Capitalism

Capitalism should be optimized for inventiveness and not just efficiency

As a society, we are so fully invested in capitalism, competition and algorithms that it’s almost impossible to pull ourselves out of the cycle to see a bigger pattern, which is that we have entire economies built upon our misery.

Most analysts of capitalism, following nineteenth- and twentieth-century leads, have ignored the formation of “raw” materials, taking them for granted as capitalist resources. Yet these materials have their own genealogies of production outside the capitalist purview, and our recent awareness that capitalism is destroying Earth’s livability makes... See more

Now, the GoFundMe and DonorsChoose thing is closely related, but it gets its own throughline. These platforms emerge to seemingly supplement gaps in the public safety net for things like education and health care. But instead, they’re in a kind of enabling feedback loop: instead of your taxes ensuring that kids have desks and cancer patients can... See more