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[...] consumption in mature capitalist societies has long become dissociated from material need. The lion’s share of consumption expenditure today – and a rapidly growing one – is spent not on the use value of goods, but on their symbolic value, their aura or halo. This is why industry practitioner…

[...] Geoffrey Hodgson has argued that capitalism can survive only as long as it is not completely capitalist – as it has not yet rid itself, or the society in which it resides, of ‘necessary impurities’. Seen this way, capitalism’s defeat of its opposition may actually have been a Pyrrhic victory,…

The image I have of the end of capitalism – an end that I believe is already under way – is one of a social system in chronic disrepair, for reasons of its own and regardless of the absence of a viable alternative. While we cannot know when and how exactly capitalism will disappear and what will su…

[...] What the deterioration of public finances was related to was declining overall levels of taxation (Figure 1.5) and the increasingly regressive character of tax systems, as a result of ‘reforms’ of top income and corporate tax rates (Figure 1.6). Moreover, by replacing tax revenue with debt, g…

[...] Egalitarian democracy, regarded under Keynesianism as economically productive, is considered a drag on efficiency under contemporary Hayekianism, where growth is to derive from insulation of markets – and of the cumulative advantage they entail – against redistributive political distortions.