Sublime
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Polanyi, who fled fascist Europe in 1933 and eventually taught at Columbia University, wrote that a self-regulating market turned human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. He decried the free market’s assumption that nature and human beings are ob
... See moreChris Hedges • Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
Impressionné par la manière dont l’aristocratie britannique s’était convertie à la liberté politique en assurant une transition paisible vers la démocratie et en s’ouvrant vers les autres classes, permettant ainsi de légitimer ses privilèges et de conserver une structure de société de classes tout en accompagnant les réformes politiques, il fut fra
... See moreNicolas Baverez • Le Monde selon Tocqueville: Combats pour la liberté (French Edition)
Democracies flourish when the nation is at peace and the harvest is bountiful—as, historically, was the environment of the professions in the post-World War II era. However, when war is declared or the crops fail, even the most ardent democracy selects a government that will direct the troops and tell factories what to produce. The style, if not th
... See moreDavid H. Maister • Managing The Professional Service Firm
This is only another way of saying that the government lenders will take risks with other people’s money (the taxpayers’) that private lenders will not take with their own money.
Henry Hazlitt • Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics
so-called great risk shift, through which corporate America has stabilized its own income statements over a generation by off-loading uncertainty onto workers; and the ways in which shareholders were running companies more and more for themselves, to the detriment of every other stakeholder.
Anand Giridharadas • Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
have to commit yourself to the manifesto your party has adopted, usually somewhere along a spectrum that ranges, in Macaulay’s language, from reckless empiricism at one end to ignorant bigotry at the other. Or to put it in more temperate language, between those who find change and experiment seductive and those who find it repellent, the old tensio
... See moreRichard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
Economic historians describe the dedication to lawlessness among the Gilded Age “robber barons” for whom Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism played the same role that Hayek, Jensen, and even Ayn Rand play for today’s digital barons.
Shoshana Zuboff • The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

Finally, if you look at the wealth management business, you’ll find just about everyone chasing the same demographic segment: the high-net-worth individual. Not Edward Jones, one of the consistently most successful U.S. brokerage firms. For thirty years, it has focused on customers defined not by how much money they have, but on their attitude towa
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