I'm Christopher Leighton, and this is open source, staring down the several crises in our economy,

and recalling the grand old joke that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

John Cassidy of The New Yorker magazine has written a sprightly catalog of capitalism's critics over the centuries. who got it right, for example, about

today's inequality crisis, or the climate damage, or the threat to democracy, or the alternatives

to capitalism that might still work better or even rescue it? Welcome, John Cassidy. Economics is

not my first language, but your book brings big, contentious characters

alive on stage around history we should all know, anxieties we can all feel, and a question

by the end, after the last century of astonishing growth, how do we find ourselves with an unpopular system in polycrisis?

Well, first, I'd like to thank you for inviting me on and giving me such a splendid

introduction. The term Sprightly is not usually applied to history books, economics books.

So I take that as a great compliment.

I guess the thesis running through the book, if you

look at it from current perspective and

from a sort of Trumpian perspective, which we all

do these days because we can't get this

terrible man out of our minds. He

dominates it day to day.

I see the rise of economic nationalism,

Trumpian populism, whatever you want to call it,

as essentially the result of a sort of crisis

of the pre-existing economic model,

the previous form of capitalism,

...