Techno-utopians rarely acknowledge that untraceable money transfers support a world of kleptocrats, tax havens, and dark-money politics.
Capitalism
Past Editor: Destin Jenkins
How to Evolve Past Capitalism
Economic systems are like ecosystems. In America, capitalism may be the dominant species. But other species exist there, too.
The False Hopes of Homeownership
The American Dream of private home ownership has fueled a system that preys on Black people for profit.
Giving Credit to White Supremacy
Something, we are told, has changed in capitalism. Finance has replaced production as the main source of wealth; credit matters more than profit; even the ...
Economics: Theories vs. Stories
In the rubble of the Richard Nixon years, a University of Chicago economist named Arthur Laffer drew a diagram on a napkin to illustrate the hidden blessings of ...
Public Thinker: Frances Negrón-Muntaner on Puerto Rico, Art, and Decolonial Joy
Frances Negrón-Muntaner is an innovative and multimodal thinker and artist, and a professor ...
Hong Kong: “When We Burn You Will Burn With Us”
The most telling chant of the 2019 Hong Kong protests is “Liberate Hong Kong, the revolution of our times” (光復香港 時代革命), not because it offers a vision ...
Disrupting the “Startup Hustle”: An Interview with Margaret O’Mara
Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, John Doerr, Jeff Bezos ...
Terminal Whiteness
While doing fieldwork in Tennessee for his eye-opening and often harrowing new book, Dying of Whiteness, Vanderbilt University Professor Jonathan M. Metzl met Trevor. A 40-something-year-old former ...
Goodbye to All That: The End of Neoliberalism?
For Richard Denniss, the evolution of the Australian War Memorial into a giant billboard illustrates the logic of neoliberalism, something that, he says ...
The World the Gulf Has Built
The viewing platform of the Burj Khalifa, currently the tallest building in the world, provides an exceptional view. On a clear day, you can see Dubai’s towers ...
Can a Recipe Save Your Life?
A recipe can be more than a guide to making food. A recipe can be a mantra, a ritual, a symbolic stay against chaos in the psyche and in the world. A hybrid genre ...
Gig Authoritarians
In 2015, Stephen Colbert asked cofounder and then CEO of Uber Travis Kalanick how the company’s heavy investment in driverless car technology squared with its purported “commitment” to its “driver ...
On the Absurdity of Ethical Capitalism
I worked two “jobs” during my first summer as a graduate student in Indiana. One involved telemarketing research, convincing people to answer telephone ...
Guns Made the State, and the State Made Guns
Industrialist and philanthropist, lobbyist and cultural leader: Samuel Galton Jr. was in 1795 a prominent member of Birmingham’s bourgeoisie. He was also ...
Islamic Alternatives to Global Finance
Across the Muslim world today ambitious experiments are underway to create an Islamic alternative to conventional finance. These initiatives are inspired by the ...
Financial Markets Were Not Designed to Manage the Planet
In a market economy, almost by definition, it is the price of things that ...
The State Will Not Save Us
In policy circles today, the primacy of the capitalist state in efforts to confront climate change is a given. This is a premise worth questioning.
“A Gun to Our Heads”
On October 13, 2016, Almir Suruí, then chief of the Paiter Suruí indigenous people of northwest Brazil, issued a panicked appeal. “This is my cry of alarm, please listen to me!” he wrote to national ...
Disaster Capitalism Strikes Puerto Rico
It has been a year since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, leaving a trail of destruction: ruined infrastructure, destroyed homes, and thousands ...