The

The Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Hinwood. In a world of mounting chaos and uncertainty,

behind the news is a rock of stability. Two guests, two segments. John Cassidy will talk about

his new book, Capitalism and its critics. And Sandeep Fahissan will talk about abundance, neoliberal

versus genuine. Capitalism went through a period of serious popularity from roughly the mid-1980s

until the 2008 financial crisis peaking around the mid to late 1990s. There were ebbs and flows,

of course, but it was the time of Tina. There is no alternative. Privatization was all the rage.

Everything would work out if we could just get the prices right. The stock market could do a better

job of supporting us in retirement than Social Security, etc., etc. I can say from experience that it was

a lonely time to be a critic of capitalism. Times have changed. The system is just not terribly popular

now, even if we have a hard time imagining an alternative or how to get there. Of course it wasn't always so popular.

John Cassidy, a staff writer for The New Yorker, is just out with a book, capitalism and its

critics, a history, from the Industrial Revolution to AI, published by Farras Strauss and Giroux.

It's not a small book, 624 pages, to be precise, but it's highly readable, both because of John's clear prose style

and because it's broken into about 30 chapters, each dedicated to a critic, in some cases

critics, of capitalism. So you can consume a few of the little essays at a time. It's a very

impressive book. The critics range from the familiar, Marx-Pelagee Keynes, to the less so, like the early

socialist feminists Anna Wheeler and Flora Tristan.

The core of these critiques, as John puts it, is that over the centuries the central

indictment of capitalism has remained remarkably consistent, that it is soulless, exploitive,

inequitable, unstable, and destructive, yet also all-conquering and overwhelming.

Hard to dispute.

...