Branko Milanovic, Capitalism Alone: The Future of the System that Rules the World (2019)

I read this book a few years ago and thought highly of it, but realized, as I was recently reading Mike Davis's Planet of Slums for my book club, that I remembered very little of Milanovic. So I reread it. Milanovic is a highly respected economist, who served in a senior post in the World Bank and has made his name by gathering and analyzing data on global inequality. In this book, he casts a sober eye on the system that, as the subtitle says, rules the world. Today capitalism comes in two forms, liberal meritocratic capitalism (the US, Western Europe, etc.) and political capitalism (China, above all, but also Russia and some others). One of the great strengths of the book is that Milanovic carefully, and to my mind, very judiciously, assesses both the advantages and disadvantages of each. The main problem of the liberal variant at present are the several, mutually reinforcing tendencies that are strengthening a closed elite. The US, in particular, is moving in the direction of becoming a plutocracy. In contrast with classical capitalism (late 19th century), those today who are capital rich are also rich in terms of income from labor. The main problems of political capitalism are, similarly, income and wealth polarization, but also the corruption that's endemic to the system. Milanovic is a somewhat heterodox economist as he credits Marx (and Marxists) with getting some things right, for example, that the bourgeoisie has captured the political system in liberal meritocratic capitalism and that capitalism was the main cause of WWI. He also explains why communism was necessary for creating the conditions in which political capitalism might emerge. Finally, Milanovic sketches out some potential positive future developments, but he seems to think that we are most likely headed toward ever greater atomization and commercialization, as market relations dissolve (nearly?) all others. This sober and tragic view reminded me of Weber.

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (2006)

I just finished this for my Zoom book club. Four of us (the others are Paul Lachelier, Eric Kurlander, and Christian Thorne) have been meeting every few months since 2015! Sometimes we share some comments ahead of time (more often, though, afterwards). Here's what I wrote to the others ahead of our meeting: The book is well argued and full of shocking data and descriptions. I hadn't read or thought much about the problem of slums. Now it's on my radar. However, I have two main critiques: 1) What is the scope of the problem, exactly? The title, of course, would seem to suggest that much of the world's population will one day fill the slums. Davis's observations that the world is becoming more urban and that urban residents are increasingly slum dwellers point to the same apocalyptic end-state. But what do the numbers so far show? I found Davis frustratingly elusive about the scope of the problem. Of course, Davis does include lots of data -  we hear estimates of the numbers of slum-dwellers in many places and even globally. But we never hear, as far as I remember, about proportions. Has the percentage of the world's population living in slums grown over time? What was it in, say, 1945 and 1970 and at the time of writing (2006)? Most of the things I've read about global trends in income and wealth (and by extension, in slum-dwelling) over the last 50 years, say, suggest that the problem of dire poverty has remained intractable for some billion people. That accords with Davis's numbers. However, the other six to seven billion have fared better (of course, with tremendous internal variation) over the same period. As a proportion of the world's population, dire poverty is a diminishing - not a growing - problem. Two relevant, widely cited works are Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion and Angus Deaton's The Great Escape. And this is a great website with all sorts of data: Our World in Data. Davis's work would be just as searing - and more credible - if it dropped the apocalyptic framing. 2) Davis's Causal Account He points the finger at neoliberal policies from the 1970s to 1990s. But much of his own evidence attributes the growth of slums to other factors, many predating the 1970s. The drive to industrialize and urbanize at any cost characterized both communism (at least in its Soviet form) and import-substituting industrialization, the policy pursued in many newly independent countries after 1945. This isn't to discount the role of neoliberal policies in perhaps accelerating slum formation in some or even many cases - just to suggest it's implausible to pin all of the blame on them. I also wonder about population growth as a driver of slum-building and the "bright lights" phenomenon attracting people from the dreary (and dark) countryside.

Bruce K. Alexander, The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in the Poverty of Spirit (2008)

This is a remarkable book - quietly, and often persuasively, radical. I was alerted to it by David Courtwright, in Age of Addiction. Alexander makes three main claims: 1) what he calls "psychosocial integration" - basically, people's embeddedness in community - is necessary for human well-being; 2) in modern times, the spread of the free market ineluctably destroys communities, thereby "dislocating" individuals; 3) addictions - which Alexander defines as negative "overwhelming involvements" - are an adaptation to this dislocation. I agree with these points, though I think Alexander could have spent more time fleshing out what, exactly, psychosocial integration looks like. This is all the more necessary because Alexander defines addiction (and by implication the absence of psychosocial integration) so broadly. "Overwhelming involvements" with alcohol and drugs are only a small fraction of addictions in his eyes; other addictions are to gambling, eating, love, work, attention, fame, having more stuff, religion, etc. By contrast, he implies, only a life of balance, and in a community, is whole, healthy, and integrated. The majority of the world's population is addicted, Alexander speculates. This broad definition of addiction, and the damning picture of modern, capitalist life that follows, is what makes the book so radical. Questions remain - for example, is there any place here for Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "flow" state? According to Csikszentmihalyi, this is the "optimal experience" that occurs when we are fully engaged (overwhelmingly involved?) in mastering a challenge. Alexander does make room for positive addications, but seems to imply that these, too, may be incompatible with complete psychosocial integration. Alexander aknowledges the enormous material gains brought about by capitalism; he doesn't advocate its overthrow, only its taming. I think this non-Marxist stance made the radical arguments go down easier for me. I found myself nodding along to thinkers I had previously scorned, such as Karl Polanyi and even Noam Chomsky! It would be worthwhile to weigh this book's arguments against those in Angus Deaton's Great Escape to develop an overall assessment of capitalism and modernity.

Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control The Fate of Humanity (2025)

This is a good (not great) book. It opened my eyes to the truly vast ambitions of today's tech billionaires. Ambitions here does not refer to wealth or political influence or anything else merely of this world, but something incomparably greater. Key ideas are the Singularity (the imminent time when AI blows past human intelligence, creating a radically different situation); the importance and inevitability of human colonization of space, including eventually the entire universe, perhaps with swarms of nanobots carrying human consciousnesses in silicon form; long-termism (the valuing of all future lives as highly as those now alive), etc. While there is some disagreement among the carriers of these ideas, there's general consensus that the long term human (or human-AI) colonization of the universe is of such great importance that all other problems fall by the wayside. The Singularity will usher in utopia - or perhaps apocalypse. These highly dubious ideas would not matter much, of course, were it not for the fact that their advocates have so much wealth and power. Becker skillfully explains the main ideas and nearly as skillfully he debunks almost all of them. He points to the deep inconsistency between, on the one hand, the tech billionaires' championing of science and, on the other, their refusal to face basic facts. He also offers a plausible account of some of the origins of, and motivations behind, these ideas: ultimately, they are rooted in Christian hopes to escape death and reach some kind of heaven, now conjoined to technological salvationism. Disseminating and funding these beliefs, especially the philosophy of effective altruism, gives the tech billionaires a patina of intellectual and even moral respectability. Their insistence on the overriding importance of the Singularity and "aligning" AI's interests with humanity's allows them to sidestep all other contemporary problems as trivial. I sometimes wished Becker had dug more deeply into certain topics. He tends to rely on interviews for his evidence. When it comes to precursors to this generation of science-obsessed utopianists, Becker never considers Condorcet and mentions Frederick Winslow Taylor only once in passing. Sometimes Becker assigns guilt by association, however tenuous. For example, the fact that these people talk of "colonizing" the universe associates them with European colonists (the only kind, apparently) and hence with racism. Capitalism, racism, and white men are sometimes tossed in, casually, as stock villains. In the end, though, these minor gripes don't detract too seriously from Becker's timely, valuable work.

Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Conceptualizing Capitalism: Institutions, Evolution, Future (2015)

This book is somewhat challenging to comment on. I found many parts quite interesting, but I don't think it ranks up there - for me, at least - as a great book. Hodgson knows a lot about many things - and he comments smartly on many debates - but at times I lost sight of what he cared most about. Or why those things mattered. For example, as his title suggests, Hodgson insists that getting the definition of capitalism right is of great importance. Conceptual precision, he says, is as important as mathematical precision. I was not completely persuaded. Midway through the book, around p. 200, he finally offered his most detailed argument why definitions mattered. Hodgson makes a case that capitalism is more than just private property and markets, which have existed for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Of crucial importance are the state and law, which make property "collateralizable" - i.e. property is the usual collateral for loans, which in Hodgson's eyes are the real motor of modern growth. So capitalism is not a timeless system, but a historical, conditional one (and it may not always be with us). Hodgson also spends considerable time making the case that too many economists have remained wedded to a "physicalist" notion of property, i.e. viewing roperty as stuff. Instead, drawing on the philosopher John Searle's ideas about collective intentionality and institutional facts, Hodgson wants us to reconceptualize property as an institutional or social fact - something we together believe in and, hence, make real. I think these are his main claims. To be honest, I stopped reading about halfway through. I found myself agreeing with his intellectual affiliations (institutional economics, evolutionary economics) and admiring his relentlessly independent judgment.

Richard R. Nelson and Sidney G. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (1982)

I was already familiar with, and persuaded by, the general arguments in this book: orthodox economic theory makes many unrealistic assumptions, about maximizing behavior, perfect knowledge and rationality, highly competitive markets, static equilibria, competition occurring only over price, etc. Nonetheless, I still found this book extremely interesting and well-argued. The authors draw on work in many fields, including Michael Polanyi's ideas about "tacit knowledge" and organizational sociology and, of course, modern evolutionary thought, to offer a much more realistic picture of how individuals and firms behave than does orthodox economics. The book draws extensively on Joseph Schumpeter's ideas and tries to formalize them (I have to admit I couldn't follow the models and math and skipped these sections).The book has been enormously influential, having been cited more than 55,000 times. I wish I knew the lineaments of its influence - which arguments have been challenged, modified or further developed. Several years ago I read and greatly appreciated Robert Frank's more recent Darwin Economics, which made a generally similar argument (though I don't remember Frank's book in enough detail to say what the differences might be). Finally, as I read this book, I was struck by the parallels to Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson's Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1985), which came out just three years later and also proposed, and made a persuasive case for, an evolutionary approach to significant aspects of human history.

Randall Collins, The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification (1979)

For some time I'd been meaning to read two widely cited classics from the 1970s about American education: Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis's Schooling in Capitalist America and Collins's book. I thought of the books as rivals, offering different accounts of education: Bowles and Gintis, who were Marxists at the time, argued that schooling primarily served the function of instilling discipline in workers for the rigors of capitalist work. I assumed that Collins, one of the leading advocates of a conflict theory in sociology, would offer a largely empirical account of how individual competition fueled the race for credentials. The race for credentials, I expected, would only modify, but not constitute, the educational system. To my great and pleasant surprise, Collins turned out to be much more theoretical, and theoretically bold, than I had expected. He argues that education does not provide productivity-enhancing skills. Rather, it's all about carving out "property in positions," i.e. sinecures. Collins supports his claims with evidence of various kinds. Whether he's right or not, I'm not sure; but I found his ideas highly thought-provoking, to say the least. Throughout Collins acknowledges his intellectual debts to Weber and, indeed, reminded me in many ways, both substantively and styllistically, of the master.

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019)

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Odell is widely, eclectically read and weaves her reflections on everyone from Diogenes the Cynic to David Hockney's art together with vignettes from her own life in the Bay Area. Odell is a digital artist and also an avid watcher and friend of birds and nature. Both art and nature play a big role in her reflections. She makes a thoughtful, eloquent case for "standing apart" from the attention economy - neither retreating fully, nor succumbing. Standing apart as individuals, she hopes, may prepare the way for collective standing apart and then collective action. I may try to incorporate passages from this book into my current course on Media and Minds.

David T. Courtwright, The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business (2019)

I wholeheartedly recommend this book. The topic has been on my mind for the last decade, as I've become increasingly alarmed by our phone-based lives. Courtwright has read very widely and integrates evidence and ideas from many fields. His writing is taut, witty, often masterful. His judgment, at least in my eyes, is superb - for example, while castigating "limbic capitalism" - a term he coins here - he pays homage to the great good done by its benevolent twin, plain capitalism. He contrasts undisciplined and disciplined pleasures. The book belongs on the shelf of anybody interested in "big history." Courtwright starts with hunter-gatherers, who generally stumbled on limited pleasures in their diverse habitats, before he quickly and skillfully moves through the role of trade and the first globalization in creating globally homogeneous pleasures (as well as glocalized ones). The last two-thirds of the book consider the accelerating pleasure revolution of the last two hundred years, as pleasures, vices, and addictions have been engineered and relentlessly marketed. Courtwright makes interesting observations about the reasons why the anti-vice movement of the Progressive Era generally lost out to the pro-vice movements of World Wars and rising affluence. He cautiously subscribes to the recently emerging consensus that all addictions share the same neural footprint, all being diseases of the brain. Courtwright acknowledges that his emphasis on the supply-side of addiction (engineered pleasures, big business) must be complemented by the demand-side story, which traces the rise in addiction to the dislocation, isolation, and anomie of modern life. Bruce Alexander has pursued this story in The Globalization of Addiction. Age of Addiction was persuasive enough to make me rebalance my assessment of capitalism. Its somber assessment must now join Shoshanna Zuboff's indictment of surveillance capitalism and Fred Hirsch's and Robert Frank's works on zero-sum status competition (as well as older works by Joseph Schumpeter and Daniel Bell on the cultural contradictions of capitalism) as another dark, and possibly growing, stain on capitalism's reputation.