Activity

The financial managers of the global economy—the vast majority working at private rather than central or other public banks—occupy a class, not a control room. They share much in terms of wealth, positions of power, education, and lunches in Davos. But as individuals they have their own histories, …

These cycles of boom and bust are not, however, pure anarchy. Capitalism, too, has something akin to an economy-wide central planner: the financial system—the first car in the rollercoaster, managing spirits and rationing investment. Economist J. W. Mason, who has developed the idea of finance as p…

[...] Instead of optimizing the satisfaction of our needs and desires, as well as workers’ working conditions and livelihoods, Amazon’s plans are geared toward maximizing profit for its shareholders—or future profit, since Amazon keeps plowing money from sales into research, IT and physical infrast…

The manager’s exercise of central planning over his small province of tyranny is therefore not simply a better means to an end, as Coase thought, but a reflection of how the economy actually works. The adversarial relationship between bosses and workers that capitalism creates is no accident of mar…

[...] Too often we confuse the violence of despots with what makes despotism wrong. But much of this violence is a grotesque tool to enforce submission. It is this unfreedom—unchallengeable control of a human by another—that is the worst crime.