"Marx in the Twenty-First Century"

"This is not to say that Marx thought that industrialization, mechanization, or globalization were bad things. He was no Luddite. His concern was the disconnect between profits and human need: Much like today's industrial regions, the slums of nineteenth-century Manchester that Marx observed were filled with workers who were exhausted, unhealthy, and miserable while the factory owners dined on beef bourguignon and claret in their mansions. The factories these days just happen to be in Shenzhen or Dhaka, not the other side of town. Unlike the British machine wreckers of a generation before, Marx saw no way to stuff the technological genie back into the bottle. New tools must be utilized for the greatest good: Instead of getting rid of the factories, the public should take ownership of them."

Max Holleran at The New Republic reviews David Harvey's The Story of Capital: What Everyone Should Know About How Capital Works.

"Malthus May Have Been Less Wrong Than He Was Hasty"

"Regardless, the far right need not wait for future food shortages to cast climate science as a rationale for ultranationalism. Even in our present era of indefensibly ill-distributed abundance, one can credibly claim that the Third World's growing affluence poses an existential threat to our own. After all, China's share of global carbon emissions is twice that of the U.S. and rapidly rising. And while India's carbon footprint is currently relatively small, it's poised to explode in the coming decades, as the Earth's second-most populous country continues to industrialize. If you accept the consensus projections for carbon emissions over the next half-century—but reject the idea that all human lives have inherent value (as, by all appearances, many of our current leaders do)—you can argue somewhat coherently that sustaining the American 'way of life' requires keeping the Global South down."

Eric Levitz at New York worries about a far-right embrace of the politics of climate change.

"This Goes Back to Hamilton, the Daddy of It All"

"'From its very beginning, the United States again and again enacted policies to shift its economy onto a new growth direction—toward a new economic space of opportunity,' argues Concrete Economics, a book by Cohen and DeLong that appears on the reading list. 'Yes, there was an "invisible hand" … But the invisible hand was repeatedly lifted at the elbow by the government, and re-placed in a new position from where it could go on to perform its magic.'"

Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic portrays the Green New Deal as "a leftist resurrection of federal industrial policy."

"Surprisingly Timeless in Ways That Are, by Turns, Delightful and Depressing"

"The stories that document the growing pains of the socialist movement, including its squabbles over the utility of electoral politics, have present-day corollaries as well. In the collection's opening story, 'An Old Fable Retold,' a group of chickens gathers to debate which sauce they should petition to be cooked in come Christmastime, scoffing at the naive idealism of a young chicken that pipes up to ask why they must be killed and eaten at all. It's a send-up of self-defeating reformism that, from the perspective of the members of the American left campaigning today for single-payer health care and tuition-free education, might easily describe the lukewarm pragmatism of Democratic Party centrists. Then there's 'The History of a Giant,' in which a giant named Labour discovers that while his associates Liberal and Tory both profess to have his interests at heart, usually around election time, neither group will let him propose legislative changes in Parliament that might actually improve his lot in life. (Again, the average American worker today might say the same of Democrats and Republicans.) The only solution, Labour comes to understand, is an independent party."

At The Atlantic, J. C. Pan reviews Michael Rosen's Worker's Tales: Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables, and Allegories from Great Britain.

"That Opened Up a Whole New Way of Looking at the Industrial Revolution"

"Satia couldn't understand the apparent contradiction between Quaker tenets and the gun-making Galtons, who strived in the industry for decades without incurring the church's disapproval. When the church did object at the local level in Birmingham, in 1795, Galton argued that two were compatible, that living at the heart of manufacturing made his involvement with the violence of war unavoidable. Galton's arguments wouldn't prove strong enough for the church; eventually he was disowned by the religious group. As Satia dug deeper into Galton's history, her book became a much larger story of how warfare and firearm production was a hidden force in the Industrial Revolution, reshaping the British economy, the Empire, and the world."

Lorraine Boissoneault at Smithsonian interviews Priya Satia about Satia's new book, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution.

"The Story of Capitalism Begins Not in Smog-Laden Factory Cities but on the Farms of the English Countryside"

"To be sure, plenty of pre-capitalist societies have relied on some of what we see as the trappings of capitalism: money, trade, markets, and even wage labor. But capitalism itself, Cook argues (like many historians and theorists of capitalism, going back to at least Marx), is something very novel. 'Markets, commodities, and consumer goods,' he writes, 'while certainly necessary components, do not a capitalist society make.' For Cook, it is instead the rise of dividend-producing investments that defines capitalism. First land, and then people, came to be seen not merely as commodities to be bought and sold, but as capital, the price of which was increasingly tied not to some measure of innate value or even to hours of labor committed, but by the promise of future profits."

Adam Gaffney at the New Republic reviews Eli Cook's The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life.

A "Singular Experience of Economic Growth"

"Instead of permanent stagnation, growth became so rapid and so seemingly automatic that by the fifties and sixties the average American would roughly double his or her parents' standard of living. In the space of a single generation, for most everybody, life was getting twice as good.
"At some point in the late sixties or early seventies, this great acceleration began to taper off. The shift was modest at first, and it was concealed in the hectic up-and-down of yearly data. But if you examine the growth data since the early seventies, and if you are mathematically astute enough to fit a curve to it, you can see a clear trend: The rate at which life is improving here, on the frontier of human well-being, has slowed."

In a 2013 New York article, Benjamin Wallace-Wells explores if "the rate of improvement in the standard of living—[,] year over year, and generation after generation­—[,] will be no faster than it was during the dark ages."

"Turns It Sideways"

"But to me, the most important thing Randall did in this comic is to beautifully show how rapidly the Earth is warming. The increase in temperature is pretty slow, with the dashed line of temperature moving left to right subtly as you scroll down. But then, finally, after nearly 15,000 pixels of scrolling down, you can see the temperature take a sudden sharp surge to the right, showing the painful and very recent upturn in heat stored all over our planet. It's a slap in the face."

Phil Plait at Slate praises Randall Munroe's illustrated timeline of climate change.

"The Golden Age of American Growth May Be Over"

"But Mr Gordon's tone grows gloomy when he turns to the 1970s. Economic turbulence increased as well-known American companies were shaken by foreign competition, particularly from Japan, and as fuel prices surged thanks to the OPEC oil-price rise. Economic inequality surged as the rich pulled ahead of the rest. Productivity growth fell: having reached an average of 2.82% a year between 1920 and 1970, output per hour between 1970 and 2014 grew by an annual rate of no more than 1.62%. America today faces powerful headwinds: an ageing population, rising health-care and education costs, soaring inequality and festering social ills.
"What chance does the country have of restoring its lost dynamism? Mr Gordon has no time for the techno-Utopians who think that the information revolution will rescue America from such 'secular stagnation.'"

The Economist reviews Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living since the Civil War.

The Fabric of Our Lives

"If there is an ancestral home for the Industrial Revolution, it's Manchester, England, where the first factories were built. Cotton propelled the factory's emergence, created after British inventors found a way to spin slave-grown cotton into yarn more swiftly. The man who invented the mechanized cotton mill at the center of these new factories was Samuel Greg, the prototypical genius-inventor of capitalist lore. By tying Greg’s success to slave-grown cotton and the ghastly conditions of factory workers, Beckert recasts him in a garish new light. Women and children comprised the vast majority of these first factory workers, all of them expected to work 14-hour days and huddled into barracks at night. If we celebrate Greg as a genius, Beckert implies, we must also accept that he was utterly dependent on the most coercive labor systems imaginable."


Eric Herschthal in Slate reviews Sven Berkett's Empire of Cotton: A Global History.

"The Turn Toward Capitalism"

"Today, confronting the twin pressures of mounting income inequality and escalating concerns about climate change, partisans of economic growth face stronger opposition than at any time in decades. Even if continued growth were desirable, an increasing number of economists are convinced that a decrease from the last century’s norm will be unavoidable in the century ahead. It is a strange tableau: while economists speculate on growth's decline, a swath of the historical profession, eager to challenge the tyranny of economists, has attempted to make modernity into the story of economic growth—a story that the economists of a prior generation did more than any other group to canonize. Understanding how we arrived at this intellectual crossroads requires a history of its own."


Timothy Shenk in The Nation looks at the rise of "capitalism studies."

"Hamilton’s Work, By Contrast, Reveals the Truth That for Capital, There Is No 'Outside of the State'"

"Even today, Hamilton's ideas about state-led industrialization offer much. Consider the crisis of climate change. Alas, we do not have the luxury of making this an agenda item for our future post-capitalist assembly. Facing up to it demands getting off fossil fuels in a very short time frame. That requires a massive and immediate industrial transformation, which must be undertaken using the actually existing states and economies currently on hand. Such a project can only be led by the state—an institution that Hamilton’s writing and life's work helps us to rethink."


Christian Parenti in Jacobin champions Alexander Hamilton, instead of Thomas Jefferson, as a progressive model.

"If You Were a Dinosaur in Canada When That Asteroid Hit the Yucatán, You Had Approximately Two Minutes to Live"

"Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid crashed into the Yucatán Peninsula, leaving behind a crater 110 miles wide and twenty miles deep and a colossally larger hole in the tree of life. The impact and its after­effects wiped out an estimated 75 percent of species, including, most famously, all non-avian dinosaurs. That event, the end-­Cretaceous extinction, is one of six massive die-offs in the history of the planet. Five of them happened in the distant past: 450 million, 375 million, 252 million, 200 million, and 66 million years ago. The sixth one is happening right now."


Kathryn Schulz in New York reviews Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.

"A 'Race between Education and Technology'"

"Everyone should be able to benefit from productivity gains—in that, Keynes was united with his successors. His worry about technological unemployment was mainly a worry about a 'temporary phase of maladjustment' as society and the economy adjusted to ever greater levels of productivity. So it could well prove. However, society may find itself sorely tested if, as seems possible, growth and innovation deliver handsome gains to the skilled, while the rest cling to dwindling employment opportunities at stagnant wages."


The Economist discusses the danger of "technological unemployment."

"It’s Creativity that Made the Modern World"

"It’s the utopianism of both the left and the right that’s bad. You say, the only dignified life is being a soldier—that’s the aristocratic idea. Or the only dignified life is being a saint. And those two get adopted, one by the right and one by the left."

Joshua Rothman in The Boston Globe interviews Deirdre McCloskey about her new book, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World.