Kong as the world’s best example of laissez faire capitalism in action. Most richer and developing nations embarked on at least some degree of deregulation and privatisation. The German model has been distinguished by fewer takeovers, a greater emphasis on investment from retained earnings and lower dividend payments. But even Germany, the spiritual home of the social, stakeholder model, with its greater emphasis on collective success, consensus and the long term, found itself being drawn in the direction of the greater individualism and short-termism of the Anglo-Saxon model.

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When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. The measure of success attained by Wall Street, regarded as an institution of which the proper social purpose is to direct new investment into the most profitable channels in terms of future yield, cannot be claimed as one of the outstanding triumphs of laissez-faire capitalism—which is not surprising, if I am right in thinking that the best brains of Wall Street have been in fact directed towards a different object.’317 But Keynes also viewed the growing income gap as a key contributor to the buildup of financial instability during the 1920s. He argued that because lower income groups consume a higher proportion of their income than the rich (in economic jargon, they have a lower marginal propensity to consume) while the rich also have a high propensity for speculation, excessive income inequality increases the risk of financial instability and economic collapse.

Ayn Rand Cult by Jeff Walker

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, buy and hold, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Elliott wave, gentleman farmer, George Gilder, Herbert Marcuse, Jane Jacobs, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, price stability, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Tipper Gore, Torches of Freedom

Reinforcing the emerging hierarchy which placed Nathan second as Rand’s special protégé and intellectual heir, Ayn and Nathan began a sexual affair in 1955, kept secret from all but their spouses, who were persuaded to give their consent to it. By 1957, some of Rand’s more youthfully optimistic disciples were convinced that the world would be almost instantly converted to her selfishness-based laissez-faire capitalism, from the collectivist corruption she had dramatized in Atlas Shrugged. Just as the novel ends with society in ruins and the heroes of Galt’s Gulch about to descend from their Nietzschean mountain retreat to set all things right, so ‘the Collective’ saw itself as the personal vanguard of Ayn Rand’s philosophic and literary genius, preparing to instruct a society grateful for Rand’s solutions.

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Typically, recruits learned the Objectivist line on all these subject areas, and then, perhaps, began to learn a little about them. The students’ first exposure to these subjects was through a Randian lens. Pierpont describes Rand’s readership as the largely abandoned class of thinking nonintellectuals. Joan Kennedy Taylor concurs: “Many thought that Rand had invented laissez-faire capitalism. . . . dentists, engineers, and so on loved this vision of a technologically advancing logical world, but this was the first they had dealt with ideas in any grand sense.” Taylor, having grown up with people in the arts and having gone to a liberal arts college, was not quite as overwhelmed by Rand’s ideas as most of her fellow students of Objectivism, for whom these were the only ideas in the world.

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Harry Binswanger would write in a leaked ARI memo to Peikoff a few years later. Nathaniel Branden recalls that just prior to the publication of Atlas Shrugged, embodying “the excited child in us all . . . Leonards projections were so extravagantly wild that they bordered on hysteria. He spoke of the conversion of the country to laissez-faire capitalism and the ideals of individualism ‘within a year’. He even wondered what there was left for him to do in philosophy, since Ayn had said everything.” He would alternate from inordinate optimism to inordinate pessimism and back. December 1983 had him confessing that there are “times and situations where despite my knowledge of philosophy I feel over-whelmed by the evil in the world, isolated, alienated, lonely, bitter, malevolent,” once so much so that he thought, “I’m going to retire and stop lecturing and let the whole thing blow up.”

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

It doesn’t mean the fairness of getting what you deserve according to what you earn, but of having your needs satisfied regardless of what you earn (and of not being free to earn too much more than others). What made America great, in their view—to the extent they grant that it ever was great—was not freedom, but the post–New Deal regulatory-welfare state. The danger they see today is the alleged breakdown of that regulatory-welfare state in the name of laissez-faire capitalism. The key to saving the American Dream, they conclude, is to move rapidly in the direction of a European social welfare state. We have seen that every element of this narrative is false—in many cases it is wildly false, based on inexcusable errors, fallacies, and even deceptions. The inequality critics attempt to prove we are stagnating—by playing statistical games that evade the fact that as inequality has increased, so has our standard of living.

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How to Liberate Ability We do face problems today, but they aren’t economic inequality problems—they are political inequality problems. Our equal rights as human beings aren’t being protected. If we want to save the American Dream, we need a program to secure those rights and thereby liberate human ability. In our first book, Free Market Revolution, we laid out a full program for establishing laissez-faire capitalism in America. Here are five steps that, while not erasing all of the government’s barriers to success, would go a long way toward restoring opportunity to America. Abolish all forms of corporate welfare so that no business can gain unfair advantages. This includes bailouts, subsidies, tariffs, government-granted monopolies, and the like.

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., 160–1 Keohane, Georgia Levinson, 110 Khmer Rouge, 207–10 Kilby, Jack, 89 Kinsley, Michael, 151–2 Klein, Naomi, 7, 212 Krakauer, Jon, 56–7 Krueger, Alan B., 126 Krugman, Paul, 23, 26, 29, 81, 111, 117, 125–6, 143, 159–60, 162, 185–6, 210, 217 Kwak, James, 192 labor unions, 5, 114, 128, 130, 170, 211 and inequality narrative, 20, 23–4, 27–30 pro-union legislation, 7, 20, 24, 27–9, 224 laissez-faire capitalism, 32–3, 37–8, 224 Landsburg, Steven, 169 Larrimore, Jeff, 45–6 Lein, Laura, 142 Lemieux, Pierre, 35–6 Lewis, Hunter, 151 life expectancy, 24, 39, 84 Lindquist, Matthew J., 123 Locke, John, 12 management, 91–2. See also CEOs Manzi, James, 158, 163 Marconi, Guglielmo, 89 Markkula, Mike, 93–4 Marxism, 215–16 Mazumder, Bhashkar, 123 McCandless, Christopher Johnson, 56–7 McCloskey, Deirdre, 104, 165–6 McElwee, Sean, 125, 211, 213 McLaughlin, Patrick, 36 Mead, Lawrence, 140 Medicaid, 35, 134, 136, 138, 183 Medicare, 35, 70, 127, 134–6, 138, 170, 183, 225 merit, 6, 13–16, 114, 118, 120, 145–53, 179, 223 Micklethwait, John, 32 Microsoft, 92, 131–2, 146, 151–2 mobility, 4–5, 20, 63, 117–23, 222–3 “Money-Makers” and “Money-Appropriators,” 149–54 Munell, Alicia, 181 Munkhammar, Johnny, 113 Murphy, Liam, 203–4 Murray, Charles, 75, 139–40, 239n43 Musk, Elon, 28, 91, 130 Nagel, Thomas, 187, 203–4, 217 Nardelli, Robert, 164 New Deal, 28, 38, 174, 185–6 Newcomen, Thomas, 90 Newman, Katherine, 73, 77–8, 141–2 Newton, Isaac, 90, 100 Noah, Timothy, 4, 8, 121 Nolan, Hamilton, 212 Noyce, Robert, 89 Obama, Barack, 4–6, 9, 117, 119, 151–2, 164, 181, 196–7, 210.

Machinery of Freedom: A Guide to Radical Capitalism by David Friedman

Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, Fractional reserve banking, hiring and firing, jitney, laissez-faire capitalism, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, means of production, Money creation, radical decentralization, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

The middle class has expanded enormously, and now includes many people whose professions would once have classified them for membership in the laboring classes. In absolute terms, the rich have also gotten richer, but the gap between rich and poor seems, so far as very imperfect statistics make it possible to judge, to have been slowly closing. Many modern liberals argue that Marx's predictions were accurate enough for laissez-faire capitalism, but that such liberal institutions as strong labor unions, minimum wage laws, and progressive income taxes prevented them from being realized. A statement about what might have happened is difficult to refute. We can note that both the rise in general standard of living and the decreasing inequality appear to have been occurring fairly steadily, over a long period of time, in a variety of different more or less capitalist societies.

…

In the previous chapter I argued that liberal measures tend to injure the poor, not benefit them, and to increase, not decrease, inequality. If that has been true in the past, then the increasing equality we have experienced is in spite of, not because of, such measures. Another version of the same argument is the claim that the great depression was the true expression of laissez faire capitalism and that we were rescued from it by the abandonment of laissez faire in favor of Keynesian policies. The controversy here runs into, not merely a book, but an extensive literature; for some decades it was a central issue of debate among economists. Those who would like to see the anti-Keynesian side will find one variant of it in The Great Contraction by Friedman and Schwartz.

…

Many people, reading of the long work days and low salaries of nineteenth-century England and America, consider the case against capitalism and industrialism already proven. They forget that those conditions seem intolerable to us only because we live in an enormously richer society and that our society became so productive largely through economic progress made during the nineteenth century under institutions of relatively unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism. Under the economic conditions of the nineteenth century, no institutions, socialist, capitalist, or anarcho-capitalist, could have instantly produced what we would regard as a decent standard of living. The wealth simply was not there. If a socialist had confiscated the income of all the capitalist millionaires and given it to the workers, he would have found the workers little better off than before.

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics by John B. Judis

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, mass immigration, means of production, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, Winter of Discontent

It had replaced a worldview that stressed a far more limited role for government in the economy. The role of underlying worldviews is characteristic of politics in the United States and Europe, and of all countries that are governed primarily by consent rather than by force and terror. In Great Britain, for instance, laissez-faire capitalism, associated with Adam Smith’s invisible hand, prevailed for much of the nineteenth century, but after World War II it was superseded by Keynesian economics. American politics is structured to sustain prevailing worldviews. Its characteristics of winner takes all, first past the post, single-member districts have encouraged a two-party system.

…

In American politics, these outbursts often take the form of populist candidacies and movements. These catalytic populists have defined politics in “us vs. them” terms—as struggles of the people against the establishment based on issues and demands that the latter had been sidestepping. The rise of the People’s Party was the first major salvo against the worldview of laissez-faire capitalism. Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth coincided with Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932 and helped drive the Roosevelt administration to develop a new politics to sustain its majority. Together, these movements established the populist framework that Bernie Sanders, who described himself both as a democratic socialist and as a progressive, would adopt during his 2016 campaign.

Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism by Richard D. Wolff

asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, feminist movement, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Howard Zinn, income inequality, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, wage slave, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

State-interventionist capitalism “with a human face” replaced the more laissez-faire, harsher capitalism that had built up since the late nineteenth century. From 1945 to the 1970s, state-interventionist capitalism was the norm, with Keynesian economics its dominant theoretical frame of reference. From the early 1970s until the crisis of the US economy in 2007, laissez-faire capitalism was the norm, supported by the widespread acceptance of a neoliberal ideological framework. The last half of the twentieth century was thus a perfect example of the shifts within capitalism between more and less state-interventionist phases. In capitalism’s current crisis, an ongoing struggle concerns the pace and form of the next possible oscillation.

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In much of the rest of the world, too, similar shifts were also under way. These political developments coincided with surges in economic growth, profits as a percentage of national income, employers’ overall profitability, and income and wealth gains disproportionately appropriated by upper-income groups. Much as the processes of laissez-faire capitalism had led to the crisis of 1929, so the processes of welfare-state capitalism built to its crisis in the 1970s. 1.3 Capitalism, 1970s–2007: The Crisis Building from Below The 1970s brought to an end more than a century of rising average real wages in the United States. It had been a remarkable run for workers, unmatched by workers’ experiences in any other capitalist country.

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common by Alan Greenspan

addicted to oil, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, equity premium, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, information security, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, pets.com, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

It's the story of an architect named Howard Roarkwho heroically resists all pressure to compromise his vision—he even blows up a public-housing project when he finds out that the builder has altered his design—and ultimately prevails. Rand wrote the story to illustrate a philosophy she had come to, one that emphasized reason, individualism, and enlightened self-interest. Later she named it objectivism; today she would be called a libertarian. Objectivism championed laissez-faire capitalism as the ideal form of social organization; not surprisingly, Ayn Rand abhorred Soviet communism, in which she had been schooled. She saw it as the embodiment of brutal collectivism. And at the height of Soviet power, she held that the system was so inherently corrupt that eventually it would collapse from within.

…

Yet Smith's reputation and influence eroded as industrialization spread. He was no hero to many who struggled during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries against what they saw as the barbarism and injustice that accompanied laissez-faire market economies. Robert Owen, a successful British factory owner, believed that laissez-faire capitalism by its very nature could lead only to poverty and disease. He founded the Utopian movement, which advocated, in Owen's phrase, "villages of cooperation." In 1826, his adherents set up New Harmony, Indiana. Ironically, strife among the residents brought New Harmony to collapse within two years.

…

To me, the degree of willingness to take risks is, in the end, the major defining characteristic that separates countries into the various modes of capitalism. Whether different degrees of risk aversion stem from an ethical antipathy toward wealth accumulation or the stress of competitive battle does not affect the consequences. They are both captured in the choice of legal inhibitions imposed on competition that dilute laissez-faire capitalism, an important purpose of the welfare state. But there are other, less fundamental suppressants of competitive behavior as well. Most politically prominent is the inclination of many societies to protect "national treasures" from the winds of creative destruction, or worse, foreign ownership.

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, global supply chain, helicopter parent, High speed trading, immigration reform, income inequality, Khan Academy, laissez-faire capitalism, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler

Two aspects of this project gave rise to the conditions that fuel populist protest. One is its technocratic way of conceiving the public good; the other is its meritocratic way of defining winners and losers. The technocratic conception of politics is bound up with a faith in markets—not necessarily unfettered, laissez-faire capitalism, but the broader belief that market mechanisms are the primary instruments for achieving the public good. This way of thinking about politics is technocratic in the sense that it drains public discourse of substantive moral argument and treats ideologically contestable questions as if they were matters of economic efficiency, the province of experts.

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It is instructive nonetheless to see why, despite their disagreements, they both reject merit as the basis of justice. Free-Market Liberalism Perhaps the most influential case for free-market liberalism in the twentieth century was advanced by Friedrich A. Hayek, an Austrian-born economist-philosopher. A source of inspiration for Margaret Thatcher and other proponents of laissez-faire capitalism, Hayek opposed government efforts to reduce economic inequality, argued against progressive taxation, and viewed the welfare state as antithetical to freedom. In his book The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Hayek argues that the only equality compatible with freedom is the purely formal equality of all citizens before the law.

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., 206 , 212 Kenyon, E. W., 46 Kerry, John, 50 Keynes, John Maynard, 209 , 211 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 54–57 , 210 Knight, Frank, 137–40 , 209 Knights of Labor, 192 Kristof, Nicholas, 200 Kushner, Jared, 9 Labour Party (Britain), 20 , 22 , 66 , 86 , 97–98 , 100 , 102 , 116 , 117 , 134 , 152 laissez-faire capitalism, 19 , 126 , 139 Lasch, Christopher, 192–93 Latinos/Latinx, 102 , 170 Lears, Jackson, 42–43 , 44 Lemann, Nicholas, 157–58 Le Pen, Marine, 103 Levine, Madeline, 179–80 Lewis, Michael, 217 liberalism, liberals, 11 , 21 , 38 , 78 , 145 ; changing sensibility of, 55 ; and dignity of work, 205 ; free-market, 125–28 , 133–34 , 150 ; luck egalitarians, 69 , 146–50 ; market-friendly, 63 ; meritocratic, 87 ; providentialism and, 49–52 ; technocratic, 20 ; welfare state (egalitarian), 125 , 128–32 , 133–34 , 141 , 143 , 146 , 150–51 ; see also neoliberal globalization libertarian economists, 137 Library of Congress, U.S., 225 Libya, 53 life expectancy, 199–200 Lincoln, Abraham, 99 losing, losers, see success and failure, winners and losers luck and chance, 25 , 46 , 122–23 , 142 , 193 ; bad, compensation for, 146 ; brute luck versus option luck, 148 ; choice and, 146–50 ; genetic lottery, 123 , 149 , 150–51 ; luck egalitarian philosophy, 69 , 146–50 ; talents as, 122–23 , 130 , 150 ; see also misfortune and suffering Luthar, Suniya S., 180 Luther, Martin, 38–41 , 43 Lutherans, 40 Mackey, John, 48–49 Macron, Emmanuel, 103–104 Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business (Foroohar), 220–21 Manhattan Project, 157 Mankiw, N.

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, bank run, barriers to entry, centralized clearinghouse, collective bargaining, creative destruction, desegregation, feminist movement, financial independence, gentleman farmer, George Gilder, Herbert Marcuse, invisible hand, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, side project, Stewart Brand, The Chicago School, The Wisdom of Crowds, union organizing, urban renewal, We are as Gods, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

She labored to define reason as inextricably linked to individuality, asserting, “The rational faculty is an attribute of the individual.” Men could share the result of their thinking but not the process of thought itself, she argued. And since man’s survival depended on his own thought, individuals must be left free. Rationality thus connected to laissez-faire capitalism, the only economic system that sought to maximize individual freedom. Placing rationality at the heart of her philosophy also began to shift the grounding of Rand’s ethics. In her early work independence had been the basic criterion of value. Now she wrote, “All the actions based on, proceeding from, in accordance with man’s nature as a rational being are good.

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In 1956 Buckley’s National Review would offer a famously lukewarm endorsement: “We prefer Ike.”32 But now, to her dismay, most of Rand’s New York friends swallowed their reservations and climbed aboard the Eisenhower bandwagon. Twenty years of Democratic rule had made them desperate for any Republican president. This struck Rand as foolish compromise and unforgiveable inconsistency. She realized, “[T]hey were not for free enterprise, that was not an absolute in their minds in the sense of real laissez faire capitalism. I knew then that there is nothing that I can do with it and no help that I can expect from any of them.”33 After a string of disappointments, she was ready to turn her back on conservatives altogether. It was Nathan, stepping forward into a new role of advisor, who gently nudged Rand to this conclusion.

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Advocates of capitalism had to “start from scratch” and concentrate on culture rather than practical politics.48 This was the same conclusion she had reached after the Willkie campaign—that a popular consensus on the virtues of capitalism had to be established before electoral success could be achieved. Laissez-faire capitalism belonged to the uncharted future rather than the past. The senator himself seemed to accept Rand’s explanation for his defeat, quoting her in his syndicated column.49 In The Objectivist Newsletter, her private forum, Rand openly blamed Goldwater for his loss. She was appalled that the only voters he had drawn to his banner were southern whites: “As it stands, the most grotesque, irrational and disgraceful consequence of the campaign is the fact that the only section of the country left in the position of an alleged champion of freedom, capitalism and individual rights is the agrarian, feudal, racist South.” 50 The only glimmer of hope had been Ronald Reagan’s principled and philosophical speech on behalf of Goldwater, but it had been too little, too late.

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

We’ve been living under Reaganomics since the 1980s, a span I call the Reagan era. Please be clear that I’m referring to the entire period from 1980 until now, and not just the duration of Reagan’s presidency. I’ll define Reaganomics in detail later in the book, but for now, this brief description will suffice. Reaganomics is a version of laissez-faire capitalism that emphasizes a minimum of regulation, especially in the financial sector; a lowering of taxes, especially on the wealthiest individuals; rapid growth in government spending, especially on national defense; and an indulgent attitude toward the business community. The Impact of Reaganomics Economists are critical of the overall impact of Reaganomics on productivity and family prosperity.

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Rising income disparities gave voice to collectivists; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, who published Discourse on the Origin of Inequality in 1755, and Karl Marx, whose dense Communist Manifesto was published nearly a century later. Mainstream critics sought to temper the increasingly evident excesses of poverty, wage suppression, and the amorality endemic with laissez-faire capitalism, as popularized by Charles Dickens and others, and later, by American writers such as Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck. It was a battle first waged in England, featuring the Chartist laborers’ uprisings in 1838–1848 promising class warfare.41 Forced by public opinion to acknowledge the validity of long-suppressed employee grievances, Parliament launched study commissions and soon crafted a middle ground between conservatives like Thomas Carlyle and socialists like John Stuart Mill that became a continent-wide template.

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His January 1944 fireside chat encapsulated the wisdom that human fulfillment has an inescapable economic component: “True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”55 Drawing on Adam Smith, their alternative was to remediate the flaws of laissez-faire capitalism with careful regulation, creating a twentieth-century grand bargain, with government maintaining prudent regulations on commerce and labor markets and expanding the safety net with retirement and unemployment support. As explained by his biographer, Robert Skidelsky, Keynes supported regulation to “redress the failings of society not because he loved it, but because he saw it, in the last resort, as the savior of capitalism from the temptations of collectivism or worse.”56, 57 In clarifying a capitalism that sanctified family prosperity, Keynes and others fended off the Bolsheviks and provided the intellectual heft and insights vital to victory later during the Cold War.

Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Bolshevik threat, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Future Shock, gentleman farmer, greed is good, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Milgram experiment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, open borders, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, wage slave, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Still, the intrepid president was so deeply, if narrowly, hated that country-club Republicans swore he possessed every vice from Stalinism to syphilis (rumored to have been transmitted to him by the first lady, who got it “from a Negro”). When he ran for a third term, those who believed in minimal government and laissez-faire capitalism saw totalitarianism in the making. If he were to win, Rand and others believed, there might never be another federal election. America might turn to dictatorship, a notion that was not as fanciful then as it seems now, given that Hitler and Mussolini had risen to power through popular movements and were overrunning the free nations of Europe.

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She and others formed the Associated Ex—Willkie Workers Against Willkie and wrote broadsides and letters to the editor ridiculing the luckless utilities executive and accusing him of aiding the U.S. Communist Party agenda. What the country needed now, before it was too late, she told Channing Pollock, was an organization of conservative intellectuals to frame and promote a full-fledged ideology, or moral justification, of laissez-faire capitalism—to do what Willkie had refused to do. She asked Pollock to be its leader. He agreed. The first few meetings were held in offices around town or in the O’Connors’ most recent apartment, tucked into a slightly scruffy building on East Forty-ninth Street and First Avenue, near where the United Nations headquarters later rose.

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The sole affirmative function of the state is to safeguard individuals from one another so that they may create and work in peace. Third, there is “and ever has been” one fountainhead of progress: the individual person in a state of political and economic freedom. This was the source of the wheel, the steam engine, the electric lightbulb, and all great music, art, and literature. Laissez-faire capitalism is the only system ever evolved to operate solely on the basis of individual human reason juxtaposed against an opportunity or a need, and as such must be thanked for 150 years of industrial creativity and material progress such as the world had never known. Perhaps most important, capitalism, unlike Communism, doesn’t demand the impossible.

The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future by Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway

Anthropocene, anti-communist, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, oil shale / tar sands, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, the built environment, the market place

Even at the time, some recognized this system as a quasi-religious faith, hence the label market fundamentalism. 38 M a r k e t F a i l u r e Market fundamentalism—and its various strands and interpretations known as free market fundamentalism, neoliberalism, laissez-faire economics, and laissez-faire capitalism—was a two-pronged ideological system. The first prong held that societal needs were served most efficiently in a free market economic system. Guided by the “invisible hand” of the marketplace, individuals would freely respond to each other’s needs, establishing a net balance between solutions (“supply”) and needs (“demand”).

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present by Thomas J. Dilorenzo

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, California energy crisis, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, electricity market, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Hernando de Soto, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

As such, they are predominantly utopians. Laissez-faire capitalism has little or no role in utopian planning, for such a system calls for no central planning authority (which the advising intellectual class should guide, of course). Under pure capitalism individuals constantly plan, but they do so voluntarily and in a way that best serves their own interests, as they see them, which are not necessarily the same as the would-be government planners’ interests. This is another reason why the intellectual class is predominantly socialistic: under a regime of economic freedom and laissez-faire capitalism there is no role for intellectuals to advise to the state on how to best plan everyone else’s affairs.

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sinatra Doctrine, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

He was a man of powerful libertarian and free-market convictions who both captured and molded the spirit of his age. As a young man, Greenspan had been captivated by the personality and ideas of Ayn Rand, a Russian exile, philosopher, and bestselling novelist who, as Greenspan puts it, “championed laissez-faire capitalism as the ideal form of social organization.”3 Debating with her, Greenspan later remembered, was “like starting a game of chess thinking I was good, and later finding myself in checkmate.”4 Rand was short, forceful, charismatic, and dominated many of her youthful disciples. One of them, Nathaniel Branden, became involved in an affair with her despite being twenty-five years her junior.

…

., May 2009. 27. Michael Mandelbaum, The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy, and Free Markets in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), 395. 28. Yukio Hatoyama, “A New Path for Japan,” New York Times, August 27, 2009. 29. Quoted in Elitsa Vucheva, “Laissez-faire capitalism is finished says France,” EUObserver.com, September 26, 2008. 30. Piergiorgio Alessandri and Andrew Haldane, “Banking on the State,” Bank of England, November 2009. Available from http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/ speeches/2009/speech409.pdf. 31. John Reed, “Back on the road,” Financial Times, June 18, 2009. 32.

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, game design, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, income inequality, interest rate derivative, it's over 9,000, John Meriwether, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, Network effects, New Journalism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, one-China policy, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, power law, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time value of money, too big to fail, value at risk, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

This arrangement bears comparison to regional Federal Reserve Banks in the United States, which are privately owned but act as a financial arm of the government. It was only in the late eighteenth century, with the industrial revolution and the publication of The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, that a more modern form of laissez-faire capitalism with private ownership and banking arose. Yet through the twentieth century, despite the success of private enterprise, state-controlled businesses still prevailed in societies dominated by communists, fascists, oligarchs and many other antidemocratic forces. What we today take for granted as the dominant financial paradigm of private capitalist free enterprise and entrepreneurship is, in fact, exceptional in most times and most places.

…

The creation of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1969, seventy-four years after the original Nobel Prize in physics, confirmed this academic metamorphosis. Economists were the new high priests of a large part of human activity—wealth creation, jobs, savings and investment—and came well equipped with the equations, models and computers needed to perform their priestly functions. There has never been a time since the rise of laissez-faire capitalism when economic systems were entirely free of turmoil. Bubbles, panics, crashes and depressions have come and gone with the regularity of floods and hurricanes. This is not surprising, because the underlying dynamics of economics, rooted in human nature, are always at work. Yet the new scientific economics promised better.

Decline of the English Murder by George Orwell

British Empire, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, Lao Tzu, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thorstein Veblen, W. E. B. Du Bois

Here is the stuff that is read somewhere between the ages of twelve and eighteen by a very large proportion, perhaps an actual majority, of English boys, including many who will never read anything else except newspapers; and along with it they are absorbing a set of beliefs which would be regarded as hopelessly out of date in the Central Office of the Conservative Party. All the better because it is done indirectly, there is being pumped into them the conviction that the major problems of our time do not exist, that there is nothing wrong with laissez-faire capitalism, that foreigners are unimportant comics and that the British Empire is a sort of charity-concern which will last for ever. Considering who owns these papers, it is difficult to believe that this is unintentional. Of the twelve papers I have been discussing (i.e. twelve including the Thriller and Detective Weekly) seven are the property of the Amalgamated Press, which is one of the biggest press-combines in the world and controls more than a hundred different papers.

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown by Simon Johnson, James Kwak

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, business logic, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency risk, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, yield curve

The 1920s were a period of significant deregulation, as Republican administrations dismantled the system of state control developed in order to fight the First World War.75 By the time the war ended and President Warren G. Harding came to power in 1921, there was a determined effort to restore laissez-faire capitalism.76 Harding’s philosophy was “The business of America is the business of everybody in America”; his successor, Calvin Coolidge, famously said, “The chief business of the American people is business.”77 But the two people who best embodied the hands-off philosophy of the decade were Andrew Mellon, treasury secretary from 1921 to 1932, and Herbert Hoover, secretary of commerce under both Harding and Coolidge and president from 1929 to 1933.

…

Although Greenspan was not a Wall Street banker—he headed a New York economic consulting firm for nearly thirty years before becoming Fed chairman—there came to be no truer believer in the ideology of free markets, financial innovation, and deregulation. Greenspan was a “lifelong libertarian Republican” and a longtime associate of Ayn Rand, the philosopher and novelist who argued for pure laissez-faire capitalism.34 He believed in both the doctrine of efficient markets and the Reagan Revolution against governmental interference in the economy. He looked forward eagerly to a world without government regulation: Regulation is inherently conservative. It endeavors to maintain the status quo and the special interests who benefit therefrom.… With technological change clearly accelerating, existing regulatory structures are being bypassed, freeing market forces to enhance wealth creation and economic growth.

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? by Thomas Geoghegan

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, dark matter, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disinformation, Easter island, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, McJob, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce

The very constitutions of these countries, like the German Basic Law, make clear the purpose of the state is to protect people from the “excesses of capitalism.” Law professors actually state this in their lectures. In the Basic Law there is literally a provision to protect the family, and yes, it’s right wing and Catholic, but they’re serious about protecting the family against laissez-faire capitalism. In that sense, laissez-faire is unconstitutional. In defending the Gothic against the Classical, John Ruskin argued that, however flawed and imperfect the Gothic style might be, at least it was human and, because of that, greater and closer to the divine than the cold, impersonal Classical style could ever be.

…

Johnson, Diane Judt, Tony Kafka, Franz Kant, Immanuel Keynes, John Maynard Kiel, Germany Kinsley, Michael Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations (Warsh) “knowledge” economies Kohl, Helmut Krise. See financial meltdown of 2008 (the Krise) and German model labor markets (German). See German model of social democracy (labor and industry) labor movement (German). See German model of social democracy (unions and labor movement) Lafontaine, Oskar laissez-faire capitalism Landesbank (State Bank of Hesse) land-use planning Lane, Nathan law students and law education Germany U.S. leisure time Lenya, Lotte Libération (French newspaper) “the Links” Longworth, Dick Maastricht Treaty Major, John Malin, Martin Marshall Fund grant Marx, Karl Marx, Reinhard maternity leave/paternity leave May Day parade in Berlin (2001) Mazower, Mark McKinnon, Robert Meany, George Merkel, Angela and co-determined boards and German model and unemployment rates Microsoft military spending minimum wage Mitbestimmung (German magazine) mobility and public transportation Le Monde Moscow, Russia A Moveable Feast (Hemingway) Moynihan, Daniel Patrick Munnell, Alicia Muslims Netherlands bank model children in poverty elderly poor GDP per capita hours worked jobs/employment percent of adults holding an associate degree percent of adults self-employed purchasing power ratios/disparities unemployment rates for college graduates works councils New Deal (U.S.)

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

When the Second World War gained pace it proved the point: government spending on factory production for the war effort had the same effect, boosting employment (the US reached full employment during the war), increasing wages and stimulating demand.6 Economic growth soared and – with higher wages for the poor and higher taxes on the rich – inequality was dramatically reduced. Those were heady days. The edifices of laissez-faire capitalism were collapsing all around, and Keynes and his followers were emboldened to argue for a whole new approach to economics. The democratic state should regulate the market and harness its powers towards desired social ends, securing economic stability and improving living standards. The market should be made to serve society, not the other way round.

…

His chief inspiration was Hayek, the Austrian-born economist at the London School of Economics who had become known for his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, in which he argued that any intervention in the economy would inevitably lead to the kind of totalitarianism that characterised fascist Germany and Communist Russia. But there was virtually no audience for these views at the time. Everyone was Keynesian, and the memory of the Great Depression meant that people were reluctant to return to the dangerous days of laissez-faire capitalism. Nonetheless, the two men continued to propagate their ideas, hoping they would eventually take hold. In 1947, they formed the Mont Pèlerin Society along with others who shared their ideology. It was a club of free-market economists, named for its location in the elite Swiss resort town, established to push these ideas as urgently as possible into the public sphere.

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

To this day Friedman remains a divisive figure in popular opinion, but that’s largely a reflection of the very libertarian and pro free-market positions he was to take publicly later in life rather than the body of economic research that led to his 1976 Nobel Prize. He was viewed as one of the key influences behind the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the 1980s, both of which were ideologically driven towards smaller government and more laissez-faire capitalism. Both leaders attracted criticism, some of which inevitably reflected on Friedman as a well-known conservative who was central to their economic thinking. Like most academics, by the time he received his Nobel Prize he was really past the zenith of the research that propelled him to the award in the first place.

…

When he and Rose spent a year travelling the world in the early 1960s, they were hosted by many of his former students. The notion of the ‘Chicago School’ has become associated with monetarism (a belief that the total amount of money in an economy could not permanently alter the economy) and laissez-faire capitalism. It coincided with Friedman’s tenure at the university, which was to span three decades between 1946 and 1976. Perhaps it should really be referred to as the ‘Friedman School’? In 1976, Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. At the time, the award was then only in its seventh year, but it was still a big deal and, without any doubt, the biggest prize available in economics.

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

To this day Friedman remains a divisive figure in popular opinion, but that’s largely a reflection of the very libertarian and pro free-market positions he was to take publicly later in life rather than the body of economic research that led to his 1976 Nobel Prize. He was viewed as one of the key influences behind the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the 1980s, both of which were ideologically driven towards smaller government and more laissez-faire capitalism. Both leaders attracted criticism, some of which inevitably reflected on Friedman as a well-known conservative who was central to their economic thinking. Like most academics, by the time he received his Nobel Prize he was really past the zenith of the research that propelled him to the award in the first place.

…

When he and Rose spent a year travelling the world in the early 1960s, they were hosted by many of his former students. The notion of the ‘Chicago School’ has become associated with monetarism (a belief that the total amount of money in an economy could not permanently alter the economy) and laissez-faire capitalism. It coincided with Friedman’s tenure at the university, which was to span three decades between 1946 and 1976. Perhaps it should really be referred to as the ‘Friedman School’? In 1976, Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. At the time, the award was then only in its seventh year, but it was still a big deal and, without any doubt, the biggest prize available in economics.

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow by Tim Jackson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, biodiversity loss, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, secular stagnation, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, Works Progress Administration, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The role of the state should be to get out of the way of markets so that they can operate without intervention. This idea has achieved an almost unrivalled supremacy in contemporary economics and it has been used to particularly pernicious effect both in the liberalisation of financial markets and in defence of the subsequent austerity (Chapter 2). In support of their views, proponents of laissez-faire capitalism will almost invariably draw on the failure of the most significant governance alternative of the last two centuries. The collapse of communism in the 1990s did nothing to persuade ordinary people that an active, interventionist state can be a good thing. The historical weaknesses of communism – the corruption of power, the erosion of autonomy, the destructive nature of its economic model – appear to underline the same message.

…

INDEX Locators in italic refer to figures absolute decoupling 84–6; historical perspectives 89–96, 90, 92, 94, 95; mathematical relationship with relative decoupling 96–101, 111 abundance see opulence accounting errors, decoupling 84, 91 acquisition, instinctive 68 see also symbolic role of goods adaptation: diminishing marginal utility 51, 68; environmental 169; evolutionary 226 advertising, power of 140, 203–4 Africa 73, 75–7; life-expectancy 74; philosophy 227; pursuit of western lifestyles 70; growth 99; relative income effect 58, 75; schooling 78 The Age of Turbulence (Greenspan) 35 ageing populations 44, 81 agriculture 12, 148, 152, 220 Aids/HIV 77 algebra of inequality see inequality; mathematical models alienation: future visions 212, 218–19; geographical community 122–3; role of the state 205; selfishness vs. altruism 137; signals sent by society 131 alternatives: economic 101–2, 139–40, 157–8; hedonism 125–6 see also future visions; post-growth macroeconomics; reform altruism 133–8, 196, 207 amenities see public services/amenities Amish community, North America 128 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Smith) 123, 132 angelised growth see green growth animal welfare 220 anonymity/loneliness see alienation anthropological perspectives, consumption 70, 115 anti-consumerism 131 see also intrinsic values anxiety: fear of death 69, 104, 115, 212–15; novelty 116–17, 124, 211 Argentina 58, 78, 78, 80 Aristotle 48, 61 The Art of Happiness (Dalai Lama) 49 arts, Baumol’s cost disease 171–2 assets, stranded 167–8 see also ownership austerity policies xxxiii–xxxv, 189; and financial crisis 24, 42–3; mathematical models 181 Australia 58, 78, 128, 206 authoritarianism 199 autonomy see freedom/autonomy Ayres, Robert 143 backfire effects 111 balance: private interests/common good 208; tradition/innovation 226 Bank for International Settlements 46 bank runs 157 banking system 29–30, 39, 153–7, 208; bonuses 37–8 see also financial crisis; financial system basic entitlements: enterprise as service 142; income 67, 72–9, 74, 75, 76, 78; limits to growth 63–4 see also education; food; health Basu, Sanjay 43 Baumol, William 112, 147, 222, 223; cost disease 170, 171, 172, 173 BBC survey, geographical community 122–3 Becker, Ernest 69 Belk, Russ 70, 114 belonging 212, 219 see also alienation; community; intrinsic values Bentham, Jeremy 55 bereavement, material possessions 114, 214–15 Berger, Peter 70, 214 Berry, Wendell 8 Better Growth, Better Climate (New Climate Economy report) 18 big business/corporations 106–7 biodiversity loss 17, 47, 62, 101 biological perspectives see evolutionary theory; human nature/psyche biophysical boundaries see limits (ecological) Black Monday 46 The Body Economic (Stuckler and Basu) 43 bond markets 30, 157 bonuses, banking 37–8 Bookchin, Murray 122 boom-and-bust cycles 157, 181 Booth, Douglas 117 borrowing behaviour 34, 118–21, 119 see also credit; debt Boulding, Elise 118 Boulding, Kenneth 1, 5, 7 boundaries, biophysical see limits (ecological) bounded capabilities for flourishing 61–5 see also limits (flourishing within) Bowen, William 147 Bowling Alone (Putnam) 122 Brazil 58, 88 breakdown of community see alienation; social stability bubbles, economic 29, 33, 36 Buddhist monasteries, Thailand 128 buen vivir concept, Ecuador xxxi, 6 built-in obsolescence 113, 204, 220 Bush, George 121 business-as-usual model 22, 211; carbon dioxide emissions 101; crisis of commitment 195; financial crisis 32–8; growth 79–83, 99; human nature 131, 136–7; need for reform 55, 57, 59, 101–2, 162, 207–8, 227; throwaway society 113; wellbeing 124 see also financial systems Canada 75, 206, 207 capabilities for flourishing 61–5; circular flow of the economy 113; future visions 218, 219; and income 77; progress measures 50–5, 54; role of material abundance 67–72; and prosperity 49; relative income effect 55–61, 58, 71, 72; role of shame 123–4; role of the state 200 see also limits (flourishing within); wellbeing capital 105, 107–10 see also investment Capital in the 21st Century (Piketty) 33, 176, 177 Capital Institute, USA 155 capitalism 68–9, 80; structures 107–13, 175; types 105–7, 222, 223 car industry, financial crisis 40 carbon dioxide emissions see greenhouse gas emissions caring professions, valuing 130, 147, 207 see also social care Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams) 213 causal path analysis, subjective wellbeing 59 Central Bank 154 central human capabilities 64 see also capabilities for flourishing The Challenge of Affluence (Offer) 194 change see alternatives; future visions; novelty/innovation; post-growth macroeconomics; reform Chicago school of economics 36, 156 children: advertising to 204; labour 62, 154; mortality 74–5, 75, 206 Chile xxxiii, xxxvii, 58, 74, 74, 75, 76 China: decoupling 88; GDP per capita 75; greenhouse gas emissions 91; growth 99; life expectancy 74; philosophy 7; post-financial crisis 45–6; pursuit of western lifestyles 70; relative income effect 58; resource use 94; savings 27; schooling 76 choice, moving beyond consumerism 216–18 see also freedom/autonomy Christian doctrine see religious perspectives chromium, commodity price 13 Cinderella economy 219–21, 224 circular economy 144, 220 circular flow of the economy 107, 113 see also engine of growth citizen’s income 207 see also universal basic income civil unrest see social stability Clean City Law, São Paulo 204 climate change xxxv, 22, 47; critical boundaries 17–20; decoupling 85, 86, 87, 98; fatalism 186; investment needs 152; role of the state 192, 198, 201–2 see also greenhouse gas emissions Climate Change Act (2008), UK 198 clothing see basic entitlements Club of Rome, Limits to Growth report xxxii, xxxiii, 8, 11–16, Cobb, John 54 collectivism 191 commercial bond markets 30, 157 commitment devices/crisis of 192–5, 197 commodity prices: decoupling 88; financial crisis 26; fluctuation/volatility 14, 21; resource constraints 13–14 common good: future visions 218, 219; vs. freedom and autonomy 193–4; vs. private interests 208; role of the state 209 common pool resources 190–2, 198, 199 see also public services/amenities communism 187, 191 community: future visions of 219–20; geographical 122–3; investment 155–6, 204 see also alienation; intrinsic values comparison, social 115, 116, 117 see also relative income effect competition 27, 112; positional 55–61, 58, 71, 72 see also struggle for existence complexity, economic systems 14, 32, 108, 153, 203 compulsive shopping 116 see also consumerism Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (CoP21) 19 conflicted state 197, 201, 209 connectedness, global 91, 227 conspicuous consumption 115 see also language of goods consumer goods see language of goods; material goods consumer sovereignty 196, 198 consumerism 4, 21, 22, 103–4, 113–16; capitalism 105–13, 196; choice 196; engine of growth 104, 108, 120, 161; existential fear of death 69, 212–15; financial crisis 24, 28, 39, 103; moving beyond 216–18; novelty and anxiety 116–17; post-growth economy 166–7; role of the state 192–3, 196, 199, 202–5; status 211; tragedy of 140 see also demand; materialism contemplative dimensions, simplicity 127 contraction and convergence model 206–7 coordinated market economies 27, 106 Copenhagen Accord (2009) 19 copper, commodity prices 13 corporations/big business 106–7 corruption 9, 131, 186, 187, 189 The Cost Disease: Why Computers get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn’t (Baumol) 171, 172 Costa Rica 74, 74, 76 countercyclical spending 181–2, 182, 188 crafts/craft economies 147, 149, 170, 171 creative destruction 104, 112, 113, 116–17 creativity 8, 79; and consumerism 113, 116; future visions 142, 144, 147, 158, 171, 200, 220 see also novelty/innovation credit, private: deflationary forces 44; deregulation 36; financial crisis 26, 27, 27–31, 34, 36, 41; financial system weaknesses 32–3, 37; growth imperative hypothesis 178–80; mortgage loans 28–9; reforms in financial system 157; spending vs. saving behaviour of ordinary people 118–19; and stimulation of growth 36 see also debt (public) credit unions 155–6 crises: of commitment 192–5; financial see financial crisis critical boundaries, biophysical see limits (ecological) Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi 127 Cuba: child mortality 75; life expectancy 74, 77, 78, 78; response to economic hardship 79–80; revolution 56; schooling 76 Cushman, Philip 116 Dalai Lama 49, 52 Daly, Herman xxxii, 54, 55, 160, 163, 165 Darwin, Charles 132–3 Das Kapital (Marx) 225 Davidson, Richard 49 Davos World Economic Forum 46 Dawkins, Richard 134–5 de Mandeville, Bernard 131–2, 157 death, denial of 69, 104, 115, 212–15 debt, public-sector 81; deflationary forces 44; economic stability 81; financial crisis 24, 26–32, 27, 37, 41, 42, 81; financial systems 28–32, 153–7; money creation 178–9; post-growth economy 178–9, 223 Debt: The First Five Thousand Years (Graeber) 28 decoupling xix, xx, xxxvii, 21, 84–7; dilemma of growth 211; efficiency measures 84, 86, 87, 88, 95, 104; green growth 163, 163–5; historical perspectives 87–96, 89, 90, 92, 94, 95; need for new economic model 101–2; relationship between relative and absolute 96–101 deep emission and resource cuts 99, 102 deficit spending 41, 43 deflationary forces, post-financial crisis 43–7, 45 degrowth movement 161–3, 177 demand 104, 113–16, 166–7; post-financial crisis 44–5; post-growth economy 162, 164, 166–9, 171–2, 174–5 dematerialisation 102, 143 democratisation, and wellbeing 59 deposit guarantees 35 deregulation 27, 34, 36, 196 desire, role in consumer behaviour 68, 69, 70, 114 destructive materialism 104, 112, 113, 116–17 Deutsche Bank 41 devaluation of currency 30, 45 Dichter, Ernest 114 digital economy 44, 219–20 dilemma of growth xxxi, 66–7, 104, 210; basic entitlements 72–9, 74, 75, 76, 78; decoupling 85, 87, 164; degrowth movement 160–3; economic stability 79–83, 174–6; material abundance 67–72; moving beyond 165, 166, 183–4; role of the state 198 diminishing marginal utility: alternative hedonism 125, 126; wellbeing 51–2, 57, 60, 73, 75–6, 79 disposable incomes 27, 67, 118 distributed ownership 223 Dittmar, Helga 126 domestic debt see credit dopamine 68 Dordogne, mindfulness community 128 double movement of society 198 Douglas, Mary 70 Douthwaite, Richard 178 downshifting 128 driving analogy, managing change 16–17 durability, consumer goods 113, 204, 220 dynamic systems, managing change 16–17 Eastern Europe 76, 122 Easterlin, Richard 56, 57, 59; paradox 56, 58 eco-villages, Findhorn community 128 ecological investment 101, 166–70, 220 see also investment ecological limits see limits (ecological) ecological (ecosystem) services 152, 169, 223 The Ecology of Money (Douthwaite) 178 economic growth see growth economic models see alternatives; business-as-usual model; financial systems; future visions; mathematical models; post-growth macroeconomics economic output see efficiency; productivity ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’ (Keynes) 145 economic stability 22, 154, 157, 161; financial system weaknesses 34, 35, 36, 180; growth 21, 24, 67, 79–83, 174–6, 210; post-growth economy 161–3, 165, 174–6, 208, 219; role of the state 181–3, 195, 198, 199 economic structures: post-growth economy 227; financial system reforms 224; role of the state 205; selfishness 137 see also business-as-usual model; financial systems ecosystem functioning 62–3 see also limits (ecological) ecosystem services 152, 169, 223 Ecuador xxxi, 6 education: Baumol’s cost disease 171, 172; and income 67, 76, 76; investment in 150–1; role of the state 193 see also basic entitlements efficiency measures 84, 86–8, 95, 104, 109–11, 142–3; energy 41, 109–11; growth 111, 211; investment 109, 151; of scale 104 see also labour productivity; relative decoupling Ehrlich, Paul 13, 96 elasticity of substitution, labour and capital 177–8 electricity grid 41, 151, 156 see also energy Elgin, Duane 127 Ellen MacArthur Foundation 144 emissions see greenhouse gas emissions employee ownership 223 employment intensity vs. carbon dioxide emissions 148 see also labour productivity empty self 116, 117 see also consumerism ends above means 159 energy return on investment (EROI) 12, 169 energy services/systems 142: efficiency 41, 109–11; inputs/intensity 87–8, 151; investment 41, 109–10, 151–2; renewable xxxv, 41, 168–9 engine of growth 145; consumerism 104, 108, 161; services 143, 170–4 see also circular flow of the economy enough is enough see limits enterprise as service 140, 141–4, 158 see also novelty/innovation entitlements see basic entitlements entrepreneur as visionary 112 entrepreneurial state 220 Environmental Assessment Agency, Netherlands 62 environmental quality 12 see also pollution environmentalism 9 EROI (energy return on investment) 12, 169 Essay on the Principle of Population (Malthus) 9–11, 132–3 evolutionary map, human heart 136, 136 evolutionary theory 132–3; common good 193; post-growth economy 226; psychology 133–5; selfishness and altruism 196 exchange values 55, 61 see also gross domestic product existential fear of death 69, 104, 115, 212–15 exponential expansion 1, 11, 20–1, 210 see also growth external debt 32, 42 extinctions/biodiversity loss 17, 47, 62, 101 Eyres, Harry 215 Fable of the Bees (de Mandeville) 131–2 factor inputs 109–10 see also capital; labour; resource use fast food 128 fatalism 186 FCCC (Framework Convention on Climate Change) 92 fear of death, existential 69, 104, 115, 212–15 feedback loops 16–17 financial crisis (2008) 6, 23–5, 32, 77, 103; causes and culpability 25–8; financial system weaknesses 32–7, 108; Keynesianism 37–43, 188; nationalisation of financial sector 188; need for financial reforms 175; role of debt 24, 26–32, 27, 81, 179; role of state 191; slowing of growth 43–7, 45; spending vs. saving behaviour of ordinary people 118–21, 119; types/definitions of capitalism 106; youth unemployment 144–5 financial systems: common pool resources 192; debt-based/role of debt 28–32, 153–7; post-growth economy 179, 208; systemic weaknesses 32–7; and wellbeing 47 see also banking system; business-as-usual model; financial crisis; reform Findhorn community 128 finite limits of planet see limits (ecological) Fisher, Irving 156, 157 fishing rights 22 flourishing see capabilities for flourishing; limits; wellbeing flow states 127 Flynt, Larry 40 food 67 see also basic entitlements Ford, Henry 154 forestry/forests 22, 192 Forrester, Jay 11 fossil fuels 11, 20 see also oil Foucault, Michel 197 fracking 14, 15 Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) 92 France: GDP per capita 58, 75, 76; inequality 206; life-expectancy 74; mindfulness community 128; working hours 145 free market 106: financial crisis 35, 36, 37, 38, 39; ideological controversy/conflict 186–7, 188 freedom/autonomy: vs. common good 193–4; consumer 22, 68–9; language of goods 212; personal choices for improvement 216–18; wellbeing 49, 59, 62 see also individualism Friedman, Benjamin 176 Friedman, Milton 36, 156, 157 frugality 118–20, 127–9, 215–16 fun (more fun with less stuff) 129, 217 future visions 2, 158, 217–21; community banking 155–6; dilemma of growth 211; enterprise as service 140, 141–4, 147–8, 158; entrepreneur as visionary 112; financial crisis as opportunity 25; and growth 165–6; investment 22, 101–2, 140, 149–53, 158, 169, 208; money as social good 140, 153–7, 158; processes of change 185; role of the state 198, 199, 203; timescales for change 16–17; work as participation 140, 144–9, 148, 158 see also alternatives; post-growth macroeconomics; reform Gandhi, Mahatma 127 GDP see gross domestic product gene, selfish 134–5 Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) 54, 54 geographical community 122–3 Germany xxxi; Federal Ministry of Finance 224–5; inequality 206; relative income effect 58; trade balance 31; work as participation 146 Glass Steagal Act 35 Global Commodity Price Index (1992–2015) 13 global corporations 106–7 global economy 98: culture 70; decoupling 86–8, 91, 93–5, 95, 97, 98, 100; exponential expansion 20–1; inequality 4, 5–6; interconnectedness 91, 227; post-financial crisis slowing of growth 45 Global Research report (HSBC) 41 global warming see climate change Godley, Wynne 179 Goldman Sachs 37 good life 3, 6; moral dimension 63, 104; wellbeing 48, 50 goods see language of goods; material goods; symbolic role of goods Gordon, Robert 44 governance 22, 185–6; commons 190–2; crisis of commitment 192–5, 197; economic stability 34, 35; establishing limits 200–8, 206; growth 195–9; ideological controversy/conflict 186–9; moving towards change 197–200, 220–1; post-growth economy 181–3, 182; power of corporations 106; for prosperity 209; signals 130 government as household metaphor 30, 42 governmentality 197, 198 GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator) 54, 54 Graeber, David 28 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act 35 Great Depression 39–40 Greece: austerity xxxiii–xxxiv, xxxvii, 43; energy inputs 88; financial crisis 28, 30, 31, 77; life expectancy 74; schooling 76; relative income effect 58; youth unemployment 144 Green Economy initiative 41 green: growth xxxvii, 18, 85, 153, 166, 170; investment 41 Green New Deal, UNEP 40–1, 152, 188 greenhouse gas emissions 18, 85, 86, 91, 92; absolute decoupling 89–92, 90, 92, 98–101, 100; dilemma of growth 210–11; vs. employment intensity 148; future visions 142, 151, 201–2, 220; Kyoto Protocol 18, 90; reduction targets 19–20; relative decoupling 87, 88, 89, 93, 98–101, 100 see also climate change Greenspan, Alan 35 gross domestic product (GDP) per capita 3–5, 15, 54; climate change 18; decoupling 85, 93, 94; financial crisis 27, 28, 32; green growth 163–5; life expectancy 74, 75, 78; as measure of prosperity 3–4, 5, 53–5, 54, 60–1; post-financial crisis 43, 44; post-growth economy 207; schooling 76; wellbeing 55–61, 58 see also income growth xxxvii; capitalism 105; credit 36, 178–80; decoupling 85, 96–101; economic stability 21, 24, 67, 80, 210; financial crisis 37, 38; future visions 209, 223, 224; inequality 177; labour productivity 111; moving beyond 165, 166; novelty 112; ownership 105; post-financial crisis slowing 43–7, 45; prosperity as 3–7, 23, 66; role of the state 195–9; sustainable investment 166–70; wellbeing 59–60; as zero sum game 57 see also dilemma of growth; engine of growth; green growth; limits to growth; post-growth macroeconomy growth imperative hypothesis 37, 174, 175, 177–80, 183 habit formation, acquisition as 68 Hall, Peter 106, 188 Hamilton, William 134 Hansen, James 17 happiness see wellbeing/happiness Happiness (Layard) 55 Hardin, Garrett 190–1 Harvey, David 189, 192 Hayek, Friedrich 187, 189, 191 health: Baumol’s cost disease 171, 172; inequality 72–3, 205–6, 206; investment 150–1; and material abundance 67, 68; personal choices for improvement 217; response to economic hardship 80; role of the state 193 see also basic entitlements Heath, Edward 66, 82 hedonism 120, 137, 196; alternatives 125–6 Hirsch, Fred xxxii–xxxiii historical perspectives: absolute decoupling 86, 89–96, 90, 92, 94, 95; relative decoupling 86, 87–9, 89 Holdren, John 96 holistic solutions, post-growth economy 175 household finances: house purchases 28–9; spending vs. saving behaviour 118–20, 119 see also credit household metaphor, government as 30, 42 HSBC Global Research report 41 human capabilities see capabilities for flourishing human happiness see wellbeing/happiness human nature/psyche 3, 132–5, 138; acquisition 68; alternative hedonism 125; evolutionary map of human heart 136, 136; intrinsic values 131; meaning/purpose 49–50; novelty/innovation 116; selfishness vs. altruism 133–8; short-termism/living for today 194; spending vs. saving behaviour 34, 118–21, 119; symbolic role of goods 69 see also intrinsic values human rights see basic entitlements humanitarian perspectives: financial crisis 24; growth 79; inequality 5, 52, 53 see also intrinsic values hyperbolic discounting 194 hyperindividualism 226 see also individualism hyper-materialisation 140, 157 I Ching (Chinese Book of Changes) 7 Iceland: financial crisis 28; life expectancy 74, 75; relative income effect 56; response to economic hardship 79–80; schooling 76; sovereign money system 157 identity construction 52, 69, 115, 116, 212, 219 IEA (International Energy Agency) 14, 152 IMF (International Monetary Fund) 45, 156–7 immaterial goods 139–40 see also intrinsic values; meaning/purpose immortality, symbolic role of goods 69, 104, 115, 212–14 inclusive growth see inequality; smart growth income 3, 4, 5, 66, 124; basic entitlements 72–9, 74, 75, 76, 78; child mortality 74–5, 75; decoupling 96; economic stability 82; education 76; life expectancy 72, 73, 74, 77–9, 78; poor nations 67; relative income effect 55–61, 58, 71, 72; tax revenues 81 see also gross domestic product INDCs (intended nationally determined commitments) 19 India: decoupling 99; growth 99; life expectancy 74, 75; philosophy 127; pursuit of western lifestyles 70; savings 27; schooling 76 indicators of environmental quality 96 see also biodiversity; greenhouse gas emissions; pollution; resource use individualism 136, 226; progressive state 194–7, 199, 200, 203, 207 see also freedom/autonomy industrial development 12 see also technological advances inequality 22, 67; basic entitlements 72; child mortality 75, 75; credible alternatives 219, 224; deflationary forces 44; fatalism 186; financial crisis 24; global 4, 5–6, 99, 100; financial system weaknesses 32–3; post-growth economy 174, 176–8; role of the state 198, 205–7, 206; selfishness vs. altruism 137; symbolic role of goods 71; wellbeing 47, 104 see also poverty infant mortality rates 72, 75 inflation 26, 30, 110, 157, 167 infrastructure, civic 150–1 Inglehart, Ronald 58, 59 innovation see novelty/innovation; technological advances inputs 80–1 see also capital; labour productivity; resource use Inside Job documentary film 26 instant gratification 50, 61 instinctive acquisition 68 Institute for Fiscal Studies 81 Institute for Local Self-Reliance 204 institutional structures 130 see also economic structures; governance intended nationally determined commitments (INDCs) 19 intensity factor, technological 96, 97 see also technological advances intentional communities 127–9 interconnectedness, global 91, 227 interest payments/rates 39, 43, 110; financial crisis 29, 30, 33, 39; post-growth economy 178–80 see also credit; debt Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 18, 19, 201–2 International Energy Agency (IEA) 14, 152 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 45, 156–7 intrinsic values 126–31, 135–6, 212; role of the state 199, 200 see also belonging; community; meaning/purpose; simplicity/frugality investment 107–10, 108; ecological/sustainable 101, 152, 153, 166–70, 220; and innovation 112; loans 29; future visions 22, 101–2, 140, 149–53, 158, 169, 208, 220; and savings 108; social 155, 156, 189, 193, 208, 220–3 invisible hand metaphor 132, 133, 187 IPAT equation, relative and absolute decoupling 96 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 18, 19, 201–2 Ireland 28; inequality 206; life expectancy 74, 75; schooling 76; wellbeing 58 iron cage of consumerism see consumerism iron ore 94 James, Oliver 205 James, William 68 Japan: equality 206; financial crisis 27, 45; life expectancy 74, 76, 79; relative income effect 56, 58; resource use 93; response to economic hardship 79–80 Jefferson, Thomas 185 Jobs, Steve 210 Johnson, Boris 120–1 Kahneman, Daniel 60 Kasser, Tim 126 keeping up with the Joneses 115, 116, 117 see also relative income effect Kennedy, Robert 48, 53 Keynes, John Maynard/Keynesianism 23, 34, 120, 174, 181–3, 187–8; financial crisis 37–43; financial system reforms 157; part-time working 145; steady state economy 159, 162 King, Alexander 11 Krugman, Paul 39, 85, 86, 102 Kyoto Protocol (1992) 18, 90 labour: child 62, 154; costs 110; division of 158; elasticity of substitution 177, 178; intensity 109, 148, 208; mobility 123; production inputs 80, 109; structures of capitalism 107 labour productivity 80–1, 109–11; Baumol’s cost disease 170–2; and economic growth 111; future visions 220, 224; investment as commitment 150; need for investment 109; post-growth economy 175, 208; services as engine of growth 170; sustainable investment 166, 170; trade off with resource use 110; work-sharing 145, 146, 147, 148, 148, 149 Lahr, Christin 224–5 laissez-faire capitalism 187, 195, 196 see also free market Lakoff, George 30 language of goods 212; material footprint of 139–40; signalling of social status 71; and wellbeing 124 see also consumerism; material goods; symbolic role of goods Layard, Richard 55 leadership, political 199 see also governance Lebow, Victor 120 Lehman Brothers, bankruptcy 23, 25, 26, 118 leisure economy 204 liberal market economies 106, 107; financial crisis 27, 35–6 life expectancy: and income 72, 73, 74, 77–9, 78; inequality 206; response to economic hardship 80 see also basic entitlements life-satisfaction 73; inequality 205; relative income effect 55–61, 58 see also wellbeing/happiness limits, ecological 3, 4, 7, 11, 12, 20–2; climate change 17–20; decoupling 86; financial crisis 23–4; growth 21, 165, 210; post-growth economy 201–2, 226–7; role of the state 198, 200–2, 206–7; and social boundaries 141; wellbeing 62–63, 185 limits, flourishing within 61–5, 185; alternative hedonism 125–6; intrinsic values 127–31; moving towards 215, 218, 219, 221; paradox of materialism 121–23; prosperity 67–72, 113, 212; role of the state 201–2, 205; selfishness 131–8; shame 123–4; spending vs. saving behaviour 118–21, 119 see also sustainable prosperity limits to growth: confronting 7–8; exceeding 20–2; wellbeing 62–3 Limits to Growth report (Club of Rome) xxxii, xxxiii, 8, 11–16 ‘The Living Standard’ essay (Sen) 50, 123–4 living standards 82 see also prosperity Lloyd, William Forster 190 loans 154; community investment 155–6; financial system weaknesses 34 see also credit; debt London School of Economics 25 loneliness 123, 137 see also alienation long-term: investments 222; social good 219 long-term wellbeing vs. short-term pleasures 194, 197 longevity see life expectancy love 212 see also intrinsic values low-carbon transition 19, 220 LowGrow model for the Canadian economy 175 MacArthur Foundation 144 McCracken, Grant 115 Malthus, Thomas Robert 9–11, 132–3, 190 market economies: coordinated 27, 106; liberal 27, 35–6, 106, 107 market liberalism 106, 107; financial crisis 27, 35–6; wellbeing 47 marketing 140, 203–4 Marmot review, health inequality in the UK 72 Marx, Karl/Marxism 9, 189, 192, 225 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 11, 12, 15 material abundance see opulence material goods 68–9; identity 52; language of 139–40; and wellbeing 47, 48, 49, 51, 65, 126 see also symbolic role of goods material inputs see resource use materialism: and fear of death 69, 104, 115, 212–15; and intrinsic values 127–31; paradox of 121–3; price of 126; and religion 115; values 126, 135–6 see also consumerism mathematical models/simulations 132; austerity policies 181; countercyclical spending 181–2, 182; decoupling 84, 91, 96–101; inequality 176–8; post-growth economy 164; stock-flow consistent 179–80 Mawdsley, Emma 70 Mazzucato, Mariana 193, 220 MDG (Millennium Development Goals) 74–5 Meadows, Dennis and Donella 11, 12, 15, 16 meaning/purpose 2, 8, 22; beyond material goods 212–16; consumerism 69, 203, 215; intrinsic values 127–31; moving towards 218–20; wellbeing 49, 52, 60, 121–2; work 144, 146 see also intrinsic values means and ends 159 mental health: inequality 206; meaning/purpose 213 metaphors: government as household 30, 42; invisible hand 132, 133, 187 Middle East, energy inputs 88 Miliband, Ed 199 Mill, John Stuart 125, 159, 160, 174 Millennium Development Goals (MDG) 74–5 mindfulness 128 Minsky, Hyman 34, 35, 40, 182, 208 MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) 11, 12, 15 mixed economies 106 mobility of labour, loneliness index 123 Monbiot, George 84, 85, 86, 91 money: creation 154, 157, 178–9; and prosperity 5; as social good 140, 153–7, 158 see also financial systems monopoly power, corporations 106–7 The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (Friedman) 82, 176 moral dimensions, good life 63 see also intrinsic values moral hazards, separation of risk from reward 35 ‘more fun with less stuff’ 129, 217 mortality fears 69, 104, 115, 212–15 mortality rates, and income 74, 74–6, 75 mortgage loans 28–9, 35 multinational corporations 106–7 national debt see debt, public-sector nationalisation 191; financial crisis 38, 188 natural selection 132–3 see also struggle for existence nature, rights of 6–7 negative emissions 98–9 negative feedback loops 16–17 Netherlands 58, 62, 206, 207 neuroscientific perspectives: flourishing 68, 69; human behaviour 134 New Climate Economy report Better Growth, Better Climate 18 New Deal, USA 39 New Economics Foundation 175 nickel, commodity prices 13 9/11 terrorist attacks (2001) 121 Nordhaus, William 171, 172–3 North America 128, 155 see also Canada; United States Norway: advertising 204; inequality 206; investment as commitment 151–2; life expectancy 74; relative income effect 58; schooling 76 novelty/innovation 104, 108, 113; and anxiety 116–17, 124, 211; crisis of commitment 195; dilemma of growth 211; human psyche 135–6, 136, 137; investment 150, 166, 168; post-growth economy 226; role of the state 196, 197, 199; as service 140, 141–4, 158; symbolic role of goods 114–16, 213 see also technological advances Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Thaler and Sunstein) 194–5 Nussbaum, Martha 64 nutrient loading, critical boundaries 17 nutrition 67 see also basic entitlements obesity 72, 78, 206 obsolescence, built in 113, 204, 220 oceans: acidification 17; common pool resources 192 Offer, Avner 57, 61, 71, 194, 195 oil prices 14, 21; decoupling 88; financial crisis 26; resource constraints 15 oligarchic capitalism 106, 107 opulence 50–1, 52, 67–72 original sin 9, 131 Ostrom, Elinor and Vincent 190, 191 output see efficiency; gross domestic product; productivity ownership: and expansion 105; private vs. public 9, 105, 191, 219, 223; new models 223–4; types/definitions of capitalism 105–7 Oxfam 141 paradoxes: materialism 121–3; thrift 120 Paris Agreement 19, 101, 201 participation in society 61, 114, 122, 129, 137; future visions 200, 205, 218, 219, 225; work as 140–9, 148, 157, 158 see also social inclusion part-time working 145, 146, 149, 175 Peccei, Aurelio 11 Perez, Carlota 112 performing arts, Baumol’s cost disease 171–2 personal choice 216–18 see also freedom/autonomy personal property 189, 191 Pickett, Kate 71, 205–6 Piketty, Thomas 33, 176, 177 planetary boundaries see limits (ecological) planning for change 17 pleasure 60–1 see also wellbeing/happiness Plum Village mindfulness community 128 Polanyi, Karl 198 policy see governance political leadership 199 see also governance Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts 41 pollution 12, 21, 53, 95–6, 143 polycentric governance 191, 192 Poor Laws 10 poor nations see poverty population increase 3, 12, 63, 96, 97, 190; Malthus on 9–11, 132–3 porn industry 40 Portugal 28, 58, 88, 206 positional competition 55–61, 58, 71, 72 see also social comparison positive feedback loops 16–17 post-growth capitalism 224 post-growth macroeconomics 159–60, 183–4, 221; credit 178–80; degrowth movement 161–3; economic stability 174–6; green growth 163–5; inequality 176–8; role of state 181–3, 182, 200–8, 206; services 170–4; sustainable investment 166–70 see also alternatives; future visions; reform poverty 4, 5–6, 216; basic entitlements 72; flourishing within limits 212; life expectancy 74, 74; need for new economic model 101; symbolic role of goods 70; wellbeing 48, 59–60, 61, 67 see also inequality; relative income effect power politics 200 predator–prey analogy 103–4, 117 private credit see credit private vs. public: common good 208; ownership 9, 105, 191, 219, 223; salaries 130 privatisation 191, 219 product lifetimes, obsolescence 113, 204, 220 production: inputs 80–1; ownership 191, 219, 223 productivity: investment 109, 167, 168, 169; post-growth economy 224; services as engine of growth 171, 172, 173; targets 147; trap 175 see also efficiency measures; labour productivity; resource productivity profits: definitions of capitalism 105; dilemma of growth 211; efficiency measures 87; investment 109; motive 104; post-growth economy 224; and wages 175–8 progress 2, 50–5, 54 see also novelty/innovation; technological advances progressive sector, Baumol’s cost disease 171 progressive state 185, 220–2; contested 186–9; countering consumerism 202–5; equality measures 205–7, 206; governance of the commons 190–2; governance as commitment device 192–5; governmentality of growth 195–7; limit-setting 201–2; moving towards 197–200; post-growth macroeconomics 207–8, 224; prosperity 209 prosocial behaviour 198 see also social contract prosperity 1–3, 22, 121; capabilities for flourishing 61–5; and growth 3–7, 23, 66, 80, 160; and income 3–4, 5, 66–7; limits of 67–72, 113, 212; materialistic vision 137; progress measures 50–5, 54; relative income effect 55–61, 58, 71, 72; social perspectives 2, 22, 48–9; state roles 209 see also capabilities for flourishing; post-growth macroeconomics; sustainable prosperity; wellbeing prudence, financial 120, 195, 221; financial crisis 33, 34, 35 public sector spending: austerity policies 189; countercyclical spending strategy 181–2, 182; welfare economy 169 public services/amenities: common pool resources 190–2, 198, 199; future visions 204, 218–20; investment 155–6, 204; ownership 223 see also private vs. public; service-based economies public transport 41, 129, 193, 217 purpose see meaning/purpose Putnam, Robert 122 psyche, human see human nature/psyche quality, environmental 12 see also pollution quality of life: enterprise as service 142; inequality 206; sustainable 128 quality to throughput ratios 113 quantitative easing 43 Queen Elizabeth II 25, 32, 34, 37 quiet revolution 127–31 Raworth, Kate 141 Reagan, Ronald 8 rebound phenomenon 111 recession 23–4, 28, 81, 161–3 see also financial crisis recreation/leisure industries 143 recycling 129 redistribution of wealth 52 see also inequality reforms 182–3, 222; economic structures 224; and financial crisis 103; financial systems 156–8, 180 see also alternatives; future visions; post-growth economy relative decoupling 84–5, 86; historical perspectives 87–9, 89; relationship with absolute decoupling 96–101, 111 relative income effect 55–61, 58, 71, 72 see also social comparison religious perspectives 9–10, 214–15; materialism as alternative to religion 115; original sin 9, 131; wellbeing 48, 49 see also existential fear of death renewable energy xxxv, 41, 168–169 repair/renovation 172, 220 resource constraints 3, 7, 8, 11–15, 47 resource productivity 110, 151, 168, 169, 220 resource use: conflicts 22; credible alternatives 101, 220; decoupling 84–9, 92–5, 94, 95; and economic output 142–4; investment 151, 153, 168, 169; trade off with labour costs 110 retail therapy 115 see also consumerism; shopping revenues, state 222–3 see also taxation revolution 186 see also social stability rights: environment/nature 6–7; human see basic entitlements risk, financial 24, 25, 33, 35 The Road to Serfdom (Hayek) 187 Robinson, Edward 132 Robinson, Joan 159 Rockström, Johan 17, 165 romantic movement 9–10 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 35, 39 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 9, 131 Russia 74, 76, 77–80, 78, 122 sacred canopy 214, 215 salaries: private vs. public sector 130, 171; and profits 175–8 Sandel, Michael 150, 164, 218 São Paulo, Clean City Law 204 Sardar, Zia 49, 50 Sarkozy, Nicolas xxxi, 53 savage state, romantic movement 9–10 savings 26–7, 28, 107–9, 108; investment 149; ratios 34, 118–20, 119 scale, efficiencies of 104 Scandinavia 27, 122, 204 scarcity, managing change 16–17 Schumpeter, Joseph 112 Schwartz, Shalom 135–6, 136 schooling see education The Science of Desire (Dichter) 114 secular stagnation 43–7, 45, 173 securitisation, mortgage loans 35 security: moving towards 219; and wellbeing 48, 61 self-development 204 self-expression see identity construction self-transcending behaviours see transcendence The Selfish Gene (Dawkins) 134–5 selfishness 133–8, 196 Sen, Amartya 50, 52, 61–2, 123–4 service concept/servicization 140–4, 147–8, 148, 158 service-based economies 219; engine of growth 170–4; substitution between labour and capital 178; sustainable investment 169–70 see also public services SFC (stock-flow consistent) economic models 179–80 shame 123–4 shared endeavours, post-growth economy 227 Sheldon, Solomon 214 shelter see basic entitlements shopping 115, 116, 130 see also consumerism short-termism/living for today 194, 197, 200 signals: sent out by society 130, 193, 198, 203, 207; social status 71 see also language of goods Simon, Julian 13 simplicity/simple life 118–20, 127–9, 215–16 simulations see mathematical models/simulations slow: capital 170; movement 128 smart growth 85, 163–5 see also green growth Smith, Adam 51, 106–7, 123, 132, 187 social assets 220 social boundaries (minimum standards) 141 see also basic entitlements social care 150–1 see also caring professions social comparison 115, 116, 117 see also relative income effect social contract 194, 198, 199, 200 social inclusion 48, 69–71, 114, 212 see also participation in society social investment 155, 156, 189, 193, 208, 220–3 social justice 198 see also inequality social logic of consumerism 114–16, 204 social stability 24, 26, 80, 145, 186, 196, 205 see also alienation social status see status social structures 80, 129, 130, 137, 196, 200, 203 social tolerance, and wellbeing 59, 60 social unrest see social stability social wage 40 social welfare: financial reforms 182–3; public sector spending 169 socialism 223 Sociobiology (Wilson) 134 soil integrity 220 Solon, quotation 47, 49, 71 Soper, Kate 125–6 Soros, George 36 Soskice, David 106 Soviet Union, former 74, 76, 77–80, 78, 122 Spain 28, 58, 144, 206 SPEAR organization, responsible investment 155 species loss/extinctions 17, 47, 62, 101 speculation 93, 99, 149, 150, 154, 158, 170; economic stability 180; financial crisis 26, 33, 35; short-term profiteering 150; spending: behaviour of ordinary people 34, 119, 120–1; countercyclical 181–2, 182, 188; economic stability 81; as way out of recession 41, 44, 119, 120–1; and work cycle 125 The Spirit Level (Wilkinson and Pickett) 71, 205–6 spiritual perspectives 117, 127, 128, 214 stability see economic stability; social stability stagflation 26 stagnant sector, Baumol’s cost disease 171 stagnation: economic stability 81–2; labour productivity 145; post-financial crisis 43–7, 45 see also recession state capitalism, types/definitions of capitalism 106 state revenues, from social investment 222–3 see also taxation state roles see governance status 207, 209, 211; and possessions 69, 71, 114, 115, 117 see also language of goods; symbolic role of goods Steady State Economics (Daly) xxxii steady state economies 82, 159, 160, 174, 180 see also post-growth macroeconomics Stern, Nicholas 17–18 stewardship: role of the state 200; sustainable investment 168 Stiglitz, Joseph 53 stock-flow consistent (SFC) economic models 179–80 Stockholm Resilience Centre 17, 201 stranded assets 167–8 see also ownership structures of capitalism see economic structures struggle for existence 8–11, 125, 132–3 Stuckler, David 43 stuff see language of goods; material goods; symbolic role of goods subjective wellbeing (SWB) 49, 58, 58–9, 71, 122, 129 see also wellbeing/happiness subprime lending 26 substitution, between labour and capital 177–178 suffering, struggle for existence 10 suicide 43, 52, 77 Sukdhev, Pavan 41 sulphur dioxide pollution 95–6 Summers, Larry 36 Sunstein, Cass 194 sustainability xxv–xxvi, 102, 104, 126; financial systems 154–5; innovation 226; investment 101, 152, 153, 166–70, 220; resource constraints 12; role of the state 198, 203, 207 see also sustainable prosperity Sustainable Development Strategy, UK 198 sustainable growth see green growth sustainable prosperity 210–12; creating credible alternatives 219–21; finding meaning beyond material commodities 212–16; implications for capitalism 222–5; personal choices for improvement 216–18; and utopianism 225–7 see also limits (flourishing within) SWB see subjective wellbeing; wellbeing/happiness Switzerland 11, 46, 157; citizen’s income 207; income relative to wellbeing 58; inequality 206; life expectancy 74, 75 symbolic role of goods 69, 70–1; existential fear of death 212–16; governance 203; innovation/novelty 114–16; material footprints 139–40; paradox of materialism 121–2 see also language of goods; material goods system dynamics model 11–12, 15 tar sands/oil shales 15 taxation: capital 177; income 81; inequality 206; post-growth economy 222 technological advances 12–13, 15; decoupling 85, 86, 87, 96–8, 100–3, 164–5; dilemma of growth 211; economic stability 80; population increase 10–11; role of state 193, 220 see also novelty/innovation Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 8 terror management, and consumption 69, 104, 115, 212–15 terrorist attacks (9/11) 121 Thailand, Buddhist monasteries 128 Thaler, Richard 194 theatre, Baumol’s cost disease 171–2 theology see religious perspectives theory of evolution 132–3 thermodynamics, laws of 112, 164 Thich Nhat Hanh 128 thrift 118–20, 127–9, 215–16 throwaway society 113, 172, 204 timescales for change 16–17 tin, commodity prices 13 Today programme interview xxix, xxviii Totnes, transition movement 128–9 Towards a Green Economy report (UNEP) 152–3 Townsend, Peter 48, 61 trade balance 31 trading standards 204 tradition 135–6, 136, 226 ‘Tragedy of the commons’ (Hardin) 190–1 transcendence 214 see also altruism; meaning/purpose; spiritual perspectives transition movement, Totnes 128–9 Triodos Bank 156, 165 Trumpf (machine-tool makers) Germany 146 trust, loss of see alienation tungsten, commodity prices 13 Turkey 58, 88 Turner, Adair 157 21st Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (2015) 19 UBS (Swiss bank) 46 Ubuntu, African philosophy 227 unemployment 77; consumer goods 215; degrowth movement 162; financial crisis 24, 40, 41, 43; Great Depression 39–40; and growth 38; labour productivity 80–1; post-growth economy 174, 175, 183, 208, 219; work as participation 144–6 United Kingdom: Green New Deal group 152; greenhouse gas emissions 92; labour productivity 173; resource inputs 93; Sustainable Development Strategy 198 United Nations: Development Programme 6; Environment Programme 18, 152–3; Green Economy initiative 41 United States: credit unions 155–6; debt 27, 31–32; decoupling 88; greenhouse gas emissions 90–1; subprime lending 26; Works Progress Administration 39 universal basic income 221 see also citizen’s income University of Massachusetts, Political Economy Research Institute 41 utilitarianism/utility, wellbeing 50, 52–3, 55, 60 utopianism 8, 38, 125, 179; post-growth economy 225–7 values, materialistic 126, 135–6 see also intrinsic values Veblen, Thorstein 115 Victor, Peter xxxviii, 146, 175, 177, 180 vision of progress see future visions; post-growth economy volatility, commodity prices 14, 21 wages: and profits 175–8; private vs. public sector 130, 171 walking, personal choices for improvement 217 water use 22 Wealth of Nations, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes (Smith) 123, 132 wealth redistribution 52 see also inequality Weber, Axel 46 welfare policies: financial reforms 182–3; public sector spending 169 welfare of livestock 220 wellbeing/happiness 47–50, 53, 121–2, 124; collective 209; consumer goods 4, 21, 22, 126; growth 6, 165, 211; intrinsic values 126, 129; investment 150; novelty/innovation 117; opulence 50–2, 67–72; personal choices for improvement 217; planetary boundaries 141; relative income effect 55–61, 58, 71, 72; simplicity 129; utilitarianism 50, 52–3, 55, 60 see also capabilities for flourishing western lifestyles 70, 210 White, William 46 Whybrow, Peter 68 Wilhelm, Richard 7 Wilkinson, Richard 71, 205–6 Williams, Tennessee 213 Wilson, Edward 134 wisdom traditions 48, 49, 63, 128, 213–14 work: as participation 140–9, 148, 157, 158; and spend cycle 125; sharing 145, 146, 149, 175 Works Progress Administration, USA 39 World Bank 160 World Values Survey 58 youth unemployment, financial crisis 144–5 zero sum game, growth as 57, 71

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible by William N. Goetzmann

Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, delayed gratification, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, index fund, invention of the steam engine, invention of writing, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, wage slave

She was eventually moderately successful as a screenwriter, but her true claim to fame came through her political novels. Atlas Shrugged is widely regarded as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. Published in 1957 at the height of the Cold War, it stridently rejects Soviet-style collectivism and instead proposes “Objectivism”—a libertarian philosophy championing laissez-faire capitalism and self-interested rational economic action. Atlas Shrugged pits the economic elite—the entrepreneurs and self-made CEOs of a future United States—against a system of political favoritism that rewards mediocracy, a system in which business decisions are made in the back rooms of Washington, DC.

…

Rejecting a long tradition of financial innovation and reliance on global capital markets, Russia instead villainized capitalism and formed itself in the image of the Communist Manifesto; a slim volume short on practical detail, written by two armchair revolutionaries and elaborated by them in a massive work of cultural criticism, penned in London, the bastion of laissez-faire capitalism. The strange schism of the twentieth century would not soon heal. One might have expected that the world would divide itself along lines of religious intolerance. After all, the Crusades are still the rallying cry in parts of the Islamic world. But the notion that the theory of finance—in particular, a disagreement over the role of investors in society—could rip the world in two is difficult to conceive of ex ante.

…

When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. The measure of success attained by Wall Street, regarded as an institution of which the proper social purpose is to direct new investment into the most profitable channels in terms of future yield, cannot be claimed as one of the outstanding triumphs of laissez-faire capitalism—which is not surprising, if I am right in thinking that the best brains of Wall Street have been in fact directed towards a different object.1 J. M. KEYNES, THE GENERAL THEORY AMERICAN WAY AMERICAN WAY The seminar room was classic Harvard: paneled walls; a coffered ceiling; and a long, beautiful table.

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

Admiral Zheng, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, defund the police, Deng Xiaoping, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, George Floyd, global pandemic, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeremy Corbyn, Jones Act, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, McMansion, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parkinson's law, pensions crisis, QR code, rent control, Rishi Sunak, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, trade route, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Washington Consensus

Modern economics headed down the same path. John Maynard Keynes always saw himself as a liberal who disliked the Webbs’ puritanism as much as their collectivism and believed that the state should never consume more than about a quarter of GDP.27 But his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) ripped apart laissez-faire capitalism. Left to itself, the market would not prove self-correcting, Keynes showed. Capitalism might be wonderful, but it was also self-destructive and needed to be saved from itself. The invisible hand of the market had to be guided by the visible hand of the state. During crises, government had to step in to boost demand by spending public money, particularly on infrastructure and unemployment pay.

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Paul Pierson, Jacob S. Hacker

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business climate, business cycle, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, desegregation, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, invisible hand, John Bogle, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, moral hazard, Nate Silver, new economy, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

The frontier was settled because government granted land to the pioneers, killed, drove off, or rounded up Native Americans, created private monopolies to forge a nationwide transportation and industrial network, and linked the land settled with the world’s largest postal system. Similarly, the laissez-faire capitalism of the early twentieth century was underpinned by a government that kept unions at bay, created a stable money supply, erected trade barriers that sheltered the new manufacturing giants, protected entrepreneurs from debtors’ prison and corporations from liability, and generally made business the business of government.

…

., 141, 202 Kerry, John, 226, 259, 272, 304 Keynes, John Maynard, 88 Kirk, Paul, 178 Koch, Charles, 283–84 Koch, David, 283–84 Koch, Fred, 283–84 Konwinski, Lisa, 260 Koppel, Ted, 105 Kristol, Irving, 123, 135, 233, 302 Kristol, William, 123, 233, 262–63, 286 Krugman, Paul, 42 K Street Project, 178, 207, 231, 250 Kuttner, Robert, 68, 224 Labor Department, U.S., 186–87 Labor Law Reform Bill, 130–32 Labor-Management Group, 131–32, 141 La Follette, Robert, 306 LaHood, Ray, 262 laissez-faire capitalism, 55, 81 Landrieu, Mary, 245, 281 Landrum-Griffin Act (1959), 129 laws, labor, 44, 58, 78, 80, 125–32, 134, 189, 296 lawyers, 48, 68, 154, 219, 252 Lazio, Rick, 272 legal realism, 81, 82 Lehman Brothers, 67, 70 Leuchtenburg, William, 90 leverage, financial, 197, 249, 254 Levitt, Arthur, 66, 197, 247 Levy, Frank, 58 Lewis, John, 140 Lewis, Michael, 233–34 liberalism, 5, 7, 43, 53–56, 62, 68, 69, 88–90, 91, 95–100, 110, 115, 116–19, 137, 138, 140, 145–48, 159–60, 163, 178, 179, 181, 186–89, 200, 225, 234, 239, 256–57, 305 libertarianism, 55, 254 liberum veto, 271 Lieberman, Joe, 181, 225, 226, 239, 247, 281 Limbaugh, Rush, 294 Lincoln, Abraham, 260 Lincoln, Blanche, 240, 245, 273, 274, 281 Lincoln Savings and Loan, 185 Lippmann, Walter, 83, 86, 90, 91, 305 litigation, private, 65, 219 lobbyists, 66, 89, 114, 117, 118, 124–26, 135–36, 144, 183–84, 198, 205–7, 218, 238–39, 275–77 Lochner v.

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It by Owen Jones

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, disinformation, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Dyson, Jon Ronson, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, night-watchman state, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, Overton Window, plutocrats, popular capitalism, post-war consensus, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

Back in 1981, King had been among 364 economists who had signed a public letter to The Times damning the then Chancellor Geoffrey Howe for his savage, City-pleasing deflationary economics. But, like so many of his contemporaries, King came to embrace the economics of the outriders, believing in laissez-faire capitalism and leaving the market to work its magic. King was the ‘classic example of a theorist who cares less about what the world actually looked like,’ says Blanchflower. ‘So there was an ideological bent, pretty much. The economists there were really dominantly those who Mervyn wanted.’ With an ideologue such as King firmly in place, those who disagreed with the Bank of England’s line could be quietly marginalized.

…

That is what the neo-liberal outriders themselves realized many decades ago. One of the false arguments thrown at opponents of the Establishment is that our alternative is simply statism, replacing the liberating free market with a stultifying, bureaucratic monstrosity. This is a false binary opposition: an alternative to laissez-faire capitalism does not mean top-down statism. In a sense the alternative to Establishment mantras is partly about rolling back the state. What is called the ‘free market’ is actually a con, a front in part for generous subsidies and handouts for the wealthy elite. A welfare state that was intended to provide social security for all has become distorted: it acts as a de facto source of income for low-wage-paying bosses and extortionate-rent-charging private landlords.

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological principle, death from overwork, discovery of DNA, Eddington experiment, false memory syndrome, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, life extension, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Ethics: Self-interest 4. Politics: Capitalism In other words, reality exists independent of human thought. Reason is the only viable method for understanding reality. Every human should seek personal happiness and exist for his own sake, and no one should sacrifice himself for or be sacrificed by others. And laissez-faire capitalism is the political-economic system in which the first three flourish best. This combination, said Rand, allows people to "deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit." This is not to say, however, that "anything goes."

…

Moreover, there may well be Marxist, communist, atheistic, and even immoral evolutionists, but there are probably just as many capitalist, theist, agnostic, and moral evolutionists. As for the theory itself, it can be used to support Marxist, communist, and atheistic ideologies, and it has; but so has it been used (especially in America) to lend credence to laissez-faire capitalism. The point is that linking scientific theories to political ideologies is tricky business, and we must be cautious of making connections that do not necessarily follow or that serve particular agendas (e.g., one person's cultural and moral decline is another person's cultural and moral progress). 8.

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas by Janek Wasserman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, New Journalism, New Urbanism, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game, éminence grise

In the 1910s and 1920s, Lippmann was one of the faces of progressive politics in the United States, emphasizing the role of expertise and scientific intervention in public affairs in his books and New Republic essays. A friend of Keynes and an advocate of Franklin Roosevelt’s political program, it was only in the mid-1930s that his economic views underwent a rightward shift. While he was skeptical of unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism, he lost faith in the efficacy of economic planning. He attributed this new attitude to reading Hayek’s Collectivist Economic Planning. In a letter to Hayek, he confessed, “without the help of you and from Professor von Mises, I could never have developed the argument.” In The Good Society, he castigated planning, extolled the free market, and admonished his readers to avoid “authoritarian collectivism.”

…

Schumpeter told a swashbuckling tale of capitalist booms and busts, transporting the reader from textile owners in Lancashire to railroad and steel barons in Essen to assembly lines in Detroit. Schumpeter wove a tapestry of capitalist evolution, valorizing efficiency, economies of scale, and disruption. In the end, Schumpeter defended the capitalist process, even in the face of the Great Depression and the “end of laissez-faire”: “Capitalism and its civilization may be decaying, shading off into something else, or tottering toward a violent death. . . . But the world crisis does not prove it and has, in fact, nothing to do with it. It was not a symptom of a weakening or a failure of the system.” Schumpeter railed against efforts to dampen the creative destruction of capitalism, especially New Deal programs and Keynesian economics: “Without that change or, more precisely, that kind of change which we have called evolution, capitalist society cannot exist; . . . without innovations, no entrepreneurs; without entrepreneurial achievement, no capitalist returns and no capitalist propulsion.

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global reserve currency, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, value at risk, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Going forward, it asks, should we worry more about inflation or deflation? What will be the long-term consequences of policy measures like the stimulus packages implemented by many countries, never mind the emergency measures undertaken by the Federal Reserve and other central banks? And what is the future of the Anglo-Saxon model of unfettered laissez-faire capitalism? What is the future of the dollar? Does the recent crisis mark the beginning of the end of the American empire, and the rise of China and other emerging economies? Finally, how can we reform global economic governance in order to mitigate the damage from future crises? The modest ambition of this book is to answer these questions by placing the recent crisis in the context of others that have occurred over the ages and across the world.

…

Some of these tactics were first articulated by Keynes; many more represented a massive, unprecedented intervention in the economy. This chapter assesses the future implications of the most radical measures, particularly the risks they may create down the line. The level of intervention necessary to stabilize the system challenges the sustainability of traditional laissez-faire capitalism itself; governments may end up playing a much larger direct and indirect role in the postcrisis global economy, via increased regulation and supervision. Chapters 8 and 9 lay out a blueprint for a new financial architecture, one that will bring new transparency and stability to financial institutions.

The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, business logic, Cass Sunstein, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, electricity market, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, IBM and the Holocaust, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, market fundamentalism, Naomi Klein, new economy, precautionary principle, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban sprawl

In the meantime, however, in the near- to medium- range future-in terms of what we can do tomorrow, next week, and next year-realism dictates presuming that the corporation's constitution will remain much as it is: self-interested to the point of psychopathy. It bears stating here that the corporation is an institutional reflection of the principles of laissez faire capitalism. Changing it must be understood as part of a larger project of economic change. The challenge for now is to find ways to control the corporation- to subject it to democratic constraints and protect citizens from its dangerous tendencies-even while we hope and strive in the longer term for a more fully human and democratic economic order.

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream by R. Christopher Whalen

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, commoditize, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, debt deflation, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce

Not all of the leaders of Europe disagreed with FDR’s actions with respect to gold, however, including a conservative back bencher in the United Kingdom named Winston Churchill. Keynes subsequently wrote an article supporting FDR’s action. More than a few politicians understood that FDR, by following the thinking of Keynes, was essentially creating an alternative, a “middle way” between the laissez-faire capitalism of nineteenth century America and the Marxist socialism that was destroying Russia. Many people believed that a communist revolution threatened Europe and America equally. But for most Americans, FDR’s actions with respect to gold and the dollar marked a repudiation of the past. In the wonderfully sarcastic book The New Dealers, published anonymously in 1934 by Simon & Schuster, the “Unofficial Observer” described the FDR devaluation and repudiation of gold, and what this meant for the way the U.S. economy performed: On the one hand, you have the good old traditional way of doing business, which required the entire population of the country to “walk home” at twenty-year intervals in the name of God and the Gold Standard.

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“New Frontier” speech Kennedy, Joseph SEC role Kern, John Worth Keynes, John Maynard central planning belief evangelism fiscal action support General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money How to Pay for the War impact Treatise on Money Keynesian liquidity problems Kleppner, Paul Knickerbocker Trust Company depositor run failure Knox, P.C. Knox v. Lee Koestler, Arthur Korean War China, entry initiation mobilization Kotok, David Krugman, Paul Kubarych, Roger LaFollette, Robert (Progressive Party) Laissez faire capitalism Republican approach role, return system Lamont, Thomas Lance, Bert Land speculation (1830s) Latin debt crisis Corrigan management Laughlin, Lawrence Lee, Robert Henry Leffingwell, Russell Legal Tender Act (1862) Legal tender laws Continental Congress usage legacy legality, upholding Lincoln enactment Legal tender notes, Chase opposition Lehman Brothers, collapse/destruction Lend Lease Act of WWII Lend-lease obligation, forgiveness Lend Lease program Less-developed countries, debt forgiveness Less developed countries (LDCs), trouble Liberia, WWI loan repayment Liberty bonds, U.S.

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98: Birth of the Age of Debt by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discounted cash flows, diversification, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, short selling, social distancing, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, yield curve

It was the first major battle in a war that continues to this day and will shape the rest of the 21st century. It is a war that was instigated by a Thatcher/Reagan revolution that launched a new form of capitalism that sought to change the world, armed with excessive amounts of debt, in pursuit of profit. While initially it looked like an old form of what might be called laissez-faire capitalism, it very quickly became a new form of capitalism probably best labelled financial capitalism. It was a form of capitalism that combined individualism with the aggressive use of balance sheet management for primarily personal profit. As early as 1983, Michael Milken was helping corporate America supercharge returns through the issuance of a record amount of speculative credit instruments known as junk bonds.

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When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. The measure of success attained by Wall Street, regarded as an institution of which the proper social purpose is to direct new investment into the most profitable channels in terms of future yield, cannot be claimed as one of the outstanding triumphs of laissez-faire capitalism. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936 When the tide of capital turned it was indeed to be the asset traders and their financiers and their investors that lost most in this particular casino. That their collapse was to create a set of circumstances that would enfranchise the asset traders and their financiers to play this game on a global basis was something that I never considered.

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, borderless world, business process, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, industrial cluster, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, new economy, North Sea oil, pneumatic tube, race to the bottom, railway mania, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, wage slave, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

The robber barons themselves found heartwarming justification for their doings in the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer, an English thinker who won a huge following in America for his doctrine of “the survival of the fittest” and his opposition to state intervention of all sorts, from tariffs to public education. “Light came in as a flood, and all was clear” was Carnegie’s reaction to Spencer. Rockefeller likened laissez-faire capitalism to breeding an American Beauty rose “by sacrificing the early buds which grew up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.”26 Others saw this pruning from the other side. In 1869, the historian Charles Francis Adams wondered whether the joint-stock corporation wasn’t a dangerous idea.

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest by Yochai Benkler

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, business process, California gold rush, citizen journalism, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, do well by doing good, East Village, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, informal economy, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, peer-to-peer, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In the United States, Britain, and other liberal democracies, Leviathan took more benevolent forms: the burgeoning welfare state and the rise of government bureaucracies (ushered in by the New Deal in the United States, and by similar movements in Western Europe). By the late 1950s and early 1960s the pendulum began to swing back as concerns mounted over petty bureaucrats, unchecked discretion, and inefficiency. By the 1980s we were back in full swing toward laissez-faire capitalism; the Reagan and Thatcher governments in the United States and Britain, the rise of the efficiency- and free-trade-focused European Commission in Europe, and the emergence of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as bearers of what came to be known as “the Washington Consensus.”

American Made: Why Making Things Will Return Us to Greatness by Dan Dimicco

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, California high-speed rail, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, digital divide, driverless car, fear of failure, full employment, Google Glasses, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, manufacturing employment, Neil Armstrong, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

When we think of mercantilism, we usually think of England and Spain in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, trying to amass as much gold and silver as they could get their hands on. A mercantilist trading policy is one in which a government protects and heavily subsidizes key industries, exporting as much as possible and importing as little as possible. The great Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith said the remedy to mercantilism was laissez-faire capitalism. The “invisible hand” of capitalism has always struggled with the heavy hand of government meddling. The U.S. trade deficit, which had fallen 60 percent during Reagan’s second term and into the elder Bush’s presidency, began to expand again in the early 1990s.7 The move toward free trade (which we’ll discuss at greater length in chapter 5) left U.S. industries vulnerable once again to predatory foreign trade practices.

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, desegregation, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, yellow journalism

The decade following the decision saw astonishing growth in the number of corporations, which were quickly becoming the preferred form of business enterprise in the American economy. Equally significant, the decision became, according to historian R. Kent Newmyer, “a potent legal and ideological weapon for corporations who sought to defeat regulation and establish the ideological primacy of laissez-faire capitalism.”25 Dartmouth College did not mean that corporations were completely immune from all regulation, of course. In his concurring opinion in the case, Justice Story observed that the logic of Marshall’s ruling might still allow states to require future charters to include a “reservation clause,” reserving the state’s authority to alter or amend charters.

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., 296 Kent, James, 128 Kentucky, 221–22 Keppler, Joseph, 196–97, 196, 212 kerosene, in home illumination, 141 Kerry, John, 328 Key, Francis Scott, 59 Key, Philip Barton, 59–60, 60, 344 Kilberg, William, 344, 348 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 257, 349 King, Rufus, 5, 149 King & Spalding, 346 “king’s consent,” 48–49 kinsmen, 168 Kirland & Ellis, 346 knights, 168 Kraft Foods, 302 Ku Klux Klan, 265 labor unions, 219, 287, 289, 326, 329–33, 334, 359, 361, 363, 403 Lacombe, Emile Henry, 175, 177 laissez-faire capitalism, 88, 154, 360–61 Lake Charles American-Press, 250 Lamberth, Royce, 343 Landes, William, 350 land grants, 14–15, 18, 21, 78, 82, 106, 118–19, 123 Landon, Alf M., 330 Lansing Brewing Co., 223–26, 225, 335 Late Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints v. United States, The, 261 law: Anglo-American, 24, 30, 46–47, 66–67 of assemblies, 19–20, 21, 22, 24 automobile safety, 285–86 bankruptcy, 88 British, 45–46, 62, 63, 66–67 by-, 49 case, 244 contract, 28, 45, 48, 49–50, 76, 78, 96–97, 146, 154, 155, 159, 181, 182–83, 184, 187–88, 221–22, 246, 261, 275–76, 353, 369, 388, 400 corporate, xxii, 28–29, 46–47, 50–52, 87, 163, 168–69, 170, 184–85, 189, 193–94, 207, 209–10, 244–45, 248, 261, 271–72, 382–89 criminal, 51, 164, 176–77, 179 due process of, xvi environmental, 49, 280, 389–94 federal, 149–53, 178–79, 238, 261, 276, 280, 298, 379–80, 392–94, 403 health, xvi–xvii, 126–27, 378–82, 387 insurance, 209–10 Jim Crow, xv, 63–64, 159, 257, 259–62, 264, 275, 276–78 labor, 49, 99, 153–54, 158 landmark cases in, 120, 181–82, 263–64, 323 local and municipal, 240, 241–42, 292–93, 389–94 loopholes in, 306–7, 329, 351 martial, 16 “of the land,” 63 political impact of, 232 precedent in, 76, 138, 146, 156, 157, 181–82, 241–42, 244, 266–67, 337, 357, 369, 371, 392 public nuisance, 241–42 repugnancy principle in, 63, 82 Roman, 44–45, 49, 184, 399 social change and, xvii state, 53–54, 61, 97–103, 115, 118–19, 131–32, 148, 150, 176–77, 179, 180–81, 209, 220–21, 223, 238, 240, 241–44, 275–76, 290–300, 360, 392 workplace, 49 zoning, 158 law and economics movement, 352–53, 366 law reviews, 294–95, 299, 385–86 law schools, 120, 134–36, 150, 176, 294–95, 299, 341, 385–86 lawsuits, 262–64, 277, 291, 292, 298–300, 306, 320, 322, 324–25, 350, 375, 388, 390, 391–94, 400–401 lawyer’s fees, 122, 346 Ledbetter v.

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, obamacare, occupational segregation, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, trade liberalization, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Against the backdrop of fears among the “haves” of anarchy and revolution by the “have-nots,” mutualism and compromise had begun to win out over individualism and conflict, though it would be several decades before a new model of labor relations would emerge. Union membership oscillated up and down in these early years, depending on the state of the economy and the political climate, but the secular trend was ascendant. In the background was a growing rejection (and not just among workers themselves) of pure laissez-faire capitalism in favor of “industrial democracy” that linked workers’ rights to their role as equal citizens in a democratic community.76 Renewed antiunion efforts by conservatives during the 1920s reduced union membership by a third from a peak of 5 million just after World War I to 3.5 million in 1929.

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.… Attempts to overrule evolution—as by alleviating the plight of the poor—were both immoral and imprudent.”12 That version of social Darwinism, launched around 1870, reached its peak influence between 1890 and 1915 and swept through much of the intellectual and upper middle classes as the Gilded Age waxed and then began to wane. Social Darwinism gave birth to scientific racism,13 to eugenics, and to a pseudo-biological defense of laissez-faire capitalism. Scientific racism offered a convenient rationale for the contemporary efforts of Southerners and their Northern sympathizers of the so-called “Redemption Era” to impose Jim Crow oppression and ridicule on freed slaves. To wealthy residents of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, disturbed by muckraker Jacob Riis’s appalling photographs of destitute slum-dwellers of the Lower East Side in How the Other Half Lives (1890), social Darwinism gave reassurance that they deserved their wealth.

The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death by John Gray

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, death from overwork, dematerialisation, disinformation, George Santayana, laissez-faire capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nikolai Kondratiev, public intellectual, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, scientific worldview, the scientific method

Progress implies a destination towards which one is travelling, whereas natural selection is simply drift. The popular cult of evolution has always denied this truth, and in fact the most influential versions of evolution have never been Darwin’s. One was that of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), the prophet of laissez-faire capitalism who invented the expression ‘survival of the fittest’. In Spencer’s version evolution was a teleological process – in other words, it had a goal: a universal state of complex equilibrium. Another version was developed by the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), who believed traits acquired during an organism’s lifetime could be inherited by future generations.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Colonization of Mars, Copley Medal, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, gentleman farmer, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Lao Tzu, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

The need to fund expensive colonial wars made it necessary, and the fertile intellectual environment and speculative spirit of the coffeehouses made it possible. The financial equivalent of the Principia was The Wealth of Nations, written by the Scottish economist Adam Smith. It described and championed the emerging doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism, according to which the best way for governments to encourage trade and prosperity was to leave people to their own devices. Smith wrote much of his book in the British Coffee House, his base and postal address in London, and a popular meeting place for Scottish intellectuals, among whom he circulated chapters of his book for criticism and comment.

A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent Into Depression by Richard A. Posner

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, debt deflation, diversified portfolio, equity premium, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, very high income

Companies that raise billions of dollars, some of it from immensely wealthy investors, have a legitimate business interest in decorating their quarters in a manner apt to impress such investors. The financial crisis was indeed the consequence of decisions, some mistaken, by financiers. But the mistakes were systemic —the product of the nature of the banking business in an environment shaped by low interest rates and deregulation rather than the antics of crooks and fools. Laissez-faire capitalism failed us, but government allowed the preconditions of depression to develop and wreak havoc with the economy. And its responses to the crisis were late, slow, indecisive, and poorly articulated. The responses also created "moral hazard" (the tendency to engage in risky behavior if one is insured against the consequences of the risks' materializing).

Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One by Meghnad Desai

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, women in the workforce

When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. The measure of success attained by Wall Street, regarded as an institution of which the proper social purpose is to direct new investment into the most profitable channels in terms of future yield, cannot be claimed as one of the outstanding triumphs of laissez-faire capitalism – which is not surprising, if I am right in thinking that the best brains of Wall Street have been in fact directed towards a different object.4 The crash when it came first hit the banks.5 They had overextended their lending and bought each other’s dubious packages of securitized mortgages and other derivative products.

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

America represents a late-twentieth-century role model for managing political-economic modernity, but the future will reveal an increasing number of variants and formulas. The more universal the acceptance of capitalism becomes, the more its many shades of gray are revealed, most notably between what was once American laissez-faire capitalism and the surging Asian state capitalism. Within that spectrum, only two real criteria separate winners from losers among models of entrepreneurial capitalism: those that enforce contracts and attract innovation and those that don’t. In other words, we are in an up-for-grabs era of economic management, one in which mixed models compete to pull their countries ahead and, in doing so, set examples that others will follow.

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream by Arianna Huffington

Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 13, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, call centre, carried interest, citizen journalism, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, do what you love, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, invisible hand, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, smart grid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Works Progress Administration

We see the results of capitalism without a conscience all around us: the pollution of our environment, workers being injured or killed, the sale of dangerous products, the shameless promotion of risky mortgages for overvalued homes, and the wholesale loss of millions of jobs and trillions in savings. The collapse of communism as a political system sounded the death knell for Marxism as an ideology. But while unregulated, laissez-faire capitalism has been a monumental failure in practice, the ideology is still alive and kicking. You can find all manner of free-market fundamentalists still on the Senate floor or in governors’ mansions or showing up on TV trying to peddle deregulation snake oil. Given how close we were in 2008 to the complete collapse of our economic and financial system, anyone who continues to make the case that markets do best when left alone should be laughed off his bully pulpit.17 Despite the fact that many banks, car companies, and so on would be defunct without government intervention, the free-market fundamentalists continue to live in denial, trying to convince the world that if only left alone, free markets would right themselves.

The Handbook of Personal Wealth Management by Reuvid, Jonathan.

asset allocation, banking crisis, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon credits, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, financial deregulation, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, income per capita, index fund, interest rate swap, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, low interest rates, managed futures, market bubble, merger arbitrage, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, short selling, side project, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, systematic trading, transaction costs, yield curve

The link between art and money is at times challenging but long standing, with the first evidence of the art trade 5,000 years ago. The first well-documented art markets developed in Italy and Flanders (modern Belgium) during the 15th century. Even today, art from those times still appears on the market occasionally. Despite its long history, the art market remains one of the last examples of almost unregulated laissez-faire capitalism: one where supply tends to stimulate demand and objects tend to become more highly valued as their original purpose (or even beauty) is lost. As Western investors experience slim returns on cash, weak stock markets, falling property prices and the threat of deflation, art remains a safe haven, since it tends to hold its value over a longer period while providing lower risk and higher returns if part of a diversified investment portfolio.

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes by Mark Skousen

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, experimental economics, financial independence, Financial Instability Hypothesis, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, liberation theology, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, pushing on a string, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

Even the World Bank, once a severe critic of the capitalist model, has shifted dramatically in favor of market solutions to underdevelopment problems (with some important exceptions). The radical model of Marx and the socialists was clearly losing ground. But it wasn't always that way. In fact, during most of the twentieth century, heavy-handed central planning was considered more efficient and more productive than laissez-faire capitalism. At the depths of the Great Depression, radical thinking dominated the atmosphere in intellectual and political circles. Suspicious of free-market capitalism, many were attracted to central planning and the Soviet model. Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek were in the minority in questioning the collectivist Zeitgeist and offering a critique of socialism on purely economic grounds.

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

We all have a role to play in making sure that our society chooses to head towards that Golden Age rather than continuing towards a scorched-earth future of mass impoverishment and plutocracy. CHAPTER 13 Fifty Shades of Capitalism When I say ‘capitalism’, I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism – with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church. Ayn Rand1 We are told that we have to love free markets: the USSR tried socialism and that failed – and there is no alternative. This chapter shows that in reality we have a huge variety of choices open to us in thinking about how to run our society, and we’ll explore some of the criteria that might help us make those choices.

The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, bread and circuses, British Empire, David Attenborough, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Future Shock, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Joan Didion, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois

“We preach neither the upsetting of science nor the overthrow of the existing social order,” Schmoller wrote in 1872, “but we do not wish to allow the most crying abuses to become daily worse.” A tremendous crisis would strike the industrial West unless it dissolved the inequities and private concentrations of power that modern capitalism seemed to entail.13 Schmoller’s image of a laissez-faire capitalism doomed to selfdestruction deeply impressed Du Bois, as did the armchair socialists’ shining ideals of a planned economy and “scientific control” of industry. They also impressed a slightly later generation of German students, including the young Oswald Spengler.* Spengler and Du Bois also understood that the objections to capitalism were not entirely, or even principally, economic.

…

The third and final challenge to cultural vitality came from liberalism, the belief in limited government and individual rights that emanated from Tocqueville, Mill, and Herbert Spencer. Cultural critics on both the Right and the Left agreed that laissez-faire liberalism was anathema to Germany’s deepest cultural values, just as Adolf Wagner and Schmoller had argued that laissez-faire capitalism was an attack on the idea of organic community and rural life. “Liberals see themselves as isolated individuals,” Arthur Moeller van den Bruck wrote later. “They seek only their own personal advantage in the present.” Werner Sombart saw liberalism as the ideology of materalism and big business.

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Although incoherent and unplanned, this countermovement led ultimately to a paradoxical situation whereby the only way of realizing the “stark utopia” (Polanyi 1957b: 218, 250) of the self-adjusting market was through the support of a strong interventionist state. He wittily describes this system as planned laissez-faire capitalism: “There was nothing natural about laissez-faire, free markets could never have come into being merely by allowing things to take their course … laissez-faire itself was enforced by the state” (Polanyi 1957b: 145). The double movement that Polanyi describes consists of the reembedding of market institutions within society.

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See also death of God; eternal return; Übermensch Nigeria, 301 ninety-nine percent, 3, 129–30, 370–71 nihilism, 141, 142 Nishibe, Makoto, 345 Nixon, Richard, 45, 98–99, 244 Nixon shock, 45n Nobel Prize, 330 nomos, 262, of the Earth, 222, 223 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 239 nonpecuniary values, 287, 294 North, Peter, 373 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 239 Nostradamus, 49 Nuer, 284 numismatics, 165; sociological, 34 nummus, 223, 262 occultism, 7, 11; and capital, 56, 154 Occupy movement, 1, 3, 50, 130n55, 201, 267, 370 Oedipus complex, 149, 150, 230 Oesterreichische Nationalbank, 20n Old Glory Mint, 361 one trillion dollar platinum coin, 385, 386, 387, 392 optimal currency area (OCA), 20, 253 order of worth, 200 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Orléan, André, 19, 43–46, 250; on Mauss, 32 Ortega y Gasset, José, 247 overaccumulation, in Bataille, 176; in Baudrillard, 192; and financialization, 61n22; in Harvey, 68, 166, 243; Marxian concept of, 65, 88, 205 overbanking, 122, 124 overproduction, 57, 73 Owen, Robert, 342 Pan, 77, 246 panic, etymology, 77n; financial, 77 paradox of thrift, 208, 347, 348 parallax view, 80–81, 205 Park, Robert, 319 Parsons, Talcott, 8, 34, 230, 276n patriarchy, 336 Patton, Paul, 227 Paulhan, Jean, 172n payday loans, 325 PayPal, 378, 380n Peace of Westphalia, 216 Pecunix, 42, 316 Peebles, Gustav, 304–5 peer-to-peer (P2P) currencies, 105, 365, 370 peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, 247, 316 peer-to-peer (P2P) payment networks, 365 pension fund socialism, 77 pension funds, 59, 68, 75, 110, 129n52, 132, 221, 243 pensioners, 2, 22, 72, 77, 88, 126 perfect money, 14, 30, 197, 315, 316, 317–22, 326, 328–30, 339, 341, 356–57, 375, 382 perfect society, 30, 315, 316, 320–21, 322, 326, 329–30, 351 Perroux, François, 207 philanthropy, 166 Pixley, Jocelyn, 315n Plato, 200, 313 Platonism, 322, 326 Plender, John, 50 Poe, Edgar Allen, 185 poetry, 313, 314, 331 Polanyi, Karl, 13, 36, 57n16, 271, 279–86, 291, 292, 294, 299, 306; on the double movement, 128, 280, 311; on embeddedness, 279, 280–81, 285; on fictitious commodities, 279–80; on formal versus substantive approaches to the economy, 285; The Great Transformation, 279, 282, 284, 286; on limited and general purpose money, 279, 282–83, 285, 286, 325, 373; on the market, 372, 279–81; on money and language, 297; on planned laissez-faire capitalism, 280 Polillo, Simone, 218–19 Polybius, Histories, 239 Ponzi, Charles, 117n Ponzi finance, 58, 117n, 118, 199; and Bitcoin, 368 Ponzi stage, 120. See also Minsky moment Poovey, Mary, 296 Pope Francis, 270–71 Posner, Eric, 368 postcapitalism, 83, 251 post-Fordism, 72, 75–76, 77, 238, 240–41, 248, 249, 341 postindustrialism, 39 post-Keynesianism, 76; monetary theory, 112n, 106n19; and neochartalism, 106 postmodernism., 238, 239 postnational money, 238 poststructuralism, 238 potlatch, 33, 155, 166, 172 power, 172, 222, 272, 389; in Agamben, 266; and banking, 115; in Baudrillard, 196, 197–98; and capital, 61n22, 64, 69, 81, 129, 234, 245, 340; and debt, 91, 101, 136, 144, 146, 147, 157; in Deleuze and Guattari, 230–31, 233, 250–51; and divinity, 274; and economics, 221, 310; in the Eurozone, 261, 265, 266; and the exception, 261, 266, 393; of finance, 121, 129; in Foucault, 25n13; in Fromm, 332, 335, 337; of the gift, 31, 33, 195; in Hardt and Negri, 238–39, 240, 241, 244, 245–46, 248; and markets, 109, 121, 129, 286; and the military, 99; of monetary institutions, 4, 69, 134, 316, 380n, 385; and money, 10, 33, 34, 42, 44, 51, 152, 154, 181–82, 246, 248, 274, 283, 284, 285, 295, 298–99, 300, 306, 307, 308, 342–43, 346, 351; in Nietzsche, 135, 141, 144, 161, 389; and nomos, 223, 262; in Proudhon, 352; in Schmitt, 223, 224, 261, 266n; and sovereignty, 26, 223, 262; of the state via money, 4, 9, 71, 73–74, 75, 96, 103, 110, 113, 212, 214, 261, 298–99, 309, 360; of states, 107n, 129; versus society, 102; supranational, 236–37, 238–39, 242; and symbolic exchange, 196, 198; and violence, 44; and wealth, 166, 343.

The Trouble With Billionaires by Linda McQuaig

"World Economic Forum" Davos, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, carried interest, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John Bogle, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, very high income, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Liars are people who deliberately tell untruths. Bullshitters, on the other hand, don’t really care about the truthfulness of their assertions. When Koch discovered Hayek could qualify for social security, he wasn’t horrified by the implications of this for Hayek’s personal liberty, nor was he worried that this godfather of laissez-faire capitalism would end up on some private road to serfdom. It’s hard not to conclude that the right’s claims about the freedom-depriving nature of social security are nothing more than empty statements meant to advance a larger agenda. Neoliberals and libertarians seem to be simply pretending to be concerned about the political and economic effects they allege.

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby

airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equity premium, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, short selling, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, trade liberalization, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, yield curve, zero-sum game

A hard-core realist is a vermin-eaten brute who sits motionless in a mud puddle, contemplates a pigsty, and whines that ‘such is life.’ If that is realism, then I am an escapist. So was Aristotle. So was Christopher Columbus.”25 As a passionate Romantic, Rand favored the economic system that “demands and rewards the best in every man, great or average, and which is, obviously, laissez-faire capitalism.” She had arrived in the United States as a near-penniless student, sailing into New York Harbor in 1926, the year of Greenspan’s birth, and had been immediately enthralled by the skyline that greeted her. The Standard Oil Building, the Singer Tower, the Woolworth Building—these were the triumphant expressions of capitalism’s creative power; they were “the will of man made visible.”

…

“My problem with your nomination,” Proxmire summed up, “is that it is very difficult, because you are honest, you are capable, and some of the things that you propose I enthusiastically applaud; but I have a great, great difficulty with the fact that you are a free enterprise man who does not believe in antitrust, does not believe in consumer protection, does not believe in progressive income tax. . . . The old-style laissez-faire capital system is dead,” Proxmire continued; the challenge for intelligent policy makers in the late twentieth century was how to make the mixed economy work better. “With the greatest goodwill in the world, you are not going to go back to Adam Smith. You know that.” “I am aware of that,” Greenspan conceded.

…

But now Greenspan made amends, treating Bradfield and his wife to a concert at the Kennedy Center. When the Journal’s crack reporters called around their sources for comments on the new chairman, they encountered nothing but warm praise. Greenspan had covered all his bases. If Black Monday boosted Greenspan’s reputation, the same could not be said for laissez-faire capitalism.64 The presumption of market efficiency, which had dominated academic finance since the late 1960s, now demanded a rethink. Statisticians pointed out that extreme falls in prices occurred far more commonly than was assumed in the efficient marketers’ equations. Behavioral economists invoked psychological experiments that showed the limits to investors’ rationality.65 For Greenspan, who had never bought into the efficient markets hypothesis, none of this revisionism upset his settled views; but there were other lessons from the crash that did challenge his thinking.66 Black Monday forced him even further from his youthful conviction that central banks ought to allow private financiers to go bust; and it drove him to reconsider his belief that a steep fall in the market would drag down the real economy.

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Railroads became the arteries of American capitalism, the circulation system of its commerce, even information—a letter or message or rumor could travel only as fast as its messenger, which now invariably was a train. Yet the railroad’s development makes clear that even early American capitalism was never the same as laissez-faire capitalism: Various forms and forces of government were instrumental to its development, its trajectory, and its eventual implications. And what was the notion of corporate limited liability but a legal abstraction created and recognized by the state? As important, the early development of financial markets was propelled by bond guarantees of the various states, enticing private capital to underwrite American infrastructure.

…

Such policies were successful in diversifying and growing the industrial base: America did emerge as the largest steel producer in the world by the end of the century. From here the growth of the American steel industry paved the way for a variety of ancillary and dependent industries over the next few decades. Even military might in the next century would be firmly rooted in steelmaking capacity. But laissez-faire capitalism it was not. The invisible hand of Adam Smith’s free market was accompanied by the guiding hand of government policy. Fourteen MACHINES The Gilded Age had a philosopher who seemed perfect for the times. Herbert Spencer built upon his fellow countryman Charles Darwin’s observations on natural selection and developed a social treatise that flowed from this evolutionary spirit.

Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Railroads became the arteries of American capitalism, the circulation system of its commerce, even information—a letter or message or rumor could travel only as fast as its messenger, which now invariably was a train. Yet the railroad’s development makes clear that even early American capitalism was never the same as laissez-faire capitalism: Various forms and forces of government were instrumental to its development, its trajectory, and its eventual implications. And what was the notion of corporate limited liability but a legal abstraction created and recognized by the state? As important, the early development of financial markets was propelled by bond guarantees of the various states, enticing private capital to underwrite American infrastructure.

…

Such policies were successful in diversifying and growing the industrial base: America did emerge as the largest steel producer in the world by the end of the century. From here the growth of the American steel industry paved the way for a variety of ancillary and dependent industries over the next few decades. Even military might in the next century would be firmly rooted in steelmaking capacity. But laissez-faire capitalism it was not. The invisible hand of Adam Smith’s free market was accompanied by the guiding hand of government policy. Fourteen MACHINES The Gilded Age had a philosopher who seemed perfect for the times. Herbert Spencer built upon his fellow countryman Charles Darwin’s observations on natural selection and developed a social treatise that flowed from this evolutionary spirit.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

The idea was already well established before the Second World War, when Keynes asserted that stock markets were essentially casinos and had no place in determining business investment; when the British government launched the 1929 Macmillan Committee to investigate whether Britain’s financial system was meeting the needs of its economy; and when Keynes, the driving force behind the committee, articulated his views on the link between financial capital and the nation’s poor capital development. Indeed, much government policy around the world is predicated on the idea that the financial system serves business poorly. For all that the financial services sector is thought of as a bastion of laissez-faire capitalism, most developed countries intervene deeply and widely in the market for business finance. Germany’s Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (founded in 1948) and the US Small Business Administration (SBA, founded in 1953) both guarantee or underwrite business financing; in 1945 the UK set up the Industrial and Commercial Finance Corporation to provide growth capital.

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, interest rate swap, laissez-faire capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

His impartiality was believable to the public precisely because of his long-demonstrated unscrupulousness and political spinelessness: he sucked up with equal ferocity to presidents of both parties and courted pundit-admirers from both sides of the editorial page, who all blessed his wrinkly pronouncements as purely nonpartisan economic wisdom. Greenspan’s rise to the top is one of the great scams of our time. His career is the perfect prism through which one can see the twofold basic deception of American politics: a system that preaches sink-or-swim laissez-faire capitalism to most but acts as a highly interventionist, bureaucratic welfare state for a select few. Greenspan pompously preached ruthless free-market orthodoxy every chance he got while simultaneously using all the powers of the state to protect his wealthy patrons from those same market forces. A perfectly two-faced man, serving a perfectly two-faced state.

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, company town, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, Edward Glaeser, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, full employment, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, Mahbub ul Haq, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McJob, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, spinning jenny, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, two tier labour market, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, working-age population

But George Soros explains why his mind and his money are pitted against the system that made him fabulously wealthy.’ However, the Soros fortune remains firmly invested in the markets. His argument is with a particular fundamentalist version of free-market economics. The article begins: ‘Although I have made a fortune in the financial markets, I now fear that the untrammelled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society.’ The danger, he believes, is the development of ‘robber capitalism’, the ‘gangster state’ — in other words, a world of inequality, exploitation and instability, where a few have the freedom to become rich at the expense of the many, terrorised and lacking in opportunities.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

His magazine remained an ardent fan of the Soviet Union until the end of the Second World War. But the American version of big government was steered in a different direction, especially by the two Roosevelt presidents. Teddy Roosevelt, who was president from 1901 to 1909, accepted the Webbs’ view that the age of laissez-faire capitalism was over. The state needed to act as a lion tamer to the capitalist lion. Roosevelt established regulatory bodies, such as the Bureau of Corporations (the forerunner of the Securities and Exchange Commission) to break up monopolies and empower consumers. “The corporation is the creature of the people,” he proclaimed, “and must not be allowed to become the ruler of the people.”

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges, Joe Sacco

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, dumpster diving, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, food desert, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Howard Zinn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban decay, wage slave, white flight, women in the workforce

Workers formed unions and demanded workplace standards, including the minimum wage—although when the 1938 federal minimum-wage law was enacted, farmworkers were not included in its provisions, and remained excluded for three decades.20 But in our globalized economy, where the labor pool stretches from Mexico to Asia and where industry can move easily across borders, Ricardo’s theory has been exposed as yet another absurdity held up by the proponents of laissez-faire capitalism. The determining factor in global corporate production is poverty. The poorer the worker and the poorer the nation, the greater the competitive advantage. With access to vast pools of desperate, impoverished workers eager for scraps, unions and working conditions no longer impede the quest for larger and larger profits.

Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing by John Boughton

British Empire, deindustrialization, full employment, garden city movement, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Leo Hollis, manufacturing employment, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Russell Brand, starchitect, systems thinking, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, young professional

The second half has embraced the Utopian ideal of housing planned by a paternalistic authority, which offered hopes of improved standards but also ran the risk of trapping people in dwellings not of their own choosing.28 A perspective that sees ‘freedom’ within the gross inequality of laissez-faire capitalism and oppression in the Welfare State speaks for itself. But Coleman ventured even more fantastically into an updated version of Social Darwinism with her assertion that the two-storey house and garden represented some kind of evolutionary end-game, a natural culmination of humanity’s quest for shelter and territory.

Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work by Dr. Paul Babiak, Dr. Robert Hare

business process, computer age, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, fixed income, greed is good, job satisfaction, laissez-faire capitalism, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, old-boy network, risk tolerance, twin studies

The documentary uses a selected set of examples of corporate misbehaviors, as well as a brief clip of a longer interview with Hare, to make and bolster its position that the corporation meets the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy. As a promotional release for the documentary put it: "Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath." Although the producers of the documentary stated that they used the term psychopath merely as a metaphor for the most egregious corporate entities, it is apparent that they had in mind corporations in general. The short excerpt from the interview with Hare did not convey his view that although the attitudes, philosophies, and behaviors of a given corporation (as a legal entity) might be considered psychopathic, at least as an academic exercise, such a "diagnosis" hardly would apply to all, or even most, corporations.

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

The market capitalization of companies listed on the Parisian bourse reached 78 percent of French GDP, more than the value of the firms on the New York Stock Exchange as a share of the American economy. But the Great Depression and the German occupation delivered a shock to the faith of the French in the Third Republic. And their faith in laissez-faire capitalism suffered a permanent blow too. The history of capitalism is punctuated by changes of direction in response to crises. In the 1930s, even as most major economies were mired in what would come to be known as the Great Depression, economic orthodoxy had it that government had no role to play in economic management.

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

The Social Democratic party in Germany, the Labor Party in England, the Progressive movement in the United States, and the French Section of the Workers International rose to prominence. Colonies increasingly chafed under the domination of the empires. Two world wars threw the established social order into question and destabilized many governments. In the 1930s, the first truly global depression undermined confidence in traditional laissez-faire capitalism. Revolutions erupted. In 1911, Chinese Nationalist forces led by Sun Yat-sen overthrew the Qin Dynasty and worked to establish a new republican government free from foreign control. While Sun’s ideas drew on many sources, George’s philosophy was the economic pillar of his Three Principles of the People.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

Those who choose to see technology as equal to life end up adopting a “let it rip” approach to its development that ignores the biases of the many systems with which technology has become intertwined. The answer to the problems of technology is always just more technology, a pedal-to-the-metal ethos that is entirely consonant with laissez-faire capitalism. Ever since the invention of central currency, remember, the requirement of capitalism is to grow. It should not surprise us that in a capitalist society we would conclude that technology also wants to grow and that this growth supports the universe in its inexorable climb toward greater states of complexity.

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Change will have to come from below. In The Great Transformation, the economic historian Karl Polanyi outlines a process he calls the “double movement.”5 Dialectical in nature, it describes the push and pull, or the pendulum swing, of opposing forms of social organization. At one extreme, laissez-faire capitalism tends to “dis-embed” the economic dimensions of society from the political realm, leading to wide commodification of everything, including labor itself. As a reaction to the problems this causes, liberal reformers begin a countermovement to “re-embed” the economy in the social sphere, submitting it to democratic oversight.

The Einstein of Money: The Life and Timeless Financial Wisdom of Benjamin Graham by Joe Carlen

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bernie Madoff, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business intelligence, discounted cash flows, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, full employment, index card, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, laissez-faire capitalism, margin call, means of production, Norman Mailer, oil shock, post-industrial society, price anchoring, price stability, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, the scientific method, Vanguard fund, young professional

While he certainly did not concur with the former's assertion that the quest for profit was inherently unjust and exploitive, he similarly rejected the latter's notion that the capitalist bore no responsibility for anyone's welfare but his or her own. In fact, Graham viewed the cataclysm of 1929 as a consequence of decades of unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism. Of course, as demonstrated by the entrepreneurialism of his own career and his drive for, in his words, “large earnings and large spending”48 (at least in his younger years), Graham was certainly an eager capitalist himself, and he believed in the overall merits of the American “free enterprise” system.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

A bit of friction in our relationship with technology may yield huge benefits. Eleventh, technology has unlimited potential, but the good of society depends on entrepreneurs and investors adopting an approach that respects the rights of users, communities, and democracies. If the country and the world allow the laissez-faire capitalism that has powered the internet platforms to continue, the cost will be ongoing damage to public health, democracy, privacy, and the economy. Is that what we want? Bad outcomes are not inevitable, but we need to overcome inertia to prevent them. Twelfth, with much reluctance I have concluded that platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter are currently doing more harm than good.

Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It) by William Poundstone

availability heuristic, behavioural economics, book value, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equal pay for equal work, experimental economics, experimental subject, feminist movement, game design, German hyperinflation, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, index card, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, Linda problem, loss aversion, market bubble, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, no-fly zone, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Potemkin village, power law, price anchoring, price discrimination, psychological pricing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, rolodex, social intelligence, starchitect, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, ultimatum game, working poor

Crew clothing company, 190, 203, 205 Jensen, Keith, 123–24 Jensen, Marlene, 232 JetBlue Airlines, 182, 183 Jews: Israeli, 81–82; mobsters, 49; Nazi persecution of, 83–84 Jobs, Steve, 184, 257 Johns Hopkins University, 52 Johnson, Eric, 280–82 Johnson & Johnson, 6 Jopling, Jay, 267 Journal of Business, 110 Journal of Consumer Research, 153, 280 Journal of Experimental Psychology, The, 65 juries, 197; damages awarded by, 3–4, 17–21, 276–79 Kahn, Irah, 84 Kahneman, Daniel, 16, 83–87, 105, 133, 146, 147, 188, 196, 236; on altruism, 117; on anchoring, 144, 207; economists’ hostility to, 77; fairness research of, 106–107, 110, 112–14; heuristics of, 88–89, 125–28, 197; on jury awards, 19, 276–77, 279; at Oregon Research Institute, 28, 87–88; on priming, 92, 94, 286; prospect theory of, 97–99, 101–102, 104, 132; and stock market bubbles, 261; on ultimatum game, 113, 115; United Nations experiment of, 10–12, 90 Kalmar, Tepper, 160, 161 Kelley Blue Book, 75 Kelly, Walt, 76 Kennedy, Edward, 257 Kenya, 122 Klein, Calvin, 246 Knetsch, Jack, 105, 107, 110, 113–14, 117 Kohl, Helmut, 271 Koolhaas, Rem, 158 Kouri, Elena, 250 Kozlowski, Dennis, 234–36 Kozlowski, Karen, 234 Krueger, Alan, 165–66 Kucher, Eckhard, 148–49 Lacayo, Richard, 267 Lagavulin whiskey, 219 laissez-faire capitalism, 108 Lamelera people, 123 “Landlord’s Game, The,” 284 La Rue, Diane, 167 Las Vegas Review Journal, 71 Laube, Jim, 160 laundry detergent, 180 Lauren, Ralph, 155 lawsuits, jury awards in, 3–4, 17–21, 276–79 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 194 Lee, Bob, 144 Leeds, University of, 219 Leeuwenhoek, Anton von, 208 Lehman Brothers, 268 Leipzig, University of, 30 Lichtenstein, Donald, 204–206 Lichtenstein, Sarah, 10, 28, 53, 62–77, 79, 81, 82, 87, 90, 220 Liebeck v.

The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics by Jonathan Aldred

airport security, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon credits, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Diane Coyle, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, framing effect, Goodhart's law, GPS: selective availability, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, new economy, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, pension reform, positional goods, precautionary principle, price elasticity of demand, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, school choice, social discount rate, spectrum auction, Thomas Bayes, trade liberalization, ultimatum game, When a measure becomes a target

First, it is sometimes suggested that arguments against markets will only persuade those with leftish politics. However, there are many contemporary restrictions on free markets which find favour with the traditional Right. Examples include immigration controls and planning law. More importantly, the idea that expanding the domain of markets represents a return to the heyday of 19th-century laissez-faire capitalism, before the dead hand of government began to interfere, is a grotesque misrepresentation of history. It was Victorian capitalists who first developed the idea of a public service ethos, because they recognized the need to separate politics, specifically the civil service, from business interests.

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman

activist lawyer, Benjamin Mako Hill, commoditize, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, ghettoisation, GnuPG, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, Jaron Lanier, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Wall, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, means of production, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, popular electronics, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, software patent, software studies, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, web application, web of trust, Yochai Benkler

Among moderate proponents, the commons is understood as compatible with private property and a capitalist market, although certainly acting as a bulwark against some of their worst abuses.14 The more liberal facet of the commons endeavor is but one moment within a broader liberal critique of the neoliberal face of capitalism. In an Atlantic Monthly article, reformed financial tycoon (now also philanthropist) George Soros (1997) enunciated the basic terms of this liberal critique: “the untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society.” The most influential articulations and organizations within this nascent commons movement have been those founded by Lessig (1999, 2001b; Creative Commons) and David Bollier (2002, 2009; Public Knowledge).

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

By bringing peace to a region riven with wars and rivalries and by integrating markets, the EEC contributed to the economic development in the member countries. The most influential explanation of the Golden Age is, however, that it was mainly the result of reforms in economic policies and institutions that gave birth to the mixed economy – mixing positive features of capitalism and socialism. Following the Great Depression, the limits of laissez-faire capitalism came to be widely accepted. It was agreed that the government should take an active role to deal with the failings of unregulated markets. At the same time, the success in wartime planning during the Second World War diminished scepticism about the feasibility of government intervention.

King Icahn: The Biography of a Renegade Capitalist by Mark Stevens

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, classic study, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gordon Gekko, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Michael Milken, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, shareholder value, yellow journalism

“If I wanted to take my family to the theater, I had the money for that. And if I wanted to buy myself a mink coat, I could do that too. But nothing was ever done to impress others. Nothing was showy. I drove the same shabby Chevrolet for twelve years.” Compared to her husband, Bella was a free-market reactionary. A ferocious critic of laissez-faire capitalism and of the vast disparity of incomes and lifestyles that it spawned, Michael Icahn railed endlessly at the wealthy “robber barons” comfortably ensconced in the sprawling estates of Lawrence and Woodmere, Greenwich and Scarsdale. “When Carl used to visit me in Scarsdale, he’d get a look at the affluent life,” said his uncle Elliot, Bella’s kid brother, who married into money and was installed by his father-in-law as president of the Cole Steel Co.

Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, post-materialism, purchasing power parity, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, special economic zone, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

But the “fall” of communism back to capitalism is equally absurd, and cannot be explained within the traditional Marxist framework. It can be explained better, albeit not fully, within the liberal framework. In the liberal view, which Francis Fukuyama captured quite well in the 1990s with The End of History and the Last Man, liberal democracy and laissez-faire capitalism represent the terminus of socioeconomic formations invented by humankind. What Marxists see as an incomprehensible reversal to a much lower (inferior) system, liberals see as a perfectly understandable movement from an inferior, dead-end system (communism) back onto the straight path leading to the end point of human evolution: liberal capitalism.

Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel by Stephen Budiansky

Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, business cycle, Douglas Hofstadter, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, John von Neumann, laissez-faire capitalism, P = NP, P vs NP, Paul Erdős, rent control, scientific worldview, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing machine, urban planning

Pauley observes, “it was the Austrian universities that helped to make anti-Semitism respectable throughout the country.” Since the 1870s, fraternities that venerated Germanness had been a vocal and often violent part of student life at the university. Devoted to the glorification of dueling, drinking, and militarism, and to the denigration of parliamentary democracy, liberalism, and laissez-faire capitalism, they were among the most enthusiastic supporters of the new “scientific” anti-Semitic theories that ascribed a host of loathsome traits to Jews’ inherent racial characteristics.45 By the 1920s the middle-class insecurities that inflamed Austrian anti-Semitism were concentrated at the universities; many sons of small tradesmen and artisans who enrolled were the first in their families to seek a university education, hoping to qualify for government service or the professions.

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens by Nicholas Shaxson

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, high net worth, income inequality, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, New Journalism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, out of africa, passive income, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transfer pricing, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

“Jersey,” it says, “represents an extension of the City of London.”28 As the City of London’s Caribbean havens and its crown dependencies were developing, something similar was happening in Asia. Hong Kong, which the U.S. economist Milton Friedman called the world’s greatest experiment in laissez-faire capitalism, was to be the new Asian offshore jewel, a tax haven gateway to China and the subregion. Britain remained the guiding hand, while giving financiers free rein. The colony’s financial secretary, Sir John Cowperthwaite, installed in 1961, had such stridently antigovernment views that he curtailed the publication of official statistics on the grounds that it would help the civil servants.

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The by Mariana Mazzucato

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, clean tech, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, Growth in a Time of Debt, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software patent, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two and twenty, two-sided market, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, Works Progress Administration, you are the product, zero-sum game

Wall Street was, he said, ‘regarded as an institution of which the proper social purpose is to direct new investment into the most profitable channels in terms of future yield'. By this yardstick, Keynes commented, Wall Street could not ‘be claimed as one of the outstanding triumphs of laissez-faire capitalism - which is not surprising, if I am right in thinking that the best brains of Wall Street have been in fact directed towards a different object'.22 That ‘different object', in Keynes's view, was not a form of production, but ‘betting' - and the profits of the bookmaker were ‘a mere transfer',23 a transfer which should be limited lest individuals ruin themselves and harm others in the process.

Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, book value, collective bargaining, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate personhood, corporate raider, COVID-19, disintermediation, distributed generation, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Firefox, forensic accounting, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, George Floyd, gig economy, Golden age of television, Google bus, greed is good, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, index fund, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, passive income, peak TV, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, time value of money, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, WeWork

However, in the lead-up to their enactment, record companies, movie studios, and music and book publishers fiercely fought every proposal to make these protections meaningful, disingenuously arguing that they were paternalistic and went against freedom of contract. So these rights ended up being neutered too. Freedom of contract is a key plank of laissez-faire capitalism. It’s the idea that people should be able to do what they like without interference from government regulation, including the right to decide whether to contract with one another and the terms on which to do so. In reality of course, we limit contracts all the time. The law won’t enforce illegal contracts (like murder for hire or attempts to pay below the minimum wage), impaired ones (where a party wasn’t capable of consenting or was tricked into doing so), or unfair restraints of trade.

The Firm by Duff McDonald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset light, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, book value, borderless world, collective bargaining, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, family office, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, new economy, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, vertical integration, young professional

McKinsey partner Richard Foster’s 2001 book, Creative Destruction, was nothing short of a big wet kiss to Enron’s way of doing business. It was also a mere repackaging of economist Joseph Schumpeter’s own work on the strengths of capitalism a half century before, but with a crucial twist: It was celebrating the worst instincts of laissez-faire capitalism, not the best. The War for Talent, a 2001 book by McKinsey consultants Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones, and Beth Axelrod (now head of HR at eBay), might have been an even wetter kiss for Enron than Creative Destruction. The book set off a worldwide craze for a raft of flimsy ideas, many of which were based on simple observation of Skilling’s management style and practices, a large part of which had come out of McKinsey itself.

Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire by Simon Winchester

borderless world, British Empire, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Edmond Halley, European colonialism, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, Khyber Pass, laissez-faire capitalism, offshore financial centre, sensible shoes, South China Sea, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, the market place, three-masted sailing ship

Ten miles away from the frontier, still deep inside a China of timeless rural peace—workers knee-deep in the paddy fields, ducks straggling along the roadside, the occasional bullock-cart lumbering down a muddy lane—we passed two unexpected signs of the new, post-Mao order: a petrol station, run by Texaco (though no cars were taking advantage of it), and a tall, electrified fence, with watchtowers and a massive and well-guarded border control post, such as you might find when taking the autobahn from Vienna to Budapest. This was not the frontier with Hong Kong, however. It was a new ‘internal’ frontier that divided the special economic zone of Shen Zhen from Marxist orthodoxies of the rest of China—the zone being a sort of halfway house, an airlock, between the rigidities of the Communist world and the laissez-faire capitalism of the Crown colony. It is a frantically busy place, with factories and tower blocks and hotels (most of them paid for by wealthy Hong Kong investors) rising out of the paddy fields, and restaurants jammed solid with a new Chinese élite who are making money on a scale of which Mao would never have dreamed.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Industrial policy is popular again and Western countries sprinkle money over particular sectors, often with the expressed intention of giving them a direct competitive advantage over their foreign competitors. Other forms of regulation are becoming far more detailed and prescribe a certain behavior, adding new regulatory costs and deterring entrepreneurship just by the sheer volume of regulations that a business needs to absorb. In the United States – that mythological example of laissez-faire capitalism – states are banning people from selling home-baked bread without a commercial license.50 Almost 900 measures restricting foreign trade were imposed in the US between 2008 and 2015.51 Regulation is back in fashion and Figure 6.2 shows this trend for selected Western countries by using data on regulatory performance in the Fraser Institute’s ranking of economic freedom in the world.

The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities by John J. Mearsheimer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, Clive Stafford Smith, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal world order, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Peace of Westphalia, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs

Republicans, in short, are deeply committed to the interventionist state and the extensive social engineering that comes with it. The United States does have a political party that is genuinely committed to modus vivendi liberalism, and it is appropriately called the Libertarian Party. It is dedicated to promoting civil liberties and laissez-faire capitalism and to abolishing the welfare state. Its party platform takes dead aim at positive rights: “We seek a world of liberty; a world in which all individuals are sovereign over their own lives and no one is forced to sacrifice his or her values for the benefit of others.”63 The Libertarian Party has never won a single seat in Congress and never come close to winning the White House.

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

Because Stein is a well-known economic conservative (and because I had just finished writing my book The Mind of the Market, a chapter of which compares Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” with Charles Darwin’s “natural selection”), I pointed out how the captains of industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries justified their beliefs in laissez-faire capitalism through the social Darwinism of “survival of the fittest corporations.” And, more recently, I noted that Enron’s CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, said his favorite book in Harvard Business School was Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (first published in 1976), a form of Darwinism that Skilling badly misinterpreted (“read by title only” in Dawkins’ apt phrase to describe those who misread the book).

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market by Nicholas Wapshott

2021 United States Capitol attack, Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, lockdown, low interest rates, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market bubble, market clearing, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Bush Treasury team and Bernanke’s Federal Reserve did not reach for Friedman or Hayek: they found relief in old-fashioned Keynesian remedies. “What then is it that, since 2007, has caused Wall Street capitalism’s own suicide?” asked Samuelson the following year. “At the bottom of this worst financial mess in a century is this: Milton Friedman-Friedrich Hayek libertarian laissez-faire capitalism, permitted to run wild without regulation. This is the root source of today’s travails. Both of these men are dead, but their poisoned legacies live on.”24 For Samuelson, the financial freeze and its cure were the ultimate vindication of a lifetime as “an incurable centrist.” “I am old enough to have seen the cycle come full circle,” he said.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 by Paul Kennedy

agricultural Revolution, airline deregulation, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, imperial preference, industrial robot, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, long peace, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, oil shock, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

Between them and the West, the proverbial “iron curtain” was falling; behind that curtain, Communist party cadres and secret police were determining that the entire region would operate under principles totally at variance with Cordell Hull’s hopes. The same was true in the Far East, where the swift occupation of Manchuria, North Korea, and Sakhalin not only avenged the war of 1904–1905, but allowed a link-up with Mao’s Chinese Communists, who were also unlikely to swallow the gospel of laissez-faire capitalism. But if this growth of Soviet influence looked imposing, its economic base had been badly hurt by the war—in contrast to the United States’ undisturbed boom. Russia’s population losses were appalling: 7.5 million in the armed forces; 6–8 million civilians killed by the Germans; plus the “indirect” war losses caused by the reduced food rations, forced labor, and vastly increased hours of work, so that “altogether probably some 20–25 million Soviet citizens died premature deaths between 1941 and 1945.”50 Since the casualties were mainly men, the consequent imbalance between the sexes greatly affected the country’s demographic structure and caused a severe drop in the birthrate.

…

This is due, one imagines, to the facts that so many of its immigrants were fleeing from socially rigid circumstances elsewhere; that the sheer size of the country allowed those who were disillusioned with their economic position to “escape” to the West, and simultaneously made the organization of labor much more difficult than in, say, France or Britain; and that those same geographical dimensions, and the entrepreneurial opportunities within them, encouraged the development of a largely unreconstructed form of laissez-faire capitalism which has dominated the political culture of the nation (despite occasional counterattacks from the left). In consequence, the “earnings gap” between rich and poor in the United States is significantly larger than in any other advanced industrial society; and, by the same token, state expenditures upon social services form a lower share of GNP than in comparable countries (except Japan, which appears to have a much stronger family-based form of support for the poor and the aged).

The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, guns versus butter model, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Parents Music Resource Center, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, Timothy McVeigh, Tipper Gore, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

House to dictate the domestic agenda to the White House. The president had to accept legislation he would have preferred to veto, like the plant-closing law that required companies to give sixty-five days’ notice to their workers before shutting down a facility. The law was a slam on the laissez-faire capitalism and free market idealism so dear to the heart of the GOP. In 1988, Congress overrode Reagan’s veto of the Civil Rights Restoration Act. The president called it a ‘‘quota bill,’’ but in suffering a veto override he further alienated African Americans from the party of Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation.

Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase by Duff McDonald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business logic, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, housing crisis, interest rate swap, Jeff Bezos, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, risk/return, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Saturday Night Live, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The early going was tough for Greenspan—the stock market crashed in the fall of 1987 and the national economy sputtered for most of the first half of the 1990s—but by the latter half of the decade, things were humming along. A disciple of the objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand—author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead—Greenspan was a vocal, if often convoluted, proponent of free-market ideology and laissez-faire capitalism. Famous for his intentionally incomprehensible testimony in front of Congress—he was legendary for saying nothing in a complicated way—he was nevertheless widely trusted for his market acumen. Bankers particularly adored him. By relaxing the Glass-Steagall Act, he opened the door for banks to become major deal makers and create new financial empires.

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar

The privatization of public transport is a recent development, but it has roots in the nineteenth century. While New York’s early elevated and subway lines, like Los Angeles’s streetcar lines, were built with private capital, governments in Britain and most of Continental Europe, though they paid lip service to the principles of laissez-faire capitalism, oversaw the design of transit networks to an extent unimaginable in the United States. In the era of the tramways, Paris and other European cities granted 50-year concessions to private street railways, after which tracks and tunnels would revert to the municipal authorities without payment, and the city would be given the option of buying the rolling stock.

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke

addicted to oil, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, demand response, dematerialisation, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet of things, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Negawatt, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off grid, off-the-grid, post-oil, profit motive, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the built environment, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, Whole Earth Catalog

Since 2000, however, not only is there far more information pouring into utility databases—a product of the widespread introduction of computerization at many points in the system, of which digital “smart” meters are the most infamous—but that information is treated as proprietary. Electricity trading, in this way, fails to be laissez-faire capitalism because nobody quite has access to the information necessary to make real-time decisions about how to manage their systems, and thus also their capital. Not even, oddly, the utilities themselves, since they now have so much information to contend with that most of it sits unprocessed in giant servers called “historians.”

The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink by Michael Blanding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, Exxon Valdez, Gordon Gekko, Internet Archive, laissez-faire capitalism, market design, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Pepsi Challenge, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, Wayback Machine

In order to keep alive its mystique, he dragged the secret formula out of a company vault in New York and personally transferred it by train to a safe-deposit box in the Trust Company bank in Atlanta—where it supposedly remains to this day. In his mind he’d hit upon the perfect product, one that could sell in any economic time, and—with the success of its “Thirst Knows No Season” ad campaign—any climate. “Robert Woodruff could still look out on an America that justified his bedrock faith in laissez-faire capitalism,” write J. C. Louis and Harvey Yazijian. “This faith informed his fundamen­ tal opposition to socialism, and later, to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” Roosevelt’s New Deal was, like the Progressive movement half a century earlier, a backlash against the greed of corporations, who were blamed by many for the crash.

The Profiteers by Sally Denton

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, clean water, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, G4S, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, nuclear winter, power law, profit motive, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, William Langewiesche

Bechtel pioneered the revolving door system that now pervades both US politics and the American economic system—a door that came to shape foreign policy not always in the interest of the nation and its citizens, but for the interests of multinational corporations. In the end, this is the ugly, untold story of America. A story not of the triumph of laissez faire capitalism, but of Profiteers whose sole client was government itself. (1) This vintage postcard from 1936 shows the construction of Hoover Dam in four different stages, with all views taken from the same point looking upstream. Called the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” it would be known as Bechtel’s historic, signature project

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy by Benjamin Barber

airport security, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, computer age, Corn Laws, Corrections Corporation of America, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, global village, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norbert Wiener, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, pirate software, Plato's cave, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, vertical integration, young professional, zero-sum game

Democracy makes markets work by allowing us the freedom of our consumer choices in the knowledge that we can counteract their accompanying vices. To do so, however, we must have alternative nonmarket institutions, and in the international arena such democratic tools are entirely absent. Even within nation-states, we are eschewing the tools we have. The dogmas of laissez-faire capitalism that have suffused the politics of America and Europe in the last few decades have been reinforced by the resentments of an alienated electorate that has lost confidence in its own democratic institutions; together, they have persuaded us that our democratic governments neither belong to us nor function usefully either to limit markets or to help them work.

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game