People like Asher were regularly told, and had come to believe, that there were less hostile ways of solving problems than systemic reform.

in the embrace they receive, it is not their values that are revealed so much as the values of those MarketWorld elites who are their patrons and impassioned base: their love of the easy idea that goes down like gelato, an idea that gives hope while challenging nothing. Their susceptibility to scientific authority, no matter how thin or disputed.

is a question of focus.

In an ideal version of these endeavors, the winner could enjoy an enticing combination of making money, doing good, feeling virtuous, working on hard and stimulating problems, feeling her impact, reducing suffering, spreading justice, exoticizing a résumé, traveling the world, and gaining a catchy cocktail-party spiel.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it. —UPTON SINCLAIR

It helped people to see that things that happened in the quiet of personal life, and yet happened over and over again at the scale of the system, and happened because of forces that no individual was powerful enough to counteract alone—that these things had to be seen as and acted on politically, grandly, holistically, and, above all, in the places

He knew his audience was interested in making the world a better place, so he decided to focus his remarks on his plan to reduce poverty in Argentina. Even so, he came nowhere near the concepts of equality and justice and power; he didn’t broach a topic like land reform or the concentration of wealth in a handful of families. Instead, he spoke of

For all the wonders the Internet brings us, it is dominated by an economics of monopoly, extraction, and surveillance. Ordinary users retain little control over their personal data, and the digital workplace is creeping into every corner of workers’ lives. Online platforms often exploit and exacerbate existing inequalities in society, even while

Politics is the inherently messy business of negotiating and reconciling incompatible interests and coming up with a decent plan, designed to be liked but difficult to love. It solves problems in a context in which everyone is invited to the table and everyone is equal and everyone has the right to complain about being unserved and unseen.