I'm Christopher Leiden, and this is open source talking about capitalism this time,

trying to reckon the power of big money to shape, even rule the human species.

Capitalism is the one word name given to a thousand-year-old force.

It's not a science or doctrine or mere politics. It's a thoroughly human and ever-changing

arrangement of affairs that can produce rapid and vast expansion of wealth in private hands.

And capitalism is the title of our guest, Sven Beckert's new thousand-page history of the

whole thing.

Thousand pages covering a thousand years.

Welcome back, Sven.

Great to be here, Chris.

Thank goodness you're a historian, not an economist.

The opening line in your book is, we live in a world created by capitalism.

How did it happen?

Is it still happening for better or worse? Did it have to happen?

Were there alternatives? Let me say, you make capitalism seem like a sort of yeast. It enlarges

private money. You could also imagine it as a virus. You've got to help us see it still evolving out there with the gold

rush to NVIDIA as we speak. We don't believe anymore in the end of history, the thought that

the evolution of capitalism has stopped. Where did it go? I start the book with the notion that

capitalism surrounds us is everywhere because in some ways it's the most important

fact about the world in which we live. We cannot really understand much about the world in which

we live without having some understanding of capitalism. Capitalism impinges upon all spheres

of our lives on the greatest macrost structures, the kind of labor markets we

...