Sources: economics

Detailed history of the dark influence of Jack Welch on capitalism and its domination by market fundamentalism. A grotesque pageant of gleeful destruction and harm perpetrated by the masters of growth-driven but non-productive companies leading economic ideology.

This is a long essay that will make you angry early and if you aren’t apoplectically furious by the end you either don’t care or drank the kool-aid. Ends with an excellent summary of the reality of the current state of generative “AI”.

Not cheerful but a helpful, dispassionate account of where we are: in a global socio-economic transition. The suggestion is that in such times shared conceptions of purpose, organization, identity, and trust break down — leaving us with only uncertainty about the future and unable to form collective objectives, and therefore, predictions about what might happen next.

I found this a useful analytic framing of present experience; the sense that the future has disappeared in uncertainty seems like a fair description of what I hear expressed by others and experience myself lately. Also many useful proposed connections relating to the rapid evolution of liberal vs conservative worldviews; the collapse of the relationship between them as points on a common spectrum; the growing reduction of ideological options into exremes of progressivism and authoritarianism…

Great overview of his book Debt: the First 5000 Years. Very unusual talk in its informality, almost as if he was asked at a party what he was working on. In consequence it is a bit like watching someone with enormous intellectual resources, and great humility, work through an idea — probably due to this being hosted by Google Talks rather than an academic institution.

An entry in the Astral Codex Ten 2023 book reviews competition, by a not-yet-disclosed poster. A deep and coherent summary of Jacob’s philosophy of economics presented in Cities and the Wealth of Nations, an extension of her earlier work on cities with greater focus on their economic significance and how typical, nation-level economic metrics miss their importance — and resulting policy often harms cities, with the further effect of harming the nation.

Excellent and enjoyable writing.

A really good essay reviewing two new books on climate change and looming catastrophe, along with some helpful history and context.

The first part of the essay is a very good summary of the seminal book, Limits to Growth: A Report on the Predicament of Mankind, which, along with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, stands at the origin our current conception of climate crisis, its future, and what we should be doing about it. Limits to Growth was the first important product of The Club of Rome, was a best-seller in 1972 when published, and inspired the first round of pro-capitalist/pro-growth climate denial. The book was produced by a team of people at MIT doing the first work in computer modeling of complex systems to make predictions about the living world and human activity. It was prescient, so far accurate, and alarming in its predictions.

The central focus of the essay is a critique of the Club of Rome’s 40th anniversary follow-up, Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity. Venzke argues the book is disappointing and fails to respect its debt to Limits to Growth, characterizing it as a sad attempt to present a case for optimism that fails to challenge the political and economic levers that continue to exacerbate the problem as predicted.

In the second book reviewed, Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change, and Pandemics, Venzke finds what one should have hoped to find in Earth for All: respect for its origin in Limits to Growth and a clear identification of the critical challenge to altering the course of catastrophe in capitalism and the economic commitment to growth.

This is quite a long essay with real depth of thinking on a range of issues, and perspective on the problems of optimism, pessimism, action, and paralysis associated with the debate. An excellent basis from which to organize thinking on the big problem and sources to look at for deeper thinking.

Noah brings it… Who was the more active deregulationist: Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan? The answer is a surprise entirely contrary to the standard neo-con->neo-liberal mythology. Of course, it isn’t quite as simple as that…

A guest-post on Noah’s substack, mainly about jobs in the age of AI and speculating that the job of secretary may have a revival as an important human role in the AI future. What most struck me was the description of the origins of the secretarial job that is far different from our typical, gendered, vaguely dismissive assumptions suggesting a trivial task based in low-skill servitude. Robbins starts by reminding us (of something I didn’t know in the first place, to make the point) of the original meaning of secretary: “The ‘secretary’ literally means ‘person entrusted with secrets,’ from the medieval Latin secretarius, the trusted officer who writes the letters and keeps the records.”

Robbins’ brief history of the job’s descent toward its current status is surprising and refreshing.